Landon Loftin: Hello Spencer. Congratulations on your newest book: Light of the Mind, Light of the World. Can you say something about the book’s main thesis?
Spencer Klavan: Thanks very much indeed, Landon. Light of the Mind, Light of the World is a new history of science from a religious perspective. My hope is to change not so much what specialists know about science, but how the average person thinks about science. I think we’ve gotten this badly wrong: most people walk around with an operating theory that the world works like a Lego set. You put little lumps of matter together in more and more complicated patterns, and then you get trees, animals, people… and from this, I think there emerge all sorts of dire philosophical consequences. What is our purpose and destiny if we’re just heaps of atoms? What do we do in the face of ever-more advanced AI? But the funny thing—and the good news—is that the materialist, atomic-building-block theory of the world isn’t just depressing: it’s also not even what science actually teaches! It’s based on an idea about science that basically stops around the 19th century. So I take a larger view, bringing the story up to the quantum revolution, and I argue that the world’s not a Lego set of material building blocks: it’s a relationship between mind and matter. Actual science is something much more mysterious, and much more consonant with the religious outlook, than we’ve been led to believe.
Spencer Klavan, author of Light of the Mind, Light of the World
Loftin: I was glad to see several references to Owen Barfield in your book. How and when did you discover Barfield?
Klavan: There’s a passage in C.S. Lewis’s Miracles in which he starts talking about what he called “picture-thinking”—the tendency or even the necessity to translate abstract and spiritual matters into concrete physical imagery. And he says offhand that if you want to get a real grip on the subject you must read Owen Barfield’s Poetic Diction.
Well, I read that in grad school, when I was pretty homesick and taking a lot of solace in Lewis’s writing. I decided to hunt down Poetic Diction in the English library, and as I recall I couldn’t check it out. So I sat there all day, glued to my seat, and read the whole thing. I was enthralled. Barfield’s understanding of language was one I had never encountered before, and as a classicist I found it intensely satisfying—the idea that we don’t begin from a material experience and work our way up to the spiritual, but rather experience spirit and flesh entwined together from the start. It changed my whole way of thinking.
Loftin: What is your favorite Barfield book, and why?
Klavan: It’s probably Saving the Appearances. That’s the one from which Light of the Mind draws most inspiration. The introduction makes the claim, which I try to work out in my book, that we haven’t yet incorporated the necessary philosophical implications of quantum physics into our mental picture of the other sciences—into how we think about prehistory, for instance. If consciousness really is a constituent part of things like time and space, then the world before consciousness must have been indescribably different from the picture we draw of it in our heads, which necessarily unfolds in the human terms of things like years and miles. It’s not his easiest book by any means—I usually encourage people to start out with one of the Burgeon dialogues like Worlds Apart. But I think if you want to get to the core of Barfield’s thinking, it’s really Saving the Appearances. When I read Poetic Diction I had the strong sense that what he says there about language maps, as in some ways it must, onto human consciousness itself in essence. But Saving the Appearances is where he really lays that out.
Loftin: You explicitly invoke Barfield on several occasions. For instance, you quote some of his reflections on the relevance of “primary” and “secondary qualities” to our understanding of the Scientific Revolution. Elsewhere, you talk about the distinction that Barfield made between “dashboard knowledge” and “engine knowledge.” How did these ideas help you advance your thesis?
Klavan: Well, in Worlds Apart there’s a mind-blowing passage about Galileo, which includes the observation that it was he—and not, say, Locke or Descartes—who first introduced the division between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. That’s the idea that there are these mind-independent attributes of the world like time and space, then these more constructed or even fictive qualities imparted to things by the mind—things like color and texture. I think that was the first time I understood why the Catholic church really objected to Galileo—not because of heliocentrism, per se, but because he wanted to locate “reality” in these hard, material, measurable quantities. Eventually, after that, we were bound to reach the conclusion that all the “merely” human experiences are mere illusion, after-effects of a fundamentally material reality. And seeing how that idea breaks down as even “primary qualities” come to seem mind-dependent was enormously clarifying for me. It helped me specify exactly what I was after—this idea, dominant in the modern era but present also in the ancient sayings of Democritus, that the world is composed of mindless objects and what the mind contributes is pure illusion. If I had to articulate the core of Barfield’s thought, it would be the opposite of that thesis: mind is as essential a component of reality as matter, and the two exist in dynamic relationship across time. They’re never apart from one another, at least among humans. With God it may be another story.
Loftin: The epigraph of part 3 is a poem by Barfield called “Meditation.” What drew you to this particular poem, and why did you choose it to introduce this section of the book?
Klavan: In that poem he outlines, in beautifully simple and suggestive language, the communication of divine truth to the human mind, and from the human mind to the material world. I actually encountered it after I had decided on the title for my book, but there are some eerie resonances: “Light in the world— / World in the mind— / Mind in the heart—.” It’s beautiful stuff. And it expresses what I’m trying to say also, that the world from the beginning is a communion between mind and matter, subject and object.
