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.” He then asks if we may say that, in Christ’s case, “the spoken word was both divine and human at the same time?”

Here, certain considerations suggest themselves. For Barfield, in speaking—especially figuratively—a human being is at once drawing on an inherited background of concrete meanings (the kind he elsewhere calls “original metaphors,” which are closely related to what he characterises as “original participation”) and—insofar as they are sufficiently alienated from this original participation to make conscious metaphorical language possible—also creatively and now consciously restoring the meanings and connections previously given. Elsewhere, he likens this to the transformation of an idol into a representation of the unmanifest.

But, the situation would, it seems, be importantly different for a divine-human person, who would be simultaneously drawing on a given history and context of meaning (as a limitation “freely accepted”) and speaking as the author of the world, and of language. And here, one might also note how the significance of this given history and context is altered if this person is, from the beginning, implicit within it, something which Barfield, of course, affirms, for instance in Saving the Appearances, when he writes: “in the course of the earth’s history, something like a Divine Word has been gradually clothing itself with the humanity it first gradually created—so that what was first spoken by God may eventually be respoken by man.”

For a human being as such, meaning is at once received and re-spoken. At its peak, linguistic creativity (say, in poetry) re-enlivens a meaning given prior to the appearance of that person, and given as, to some extent, lost and diminished. It is neither mere repetition, nor autonomous creation. But, for a divine-human person—if, as Barfield suggests, his words are themselves both divine and human––meaning cannot in the same way be dependent upon a sedimented history or reference to an external world. Nor does it make sense to suggest that the metaphorical would depend on a prior and more basic literal meaning.

Here, we might consider an example of which Barfield makes much, namely the various meanings of pneuma, especially in John 3:8. For a mere human being to speak thus would, on Barfield’s reading, involve something like the following: a prior unity of the meanings “wind,” “breath” and “spirit” having been lost, the now primary literal meaning “wind” (referring to an external, physical phenomenon) would be extended metaphorically to express something hidden, internal, spiritual, thereby consciously resurrecting, one might say, a unity previously given, only more or less implicitly. But what sense would it make to suggest that something like “mere” wind, or the mere “literal” meaning could exist, as a given, for a divine-human person, who is himself the author of the world and of language? Does mere wind “blow where it wills”? Obviously not, since “wind” does not “will” anything. Now, consider breath. Could the breath that carries the words of a divine-human person be “mere” breath, simply a biological phenomenon, which may be extended metaphorically to anthropomorphise the wind? If anything, wouldn’t the priority be reversed? Wouldn’t such a person at once receive and determine meaning as simultaneously divine and human?

Now, I find this train of thought fascinating and suggestive not only as a metaphysical or theological reflection, but also because of the implications it has for how we think of language, and the relation between any particular language user and language as such.

The obvious implausibility of grounding language in any given finite human person seems to demand some more “objective” or “universal” grounding. We may seek the source of meaning in some supposed reference to objects transcending language, treating language (to put it crudely) as a picture of a reality that has certain a certain determinate, “literal” structure independently of language. Or, we may look to more universal structural principles, or to the language system as a whole, considered “objectively.” Barfield’s approach is quite different. Regardless of one’s attitude to the idea as a theological claim, the figure of the God-Man also functions as a sort of thought experiment, which helps to clarify certain elements of the issue at hand. Stephen R. L. Clark, in his early book on Aristotle, suggests that, for Aristotle, “the life-world of the fully developed man, the Aristotelian saint, who best knows what it is to be human, is the absolute reality from which all other ways of experiencing reality are diminutions or abstractions.” I think a similar principle can be discerned in Barfield’s essay, the “original metaphors” of the Incarnate Word—rather than any “literal” meaning, referring to a semantically denuded world of mere objects—are the exemplary reality, from which all meaning derives, and in which it participates to differing degrees. Just as the first Adam named the animals, later falling from his original vocation, so the second Adam gives to things their true names. However—and this is crucial—these are not merely divine, but divine-human, names.

Photo credit: a detail from a photo of the Infant Jesus of Prague by Fotobanka ČTK, René Fluger, reproduced under a Creative Commons license, with credit required for further use (CC BY-SA 3.0).

“Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion” is published in the collection of essays by Owen Barfield published in 2023, The Riddle of the Sphinx.