Responses Archives - The Owen Barfield Literary Estate

Reflections on a Passage from “Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion”

March 4, 2025

The following contains some thoughts inspired by a very striking passage in Barfield’s late essay “Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion.” In reflecting on the Incarnation, he considers what it would mean for a divine-human person to speak. He suggests that—while an ordinary human child, in beginning to speak, is bound by the limitations of human memory (and, it is implied, by a language into which they are born, with its sedimented history of meaning)—Christ was either not limited in this way, or the limitation was “voluntarily accepted.”

“Barfield’s understanding of language was one I had never encountered before”: an interview with Spencer Klavan

February 11, 2025

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.

Owen Barfield: Harbinger of the 21st Century

December 14, 2024

The following article was first printed in the 2005 edition of The Golden Blade, an annual anthroposophical publication which survived until 2009. It was written as the draft of a lecture ultimately given in the English Auditorium at the Goetheanum on Thursday 7th August 2003. As Simon Blaxland de-Lange wrote in a footnote to its appearance in The Golden Blade, “the actual lecture took into account what had been expressed during the preceding days of the second ‘English Week’ conference, and was strongly based on Barfield’s remarkable text of the modern mysteries, Unancestral Voice, from which several quotations were taken.

On Attending the “Plotinus and Barfield” Conference at the University of Cambridge

September 24, 2024

In September 2023 I attended the first conference on Owen Barfield held at Cambridge University. That weekend, Cambridge basked in the golden embrace of a radiant sun, the city awash in warmth and light. This year’s conference, titled Plotinus and Barfield: Emanation and Evolution, took place on 14th September, and the atmosphere in Cambridge was no different. As I wandered through the narrow streets toward the Divinity Faculty, I crossed over quaint bridges, where punting boats lay moored, poised for a busy day of guiding tourists along the river, offering them glimpses of the city’s breathtaking architecture.

Accidental Philosopher: How Owen Barfield Derailed My Life

May 12, 2022

Sharing my correspondence with Owen Barfield is a gift that I’m honored to bestow. Beginning in 1988 – when he was 90 years old – we traded letters until 1995, two years before he passed. He sent copies of essays and talks of his, and commented on poems and essays I sent to him. He recommended books to read. I told him of authors I’d found. All told, I have sixteen letters from him.

Sharing my correspondence is also humbling. It does involve two people, after all, and only makes full sense when both people are taken into account.

A Sonnet for Barfield

November 8, 2021

‘…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.