When anthroposophy meets romanticism: the theology of Owen Barfield.
Wendell G. Johnson
WHY read Owen Barfield and pay attention to his religious beliefs? In part, because C. S. Lewis, the well-known Christian apologist, called Barfield "the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers" (Lewis Allegory). Barfield grew up in a middle class, secular family where a mood of skepticism prevailed regarding anything of a religious nature: "I was brought up without religious beliefs and with something of a bias against them" (Barfield Romanticism 4). He was not flippant about religious matters, but neither was he reverent. While in officer candidate school, he was required to march in a parade. Barfield confessed to being embarrassed because he was not familiar with church services: "I didn't quite know when to stand up and when to sit down" (Blaxland-de Lange 15). Shortly after the First World War, he fired of what he perceived to be the materialism of the age and found solace in Romantic poetry, particularly the meaning of individual words. He began an intense study of lyrical poetry, and through this study, became interested in the evolution of human consciousness. Early in his study, Barfield was introduced to Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophical writings by Daphne Oliver, a singer and fiddler Barfield met in Cornwall. Barfield claims to have discovered Anthroposophy and joined the society "almost in the same year (1923) that I marfled" (Blaxland-de Lange 30). His wife, however, did not share his beliefs and was initially strongly averse to them. She applied to join the society shortly before her death in 1980.Rudolf Steiner was born in February 1861 at Kraljevic, Hungary (in present day Serbia). Mystical experiences in childhood convinced him that a spiritual world existed that could be discerned by the senses. Early in his childhood, Steiner saw an apparent (to him) lack of continuity between inner and outer experience. He defined Urphanomene--the prime phenomena--as neither objective nor subjective, but as coming into existence only as they are interpreted by human beings. Steiner matriculated at the Technische Hochschule, Vienna in 1879, where he studied natural history, mathematics, and chemistry. While at Vienna, he also read widely in philosophy, particularly the works of Kant and Nietzsche. He enrolled at the University of Rostock and received his Ph.D. in 1891 upon the completion of his dissertation, Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnishteorie (The Fundamentals of Epistemology). Through the offices of his professor, Karl Julius Schroer, Steiner began to edit Goethe's writings in natural science. Prior to his conversion to Christianity from religious skepticism about the turn of the century, Steiner sharply criticized Christian ethics and considered Kant's categorical imperative to be "the philistine embodiment of an external code" (Steiner 143). He presided over the German chapter of the Theosophical Society but was expelled for refusing to follow Annie Besant's dictate that the seer Krishnamurti had appeared as Christ incarnate. Steiner wrote his first book on education, The Education of the Child, in 1907, which provided the principles behind the Waldorf Schools. The first Waldorf School was founded in 1919 to educate the children of the workers in the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. The schools emphasize the role of the imagination in education, combining creative and analytical components. As of 2010, there are nearly 1000 independent Waldorf schools throughout the world.
Anthroposophy offers a highly idiosyncratic view of the relation between God and human kind. It is an offshoot of the Theosophical movements popularized by Madame Blavatsky, but the schools of thought differ in their orientation. Theosophy incorporates Eastern elements, primarily Buddhist, while Anthroposophy has more in common with nineteenthcentury German Idealism (Reilly 17). Steiner described Anthroposophy as a path of knowledge that unites the spirit in the individual with the spirit in the universe. The human ego is of the same nature and essence as the divine ego. Anthroposophical training seeks to unite this ego with the external world. Steiner maintains that a person has a physical body (resembling the mineral world), an etheric body (which plants can also claim), an astral body (which humans share with the animal kingdom at large and which is the vehicle of sensation and passion), and finally, an ego, which differentiates human beings from all otherworldly creatures. Steiner disagreed with the Darwinian view that physical evolution ultimately leads to human consciousness. Rather, consciousness has evolved through identifiable stages. According to Steiner, human beings exist before physical birth. Before entering the world, individuals enjoy "Original Participation" or an extrasensory link with the creator. Conceptual thinking began during the Greco-Roman period, termed the "Intellectual Soul" by Steiner. Human thought continued to develop until it was completely subjective, the age of the "Consciousness Soul" (the present time), during which the individual human microcosm discovers itself completely separated from the greater macrocosm (or creation). The Consciousness Soul literally accepts the world as it appears (as opposed to the world as it actually exists apart from human perception). Human beings are moving out of the age of the "Consciousness Soul" towards "Final Participation," which is achieved by turning attention to direct inspiration and inner revelation or intuition and where the individual is a self-contained ego (Carpenter 36).
