{"id":43601,"date":"2022-12-15T16:18:51","date_gmt":"2022-12-15T15:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=43601"},"modified":"2022-12-16T12:22:10","modified_gmt":"2022-12-16T11:22:10","slug":"crossing-the-threshold-with-owen-barfield-part-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/crossing-the-threshold-with-owen-barfield-part-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Crossing the Threshold with Owen Barfield, Part I"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Who was Arthur Owen Barfield? Rudolf Steiner\u2019s foremost interpreter in the English-speaking world, some might say; the \u00abwisest friend\u00bb of C. S. Lewis, \u00abfirst and last\u00bb member of the Inklings\u2014that massively influential, 20th century group of intellectuals and authors which also included J. R. R. Tolkien among its ranks; a scholar of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Romantic philosopher in his own right, others might say. No doubt, Barfield would appreciate these acknowledgements, but when\u2014in 1991, six years before his death in 1997\u2014he sat down in his Sussex home with his biographer, Simone Blaxland-de Lange, he insisted that only the most spiritually salient contours of his life be communicated to posterity. It was in the form of \u2039psychography\u203a, or \u2039biography of the soul\u203a, that Barfield intended his story to be told, a distillate of his life shone through with the archetypal\u2014an imagination.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Blaxland-de Lange attempts to honor Barfield\u2019s wishes in \u2039Owen Barfield, Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography\u203a <\/em>and goes even further: by structuring the book in accordance with the review process that\u2014per Steiner\u2019s indications\u2014Barfield\u2019s soul-spiritual individuality would undergo over a period of 33 years beginning with his death in 1997. In doing so, Blaxland-de Lange aspired to actualize the potential for us to \u00abfollow and form a relationship to the unfolding present destiny of a soul that has lived on earth and convey this knowledge to one\u2019s fellow human beings.\u00bb<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Psychography thus becomes a means of communion, a means of \u00abseeking guidance from this now super-earthly being for what we may now ourselves accomplish.\u00bb<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Blaxland-de Lange concludes the book by calling on others to carry this effort further; I attempt to do so in this two-part essay, guided by these questions: \u00abWhere is the individuality of Arthur Owen Barfield in late 2022 and what guidance might this being have for us today?\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barfield was born November 8th, 1898, in London, England and died almost 25 years ago in Forest Row, England on December 14th 1997; he had recently celebrated his 99th birthday. If, following Blaxland-de Lange, we work with Steiner\u2019s indication that \u00abthe soul of the person who has died lives in a state of conscious awareness and in a backwards order through the entire context of what has been experienced in sleep,\u00bb a process that typically lasts one-third of the individual\u2019s lifetime, we end up with a total of 12,065 days or 33 years.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Subtract the number of days that have transpired since this process began (writing on October 11th, 2022) and we arrive at about 3,000 days of review remaining. Finally, if we multiply this number by 3\u2014and get 9,000 days\u2014we can then calculate for a rough approximation of the period of life that Barfield\u2019s individuality is currently reviewing by adding that number of days to his birthdate. We arrive at July 1st, 1923\u2014a significant year, it turns out. Barfield was 24, going on 25, and had just married Maud Douie (on April 11th, 1923) whom he met while touring Cornish towns and villages performing with the English Folk Dance Society. The year prior\u20141922\u2014Barfield\u2019s childhood friend and\u2014eventually\u2014fellow Anthroposophist, Cecil Harwood, had joined in on the dance tours and met his wife, Daphne Olivier. It was Olivier who\u2014having been recently ignited with enthusiasm for Steiner\u2019s ideas on education\u2014introduced Barfield and Harwood to Anthroposophy. \u00abThrough her, Harwood and Barfield began\u2014\u2039rather skeptically\u203a, as Barfield records\u2014attending some weekly lecture-readings which George Adams (then George Kaufmann) was conducting.\u00bb<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Thanks to a diary entry written by C. S. Lewis, we can surmise about when Barfield\u2019s skepticism began to lift: as Blaxland-de Lange writes, Lewis \u00abhad been vehemently opposed to any trace of Steiner\u2019s influence on his friends (i.e. in particular Barfield and Harwood) from the time of their first encounter with his ideas in the summer of 1923. On July 7th, 1923 he had recorded his thoughts on the matter in his diary:\u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Harwood told me of this new philosopher, Rudolf Steiner\u2026 [He] seems to be a sort of panpsychist, with a vein of posing superstition, and I was very much disappointed to hear that both Harwood and Barfield were impressed by him. The comfort they got from him (apart from the sugar plum of promised immortality, which is really the bait with which he has caught Harwood) seemed something I could get much better without him.<\/p>Blaxland-de Lange, Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography<\/em>, 157; my emphasis<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Owen Barfield in 1923. Courtesy of Owen Barfield Literary Estate<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

