From The Rediscovery of Meaning

The Rediscovery of Meaning

“The Rediscovery of Meaning”, which gave its title to, and appears first in, the collection of essays Barfield published in 1977, was originally published in 1961 in the Saturday Evening Post. The Post had a wide circulation among the American middle class. Barfield took this opportunity to introduce his findings of the evolution of consciousness, and indeed its reflection in the evolution of language, with both hands. He took his start by acknowledging the feeling or perception that many of his readers might have or see around them: “the growing general sense of meaninglessness”. He is able to conclude that man “can begin to recover meaning only if he develops his science beyond its present positivist assumptions”.

From Romanticism Comes of Age

Thinking and Thought

The important distinction that Barfield draws between “thinking” and “thought” in this essay has consequences for our whole way of perceiving the world, and therefore for the evolution of our consciousness. He uses the ancient Greeks as an example of a people whose language and literature conveyed the sense of still perceiving the sense of life being immanent within their perceptions of the phenomenal world. Barfield wrote that our question is “how to rise once more from thought into thinking, taking with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness which the Greeks never knew, and which could never have been ours if they had not laboured to turn thinking into thought. Thus, being normally outside it, it follows that we shall also be conscious of it as a different world, a world into which we can plunge at will.”

From The Riddle of the Sphinx

Israel and the Michael Impulse

Barfield wrote regularly for his fellow anthroposophists, those who accepted the validity of Rudolf Steiner’s method of spiritual science. They could be expected to accept that there had been an evolution of consciousness, so Barfield wrote about those forces underlying these transformations. In this essay, Barfield wrote about the role of Michael, the Archangel, in the elimination by the people of ancient Israel of the extra-sensory link, or participation, that ancient people had with their environment. This allowed them to concentrate on the inwardness of the divine, summed up in the name “I AM” which Moses was told to give for the name of God who had sent him. The Riddle of the Sphinx, published in 2023, contains a greater quantity of these anthroposophical writings than those essay collections Barfield published for a general audience, during his life.

Two Articles About Saving the Appearances

The Value of the Christian Myths: Self-Deceptions or Stages to Reality? (February 1958)

I See Science Heading Straight For Bankruptcy (October 1958)

These two articles appeared in the Church of England Newspaper shortly after the publication of a central work Owen Barfield’s, Saving the Appearances in 1957. Has the evolution of our understanding of phenomena, with the rise of natural scientific observation and the decline of the vision that gave rise to the myths, been entirely an abandonment of illusion, indicating cognitive progress? No, answers Barfield, and in taking the time to answer such an elementary question regarding this central work of his in short newspaper-style paragraphs, may open up something of its concerns to new readers, as it did originally for a Church of England audience. The articles clarify Barfield’s arguments for those getting to grips with the terms in which they are expressed in Saving the Appearances. They were both written in response to articles by John Wren-Lewis (1923 – 2006), a British scientist and psychologist who at the time of this debate with Barfield was involved in industrial chemical research, and was an Anglican layman of a rationalist frame of mind. Wren-Lewis later, in the 1980s, underwent a near-death experience which changed his view regarding the reasonableness of other modes of consciousness, even as he remained sceptical about paths in their pursuit.

A Selection of Essays

Mr Koestler and the Astronomers (1960)

The Sleepwalkers, by Arthur Koestler, is still a well-known book for people wishing to make sense of ancient and modern cosmology. Barfield found it wanting, as being an example of what he would elsewhere call “chronological snobbery” and having a “residue” – perhaps more – “of unresolved positivism”.

The Disappearing Trick (1970)

Published in 1970, this essay brings together, in an intellectually daring way, two separate elements in the intellectual firmament which many people are setting different courses by today – behavioural psychology and an “existential encounter with history”. Contrary to the normal pattern in much of today’s writing, this existential encounter is found to undermine the assumptions of behavioural psychology.

The Reith Lectures 1976 (1977)

This is a withering attack on the reductionist tendency in the emergent discipline of cognitive science. Readers can judge how fair it is for themselves by listening to the lectures.

Imagination and Science (1984)

A short way of expressing Barfield’s concern with science is to say that he wanted readers absolutely to accept the centrality of humans in the production of knowledge; equally the effects of scientific knowledge on them was central, because humans were what mattered. The radicalism of this project should not be underestimated. Any RUP – residue of unresolved positivism – must be abandoned. Readers are forced – as often in reading Rudolf Steiner, the subject of this review essay – to reflect on the contingency of our knowledge; and this is where imagination is necessary.

On C.S. Lewis and Anthroposophy (1976)

Although this was first published as a postscript to an article by someone else it is included here as a word to the wise lest anyone be tempted to assimilate Barfield’s concerns to Lewis’s or vice versa, or to study the Inklings as a collective rather than a group of individuals. It may be worth pointing out that many very orthodox theologians, such as N.T. Wright and Douglas Wilson, are these days saying things about history in broad agreement with Barfield rather than Lewis – for reasons both Scriptural and pastoral.

Thomas Aquinas (1954)

This is a tantalizing review of a book by Rudolf Steiner about Thomas Aquinas, The Redemption of Thinking. What is striking about the review is its emphasis on the conjunctural importance of Aquinas’s thought – its importance in his own time, and in its different significance in ours.

St James of Compostela (1964)

As much a piece of travel literature about a popular destination as anything else, and worth reading on that account, this is also a meditation on the role of feeling, part of the Steinerian triad of thinking, feeling and willing, as part of the human constitution. It is an illustration, in its insistence on the “firmness of will true tenderness” requires, of the occasional toughness of Barfield’s vision.

The Politics of Abortion (1972)

In this essay Barfield tries to provide a modus vivendi between the differing views on abortion. How a founder-member of the SPUC, with a contempt for abortion evident in his novella Night Operation, should come to counsel a relatively liberal regime on abortion is a real question. The answer has to be found in Barfield’s deep understanding of life and death; his sense of, and respect for, the circumstances in which a liberal and democratic society has arisen, which is a function of the evolution of consciousness; and ultimately in the distinction between law and love.