tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post5534710587441237292..comments2024-03-28T13:10:04.655+00:00Comments on The Notion Club Papers - an Inklings blog: Solving Tolkien's flat-earth versus spherical-earth problem with the help of Owen Barfield Bruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-70774694481230576222018-07-06T19:34:06.309+01:002018-07-06T19:34:06.309+01:00"Barfield shows that these implications show ..."Barfield shows that these implications show that we cannot do history on prehistory, cannot validly describe the world when it was inhabited by men with different consciousness."<br /><br />Thinking (if you can call it 'thinking'...) aloud, how does Lewis's likely myth of unfallen Adam in The Problem of Pain relate to this? And, the depiction of unfallen Anthropmorphic creatures in Perelandra - co-existng and interacting with fallen humans? And, again, the depiction of assorted unfallen non-/pre-/semi-Anthropomorphic creatures on Malacandra? And - a 'Numinorean' continuity to late-antique Merlin in That Hideous Strength? <br /><br />Again, re. the How, what of pre- and post-Numenorean Elvish (1) consciousness, (2) speech, (3) extant written records, and ditto Maiar (Istari) - and between those two and between each and Men? <br /><br />I wonder how much young Tolkien may have been dissatisfied by Nesbit 'solution(s)' to time-travelling English children?<br /><br />I wonder how much Tolkien and Lewis are variously consciously interacting with Milton's 'matter' of angelical explanation of the War in Heaven (among other things) to unfallen Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost? (Ransom, on Perelandra, as fallen, though (Baptismally) redeemed human, has both similar and different disadvantages to Milton's angels.)<br /><br />David Llewellyn DoddsAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-89060890984808824102018-07-03T21:06:15.081+01:002018-07-03T21:06:15.081+01:00Well, simplifying further, the original spiritual ...Well, simplifying further, the original spiritual creation of the universe included a vision of life spreading across the surface of a planet. This vision was first present to the view of the Ainur from a particular perspective, hence becoming a two-dimensional projection of a higher dimension manifold.<br /><br />Because the original singing of Arda was a harmony resulting in a symmetric expression centered on the origin (or center), the mapping of this onto a sphere presented no difficulties or distortion. Also, for some time during the initial creation, the material world was purely subject to the creative act of the Ainur by the will and power of Ilúvatar. However, Ilúvatar had already planned for the natural law consequences of this creation (including Melkor's discords), which were shown in the vision and thus reflected in the Third Theme.<br /><br />That is, the working of natural law, not according to any will of its own but merely in response to the acts of creation, are part of the rule of justice that ties the discords of Melkor (the seeking of power) into the greater theme of sorrow and regret for such acts. Though the natural laws of the material world are only a reflection of the laws of pure logic which assured that there must be unforeseen consequences of thoughtless action (and here I only describe Tolkien's probable view, I am not a Platonic Idealist).<br /><br />Anyway, even more simplistically, the idea was that, at some earlier age, it was possible for the spiritually inclined to sail to the horizon and then continue at a tangent to the surface of the Earth and sail clean off into a (physically as well as spiritually) higher world. But since then this higher spiritual reality has become mapped to the surface of the planet such that there is no particular point of travel necessary to enter it, while conversely it does not involve leaving the physical world behind.<br /><br />It's an interesting mythic idea, I think that it does communicate a profound truth about the ancient incidents of simply and physically leaving the mortal world. At the same time, the common error that simply getting further off the ground equates to spiritual progress is rampant in our time of technologically enabled flight and high-rise construction (even when unspoken, which it often isn't). I don't see that this mythic concept helps address that error.Chiu ChunLinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03519192610708043962noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-51126777362787852492018-07-03T06:31:39.688+01:002018-07-03T06:31:39.688+01:00@CCl - I don't really follow your explanation ...@CCl - I don't really follow your explanation because of its abstraction - but then I'm not yet fully clear about my own! It takes a whle for these things to settle...