Book Review
The Future of the Ancient World: Essays on the History of Consciousness by Jeremy Naydler Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2009. 311 pages Review by Frederick J. Dennehy In 1957, Owen Barfield, a literary scholar and solicitor known to the world principally through his close association with C.S. Lewis, published a slim but elegant book entitled Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. At the time it was a difficult book to characterize, including as it did some history, some philosophy, and something about the contrast between science and religion. When the copies of the first edition were sold out, that was it; it was not reprinted. Then in 1965, a paperback edition of the book was issued in the United States. Within a respectably wide circle of readers, it was considered not only a success but a revelation. Over the next twenty years, it woke thousands out of a dogmatic slumber induced by a steady diet of positivism, narrowly construed linguistic analysis, and an assorted menu of reductionist soporifics. The book was not a history of ideas but a history of consciousness—an account of the evolution of consciousness. It emphasized that contemporary physical science, and most philosophy, was wholly in agreement about the extensive participation of the human mind in the creation, or at least the evocation, of the “appearances”—or, more familiarly, “nature.” It challenged its readers to explain why the fact of that participation was always left out of any considerations outside the strict spheres of physics and 54
• being human
philosophies—such subjects, for instance, as the histories of language, civilization, thought, and even the earth. One of Barfield’s enduring gifts to his readers has been to enable us to see the ideas and practices of past civilizations not as gropings in a laborious progression toward the enlightened present, not as depositories of superseded knowledge to be glanced at with a knowing smile, but as different ways of seeing, to be respected and, if possible, to be imaginatively replicated. Barfield did not invent the idea of the evolution of consciousness. It can be traced, in related form, to Hegel. Although Barfield’s own exposition owes a great deal to Rudolf Steiner, he had developed the core of his notion independently during his studies at Oxford in semantics and poetry, before he heard of Steiner. Barfield’s extraordinarily powerful contribution to the study of the evolution of consciousness lies in the clarity of his exposition as much as in its structure. He demonstrates its validity in myriad examples drawn from every age in the spectrum of time. Barfield never loses sight of the heart of the matter. There has been an evolution not only of the “outside” world but the “inside,” and not only of ideas but of consciousness, of the way we see. Some of us grasp this and some of us don’t. Most of those who grasp it are prone to forget it very quickly. ***