It was around this time that seeds were sown for the \u2039Great War\u203a waged between Lewis and Barfield\u2014an epistemological debate that reached its highest pitch between 1927 and 1929. A central issue of this debate was the status of imagination\u2014could it serve as a \u00abvehicle for truth\u00bb?<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Barfield\u2019s answer was a lifelong, resounding \u2039yes\u203a, for it was something he knew from experience. This insight\u2014which he achieved before discovering anthroposophy\u2014was also what ultimately gave him confidence in Steiner. But Lewis would have none of it. And though Lewis learned a great deal from his intellectual battles with Barfield, and vice versa, he never budged on the status of the imagination. As Barfield himself put it, Lewis \u00abaccepted the conventionally scientific basis of knowledge and that all real knowledge depended on scientific evidence drawn from sense experience. [He] would not admit that the kind of experience that came through imagination had anything to with knowledge of reality.\u00bb<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Those familiar with anthroposophy will likely recognize Lewis\u2019 position as tantamount to what Steiner called \u2039materialism\u203a, a worldview\u2014still dominant today\u2014that limits meaning exclusively to the human subject. A chasm yawns between the meaning-seeking human soul and the cold indifference of a world reduced to a manipulable collection of objects. But, in continuity with Romantic poets and philosophers before him, Steiner insists that the imagination can be cultivated as a supersensible organ of perception; the threshold of that abyssal chasm between subject and object can be crossed; reunion with the spiritual forces weaving the phenomenal world can <\/em>be achieved. But, perhaps understandably\u2014for the first half of the 20th century was dismal indeed\u2014the \u2039spiritual science\u203a of Anthroposophy was not something Lewis could take seriously. Maud, Barfield\u2019s wife, was also opposed to Anthroposophy. After joining the Anthroposophical Society in 1924\u2014the year after their wedding\u2014Barfield remembers a time when<\/p>\n\n\n\n

members of the Society were coming to see me, and \u2026 she didn\u2019t think they always had as much sense as she had! She continued to be strongly averse to Anthroposophy \u2026 but I felt I couldn\u2019t give it up or cease to interest myself in it \u2026 It was a kind of sword through the marriage knot, right through, almost right through; though we had enough in common to get on pretty well together.<\/p>Blaxland-de Lange, Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography<\/em>, 30-31<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

A mutual love of music and dance\u2014the context in which their relationship began\u2014bound the two together in deep ways, but Maud was rooted in the perspective of her Scottish church and found Steiner\u2019s confident insistence on spiritual facts objectionable. Unlike Lewis, however, Maud seems to have had a change of heart in later years.\u00abAnd right at the end,\u00bb says Barfield, \u00abI was astonished to learn that she had applied to join the [Anthroposophical] Society\u2026 Kind of making amends\u2026 she had taken this step to join, and that did make up for something. It was rather touching.\u00bb<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Barfield\u2019s astonishment reflects the fact that, throughout their married life, Maud\u2019s attitude towards anthroposophy, like Lewis\u2019, was hostile. Zooming out now, I ask: \u00abWhat, in the vein of psychography, is most salient about Barfield\u2019s life in summer of 1923?\u00bb Three developments stand out most: Barfield and Maud were recently wed; Barfield opens himself to anthroposophy; Barfield\u2019s intellectual conflict with both Lewis and Maud, however nascent, begins. The crucial question sounding forth from these features is: What experience granted Barfield insight into the imagination such that, despite his personal conflicts with Lewis and Maud, he remained committed to its truth-value throughout his life?<\/p>\n\n\n

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Owen Barfield in 1920s. Courtesy of Owen Barfield Literary Estate<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

