Rudolph Steiner.
Anthroposophy

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Hagel

Coleridge

Goethe

Glossary of Terms at the bottom of the page.
These terms are underlined.

A religious philosophy, or a "spiritual science" (RCA 12)--
its central belief the assumption "that nature has indeed a spiritual life, a spiritual substance of her own, which she preserves quite independently of man" (RCA 210)--to
which Barfield was an adherent since the late 1920s, Anthroposophy was founded by the German occult
philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) after (because of)
his break with theosophy. Anthroposophy teaches that
human kind's evolving consciousness is the result of--inextricable from--cosmic, extra-personal processes; that
man evolves from original participation, to the age of
the intellectual soul, to the age of the consciousness
soul (the present), to final participation and the imaginative soul.

Barfield heard Steiner speak only once, in his twenties, and from that time on was greatly influenced by his prolific writings, becoming a well known proselytizer for Anthroposophy and an adherent of his teachings and of the faith that "through Rudolf Steiner there was revealed the gradual entrusting of the Cosmic Intelligence to man, of which the Incarnation of the Word was the central event, and which is the meaning of history" (RCA 189). Prior to his first encounter with Steiner, however, Barfield had already discovered many of the central tenets of Anthroposophy independently.

"From one point of view," Barfield notes, "Anthroposophy is a new and startling phenomenon in the history of the mind. From another it can be seen as the natural and inevitable development of intellectual and philosophical impulses which had begun to manifest before Steiner was born."1 Barfield's (and Steiner's) Romantic precursors had also anticipated Anthroposophy's key ideas.

The thinking of others, such as Hegel and the Nature-Philosophers in Germany and Coleridge in England, had taken the same direction, but none of them had achieved their aim so authoritatively or so completely. Coleridge could write, rather vaguely, of "organs of spirit," with a latent function analogous to that of our more readily available organs of sense, and Goethe could apply his "objective thinking" to supplement causality with metamorphosis. But neither of them could carry cognition of spirit beyond spirit-as-phenomenally-apparent in external nature. It was in Steiner that Western mind and western method first achieved cognition of pure spirit. The others were all apostles of Imagination in its best sense, Steiner alone of those profounder levels which he himself termed Inspiration and Intuition, but which may together be conceived of as Revelation in the form appropriate to this age--as a mode of cognition to which the noumenal ground of existence is accessible directly, and not only through its phenomenal manifestation; to which therefore even the remote past can become an open book. (LS 97-98)

If Anthroposophy had early 19th century antecedents, it resonates as well with developments in 20th century thought.

Much influenced by developments in modern science, especially 20th century physics' discovery of the participatory nature of reality,2 Barfield finds surprising similarities in its discoveries and the teachings of Anthroposophy: "That it is an illusion to imagine nature unperceived as being or remaining 'the same thing' as nature perceived is a truth about which Anthroposophy and modern Physics agree." But there is, of course, a different--a qualitative difference:

Modern Physics assumes for its purposes that Nature unperceived consists of some kind of network of waves or particles. What does Anthroposophy assume? That Nature unperceived is the unconscious, sleeping being of humanity; just as Nature perceived is the self-reflection of waking humanity. (RCA 211)

It is this belief, of course, which makes Anthroposophy, and the thought of Owen Barfield as well, heretical.

In an essay on "Listening to Steiner," Barfield succinctly summarizes Anthroposophy's "basic principles" in the following way:

° The evolution of the world is, and always has been, essentially an evolution of consciousness; and the material and biological evolution, which is its outward expression, will never be known, though it may be tinkered with, until that is fully realized.

° In the course of that evolution matter has emerged from mind and not mind from matter. Spirit must first take on the form of a material brain in order to lead in this form the life of the conceptual world, which can bestow upon man in his earthly life freely acting self-consciousness. To be sure, in the brain spirit mounts upward out of matter, but only after the material brain has arisen out of spirit.

° In its later stages evolution is coterminous with the evolution of human perceiving and thinking. That does not mean a "history of ideas" refracted from particular heads, but a progressive development of the whole relation between the inner and the outer world.

° The verb "to evolve" requires a single subject if it is not to be meaningless. The age-long evolution of individuality--that is, of individual selves or egos--out of a general and participating consciousness, is accordingly not conceivable except in terms of repeated earth lives (reincarnation), just as the evolution of a natural species is inconceivable without repeated individual embodiments in the course of which it acquires its special form.

° The central form in evolution, that is, of the painful emergence of a subjective and specifically "human" consciousness out of that original participation in the phenomenal world which the myths reflect, and its advance to man's final participation in that world as an individual free spirit, was the historical life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

° That stage in the evolution of consciousness which gave rise to, and has been urged forward by, the scientific revolution in the West is, on the one hand, responsible for the prevailing materialism of the present age. On the other hand it is that which has made possible exact knowledge both of nature and of spirit. Up to now this has only been realized in relation to knowledge of nature, and there only in a very limited (predominately mineral) sphere. Correlatively, however, it has made possible exact knowledge of man's own spirit and of the spiritual world of which he is a part. Organs of perception giving rise to such knowledge are latent in all human beings, but can only be developed and brought into activity by arduous and persevering endeavor.

