Mis/
Understanding Barfield as therapeutic: the role of Christianity in Owen
Barfield’s metaphysical system
Barfield explicitly stated that ‘Idolatry’ (or
‘literalism’) was the besetting sin of the modern era, and that the ‘one thing
needful’ was therefore a symbolic apprehension of life. Much less emphasized
and infrequently mentioned was Barfield’s (unorthodox) Christianity – which
provides a mostly implicit framework for his writings. This essay will suggest
that there are two levels of understanding Owen Barfield’s work – one with, and
the other without, this Christian framework. Barfield’s greatest impact so far
has probably been among non-Christians with an eclectic range of ‘Perennial
philosophy’ approaches to spirituality, Anthroposophists, and those with a
broadly ‘post-modernist’ attitude to objective reality such as post-Jungians.
These thinkers have been crucial in supporting Barfield’s work during his life,
maintaining his reputation since his death, and elucidating and clarifying
Barfield’s distinctive ideas. But in setting aside his Christianity, a degree
of misrepresentation is inevitable and the resulting understanding of
Barfield’s achievement ends-up as being broadly psychological, sociological and
‘therapeutic’. In other words, Barfield is seen as essentially providing a kind
of therapy, which has the potential to heal modern Man’s alienation. I will
argue that this interpretation is correct but incomplete; and that when
Barfield’s ideas are restored to their original Christian context he can be
seen as essentially a theologian rather than a healer.
Examining
the nature of evidence for Barfield’s Evolution of Consciousness
Barfield often stated that his core idea was the
evolution of consciousness, and also that he arrived at this idea as a
consequence of his study of the changing meaning of English words (as described
in his earliest books Poetic Diction and History in English Words); this
insight being later being confirmed by the work of Rudolf Steiner. In later
works, Barfield made further logical arguments to support a ‘developmental’
model of evolution, beginning with a generalized consciousness and only later
becoming focused into solid bodies and discrete selves. I will argue that in
his life’s work, Barfield was in reality working at the most fundamental
philosophical level of providing a new metaphysical basis for human life – and
that therefore the ‘evidence’ he provided in support of the evolution of
consciousness was not truly ‘evidence’ – because metaphysics is the framework
that controls the nature of evidence; therefore there cannot be any empirical
or observational evidence either to support or to refute a metaphysical system.
What Barfield was instead doing was to provide an historical personal account
of the development of his metaphysics, a variety of illustrations of the
consequences of his metaphysics, and an examination of the completeness and
coherence of his new metaphysics of evolution as contrasted with mainstream
Darwinian Natural Selection. This clarifies the metaphysical scope and nature
of both Darwin’s and Barfield’s evolutionary theories, and the comparison
between them is therefore primarily to be seen as a life choice, rather than
being a matter of evaluating the balance of evidence.
