The (Turbid) Ebb and Flow of Human Consciousness

In a rather remarkable essay called ‘The Son of God and the Son of Man', Owen Barfield distinguishes two ways in which a man may be said to be the Son of God, or the Son of Man. The first is expressed in pre-Christian myths, in dreams, in man’s unconscious being and in his body. It may also be called the Eastern Way, and derives from humanity’s natural inheritance through Adam from God. In this sense, man may be called the Son of God.

The other way consists in a human being’s free, conscious, reasoned acts and thoughts of kindness and love. It may be called the Western Way, since the West has always striven towards more consciousness, more deliberation, more control – whereas the East is generally inclined to dim the feeble spark of consciousness before it has fully arisen. The Western Way may be associated with the historical figure of Jesus Christ, who, perhaps for this reason, preferred to dub himself the Son of Man rather than the Son of God.

Now Barfield’s essential point is this: if we are to move forward on the Western Way, it is crucial that we regain a sense of the natural, unconscious gift we have simply by virtue of being humans, by being Sons of God. Without this realization, there is no meaning to words like freedom, love and kindness. Cut loose from the consciousness of our ultimate descent from God, we are caught in the Existentialist trap; without the strength and dignity that are our birthright, the burden of responsibility weighs us down.

Writing in the 1970s, Barfield suggests that the general turn towards the East, that was such a prominent feature of the hippie movement, was motivated at least in part by a dim recognition of this fact. For him however, this can never be the ultimate direction of Western consciousness; reconnecting with the sources of our conscious life is only worthwhile insofar as it provides us with the strength, confidence and faith to resume the (Christian) path to freedom and conscious love – to become the Sons of Man as well as the Sons of God.

The progress of consciousness is not to be conceived as a steady march onwards, ever further into an ever brighter future. Instead, it may be likened to a sea that ebbs and flows, steadily gaining on the land. In the same way, both individually and historically, we can feel the progress of consciousness ‘begin, and cease, and then again begin’. Hence the way forward may be found by retracing our steps. To use Barfield’s own words from his fairy-tale The Rose on the Ash-heap: ‘Oh traveller through the Zodiac, pass further on – by turning back’.

Barfield's essay 'The Son of God and the Son of Man' was published in The Rediscovery of Meaning (1977).

Courtly love in Barfield's short fiction

One thing that is remarkable about the recently published fiction of Barfield, i.e. The Rose on the Ash-Heap, Eager Spring and Night Operation, is that all three add a warmth of feeling to his ideas that is sometimes lacking (justifiably so) in his more purely philosophical books. This is perhaps mostly due to the importance attached to the experience of love in their imaginative portrayal of various aspects of the evolution of consciousness. Thus Sultan’s inner journey is wholly driven by his yearning for the mysterious dancer, the evil Godfrey in Virginia’s Conte is overcome by the love between Paolo and Maria, and it is only because of Jak’s awakening feelings of love that the three main figures in Night Operation escape from the sewers to Aboveground.

All three books, moreover, refer specifically to the medieval tradition of courtly love which was the focus of C.S. Lewis’s influential study The Allegory of Love (dedicated to Owen Barfield). This is most obviously so in Eager Spring, where the Trovatore (i.e. Troubadour) embodies the ideal of the courtly lover, as he tells of his experiences in Italy, France and Germany, the three regions were this tradition initially flowered, sings to the three sisters, and finally falls in love with Maria. I think Paolo’s character may also reveal why the courtly love tradition was so important for Barfield. For it is through his service to Love that Paolo comes to ponder the true relation between Spirit and flesh, and overcomes the strict divide between them. Even more importantly, it leads him finally to directly perceive the spiritual reality ‘behind’ the material, and it is his heightened powers of perception that help to avert the industrial disaster threatening the country.

The example of Paolo shows the courtly love tradition as a significant step in the history of consciousness; through his experience in this tradition he develops the kind of spiritual perception which Rudolf Steiner taught; he moves towards a form of final participation in which the material is again experienced as a representation of the spiritual. In a wider sense this shows, I think, that Barfield saw courtly love as a precursor to both Romanticism and Anthroposophy, a first step towards a new spiritual relation to the world. Through the idealization of the Lady, the spiritual is again experienced in the flesh and the mind-matter dualism dissolves.

Barfield once described love as the awareness of a spiritual bond underlying physical separateness. As such, it plays an essential part in the evolution of consciousness. While in the courtly love tradition the lover focuses on one person, his Lady, the Romantics expand it to include the whole of humanity as well as the natural world. This gradual widening of love is an idea that Barfield wonderfully expressed in his introduction to Orpheus (as well as in the play itself), where he describes his attempt to portray the development from personalized to impersonal love, from Eros to Agape “neither as a Platonic transfer of attention from carnal copy to ghostly original, nor simply as darkness giving way to light, but rather as moonlight brightening imperceptibly into sunshine”.