° Steiner himself developed these organs to an extraordinary degree and applied them to many, or nearly all, realms of knowledge. His books and lectures consist in the main of the findings of his spiritual research in those different realms. (LS 98-99)

In its simplest terms, Anthroposophy, then, should be thought of as "a path of knowledge to guide the Spiritual in the Human Being to the Spiritual in the Universe" (RCA 234: Barfield is quoting Steiner). "Men have called me also Sophia," the Meggid explains in Unancestral Voice's peroration, Barfield's most concise exposition of Anthroposophy's central teachings:

Once I was the ancestral voice of the Father-wisdom, the theosophia that spoke inarticulately through blood and instinct, but articulately through the sibyls, the prophets, the masters. But at the turning-point of time, by that central death and rebirth which was the transformation of transformations, by the open mystery of Golgotha, I was myself transformed. I am that anthroposophia who . . . is the voice of each one's mind speaking from the depths within himself. (163)

Refs:

See in particular Romanticism Comes of Age (passim), Unancestral Voice, passim (in which the Meggid serves as Anthroposophy's mouthpiece), and Worlds Apart, passim (where the character Sanderson is an Anthroposophist).

1As Barfield observes in Romanticism Comes of Age, "[Anthroposophy] begins to look much more like a coming-to-the-surface at last, and out of the clear light of day, of something that has long been at work in the dark--or nearly in the dark . . . half-hidden, always trying to reach the surface, and occasionally succeeding in doing so-for a brief period, and perhaps in an unexpected form . . . then vanishing again into obscurity"( 232).

2"Nothing is more important about the quantum principle than this," the noted physicist John Wheeler has shown, "that it destroys the concept of the world as 'sitting out there,' with the observer safely separated from it by a 20-centimeter slab of plate glass. Even to observe so minuscule an object as an electron, he must shatter the glass. He must reach in. he must install his chosen measuring equipment. it is up to him to decide whether he shall measure position or momentum. . . . . the measurement changes the state of the electron. The universe will never be the same. To describe what has happened, one has to cross out the old word 'observer' and put in its place the new word 'participator.' In some strange sense, the universe is a participatory universe" (Capra 127-28).




Glossary of Terms

The "primitive" awareness or consciousness in which mankind once believed--in a pre-logical, pre-mythical manner--that "there stands behind the phenomena, and on the other side of them from me, a represented which is of the same nature as me . . . of the same nature as the perceiving self, inasmuch as it is not mechanical or accidental, but psychic and voluntary" (SA 42), a mindset in which we feel ourselves to be "functioning member[s] of the natural world, as a finger is a member of the physical body" (RCA 230)--original participation has been eliminated by the evolution of consciousness.

"A perspective which reveals more and more of perception and less and less of thought" (HGH 24), original participation is, Barfield explains in History, Guilt and Habit,

a kind of consciousness for which it was impossible to perceive unfiguratively. But what does one mean when one speaks of perceiving figuratively? One means a kind of consciousness which does not, which cannot, perceive the material merely as such, which in perceiving its environment, perceives at the same time an immaterial within or through, or expressed by it. . . . a kind of consciousness for which there is no such thing as a merely "outer" world" (46).1

Evidence of the existence of original participation is apparent in the testament of language: "The farther back language as a whole is traced," Barfield notes in History in English Words, "the more poetical and animated do its sources appear, until it seems at last to dissolve into a kind of mist of myth. The beneficence or malignance--which might be called soul-qualities--of natural phenomena, such as clouds, plants or animals, make a more vivid impression at this time than their outer shapes and appearances" (83-84).

In original participation "the represented is felt to be on the other side of the phenomena from the perceiving self. At the same time, it is felt to be linked with, or related to, that self otherwise than through the senses. The self, so far as there yet is one, is still aware that it and the phenomena derive from the same supersensible source" (SA 122-23).

See in particular Saving the Appearances, Chaps. IV, V, VI.

1For 20th Century minds the "logic" of Original Participation seems unfathomable. As Barfield notes in Saving the Appearances, "To make no class distinction between the sun and a white cockatoo, but to feel instantly and sharply a world of difference between both of these natural phenomena and a black cockatoo is, it is felt, a state of mind at which it would be difficult to arrive by inference" (SA 30).

"Some say that evolution has now reached a stage at which man himself is becoming increasingly responsible for it . . . ," Barfield writes in History, Guilt, and Habit.

I think the same; but I do not see that responsibility at all as others see it. George Steiner once coined a useful phrase when he referred to our contemporary habit of "biologizing the data," and these people all seem to think only in terms of an evolution biologically determined, and therefore of the application of technology to the data, whether by genetic engineering or otherwise. Whereas I am certain that our responsibility will only be discharged, if at all, not by tinkering with the outside of the world but by changing it, slowly no doubt, from the inside. (92)

Such change can never come about, however, without full realization of what Barfield deems the evolution of consciousness.

"The actual evolution of the earth we know," Barfield insists, "must have been at the same time an evolution of consciousness" (SA 65). Evolution has not been the "haphazard affair" (UV 50) it is now supposed to be. It has not been the result only of chance and necessity (as Jacques Monod has argued), but is, Barfield has shown, guided by a telos which modern science refuses to recognize. This telos is the evolution of consciousness, and at its center lies the emergence of the human mind and the evolution of anthropocentricity.

