‘…the poetic… that bodiless ocean of life out of which all works of art spring.’
Owen Barfield
We participate in one and the same
Consciousness, feeling its sudden changes.
Hark! Our keel scraping against pebbles,
The impending bed pronounces your name
In metallic whispers.
The inestimable Owen Barfield differentiates three epochs in the evolution of consciousness. The first he refers to as “original participation.” The anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl meant to indicate a similar condition under the rubric participation mystique. Other thinkers refer to the same as “tribal” or “primal” consciousness. Original participation denotes a condition of consciousness in which the self has not yet precipitated out of the semantic solution of the world. For this reason, neither “spirit” nor “matter” exists as a concept because each of their meanings depends on just the phenomenological antithesis with its counterpart that is not a characteristic of the mind immersed in the state of original participation.
Even as recently as this year (2021) there has been a well-enough known C.S. Lewis commentator who wrongly states that Owen was “not a Christian.” This is not only factually incorrect, but also quite bizarre. I really feel that I must set the record straight.
A new edition of Simon Blaxland De Lange’s biography, Owen Barfield, Romanticism Come of Age, is now available from Temple Lodge Publishing.
