{"id":43701,"date":"2022-12-23T08:27:34","date_gmt":"2022-12-23T07:27:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/?p=43701"},"modified":"2022-12-23T10:32:31","modified_gmt":"2022-12-23T09:32:31","slug":"crossing-the-threshold-with-owen-barfield-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/crossing-the-threshold-with-owen-barfield-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Crossing the Threshold with Owen Barfield, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Part I of this essay<\/a> attempted to follow the soul-spiritual individuality of Owen Barfield to the current period (1923) of his after-life review. Barfield wished that his biography be communicated in the form of \u2039psychography\u203a – particularly by distilling the aspects of his personal life that might be most universal and salient for readers in the present and near future. The following question arose from a consideration of his life circumstances in 1923: \u00abWhat experience granted Barfield insight into the imagination such that he remained committed to its truth-value throughout his life?\u00bb Part I then explored how his gymnastics training and deep involvement in folk dancing might provide at least a partial answer to this question. Part II will elaborate these themes further and trace additional moments in Barfield\u2019s life that led up to the experience which inspired his confidence in the imagination and, eventually, Anthroposophy itself.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

I ended Part I of this essay claiming that it would be poetry that ultimately carried Barfield across the abyssal threshold of meaninglessness characteristic of the present age. But how? Barfield first realized that poetry could effect changes in consciousness due to the influence of his grade-school friend Cecil Harwood. As Blaxland-de Lange recounts,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When he was eleven or twelve years old, attention was being drawn in a Latin lesson to the way that the accusative case is used to express duration of time; and the particular sentence chosen to illustrate this point was \u00abCato, octoginta, annos natus, excessit e vita\u00bb (Cato died aged eighty). \u00abNevertheless\u00bb, recalls Barfield\u2026 [Harwood] suddenly observed: \u00abCato at the age of eighty \u2039walked out of life\u203a\u2014that\u2019s rather nice!\u00bb or words to that effect\u2026 [What Harwood] was drawing attention to, because it tickled his fancy, was a metaphor. You can say \u2039Cato died.\u203a You can also say \u2039Cato walked out of life.\u203a<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This moment would become one of the major touchstones to which Barfield returned repeatedly when reflecting on the development of his theory of poetry and the evolution of consciousness. In his view, to say that \u00abCato died\u00bb is to employ language in a prosaic way, wherein \u2039died\u203a is used \u00abwith a blunt and, as it were, purely material, meaning.\u00bb<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to Barfield\u2019s philological research, prosaic language tracks with an \u00abanti-poetic process\u00bb associated with the rise of scientific accuracy exclusively entrained on what appears to the senses and is mediated to them through technological instruments. Words become abstract to the extent that they are employed purely for the sake of accurate communication in accordance with the laws of this material world; language here imitates a deadened, machine-logic. The \u00abreal world\u00bb of prosaic language\u2014in today\u2019s English, at least\u2014is laden with a worldview which presupposes the primacy of matter over consciousness: according to the dictates of prosaic language, to to say \u00abCato died\u00bb would be less accurate. In contrast, when Harwood said \u00abCato walked out of life,\u00bb he employed metaphor and achieved what Barfield calls \u2039poetic diction\u203a: \u00abwhen words are selected and arranged in such a way that their  meaning either arouses, or is obviously intended to arouse, aesthetic imagination\u2026 [that activity which] produces pleasure merely by its proper activity.\u00bb<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The pleasure of aesthetic imagination may be accompanied, says Barfield, by a \u00ab\u2039felt change of consciousness\u203a, where \u2039consciousness\u203a embraces all my awareness of my surroundings at any given moment, and \u2039surroundings\u203a includes my own feelings. By \u2039felt\u203a I mean to signify that the change itself is noticed, or attended to.\u00bb<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> To say \u00abCato walked out of life\u00bb evokes a meaning that somehow exceeds materialistic assumptions about consciousness\u2014for if Cato has walked out of life, what does he then \u2039walk\u203a into? The register of some such meaning may have been what inclined Harwood to say \u00abthat\u2019s rather nice!