Is it going too far to suggest that the tradition of courtly love may be compared to the moonlight, which gradually brightens into the more conscious love of the Romantics and finally blossoms into the fully conscious experience of the spiritual in Steiner’s anthroposophy?

Review: Eager Spring

First published: 2008

Publisher: Barfield Press UK

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Introduction by John D. Rateliff

While Owen Barfield did not publish a great deal of fiction during his lifetime, what he did publish is all of a special quality. Whether it is the early fairy-tale `The Silver Trumpet', the autobiographical `This Ever Diverse Pair' or the poetic drama `Orpheus', his creative endeavours, as much as his philosophical work, reveal Barfield as a profoundly original thinker - as well as a subtle and penetrating writer in the best British tradition. `Eager Spring', the most recent addition to his imaginative oeuvre, is no exception: it is a well-crafted and thought-provoking novel, that richly rewards reading and re-reading.

`Eager Spring' departs from Barfield's earlier work in several respects. It is the first of his works to feature a female protagonist, and, perhaps more importantly, it directly confronts one of the central problems of our age: our relationship to nature and to the environment. Through this choice of subject, the novel illuminates Barfield's work from an entirely new perspective, and it also allows Barfield to shed his own peculiar light on the impending environmental disaster.

As always, he is not content with merely tackling the surface problems. Instead, he delves beneath in search of their roots, and this search takes the novel's protagonist all the way back to the scientific revolution - and beyond. For it is in the novel approach to the material world initiated during the scientific revolution that Barfield locates the source of our present-day problems.

Yet he also takes the further step, and suggest a possible way out. The novel ends with a fairy-tale written by the protagonist, in which she wonderfully describes how Paolo, an Italian poet of the courtly love tradition, uses his enhanced powers of cognition and perception to locate and destroy the evil of the new industrialism. It is a beautiful and profound imaginative exploration of the environmental problems facing the world today, and a fitting end to a novel that already ranks high among Barfield's creative achievements.

First things

Since this is to be a blog about the writings of Owen Barfield, I thought I might as well begin with an explanation of how my own long-lasting admiration for Barfield’s work first began. I would be very much interested to hear how, and why, others came to study his philosophy.

Wandering back through the past, my mind halts at a moment some six or seven years ago. This must have been the summer of 2006 since I was nineteen years old and on vacation in France with my parents. While I sat outside in the blazing sun and read Saving the Appearances, I suddenly felt a profound sense of liberation. For many years, I should explain, I had lived in two separate worlds: the world of solid fact, of trees and clouds, school and friends, on the one hand, and, on the other, the more ephemeral world of the imagination, of literature and music, myths and poetry.

I remember vividly how, as a boy of eight or nine years old – perhaps the teacher had just taught us about geology or ancient history – I lay awake at night and thought of the endless years of blank nothingness that passed before my birth, and then of the equally incomprehensible void stretching away beyond my brief life. I was utterly terrified, unable to bear this view of reality that was thrust upon me. With hindsight, it seems to me that all my later love of literature, of mythology and philosophy has really been one long attempt to escape from this terrifying vision of black nothingness and futility.

Growing up, I soon discovered that many stories, myths and poems offer a strikingly different view of life. Here I found heroes fighting for meaningful causes, carrying a sacred flame through the generations. Here I found men changing into streams or trees, and Gods guiding them in the shape of sea-gulls or stars. Here also, I discovered stories of the beginning of time, of the creation of man – and of the final war that it is to end it all.

Yet all the time I also felt a vague sense of betrayal, that my escape into this Other World was somehow wrong, that I should live my life in the world of solid fact.

Now it was in this summer in 2006, that I felt a first intimation that there  might be a bridge between these two realities. Reading Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, and in particular the rainbow analogy he begins with, for a moment the two worlds seemed suddenly to merge, like two long-sundered streams that finally meet. For I realized that, if Barfield is right, the world of ‘dry’ facts is as much the (co-)creation of our (unconscious) imagination as a poet’s or myth-maker’s wildest dream.

I recognized also that the present world may not the unchangeable reality we make it out to be; that, in fact the trees bending over me in the summer breeze, a butterfly flitting by, the rushing of waves in the distance, would have appeared rather differently to the consciousness of an earlier age. In short, I felt with a shock that the present, scientific, disenchanted world-view may not be the ultimate dead end it seems, but only a passing stage, a necessary intermediate between the old warm world that is still alive in myths and ancient stories, and an altogether new world that is only yet coming into being.

While I have since learned much more from Barfield’s many books, it is this liberating perspective on our apparently meaningless existence in this modern age, that I have been most grateful for. Barfield first showed me that the modern sunderance of inner and outer, dream and reality, fiction and fact – which to me is a biographical as well as historical issue – may be only be a temporary phase, and that their re-union might pave the way to a new vision of life’s deeper meaning and purpose.