Our understanding of evolution, Darwinism, has from the start been a victim of our idolatry and thus presents us only with half-truths:

With the doctrine of evolution the concept of "man," as a thinkable entity, with a history behind him and a destiny in front of him, made a first confused reappearance. But owing to the form which that doctrine took under the influence of the prevailing idolatry, this "man" of evolution has no inner unity with the spirit of any particular man alive on earth at any particular moment. When the evolution of phenomena is substituted for our supposed evolution of idols, it will, I believe, be seen without much difficulty that the evolution of the individual human spirit has always proceeded step by step with the evolution of nature; and that both are indeed "fallen." The biological evolution of the human race is, in fact, only one half of the story; the other has still to be told. (SA 184)

The discovery of evolution in the 18th and 19th centuries offered the human mind a radical new way of looking at life on Earth and our place within it, but that realization will , Barfield is convinced, pale by comparison to the new understanding likely to follow in the wake of the acceptance of the evolution of consciousness:

If the eighteenth-century botanist, looking for the first time through the old idols of Linnaeus's fixed and timeless classification into the new perspective of biological evolution felt a sense of liberation and of light, it can have been but a candle-flame compared with the first glimpse we now get of the familiar world and human history lying together, bathed in the light of the evolution of consciousness. (SA 72)

Barfield has provided the following schematic depictions, borrowed from Anthroposophy, of the evolution of consciousness:

(RCA 98)

Barfield offers numerous striking prose analogies for his understanding of the evolution of consciousness. Here are two of the most illuminating:

· We may very well compare the self of man to a seed. Formerly what is now the seed was a member of the old plant, and as such was wholly informed with a life not wholly its own. But now the pod or capsule has split open, and the dry seed has been ejected. It has attained to a separate existence. Henceforth one of two things may happen to it: either it may abide alone, isolated from the rest of the earth, growing dryer and dryer, until it withers up altogether; or, by uniting with the earth it may blossom into a fresh life of its own. . . . uniting itself with the Spirit of the Earth, with the Word, it may blossom into the imaginative soul, and live. It differs from the seed only in this, that the choice lies with itself. (RCA 79-80)

· If you want to represent the process of evolution diagrammatically, you must think, not as the evolutionary humanists do, of a straight line sloping on and on and on and up and up and up, but rather of a curve like a capital "U" Now, if you move down the left-hand side, or limb of a letter "U," round the curve at the bottom and up the right-hand limb, you will keep on reaching points on the right side which are at the same level as corresponding points on the left; and these levels you certainly did pass on your way down. The journey on will, by its nature--to that extent--involve a journey back, or a return. . . . Oddly enough, it is very much the same with a clock. It is not only when you move the hands backwards that you bring them back to where they were before; you also do it when you move them forwards. (RCA 230-31)

See in particular Romanticism Comes of Age, passim.

The idea of the intellectual soul is borrowed from Anthroposophy. Although Barfield admits that "there is really, by the very nature of the subject, an almost insuperable difficulty about describing or 'explaining' the intellectual soul, as seen from within, that is to say, from the Ego itself" (RCA 126), he succeeds admirably in helping us to understand its stance before the world.

"We in the West," he explains in Romanticism Comes of Age, "are so placed [in the Intellectual Soul] that

as our self-consciousness increases, we feel: over there is the material world, all that I experience as sense-perception and ordinary thought, and over here is the "I," a mysterious entity, perhaps non-entity) about which I can never know anything, and between the two there is no connection. (132)

While the Consciousness Soul "only says 'I know,' when it can add: 'because I have experienced,'" the intellectual soul knows things, or thinks it does, with certainty without the need of "suffering" them. Its knowledge is abstract.

See in particular "Of the Intellectual Soul" (RCA 126-142).

"The consciousness of 'myself' and the distinction between 'myself' and all other selves, the antithesis between 'myself,' the observer, and the external world, the observed," Barfield wrote early on (in History in English Words), "is such an obvious and early fact of experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting point of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different kind of consciousness. Yet we can see from the history of our words that this form of experience, so far from being eternal, is quite a recent achievement of the human spirit" (HEW 164). No insight is more central to Barfield's thought than this one--formulated with striking clarity before he was thirty.

The self-consciousness we now take as common sense is, in fact, the product of the entire evolution of consciousness.1

See in particular "Personality and Reason" (HEW 156-77), "Self and Reality" (RM 155-75), "Review of Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness."

1Barfield has no patience for the argument--proferred by linguistic analysts--that we have always been self-conscious but have merely not had the language to articulate our awareness of it. In "Philology and the Incarnation" he gives it the back of his hand.

It simply does not make sense to say that at one time self-consciousness was an existing fact which had not yet been discovered. You can be unaware of many things, but you cannot be unaware of being aware. In this case the discovery and the birth of the thing discovered are one and the same event. (RM 233)

An Anthroposophical term, the Consciousness Soul refers to "the maximum point [in the evolution of consciousness] of self-consciousness, the point at which the individual feels himself to be entirely cut off from the surrounding cosmos and is for that reason fully conscious of himself as an individual" (RCA 72).

The Consciousness Soul constitutes "that part of the human entelechy which comes to expression in the history of the world during a period beginning in the fifteenth century and extending far into the future beyond our own time" (RCA 198-99).

The period of the Consciousness Soul arises, due to the descent of the potency and interiorization, correlative to the discovery of the merely physical body (RCA 86). In it, the mind becomes brain-physical. In the Age of the Consciousness Soul, "the thinking of which we are fully conscious is now focused or centered in the brain in a way which does cut us off from nature and enables us to feel ourselves, at any rate, as definitely not a part of nature" (WA 138).