An important element of Barfield\u2019s biography is that he was\u2014as people today often say\u2014\u2039embodied.\u203a His family was musical and, when the many extended relatives got together for Christmas, they \u00abalways finished up dancing Sir Roger de Coverley, which is a folk dance.\u00bb \u00abIt always stuck in mind,\u00bb he continues, \u00abthat when I saw this I thought that the more there is of that kind of thing [folk dancing] the better and that I\u2019ll try it.\u00bb<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> And try it he would, for the bulk of Barfield\u2019s early twenties was spent dancing with the English Folk Dance Society. During his high school years Barfield managed to opt out of the school\u2019s compulsory sports participation and dedicated his time to gymnastics instead. The school apparently cared little for this ancient art of physical exercise, \u00abso in a year or two,\u00bb says Barfield, \u00abI became practically the senior gymnast in the school\u2014not that I was very advanced either but their standards were so low!\u00bb<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Interestingly, Steiner reports in his \u2039Speech and Drama\u203a <\/em>lectures that ancient Greek gymnastics unfolded from \u00abthe realization that the will lives in the limbs. And the very first thing the will does is to bring man into connection with the earth, so that a relationship of force develops between man\u2019s limbs and the earth.\u00bb<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to Steiner, the main exercises were<\/p>\n\n\n\n

founded on upon man\u2019s connection with the cosmos. Starting from this relationship he has to the cosmos, man is in these exercises perpetually forming as it were another relationship, a relationship of gesture; and in gesture the force, the dynamic of the human being himself is present. But men had the very same feeling in those earlier times about the revelation of the human being in speech.<\/p>Steiner, Speech and Drama<\/em>, 53.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Because thought\u2014in modernity\u2014\u00abis generally lifted out of speech, abstracted from it,\u00bb Steiner insisted upon gymnastics as a necessary foundation for training in dramatic art. Through a modified form of these exercises, performers could practice embodying gestures which intoned the archetypal human form (as dynamically inscribed by the cosmic imagination) and reconnect these substantial realities with their speech. In doing so, Steiner says,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

we shall be on the right path for discovering how gesture can come to the help of the word in dramatic art; for there is, in fact, no justifiable gesture for the stage that is not a kind of shadow-picture of some one of the five exercises of Greek gymnastics. That is, however, the other pole. The one pole is speech itself, the form of speech.<\/p>Ibid.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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The same intelligibility inhering in meaningful speech shines out from the human body as archetypal form. By tending to the pole of the will, gymnastics helps bring abstracted thought \u00abback down again into speech\u00bb with the ultimate aim of addressing \u00abthe need for the forming of the word to become in the actor a complete matter of course, so that it takes place in him instinctively.\u00bb<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Steiner\u2019s aim for such training is nothing less than a renewed, but this time consciously experienced, recognition of the human form as the image of the cosmos\u2014a living imagination woven by the cosmic Word. For Steiner, the highest potential of dramatic art and poetry is to be the conscious continuation of this cosmic creativity. One might surmise that Barfield\u2019s practice of gymnastics imbued him, however unconsciously, with insight into the cosmic meaningfulness of embodiment. As for his capacity to be receptive to something like cosmic creativity, an ecstatic memory from his time Morris Dancing after 1919 attests:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I remember having a vivid experience at the end of one of the movements. You stand there, arms going up and down in one rhythm and your feet tapping in another\u2014and I had a very strong experience of the music flowing through me, so to speak. I was motionless, but the music was flowing through me. It was very strong.<\/p>Blaxland-de Lange, Owen Barfield: Romanticism Come of Age: A Biography<\/em>, 22.<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As Philip and Carol Zaleski suggest in their wonderful book on the Inklings\u2014rightly, I think\u2014Morris dancing \u00abopened to him a new realm of quasi-mystical inner experience, in which music served as his daemon or psychopomp.\u00bb<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> And though gymnastics and dance may have done much to fortify Barfield\u2019s inner life with the incommunicable meanings of music\u2014visitations, perhaps, from worlds of spirit\u2014it would not be enough to carry him across the abyssal threshold of the age; he would need poetry for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who was Arthur Owen Barfield? Rudolf Steiner\u2019s foremost interpreter in the English-speaking world, some might say; the \u00abwisest friend\u00bb of C. S. Lewis, \u00abfirst and last\u00bb member of the Inklings\u2014that massively influential, 20th century group of intellectuals and authors which also included J. R. R. Tolkien among its ranks; a scholar of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Romantic philosopher in his own right, others might say. No doubt, Barfield would appreciate these acknowledgements, but when\u2014in 1991, six years before his death […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18085,"featured_media":43604,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8847,8848],"tags":[8814],"class_list":["post-43601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-portrait","category-literature","tag-musings"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18085"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43601"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43601\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}