<br /><br />@SA - Thanks. It feels as if there is important somewhere here, still raw and unformed. Barfield's ideas about the evolution of Man and of the earth and surprisingly slippery, and hard to hold-onto - although he is quite lucid on a sentence by sentence level about them. Much of his Platonic dialogue Worlds Apart is to do with describing his view of exactly what I am talking about. <br /><br />This in turn was greatly influenced by Rudolf Steiner, at least in its outlines, and Steiner wrote/ spoke a great deal (far too much IMHO! - and mostly nonsense) about Atlantis - which he seems to have based upon Madame Blavatsky... both claiming to know it clairvoyantly from the Akashic records, so that it should be confirmable by anyone. <br /><br />Barfield, on the other hand, argues most by a rational and deductive/ indictive kind of method. I generally feel that Barfield is insufficiently aware that he is actually doing metaphysics rather than natural science - that one cannot actually argue a different basis for evolution *from* The Evidence. Indeed both Barfield and Steiner regarded themselves as epistemologists and denied they were metaphysicians - which is false and misleading, but presumably relates to the philosophy of their times.<br /><br />Anyway, the key to all this is grasping Steiner's core argument in the Philosophy of Freedom (1894), which I find to be a convicing 'solution' to the age old problems (one problem, variously expressed) of subjective versus objective, mind versus matter, idealism versus empiricism, nominalism versus realism etc. <br /><br />The implications of Steiner's argument are astonishing in their scope - and Barfield shows that these implications show that we cannot do history on prehistory, cannot validly describe the world when it was inhabited by men with different consciousness. The modern sciences hat purport to describe evolution before Man, or earth geology before men, or the history of the universe are therefore based on metaphysical error - and are merely crude, simplified and grossly-distorted 'models' of limited and unknowable applicability. <br /><br />SO... treating them, as we do, as foundational truths is one root of the modern materialistic malaise. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-58073438725790606162018-07-03T05:01:53.183+01:002018-07-03T05:01:53.183+01:00Very very interesting, though through reading this...Very very interesting, though through reading this I see my unspoken-assumed metaphysics appears to be different-yet from those of Tolkien or Barfield, as presented in this essay. Because the essay posed some questions in a way that made this obvious to me, reading it has already been extremely valuable in that sense. It will take me a while to work through the implications, however.Seijio Arakawahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02615803270163614513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2410716623228444076.post-10678517975774528622018-07-03T04:30:39.228+01:002018-07-03T04:30:39.228+01:00As I understand it, what you are saying is, crudel...As I understand it, what you are saying is, crudely speaking, that the original creation of Eä was entirely spiritual (in the quite literal sense of being an exhalation of the Ainur), and Arda, which was to become the Earth, was originally conceived as a planar surface with radial bounds in this higher-dimensional but 'ephemeral' or perhaps 'volatile' (in computer jargon) information space.<br /><br />As the creation unfolded, it began to affect the material universe as we understand it, imposing on it a purposeful form, and it was the point at which the material universe (and in particular, the surface of the Earth) began to be allowed to influence Arda (rather than merely being shaped by it) which would correspond to the time of catastrophe.<br /><br />Because the imposition of meaning and form on the Earth from Arda began at the planer center of Arda on a given point on the surface of the habitable sphere of the Earth, and progressed moving out from there, it became possible for life to exist on Earth in a merely material level rather than being continuously 'projected' onto matter by its existence in Arda. Thus, a material being in Earth could traverse from the center of the correspondence region between Earth and Arda, and move to the border at which there ceased to be an absolute identity between the two, thus progressing to that part of the Earth which had no reflection in Arda, or to that part of Arda which did not impose corresponding form on any defined part of the Earth.<br /><br />As I understand it, the first border crossed would be that at which material entities of Earth ceased to reflect anything into Arda, while the final boundary would be entering that part of Arda which had not yet been projected onto the material Earth. An Earthly entity crossing the first boundary would still be present on Earth but simply appear to have vanished from within Arda (or rather, become 'unreal'), while a primarily spiritual entity would slowly be less reflected on Earth as it crossed the first border and moved towards the edge, remaining ineffably <i>real</i> but less visible from Earth.<br /><br />This area in which Arda is projected onto the Earth (and the smaller area within which the Earth would be reflected back into Arda) should also have been growing (though not both at the same rate, nor either at a particularly constant rate, only observing the rule that only that part of the Earth which was fully amenable to projection of form, substance, and significance from Arda would ever have been allowed to be reflected back into Arda).<br /><br />While I suppose this all might have interesting mythical implications, I'm not sure it's particularly important to go beyond the poetic and thus somewhat innately mysterious relationship between Earth and Arda which appears in Tolkien's stories.Chiu ChunLinghttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03519192610708043962noreply@blogger.com