Living in the consciousness soul man experiences isolation, loneliness, materialism, loss of faith in the spiritual world, above all, uncertainty. The soul has to make up its mind and to act in a positive way on its own unsupported initiative. And it finds great difficulty in doing so. For it is too much in the dark to be able to see any clear reason why it should, and it no longer feels the old (instinctive) promptings of the spirit within. (RCA 109)

The Consciousness Soul, Barfield notes, says "I know" only when it can add "because I have experienced" (RCA 128). It is this which turns the Consciousness Soul in the direction of science.

As the Ego detaches itself from the macrocosm, the "spiritual world" comes to rule in his own consciousness. "Fully responsible at last for his own actions, he is deprived of the instinctive guidance of spirits, even including his National or Folk Spirit . . . " (RCA 109). The consciousness soul thus seems a kind of "death experience" (RM 92).

England, Barfield shows, is among nations the epitome of the Consciousness Soul. And Shakespeare's Hamlet is likewise its literary exemplar.

See in particular "Of the Consciousness Soul" and "The Soul of Hamlet" (RCA 84-103 & 104-125).

The culminating stage in the evolution of consciousness, the "entelechy of the earth-evolution as a whole" (RCA 44), when man "regains his at-one-ment with the principle of creation, only now in full self-consciousness as a self-contained Ego" (RCA 85), final participation is a difficult (if not impossible) to grasp idea,1 which can perhaps best be understood as "a self conscious rapport with the whole phenomenal world" (IOB 13), or as a "willed consciousness of [original] participation" [EC 27] which "must itself be raised from potentiality to act" (SA 137). Final participation will be possible only when "the macrocosm is . . . focused to an invisible point in the isolated Ego" (RCA 48), for in final participation "man's Creator speaks from within man himself" (BAR 66); we grasp fully our directionally creator relation with the divine.

Final participation is not attainable simply through imitation of original participation. For the Greeks, Barfield reminds us, were inside the world's unity; we are outside of it.2 We live in thought, not in thinking, and thus we must "first . . . realize that it [the original unity] is still there, and then . . . learn how to get back into it, how to rise once more from thought into thinking, taking with us, however, that fuller self-consciousness which the Greeks never knew . . ." (RCA 61). The models upon which Barfield draws in formulating his theory of final participation come not from the Greeks but from Goethe and Rudolf Steiner.3

"One need not be an analyst," R J. Reilly has observed, "to see the progression Barfield intends: from the solitude of private thought, to the strengthened thought that rays out into the thought of the universe, to the absolute dissolution of private thought in the universe, or the Kingdom--or from subjective idealism to Anthroposophy to heaven" (BAR 76). Into his nineties, Barfield has retained a firm faith that "the world of final participation will one day sparkle in the light of the eye as it never yet sparkled early one morning in the original light of the sun" (SA 161). But if we are ever to attain final participation, it will be in the far distant future. It does not loom on the horizon. "Final participation," as Barfield writes in Saving the Appearances' final chapter,

is indeed the mystery of the kingdom--of the kingdom that is to come on earth, as it is in heaven--and we are still only on the verge of its outer threshold. Two thousand years is a trifle of time compared with the ages which preceded the Incarnation. More than a thousand years had to pass before the Western Church reached even that premonitory inkling of final participation which it expressed by adding the Filloque to the Creed, and acknowledged that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son as well as, originally, from the Father. (182)

The closing lines of Barfield's verse play Orpheus may be taken as a depiction of the mindset of final participation (the "he" of these lines can be taken to be not just Orpheus, the archetypal poet, but mankind as well):

He shall ascend Parnassus awake and find his soul:
Proteus shall work unsleeping for ever, and forms shall flow
As the meaning of words a poet has mastered. It shall be so
That Zeus shall abandon to Chronos the antique starry crown,
And softly out of Olympus the high Gods shall come down
Shedding ambrosial fragrance in clouds that for ever abide,
And earth shall be covered with blushes and make herself sweet as a bride. And her light shall be liquid as honey, her air taste good like bread In the mouths of them that dwell upon earth, and all shall be fed. (O 112)

See in particular Saving the Appearances, Chaps. XX, XXII, XXIV, XXV; Unancestral Voice, passim.
1Against the criticism that his eschatology is too complicated, Barfield explains that "The movements of fingers disentangling a crumpled skein are complicated, but the final result is not complication" (SA 163). Still, in Owen Barfield: Man and Meaning, Barfield admits that any definitive explanation of final participation is "quite beyond me."

2"There is no question of going backwards and trying to be little Greeks. . . . The task which their philosophers instinctively set themselves was . . . to get outside a plane of consciousness in which they normally lived, so as to be able to conceive of it: to turn thinking into thought. Our problem is the converse of this. We are outside it already. Our task is twofold, first to realize that it is still there, and then to learn how to get back into it, 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 follows that we shall also be conscious of it as a different world, a world into which we can plunge at will" (RCA 61).

3"Beta-thinking leads to final, by way of the inexorable elimination of all original, participation. Consequently Goethe was able to develop an elementary technique, but unable or unwilling, to erect a metaphysics, of final participation" (SA 139).

The mystery of the incarnation--of how the divine becomes flesh, the spirit body, the metaphysical physical--is, of course, of great interest to Barfield.

