Owen Barfield and the Word

By Jeffery Hipolito

Barfield was among the first English-language members of the movement. His membership card from 1924 bears the signature of Rudolf Steiner, and for the next seventy-five years until his death in 1997 he was among its most tireless advocates. More importantly, though, he was also a brilliant thinker and poet in his own right, a friend and peer of such writers and philosophers as T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, David Bohm, C. S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, W. H. Auden, and many others. He was equal parts poet and philosopher, each half of his activity forming a dynamic, interpenetrating polarity. In every sense, Barfield was the consummate crossover artist, passing back and forth between social worlds, disciplines, and cognitive capacities.

The link between Barfield’s activities as poet and philosopher, and between those activities and his overtly anthroposophical endeavors, was his deep immersion in the nature and mystery of the word. His first works of nonfiction, History in English Words and Poetic Diction , take up the theme explicitly, and it carries through to his final major essay, “Meaning, Tradition, and Revelation in Language and Religion.”

In his final major essay he reflects on his very long career and concludes that “practically all I have ever written on the subject of language and other matters connected with it could be characterized, not inaccurately, as attempts to answer the question . . . what connection could there possibly be between word[s] and their histor[ies] . . . and ‘the Word.’”

As we reflect on Owen Barfield’s importance to anthroposophy in the English-speaking world, we might also think about the connection between words and “the Word,” and about what some of the other matters connected with it might be. One place to enter the subject is Barfield’s most famous book, Saving the Appearances , which was named by HarperCollins as one of the one hundred best spiritual books of the twentieth century. Near the end of the book, Barfield says that “the object with which this book was originally conceived was none other than to try and remove one of the principal obstacles to contemporary appreciation of [Steiner’s] teaching—the study and use of which I believe to be crucial for the future of mankind.” Before we can understand the light anthroposophy sheds on the crucial relation between words and the Word, though, we must first uproot within ourselves the principal obstacle to our full understanding of it.

Barfield names that obstacle literalness. “The besetting sin of to-day,” he says, “is the sin of literalness, or idolatry.” Literalness is the same as idolatry because it treats objects of whatever sort as having a standalone existence whose independence we secretly covet. When we think of ourselves or others that way, when we foster “a dull or literal mind,” we cultivate “a certain hardness of heart.” When we “prefer to remain ‘literal’” we also, in the same gesture, refuse “a certain humble, tender receptiveness of heart which is nourished by a deep and deepening imagination and by the selfknowledge which that inevitably involves.” As we can see in Barfield’s description, to embrace literalism is to reject imagination. This is already enshrined in the ordinary definition of literal. According to the Oxford English Dictionary , a literal statement is “free from figures of speech, exaggeration, or allusion” and a literal-minded person “takes a matter-of-fact or unimaginative view of things.” To embrace the literal is simply to reject the metaphorical and imaginative. It is defined by what it omits.

This tendency is the besetting sin of our time because it infects our most fundamental, preconscious way of relating to the world, with all that flowers from it as fruit from the poisonous tree. To lack imagination is to lack self-knowledge. In the end, to be literal-minded is to say that things simply are what they are, and that they are not me. Iron ore is simply what it is, and nothing else; you are who you are, and that is all; the sun is only a ball of gas. Barfield calls this reduction of meaning to bare denotation “the specter of born literalism.” It most often appears among materialists, who make liberal use of the word “only,” as when they say “the heart is only a pump” or “the brain is only a complex computer.” That does not mean that all literalists are materialists. It is just as possible to be a spiritual literalist, which one becomes when one attempts, for example, to read Rudolf Steiner’s books and lectures as literal descriptions of spiritual experiences, or tries to isolate the literal definition of, say, the etheric body. If Barfield is correct, to find paths to the Word through Rudolf Steiner’s words we must first overcome in ourselves any vestiges of the specter of literalism, as Steiner also did before bringing his spiritual experiences into his books and lectures.

In Saving the Appearances , Barfield isolates the moment that reductive literalism was born in the western mind. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is connected to what it means to save the appearances. He begins by invoking Plato’s distinction between three kinds or stages of knowledge: observation, mathematics, and the grasp of pure ideas. As applied to astronomy, for example, we might observe the movements of bodies, and find the geometrical patterns between them, before “rising eventually to . . . an unobscured participation in the divine Mind, or Word, itself.” Entrance into this third stage of knowledge is an “intelligent participation” that is the result “in the last resort of initiation.”

In Saving the Appearances , Barfield also notes that a sixth-century follower of Plato, Simplicius of Cilicia, coined the phrase “to save the appearances” in his commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens . Simplicius meant that when astronomers want to account for some phenomenon—the movement of Mercury across the sky at twilight, let’s say—they devise hypothetical patterns of movement that are consistent with the pure ideas of “the divine Mind, or Word.” The phenomenon is “saved” because it is joined to an idea that explains it. So far, so good. The fall into literalism occurred with the Scientific Revolution, which changed our understanding of what an explanation is. For Simplicius, who sought to harmonize Plato and Aristotle, to save the appearances is not the same as to narrow down to the truth. However, as Barfield explains, “the real turning-point in the history of astronomy and of science in general . . . took place when Copernicus (probably - it cannot be regarded as certain) began to think, and others, like Kepler and Galileo, began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the appearances, but was physically true.” The modern age of alienation and materialism, of all the dangerous shadows of the consciousness soul age, rose like the Furies when people “began to take the models, whether geometrical or mechanical, literally.” What rose from beneath the ground to pursue and haunt us were “the mechanomorphic collective representations which constitute the Western world to-day.”