\u00bb and exemplifies perfectly what Barfield means when he says that \u00abtrue, imaginative metaphor\u2026 expresses and may communicate participant knowledge.\u00bb<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Harwood\u2019s metaphor conveys \u00abparticipant knowledge\u00bb by suggesting that death may mean something more than the end of biological life and, therefore, the extinction of consciousness. \u00abI find that, in addition to the moment or moments of aesthetic pleasure in appreciation,\u00bb says Barfield,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I gain from them a more permanent boon. It is as though my own consciousness had actually been expanded\u2026 Now my normal experience, as human being, of the world around me depends entirely on what I bring to the sense-datum from within; and the absorption of this metaphor into my imagination has enabled me to bring more than I could before.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

According to Barfield, the capacity to create true metaphors which expand one\u2019s actual experience of the sense-perceptible world is a recent development. Prior to this possibility, language reflected a form of human consciousness wherein thought and feeling were experienced as unified with the perceived world: meaning derives here from direct perceptual experience. \u00abThe speaker,\u00bb says Barfield, \u00abhas observed a unity, and is not therefore himself conscious of the relation<\/em>. But we, in the development of consciousness, have lost the power to see this as one.\u00bb<\/span>7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The \u00abdirect perceptual experience\u00bb of primordial human consciousness is reflected in the fact that, etymologically, \u00aban overwhelming proportion, if not all, of them [words] referred in earlier days to one of these two things\u2014a solid, sensible object, or some animal (probably human) activity.\u00bb<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Unlike other theorists of language, Barfield\u2019s great merit was to take those ancient words at face-value rather than interpolate the materialism of 20th century Europe into his interpretation. The fact that etymologies reveal the origin of most word-meanings in reference to solid, sensible objects and human activities is testament to the thoroughly embodied character of the ancient psyche, for they reflect the figurative\u2014not to be confused with \u00abfigure of speech\u00bb\u2014\u00abperceptual or aesthetic, the pictorial<\/em>, form in which these unitary meanings first manifest in consciousness.\u00bb<\/span>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Ancient words such as the Greek \u2039pneuma\u203a convey this primordial unity of inner and outer with their compact meanings, which, in this case, include denotations of \u2039breath\u203a and <\/em>\u2039spirit,\u203a among others. Barfield designates this form of consciousness as \u00aboriginal participation\u00bb <\/em>and eventually identified it with what Steiner called \u00abatavistic clairvoyance.\u00bb<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> According to both, the gradual awakening of human subjectivity to its relation with the world has historically coincided with a loss of participation, especially as catalyzed by the \u00abanti-poetic\u00bb, prosaic process referred to earlier: that differentiating force through which \u00absingle meanings [have] split up into contrasted pairs\u2014the abstract and the concrete, particular and general, objective and subjective.\u00bb<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> And though many today might not associate breath with spirit or soul, Barfield assures us that such \u00abrelations exist independently, not indeed of Thought, but of any individual thinker,\u00bb and that, through the use of true metaphor, the world may be made whole again in imaginative perception.<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reality, once self-evident, and therefore not conceptually experienced, but which can now <\/em>only be reached by an effort of the individual mind\u2014this is what is contained in a true poetic metaphor; and every metaphor is \u2039true\u203a only in so far as it contains such a reality, or hints at it.<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The confidence with which Barfield declares this potential to \u2039consciously\u203a <\/em>return to a unified experience of reality\u2014the telos of what he called \u00abfinal participation\u00bb\u2014was something he was graced with after confronting the challenge posed to individuals in the age of the Consciousness Soul. But how exactly did that pan out?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sometime between 1919 and 1920, Barfield plunged into an abyss of despair, what he would later call an \u00abacute case of depression.\u00bb During his first years touring Cornwall with the English Folk Dance Society, he fell in love\u2014or so he thought at the time\u2014with a young woman whose feelings were not requited. \u00abI was in despair,\u00bb remembers Barfield,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