If we "dwell on the full meaning of the word incarnation," the Meggid explains in Unancestral Voice, we will understand that "it does not refer only to human flesh, or even only to flesh. It refers to the whole world of nature, in so far as it is perceived through the senses; and it was to this world of the senses that Gabriel directed the earnest gaze of mankind" (40).

According to the Anthroposophical concept of the descent of the potency, there is no reason to believe that reincarnation of the human spirit takes place all at once. It is, rather, the product of the evolution of consciousness, as Burgeon comes to understand in Unancestral Voice:

He saw quite clearly that mysterious potency on its way down from the head to the lower organism. He saw it reach the heart and the blood and from there begin to manifest itself in a new way, a way in which the Greek world has as yet no experience-and of which [D. H.] Lawrence and most of the twentieth century no longer had any experience. He saw it radiating outward from within, as it once rayed formatively inward from without--then, when it was hardly yet aware of itself as physical. He saw the beginning of that awareness taking shape already in the Middle Ages. (29)

And in "The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge," Barfield offers a brief glimpse of what incarnation's final stage might imply:

Thus at the final stage of the process of evolution and bringing it full circle, we wake to see the whole as an expression of the original polarity. We see realized as fact that polarity which, as dialectic, was found to constitute the nature of grammar and logic--the I AM in the act of reproducing itself. That which I AM has so long and laboriously created itself affirms "I am." The Son of God awakens on earth and, awakened, names himself the Son of Man. (RCA 161)

See in particular, Romanticism Comes of Age, passim, Unancestral Voice, passim.

Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
German Romantic idealist philosopher, author of The Phenomenology of Mind (1807; trans. 1910). Established the concept of the historical dialectic.

Those early 19th century thinkers who, following Schelling, sought to develop a basically phenomenological approach to knowledge.

"[Coleridge's] face," Barfield explains, "was turned . . . in the opposite direction to the one which natural science was taking in his time and, in spite of his efforts and those of a few others like him, has continued to take since his death. For it was his firm conviction that, if knowledge was to advance, there must be a science of qualities as well as quantities" (CTC 40).

The author of a book-length study of his intellectual development, the editor of his "philosophical letters" for the still-in-progress definitive edition of his work, Barfield obviously owed a substantial debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). It might even be said that Barfield identified with his fellow Romantic polymath for at least three reasons.

Beleaguered since his youth by problems with stammering, Barfield empathized with Coleridge's own difficulties with speech:

[Coleridge's extraordinarily unifying mind] was too painfully aware that you cannot really say one thing correctly without saying everything. He was rightly afraid that there would not be time to say everything before going on to say the next thing, or that he would forget to do so afterwards. His incoherence of expression arose from the coherence of what he wanted to express. It was a sort of intellectual stammer. (RCA 146)
Coleridge's fame and reputation suffered, both in his own time and today, because of his presumed-to-be-unhealthy interest in German philosophy--a price Barfield too has paid in a century in which Germany has inaugurated two world wars.

Speaking, as he had to do, to his already empirically minded English contemporaries, he had, so to speak, to lay down his track as he went along, and caterpillar wheels are slow compared with ordinary wheeled traction. But then they can go into much cruder places. If the German thinkers could count on at least a second-class road of understanding into the minds of their readers, Coleridge tried to penetrate where there was no longer a road at all; to awaken to active thought minds for which "the conceivable" had already been "reduced within the bounds of the picturable." (WCT 43)
And, like Coleridge, Barfield has been misunderstood because of the unorthodox and misunderstood nature of his intellectual project--his "thinking about thinking," or "Beta-thinking" (as Barfield terms it in Saving the Appearances):

But though it is not mysticism, to reason about thinking does entail our being led inward from the product of thinking to the act itself. And this does require a certain discipline. Here is the root-cause of the charge of "obscurity," which was leveled during his life, and has so often been leveled since his death, against both Coleridge himself and his philosophy. (WCT 16)

In Romanticism Comes of Age, Barfield contrasts Coleridge with Goethe, a comparison which leads to an illuminating, almost physiognomic, descriptive analysis of Coleridge's physical appearance:

Goethe had his feet firmly planted on the earth. As a scientist, as a knower, he largely confined himself to the realm of natural science and his regular industry combined with his great genius had by the end of his life illuminated this realm with a steadily increasing flood of light. Coleridge never succeeded in finding his feet on earth at all. Look at the portrait of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London, and you will feel the full force of Wordsworth's description:

The rapt one of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature

Compare the majesty of the forehead and the eyes with the pathetically weak mouth. He himself said that he had "power without strength." He was continually forming vast schemes of works to be written on every conceivable subject, or on all at once, which he never had the energy to carry out. (RCA 161-62)

In the final reckoning, perhaps Barfield had more in common with the firmly-grounded Goethe.

See in particular What Coleridge Thought, passim, "The Philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge" (RCA 144-6

Barfield admired the scientist, playwright, novelist, and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1789-1832), the titanic figure of German Romanticism, who not only wrote one of the greatest works of world literature (Faust) but made substantial contributions to color theory and to botany, almost as much as his countryman Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Goethe's age, Barfield recognized, had great need of him:

For a student of the evolution of consciousness, it is particularly interesting that a man with the precise make-up of Goethe should have appeared in that precise moment in the history of the West. By the middle of the eighteenth century, when he was born, original participation had virtually faded out, and Goethe himself was a thoroughly modern man. Yet he showed from his earliest childhood and retained all through his life an almost atavistically strong remainder of it. It breathes through his poetry as the peculiar Goethian attitude to Nature, who is felt as a living being, almost as a personality, certainly as a "thou" rather than an "it" or an "I." It is almost as if the Gods had purposely retained this sense in Goethe as a sort of seed-corn out of which the beginnings of final participation could peep, for the first time, on the world of science. Perhaps it was an instinctive understanding of this which made him so determined to keep clear of Beta-Thinking.