Barfield was a poet as well as a philosopher - when he referred to a now-obscure figure like Simplicius he did so with the artist’s touch. His book’s title placed him in the Neoplatonic lineage, what his friend the poet Kathleen Raine called the “ancient springs,” that fed Renaissance Neoplatonism, Rosicrucianism, Jacob Boehme, the Romantic impulse in art and philosophy, and even Anthroposophy itself.

What happens when we apply Plato’s three levels of knowledge not to astronomy but to language? What is it to rise from words to the Word? Several things immediately become clear. For the literalist, there is only the first level: Words are nothing more than phenomena, appearances. When we use them to point at a dog by saying “dog,” the word exhausts itself in the phenomenon. When we point them at each other, they disappear altogether. But if we think about them with Plato’s three stages in mind, something different happens. Recall, for example, the theory of knowledge that Rudolf Steiner describes in The Philosophy of Freedom and elsewhere. The sphere of percepts that he describes corresponds to Plato’s first stage, which left to itself is a blooming, buzzing confusion. The unified realm of concepts that Steiner describes is Plato’s third level, accessible via sense-free thinking by means of initiation. And between concept and percept, perpetually unifying them and saving the appearances in our lived moment-to-moment experience is the middle sphere - not of geometry in this case, but of words themselves. The word “dog” is neither a thing, like a dog, or a concept of a dog; it is the middle space where percept and concept join as one. Words are mercurial, elusive messengers, neither quite things nor quite ideas. This is one reason why Sir Philip Sidney, an Elizabethan poet influenced by the Neoplatonic Florentine Academy that did so much to shape the Italian Renaissance, said that poets, who are closest to the essence of language, cannot lie because they “nothing affirm.” They cannot lie because they do not make literal truth claims; instead, the creative speech of poets mimics, in a small way, the continual act of creation that underlies the cosmos.

A pair of analogies may help to bring out the liminal mysteriousness of language. Here is one: Among the most famous episodes of twentieth-century physics is the double-slit experiment. It is famous because it revealed that light can manifest equally well as wave or a particle, giving rise to what is known as the waveparticle duality. A word, like light, is neither thing nor idea, neither particle nor wave, but can manifest as either and in its flexibility joins both together. A second analogy: When it is finally Socrates’ turn to speak about the nature of love in Plato’s dialogue Symposium , he reports the teaching of his initiatrix, Diotima. She taught him that like “everything spiritual” love is “in between god and mortal.” It is neither good nor bad, blessed or wretched, divine or human. Like light, and like language, love mediates and unites, moving between worlds and beyond final definition. Trinitarian theology, which Barfield knew well, describes the world of the senses as belonging to the Father, that of the spirit as belonging to the Spirit, and the middle realm as belonging to the Word, the Son. We rise to the Word by means of words, only to discover the redemptive presence of the Word in the words that led us there.

We rise to the Word by means of words, only to discover the redemptive presence of the Word in the words that led us there.

In the beautiful final sentences of his book Poetic Diction , Barfield hints at the elusive in-betweenness of words:

Over the perpetual evolution of human consciousness, which is stamping itself upon the transformation of language, the spirit of poetry hovers, for ever unable to alight. It is only when we are lifted above that transformation, so that we behold it as present movement, that our startled souls feel the little pat and the throbbing, feathery warmth, which tell us that she has perched. It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature to beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.

To rise from beholding the creature to beholding creation: This is to throw off the shroud of literalism and be resurrected into the imagination by means of the chariot of the living, luminous Word. Many anthroposophists will no doubt recall Steiner’s description of the possible future state of humanity, in which the larynx - the organ of speech - will be an organ of reproduction. To speak well and truly will be to create; goodness, truth, and beauty will then be coequal aspects of the Word.

Until that far-distant state, we must work hard on transforming ourselves. In Saving the Appearances , Barfield suggests that when we work to heal the “sin of literalness” by fostering imaginative, symbolic thinking, the poetic logic of microcosm and macrocosm, we also facilitate “the progressive incarnation of the Word.” This is a very difficult task, a modern path of initiation with all the associated risks, as adversarial powers ensure that “in our time the battle between the powers of good and evil is pitched in man’s mind even more than in his heart, since it is known that the latter will ultimately follow the former.” The central drama in this battle is whether we will be dragged down into literal-mindedness, the view of the world and each other as essentially hostile and other than ourselves, or as means to an end, as objects to exploit; or, whether we will see the world and each other as constituting a forest of symbols, matter and spirit always reflecting one another, the meaning of “I” always involving a lovingly entangled reflection of “You.”

This other state Barfield sometimes calls the imaginative soul. To feel “the seed of the Word stirring within us, as imagination” is to experience and explore the world as parable, metaphor, symbol, and sacrament. This is the heart of Goethean science. The transformation of astronomy into astrosophy (to take one example) rests on the rigorous Goethean science of self-transformation, so that each of us becomes a soulful inhabitant of the middle sphere, an iconic conduit for the living Word. For Friedrich Schiller, Goethe’s friend and sometime collaborator, this middle realm between sense and reason was one of pure free play. Perhaps we can feel something of this middle sphere awaken and move in us with the help of “A Meditation,” one of Barfield’s miraculous late poems. And, perhaps a part of that movement will be our expanding, shifting, playful, no-longer-literal apprehension of the simple words:

Strength in the pain-

Light in the strength-