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The Hebraic mind made several important, indeed
decisive, contributions to the evolution
of consciousness, outlined by Barfield in
Saving the Appearances.1
It is in the apocalypses of the Hebrews, for
example, that "we first detect a conception of history as something which
had a beginning and is moving towards an end. The apocalypses have even
been pointed to as the earliest example of something that could be called
a doctrine of evolution" (SA 150).
"We shall understand the place of the Jews
in the history of the earth, that is, of man as a whole," Barfield writes
when we see the Children of Israel
occupying the position in that history which memory occupies in the composition
of an individual man. The Jews, with their language trailing vestiges of
the world's Creator and their special awareness of history, were the dawning
memory in the human race. They . . . tore the phenomena from their setting
of original participation and made them inward, with intent to re-utter
them from within as word. They cultivated the inwardness of the represented.
They pinpointed participation to the Divine Name,
the I AM spoken only from within, and it
was the logic of their whole development that the cosmos of wisdom should
henceforth have its perennial source, not without, and behind the appearances,
but within the consciousness of man; not in front of his senses and his
figuration, but behind them. (SA 155)
The Hebraic "mission" might thus be seen as the
preparation of "humanity against the day when it [interiorization,
the development of a room of one's own]
should be complete--that is, our own time" (SA 124).
In a careful examination of the 104th Psalm
["Thou deckest thyself with light as it were with a garment; and spreadest
out the heavens like a curtain"] Barfield finds the disappearance of the
immanence of the divine which all previous religions had taken for granted.
The Psalm exhibits
not only no hint of mythology, but
no real suggestion of manifestation. Everything proclaims the glory of
God, but nothing represents Him. Nothing could be more beautiful, and nothing
could be less Platonic. . . . it is not by contemplating . . . phenomena
that we shall rise to the contemplation of the invisible Divinity who brought
them into being. Here, too, the appearances are indeed grounded in divinity;
but they are not grounded in the same way. They are not appearances--still
less, "names"--of God. They are things created by God. There is, in short,
nothing to suggest "immanence," and everything to suggest the contrary.
(SA 107-108)
Jewish "detachment from knowledge" of the world
of appearances, Barfield concludes, "arose . . . not so much from any want
of mental alertness as from a positive objection to
participation
as such" (SA 108). After all, the Greeks likewise would later strive
as well to eliminate participation from their thinking, but for "the Jewish
nation, with a different impulse and a more considered purpose . . . there
was no question of turning their attention to the phenomenon for its own
sake, or at all. The killing out of participation was the end, in itself,
and imagery of all kinds was the quarry marked out for destruction" (SA
149).2
Though admiring of its contributions, Barfield
remains through and through critical of the failures of imagination
of the Hebraic mind. He criticizes harshly, for example, their abandonment
of participation. He finds the admonition that "Thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth below, or that is in the water under the earth"
"perhaps the unlikeliest thing that ever happened.
As far as we know, in every other
nation at that time there prevailed unquestioned the participating consciousness
which apprehends the phenomena as representations
and naturally expresses itself in making images. For the Jews, henceforward,
any dealings with those nations were strictly forbidden. Everywhere throughout
the world original participation was in
full swing. For the Jews, from that moment on, original participation,
and anything smacking of it, became a deadly sin. And what is the Old Testament
but the tale of their long struggle against that very sin, their repeated
relapses and their final victory. (SA 109)
And he criticizes as well their failure to acknowledge
Christ as the Messiah as surprising and, indeed, contradictory:
We may permit ourselves to ask what
would have happened if the incarnation of
the Word had been understood at the time when it occurred; if Christ had
been acknowledged instead of being crucified. In fact, by the time the
Event happened, the pharisaical element in Jewish religion had apparently
triumphed, balking the nation of the opportunity of fulfilling its destiny.
Instead of realizing that the inwardness of the Divine
Name--a consummation to which their whole history had been leading--the
Children of Israel had turned aside. The Name had ceased to be uttered
even by the priests in the temple, and the Creator had been removed to
an infinite external distance, as Being, omnipotent, indeed, and infinitely
superior, but, in the way He was thought of, existentially parallel with
man himself. (SA 171)
See in particular
Saving the Appearances,
Chaps. XVI, XXIII, XXIV. |
1Though Barfield's
primary discussion of the Hebraic mind is to be found in Saving the
Appearances, it is not, of course, limited to that book. Much earlier,
in History in English Words, he had already offered the following
characterisation:
To one semitic tribe the passionate inner world of its thoughts
and feelings had remained almost more real than the outward one of matter
and energy. The language of the Old Testament is alone enough to tell us
that, while the Greek Aryans had been pouring their vigor into the creation
of intellectual wisdom and liberty, the Hebrews had been building up within
themselves an extraordinary moral and emotional life, as narrow as it was
intense. (HEW 37)
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2Barfield is
careful to distinguish Jewish loss of wonder at the phenomenal from the
reductionism of materialistic science:
If the children of Israel were enjoined not to worship 'the sun
or the moon or any other star,' it was because they were tempted by the
glory of these appearances to do that very thing. They refrained because
they were commanded to refrain, not because they had been educated to see
the greater light and the less as a ball of gas and a ball of rock, which
just happened to be there. It was not, in other words, a materialist non-participation.
(SA 112)
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