and the despair was not simply because of this, for I had no confidence in the meaning of life, that life had any meaning; and I was very much oppressed\u2026 Looking back at the past, I realize I wasn\u2019t really in love with her but either in love with love or what I hoped to find in the world of nature in general\u2026 But what was really at the root of the misery, I realized afterwards, was this being caged in the materialism of the age.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Carol and Philip Zaleski suggest that Barfield here exhibits a case of Romantic \u2039Weltschmerz\u203a, or world-pain\u2014that archetypal experience of disillusionment in face of the world\u2019s inability to live up to the meaningful ideals of the mind. And while I think this is certainly true, for Barfield was avowedly Romantic, he seems to have understood this experience and its resolution more specifically as typifying the initiatory null-point which sensitive individuals have the potential to reach in the Age of the Consciousness Soul. In a wonderful pair of essays, \u00abOf the Consciousness Soul\u00bb and \u00abOf the Intellectual Soul,\u00bb Barfield explicates these two members of the human constitution and their respective roles in the evolution of consciousness. He characterizes the overall movement of this evolution as the gradual separation of microcosm from macrocosm followed by the possibility of their freely-willed reunion. The crucial moment of separation comes when human beings become conscious of the paradox of thought during the Age of the Intellectual Soul (8th c. BCE to 15th c. CE):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I think the truth\u2026  I am one with all Egos and with the macrocosm. Yet it is only because I have my separate <\/em>existence as an Ego that I can think at all! What does this suggest? That here in the intellectual soul is the crucial point of this great mysterious process of separation\u2026 What, then, do we mean when we say that the Ego is working in the consciousness soul? We mean that the severance, or birth, of the human microcosm from the macrocosm has just been completed. The consciousness soul, we might say, is <\/em>\u2039the having been cut off.\u203a<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Owen Barfield in 1950s.
Courtesy of \u2018Owen Barfield Papers\u2019 held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Source: Owen Barfield Literary Estate<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The Age of the Consciousness Soul (beginning 15th c.) is thus characterized by humanity\u2019s growing awareness of, and confrontation with, this \u00abhaving been cut of\u00bb from the macrocosm. According to Steiner, the consciousness soul as a member of the human constitution inversely corresponds to the physical body which, as Barfield notes, \u00abis complete in itself, enclosed within its own skin, like a little island. And when the Ego works right down into this principle, then on a higher level of consciousness is developed the consciousness soul with its corresponding spiritual isolation.\u00bb<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The rise of scientific materialism over the last 500 years is symptomatic, says Steiner, of this evolutionary development. Nature has been thoroughly objectified, emptied of all value, made opaque, and no longer mediates macrocosmic wisdom through its appearances to the human soul. Indeed, says Steiner, the soul is \u00abpoorest of all as Consciousness Soul, shriveled up to the consciousness of the self, as though to one point.\u00bb<\/span>17<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But with this poverty of soul, this \u00abloss of participation,\u00bb comes also the boon of freedom. \u00abAt last,\u00bb writes Barfield, \u00abthe microcosm is fully and finally severed from the macrocosm. Only the uneasy question arises: has this microcosm any content? Does it really exist? Am <\/em>I?\u00bb<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Thanks to a note Barfield wrote a friend, Leo Baker, we know that he was asking such questions during his period of acute depression. On August 20th, 1920, Barfield writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been seeing practically no-one with whom I can talk naturally of the things I want to talk about, and the result is that I am being forced in on myself like an ingrowing toe-nail. It has come to such a pass that I seem to be living in a land of dream. My self is the only thing that exists, and I wear the external world about me like a suit of clothes\u2014my own body included. It\u2014the world\u2014seems to have about as much objective importance as a suit of clothes, and quite often I have a suspicion that I am really naked after all. When I am alone at night, I sometimes feel frightened of the silence ringing in my ears. Something inside me seems to be so intensely and burningly alive, and everything round me so starkly dead.