Mein kind, ich hab'es klug gemacht,
Ich hab' nie uber das Denken gedacht.1

Barfield is especially indebted to Goethe for his understanding of systematic imagination.

A systematic approach towards final participation may . . . be expected to be an attempt to use imagination systematically. This was the foundation of Goethe's scientific work. In his book on the Metamorphosis of Plants and the associated writings descriptive of his method, as well as in the rest of his scientific work, there is the germ of a systematic investigation of phenomena by way of participation. For his Urpflanze and Urphanomen are nothing more or less than potential phenomena perceived and studied as such. They are processes grasped directly and not, as hitherto since the scientific revolution, hypotheses inferred from actual phenomena. (SA 137-38)

Though well aware of the "common objection that Goethe's method ought not to be called 'scientific,' because it was not purely empirical," Barfield recognizes the charge to be the result of the very mindset Goethe sought to overturn:

we have seen that the major part of any perceived phenomenon consists of our own "figuration." Therefore, as imagination reaches the point of enhancing figuration itself, hitherto unperceived parts of the whole field of the phenomenon necessarily become perceptible. Moreover, this conscious participation enhances perception not only of present phenomena but also of the memory-images derived from them. All this Goethe could not prevail on his contemporaries to admit. idolatry was too all powerful and there were then no premonitory signs, as there are today, of its collapse. (SA 138)

See in particular "Goethe and the Twentieth Century" (RCA 164-183), Saving the Appearances, Chaps. XX.
1"I have managed things cleverly, my boy: I have never thought about thinking."

As a student of the evolution of consciousness, Barfield is anxious to distinguish between three easily confused terms: (1) the history of ideas, (2) the history of thought, and (3) the history of thinking.

Working on the assumption that "throughout the course of history the many have accepted, as far as they were able, the thoughts which have been made for them by the few in the past, and the few have gone on constructing the opinion of the future" (HEW 114), Barfield sees the history of ideas--the sort of scholarly activity engaged in by individuals like the philosopher Arthur Owen Lovejoy, the historical reconstruction of a unit idea" (say, for example, the philosophical tenet known as dualism), its origin, its dissemination, its mistaken notions,1 its modification, its demise--as only able to "collate conclusions." The history of ideas, Barfield argues, does not "attempt to penetrate into the very texture and activity of thought" (SA 90).

Moreover, the history of ideas, is grounded on a false assumption: "it assumes that all these philosophers were asking themselves the same questions and then finding different answers to them; that they were talking about the same things, and merely reasoning differently from them. That means that the history of philosophy is treated, in effect, as though it were a dialogue between contemporaries" (HGH 7-8).

The history of ideas readily falls prey as well to the worst kind of logomorphism. Indeed, Barfield contends, the history of ideas may owe its very existence as a method to the logomorphic bias of its time of origin.

[In the 19th Century] the development of human consciousness was . . . presented as a history of alpha-thinking beginning from zero and applied always to the same phenomena, at first in the form of erroneous beliefs about them and, as time went on, in the form of more and more correct and scientific beliefs. In short, the evolution of consciousness was reduced to a bare history of ideas. (SA 66)

Nor is a mere history of thought satisfactory for our needs. History of thought in Barfield's classification system is content with "observing that men began to think thus at a certain time,"2 while a "history of thinking," Barfield's preferred alternative, goes on to ask "how they became able to do so" (RCA 48). The latter goes on to the realization of the evolution of consciousness.

Methodologically convinced that "it is possible to fix a point in time, and then to cut a kind of cross-section, and define the exact, relation between language and thought at that particular moment" and that "this relation . . . is a fluid and flickering thing, varying incredibly in individual minds, leaping up and sinking down like a flame from one generation to another" (HEW 86), Barfield believes that "the progress of ideas has been as much, or more, a function of the evolution of consciousness than its vehicle. That is, of consciousness and its correlative, the phenomena or Collective Representations. . . . Accordingly, that evolution is much less dependent on contacts or communications than has generally been supposed" (SA 104).3

See in particular Saving the Appearances, passim, "History of Ideas: Evolution of Consciousness" (HGH 3-35).
1"No doubt the history of consciousness does include the story of any number of erroneous beliefs," Barfield notes in Saving the Appearances, "but the erroneous beliefs of human beings about phenomena are neither the most interesting nor the most important thing about the human beings or about the phenomena" (66-67).

2Elsewhere in Saving the Appearances, Barfield offers the following example of the unsatisfactory nature of the history of ideas, using his own terms, participation and alpha-thinking as test cases.

Granted that for the past two or three thousand years the process of evolution has consisted in the gradual ousting of participation by alpha-thinking, is even the history of alpha-thinking itself just a history of thought in the ordinary sense, or can we also detect in it the subliminal working of an evolutionary process? A history of thought, as such, amounts to a dialectical or syllogistic process, the thoughts of one age arising discursively out of, challenging, and modifying the thoughts and discoveries of the previous one. Is this all we mean by the history of alpha-thinking? (67)

3The question remains of the role individual "great minds" play in the evolution of consciousness. In Saving the Appearances, Barfield offers the following tentative hypothesis.

