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?
Posts tonen met het label Eager Spring. Alle posts tonen
Posts tonen met het label Eager Spring. Alle posts tonen
dinsdag 27 maart 2012
Review: Eager Spring
First published: 2008
Publisher: Barfield Press UK
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.
`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.
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