<\/span>19<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Though he was alone in his despair, Barfield was alone in good company\u2014for the note above is a perfect example of the existential \u2039angst\u203a suffered and exhaustively thematized by philosophers and artists in the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. Unmoored from tradition in the destructive aftermath of World War I, European intellectuals and artists stewed in the nothingness of freedom. Human beings were doomed to act, to choose their own paths and make their own meaning in a world without prescriptions. Early Surrealists even valorized suicide. Fortunately, Barfield made it across the abyss thanks to another experience, one that, though not yet typical, may become so: \u00abOut of the nothingness and uncertainty, overtones begin to sound forth, bringing with them\u2026 a certainty of pure feeling<\/em>, and then perhaps a conviction, an absolute knowledge, of the truth that resides in beauty and imagination.\u00bb<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Barfield knew this possibility from experience, for, after months of suffering through his acute depression<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather suddenly one evening, one fine evening, at the end of a holiday in Switzerland, the clouds sort of lifted\u2014I know this sounds very dramatic, but it is rather essential\u2014all the misery I had felt, all this lifted with it, because I felt I would be able to find all the beauty I had fallen for in this woman in the whole world of nature.<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Barfield would later call this turning-point his \u00abSophia experience\u00bb and considered it the basis for all his subsequent literary and philosophical work on poetry and the evolution of consciousness. What brought this experience about? Undoubtedly, it was a moment of grace, but one for which Barfield\u2019s individuality had somehow prepared him. According to Steiner, the major potential of the Consciousness Soul Age is to metamorphose this member of the human constitution into what he called the \u00abImagination Soul.\u00bb To do so necessitates a withdrawal of the consciousness soul inwards, away from external sense-impressions, to be then gradually filled with \u2039Imaginations\u203a, which in turn fill the physical body itself. \u00abTo clairvoyant vision\u00bb, says Steiner, \u00abthe physical body is transformed into imaginations, which are pictures of the macrocosm.\u00bb<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Had Barfield\u2019s gymnastic training attuned him, however unconsciously, to the macrocosmic correspondence of bodily gestures such that he might one day catch a moment\u2019s glimpse of unitary meaning bodied forth by the gestures of Nature? Was the nascent insight catalyzed by Harwood back in Latin class\u2014that metaphor can expand consciousness\u2014brought to fruition in this most expansive \u00abSophia experience?\u00bb Apart from these speculations, we do know\u2014per Barfield\u2019s note to Leo Baker\u2014that his crisis drove him inward \u00ablike an ingrowing toe-nail!\u00bb We also know that during this time he was marinating in true metaphors. As he reports, \u00abI was deeply involved with poetry, both reading and writing it, especially the English Romantics, Keats and Shelley, Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets and so forth.\u00bb<\/span>23<\/sup><\/a><\/span> After this experience, Barfield added a line to one of the sonnets he wrote during his depression that conveys the power of aesthetic imagination to restore meaning to the world: \u00abO Eve, my soul, my eyes with which I see!\u00bb<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/span> But Barfield would not stop there\u2014\u00abhuman consciousness,\u00bb he insists, \u00abcan never, in its forms of expression, come to rest.\u00bb<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/span> That many do <\/em>stop here was what Barfield called the \u00abtragedy\u00bb of Romanticism, for imagination gradually fell prey to the explanatory wiles of psychoanalytic reductionism and the like. A new question arises for the consciousness soul at this point: \u00abin what way is Imagination true?\u00bb And this is where, for Barfield, the collaboration of consciousness soul and intellectual soul especially comes into play. We must cross the threshold of subject and object; the first step forward, he insists, is to arrive at a \u00abright theory of knowledge,\u00bb one that can be verified through experience. Anthroposophy, Barfield says, is the solution to this dilemma\u2014a Romantic theory of knowledge \u00abcome of age\u00bb:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anthroposophy is, in one sense, the intellectual soul speaking to the consciousness soul. It is the science of meaning. \u00abIn genuine creative imagination,\u00bb it says to the consciousness soul, \u00abyou are already taking the first step towards reunion with the macrocosm; for it is not man alone who creates in Imagination, but Nature herself!