From the point of view of a history of consciousness, their writings [those of Plato and Aristotle, or any of the great philosophers] are rather landmarks to indicate the nature of that consciousness, inasmuch as they represent the human mind in its most wakeful state. At the same time, owing to the subtle link between thinking and figuration, and to the part played by language in evolving and sustaining the collective representations, they are by no means without causal significance. (97)

In "Philology and the Incarnation"--his own version of Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici--Barfield explains how his own thinking on the evolution of consciousness, in particular his study of language as a record of that evolution, eventually required his acceptance of the teachings of Christianity. The raised-as-an-agnostic Barfield had no Damascus, no moment of conversion. The facts of the evolution of consciousness logically required him to become a Christian.

It is possible--I know because it happened in my case--for a man to have been brought up in the belief, and to have taken it for granted, that the account given in the Gospels of the birth and the resurrection of Christ is a noble fairy story with no more claim to historical accuracy than any other myth; and it is possible for such a man, after studying in depth the history of the literature and tradition that has grown up around it and to accept (if you like, to be obliged to accept) the record as a historical fact, not because of the authority of the Church, nor by any process of ratiocination such as C. S. Lewis has recorded in his own case, but rather because it fitted so inevitably with the other facts as he had already found them. Rather because he felt, in the utmost humility, that if he had never heard of it through the Scriptures, he would have been obliged to try his best to invent something like it as a hypothesis to save the appearances. (RM 236)

Throughout his books he discusses the pivotal role of Christ in the development of human consciousness.

For Barfield, Christ is, first and foremost, "the cosmic wisdom on its way from original to final participation." "In Christ . . . we participate finally the Spirit we once participated originally" (SA 185) Thanks to Christ, Barfield would write in "From East to West, "the human Ego, the true Self, of man descended from the purely spiritual heights, where it hitherto dwelt, to the earth. Had Christ not come to earth, individual human beings would never have been able to utter the word 'I' at all" (RCA 43).1

Barfield strives to remind us how extraordinary the Christian myth is, and he endeavors to reiterate it with fresh wonder:

In the heart of that nation [Israel], whose whole impulse it had been to eliminate original participation [a process Barfield details in Saving the Appearances], a man was born who simultaneously identified himself with, and carefully distinguished himself from, the Creator of the world--whom he called the Father. On the one hand: "I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me," etc. On the other: "I and the Father are one," etc. In one man the inwardness of the Divine Name had been fully realized; the final participation, whereby man's creator speaks from within man himself, had been accomplished. The Word had been made flesh. (SA 169-70)

Christianity was thus a response to a felt need:

the incarnation of Christ in a human body, and subsequently in the "aura" of the earth, was the solution in fact of that divorce between a subjective and an objective world which had only recently arisen in human experience. . . . In the last great period of civilisation a question stood before the whole earth--the question whether it should henceforth have a meaning. And the question was answered by the deed of God, who brought meaning to the earth from the Sun. (RCA 102)

"Christianity, in its abstract purity," he would write conclusively in Saving the Appearances, "became the exoteric expression of the esoteric doctrines of the poetry and wisdom of antiquity" (185), but he had already expressed the same idea thirty years before in History in English Words.

In Palestine, Jesus of Nazareth lived and taught and died. As the years passed by, an increasing number of sages and religious teachers began to agree among themselves that recently something had actually occurred which had before only been talked about or erroneously believed to have occurred. Certain of the Jews, for instance, admitted that their Messiah had come and gone. Egyptians and followers of the Egyptian cults were persuaded that a real Horus had been born of a virgin, and had risen again as an Osiris. Some of the more forward-looking among those who had been initiated into the Mysteries felt that what had so often been enacted dramatically within the sacred precincts had now taken place in a peculiar way on the great stage of the world, this time not for a few, but for all to see. A God had himself died in order to rise again to eternal life. Thus, those who had not been initiated--the poorer classes, most of the women, and the slaves--had a joyous feeling that at last the Mysteries had been revealed, that "many things which were hid had been made plain." And some students of Platonic philosophy could admit that this might be true, that henceforth those who could not rise to the contemplation of the eternal in Nature might yet win immortality by contemplating the life and death of Jesus. (115)

Whereas some critics of Christianity--Nietzsche for example--have condemned it for usurping and demeaning Greek thought, Barfield finds in Christ an incarnate fulfillment of Greek wishful thinking:

For Christ . . . had first taught in a new and simpler way, and had then himself demonstrated, a truth which nearly every one of the Greek philosophers, including Aristotle, had been trying to say all their lives--that, in order to achieve immortality, it is necessary to "die" to this world of the senses and the appetites, and that he who thus "dies" is already living in eternity during his bodily life and will continue to do so after his bodily death. "Whosoever shall lose his life shall find it." (HEW 115)

Finally, the most distinctive feature of Christianity, as Barfield emphasizes on a number of occasions, remains its historicity:

What is peculiar in Christianity is the nexus . . . between the Second Person of the Trinity [Christ, the Logos] and a certain historical event in time. For the Christian, accordingly, religion can never be simply the direct relation between his individual soul and the eternal Trinity. As long as we ourselves are occupying a standpoint in time, so long, interposed between the First and Third Persons, all history, in a manner lies. (SA 165)

Yet surely the thing that more than all else distinguishes Christianity from other religions is that it does take serious account of time--and . . . not just short periods, not just the time of an individual biography. It accepts historical time as a reality, and a reality relevant to its own truth. (UV 92)

Only Christianity, Barfield would argue, makes possible the concept of the evolution of consciousness.