\u00bb<\/span>26<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The gradual expansion of consciousness through creative imagination leads, it is said, to clairvoyance\u2014the capacity to see through <\/em>appearances and once more perceive the world\u2019s unitary, yet dynamically unfolding, meaning. Having reached this point, theoretically, one then passes through the null-point initiated by the awakening of self-consciousness and achieves an individualized participation in the living sphere of macrocosmic Wisdom. \u00abAnd the soul which makes \u2039anthroposophia\u203a a part of itself,\u00bb says Barfield, \u00abgradually begins to know <\/em>this mystery of the emergence of the old man from the new as a fact of concrete experience.\u00bb<\/span>27<\/sup><\/a><\/span> He alludes here to the resurrection after the Mystery of Golgotha of course, but as recapitulated in individuals through the process described above. Crucially, this also involves the resurrection of the body: when the consciousness soul metamorphoses into the Imagination soul, the body becomes transparent once more and shines as an image of the weaving whole\u2014as microcosm. \u00abThe instinct for self-knowledge, one might say for the body, is growing at a rapid pace,\u00bb writes Barfield in 1944, \u00aband undermining not only \u2039Romantic\u203a experience but all experience of an emotional nature.\u00bb<\/span>28<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Today this sounds prophetic in wake of advances in science and technology which strive to reduce the human organism to a manipulable machine, one that may be progressively augmented along transhumanist lines. \u00abIt is good to bring to the surface of consciousness the hidden workings of the body,\u00bb says Barfield, \u00abbut only if one is prepared to go further and unmask in that body itself the hidden workings of the spiritual hierarchies.\u00bb<\/span>29<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such is the guidance which flows from my attempt to follow the individuality of Arthur Owen Barfield as he finishes the remaining days of his review. Discovering that the summer of 1923 was the genesis point for his lifelong intellectual conflict with Lewis and Maud pointed me further back to his period of acute depression and its resolution in the \u00abSophia experience,\u00bb that which gave him confidence in the truthfulness of imagination. I propose that this constitutes Barfield\u2019s \u00abcrossing of the threshold,\u00bb a spiritual mutation which, according to Steiner, all of humanity has been undergoing (mostly unconsciously) since the end of the 19th century. The confrontation with nothingness, nihilism, extreme materialism\u2014all of which are rampant right now: we all face this in the age of the consciousness soul. And though we might find fellowship on the other side, we must each pass through the null-point alone\u2014as individuals. That Barfield could maintain fidelity to his own experience a<\/em>nd <\/em>his friendship with Lewis, his marriage with Maud, testifies to his love for them and their own freedom. Apart from these reflections, I leave each reader to decide what guidance issues from the essay as a whole. To end, I share a quote from the book authored by Barfield that he reportedly loved the most, \u2039Unancestral Voice\u203a:<\/span>30<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Men have called me by many names; Batkhol, Daimon, Khochmah, and many more. But that was long ago. Men have also called me Sophia<\/em>. Once I was the ancestral voice of the Father-wisdom, the theosophia<\/em> that spoke inarticulately through blood and instinct, but spoke articulately only in the mysteries and 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 myself was transformed. I am that anthroposophia<\/em> who, by whatsoever communications howsoever imparted she shall first have been evoked, is the voice of each one\u2019s mind speaking from the depths within himself.<\/span>31<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>

<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part I of this essay attempted to follow the soul-spiritual individuality of Owen Barfield to the current period (1923) of his after-life review. Barfield wished that his biography be communicated in the form of \u2039psychography\u203a – particularly by distilling the aspects of his personal life that might be most universal and salient for readers in the present and near future. The following question arose from a consideration of his life circumstances in 1923: \u00abWhat experience granted Barfield insight into the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18085,"featured_media":43828,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8847,8848],"tags":[8814],"class_list":["post-43701","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\/43701","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=43701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dasgoetheanum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}