See in particular "Philology and the Incarnation" (RM 228-36); "The 'Son of God' and the 'Son of Man'" (RM 249-60); and Saving the Appearances, Chap. XXIV.
1Barfield's Christianity was through and through informed by Anthroposophy and at times becomes extremely esoteric. Consider, for example, the following passage, in which the Meggid explains Christ's past lives:

The soul of Jesus of Bethlehem was indeed the fruit of many previous lives, and there is allusion to this in the genealogy which precedes the account of his birth, and which is traced back only to Abraham-that is, approximately to the stage of emergence . . . when individuality had for the first time been recognizably attained by the human spirit. . . . The physical pedigree of Jesus of Nazareth is drawn from David through another son, the priest Nathan. But the provenance of the soul that was born in this Jesus is a deeper mystery. It had known no previous lives on earth. It was indeed an Eden-soul, unfallen, and given intact from the Father Spirit to be the persisting link between the old state of the human spirit and the new. . . .

Think only of those two souls-through what millennia prepared for that moment!-uniting to form, as it were, a chalice in which the Timeless, in which the Timeless that both dies and dies not, could indeed enter into time-as it did when the man Jesus was baptized by John in the River Jordan, and the uncreated light, the untransformed transforming, entered his consciousness and became also the Christ of history. (UV 113)

Throughout Unancestral Voice, Burgeon speaks with a being called a Meggid. "The Meggid," we are told, "was something like a voice that spoke within the mind 'in silence and solitude.' But not an audible voice."

The Meggid, we are told, may be thought of as an angel, or a spirit-being, entering man and speaking with him words of wisdom, or considered as "identical with the divine Logos" (UV 20-21).

See in particular Unancestral Voice, passim.

"Forces," "potencies," "servants of the logos" (UV 38-39), at work within mankind, shaping--at a largely unconscious level--the ebb and flow of the evolution of consciousness.

The spirit-Beings Barfield acknowledges include Ahriman, Lucifer, and Michael.

See in particular Unancestral Voice, passim.

For the Greeks logos meant many things, including (according to F. E. Peters) "speech, account, reason, definition, rational faculty, proportion" (110). For the Pre-Socratic Heraclitus, logos was "an underlying organizational principle of the universe" (Peters 111); for Plato, it was the opposite of mythos--a true account of the nature of things; for Aristotle,
it became roughly equivalent to reason itself.

For Barfield, logos names the "faint awareness of creative activity alike in nature and man" which remained after the decline of original participation (SA 185). Coleridge called the logos "the evolver" (WCT 150). Barfield calls it "the depth of all theology."

In Greek, Barfield points out, it "always meant both 'word' and the creative faculty in human beings--'Reason,' as it is often translated--which expresses itself by making and using words" (HEW 113). And yet the philological evidence suggests that the concept of the logos was the product of the evolution of consciousness:

The philosophic problem of an opposition between "subjective" and "objective" was not heard of until the time of the Stoics, and on the other hand it is in this same sect that we first meet with a theory of the divine Logos. Men begin to be conscious of an indwelling creative principle, precisely as they begin to feel themselves detached from it. (RCA 127)

It was thus only "as the Greek spirit emerged from that more thorough-going intermingling with the Spirit--or Spirits--of nature, which gave rise to the rich imaginations of their Mythologies" that the Greeks "evolved their doctrine of the Logos . . . the creative Word, which informs both man and nature." (XXXXX)

Contemporary ignorance of the shaping power of the logos--an obliviousness which, Barfield shows, began with the Romans--leads to an idolatrous, reductionistic understanding of evolution, as Burgeon explains in Unancestral Voice:

"Either all things were made, and are sustained, by the Logos, or they were not. If they were, then the Logos is, in some way, the transforming agent underlying the changes in both nature and history. The ordinary theory of evolution is what it is because by the time men first became aware of evolution they no longer knew anything of that transforming agent. And it is that very ignorance for which Rome is responsible at the bar of history." (99)

See in particular "Philosophy and Religion" (HEW 96-117), "Philology and the Incarnation" (RM 228-36), Saving the Appearances, Chaps. XXII, XXIII, XXIV.

Ahriman in Zoroastrianism

In ancient Persian religion (Zoroastrianism), Ahriman (aka Arimanius or Angra Mainya) stood high in the ranks of the enemies who opposed Ahura Mazda (aka Ohrmazd or Oromasdes). Ahriman is thought to be the first personification of "the Devil" because Zoroastrians believed in a completely dualistic form of religion.

Ahriman is ethymologically the Middle Persian form of Angra Mainyu, one of the two twin-spirits created by Ahura Mazda. Ahriman chose evil consciously, and by this act he created death. The central subject of Zoroastrian teaching and theology is the constant ongoing battle between Ahriman and Ahura Mazda.

by Micha F. Lindemans

In ancient times a prophetess who, in a state of ecstasy and under influence of Apollo, prophesized without being consulted. Famous Sibyls are the Cumaean Sibyl and the Erythraean Sibyl, who revealed to Alexander the Great his divine descent. The Cumaean Sibyl owned, according to tradition, nine books of prophecies, which she sold the remaining three to the Roman king Tarquin.