Anthroposophy offers a highly idiosyncratic view of the relation between God and human kind. It is an offshoot of the Theosophical movements popularized by Madame Blavatsky, but the schools of thought differ in their orientation. Theosophy incorporates Eastern elements, primarily Buddhist, while Anthroposophy has more in common with nineteenthcentury German Idealism (Reilly 17). Steiner described Anthroposophy as a path of knowledge that unites the spirit in the individual with the spirit in the universe. The human ego is of the same nature and essence as the divine ego. Anthroposophical training seeks to unite this ego with the external world. Steiner maintains that a person has a physical body (resembling the mineral world), an etheric body (which plants can also claim), an astral body (which humans share with the animal kingdom at large and which is the vehicle of sensation and passion), and finally, an ego, which differentiates human beings from all otherworldly creatures. Steiner disagreed with the Darwinian view that physical evolution ultimately leads to human consciousness. Rather, consciousness has evolved through identifiable stages. According to Steiner, human beings exist before physical birth. Before entering the world, individuals enjoy "Original Participation" or an extrasensory link with the creator. Conceptual thinking began during the Greco-Roman period, termed the "Intellectual Soul" by Steiner. Human thought continued to develop until it was completely subjective, the age of the "Consciousness Soul" (the present time), during which the individual human microcosm discovers itself completely separated from the greater macrocosm (or creation). The Consciousness Soul literally accepts the world as it appears (as opposed to the world as it actually exists apart from human perception). Human beings are moving out of the age of the "Consciousness Soul" towards "Final Participation," which is achieved by turning attention to direct inspiration and inner revelation or intuition and where the individual is a self-contained ego (Carpenter 36).
Anthroposophy requires no formal religious observances and its sympathizers attend a variety of Christian denominations. As Reilly notes, Anthroposophy is not a religion, but it has religious implications (15-16). The Christian Community, founded in 1922 in Switzerland by the Lutheran minister Friedrich Rittlemeyer, is based on lectures given by Steiner in England and Germany. The founding creed is reminiscent of its theological contemporary Paul Tillich, particularly the first article: "An almighty divine being, spiritual-physical, is the ground of existence of the heavens and of the earth who goes before his creatures like a Father" ("Creed"). The Christian Community celebrates the Eucharist, or Mass, in a renewed form they call the Consecration of Man. The worship service consists of four steps that reveal the invisible process of the spirit in visible form: Gospel reading, Offertory, Transubstantiation, and Communion. The term "Consecration of Man" implies that the ultimate goal of existence is to become an authentic human being by following Christ. In addition to the Consecration of Man, the Community observes six sacraments. Four of these sacraments follow traditional, mainline Christian teaching: baptism, confirmation, marriage, and ordination. Two of the sacraments have a unique anthroposophical interpretation: the Last Anointing assists the dying in freeing themselves from the body and transitioning to spiritual life, and Sacramental Consultation consists of confidential counseling which helps the initiate fulfill a person's life destiny. Adherents believe that immortality is closely related to the question of human existence. A human being does not come into existence at the time of physical birth nor does it go out of existence at physical death. Following Steiner, the Christian Community believes that human beings enjoy individual pre-existence before birth and death represents a transformation of earthly consciousness when the immortal past frees itself from its mortal body.
BARFIELD found something magical about certain combinations of words, and his experience of poetry affected his apprehension of the outer world. The poetic combination of words led him to the Romantic Poets and to their conception of imagination. For Barfield, it was a very short logical jump to posit that the human imagination conveys truth. Barfield's Romanticism Comes of Age (1944) contains essays he wrote under the auspices of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain between 1926 and 1932. It was Steiner who introduced Barfield to Goethe and opened up the writing of the English Romantics, especially Coleridge. Barfield, following Steiner, divides the evolutionary process of human consciousness into four stages extending from 10,000 BCE to the present time, encompassing the Ancient Indian Period, the Ancient Persian Period, the Egypto-Chaldean Period, and the final two stages, which have the most relevance for Barfield's theology: the Age of the Intellectual Soul (which he dates BCE 750 to CE 1450) and the Age of the Consciousness Soul (CE 1450 to the present). During these final two stages, according to Barfield, Steiner's Intellectual Soul begins to converse with the Consciousness Soul. The soul is searching for meaning and seeking to overcome the distinction between subject and object. In his essay "Of the Consciousness Soul," Barfield describes the typical experience of the conscious soul: "At first this may be a certainty of pure feeling, and then perhaps a conviction, an absolute knowledge, of the truth that resides in beauty and imagination. This is the stuff of which the English Romantic Movement was made" (Barfield Romanticism 78). In other words, according to Barfield, Coleridge and Steiner are describing the same thing: genuine creative imagination.
Barfield had high praise for Steiner: "future historians of Western thought will interpret the appearance of Romantic philosophy towards the close of the eighteenth century as foreshadowing the advent of Rudolf Steiner (Barfield Romanticism 19) and acknowledged him as il maestro di color che sanno: the master of those who teach (Barfield Romanticism 11). Barfield was disappointed to discover that individuals who shared his interest in literature had little time to listen to his observations on Steiner. By the same token, people who shared his devotion to Steiner were not anxious to hear his thoughts on language and literature. When Romanticism Comes of Age first appeared in 1944, the Anthroposophists were apparently tarred with the same brush as Nazi Germany. As a result, Barfield goes to great lengths in the book to distance the thought of Goethe and Steiner from Nazi propaganda and reiterate his abhorrence of the Nazi regime.
Barfield's allegiance to Anthroposophy and his dependence on the thought of Rudolf Steiner set off his "Great War" with C. S. Lewis. Barfield met C. S. Lewis shortly after the First World War and before enrolling at Oxford. The "Great War" is a series of letters between Barfield and Lewis that arose from Lewis's attempt to dissuade Barfield from following Anthroposophy. Barfield contended that the claims of Anthroposophy were objectively true. Lewis said that this was nonsense--Anthroposophy has nothing to do with science, scientific investigation, or the scientific method. Lewis regarded Steiner as a superstitious panpsychist and was disappointed to hear that Barfield was impressed by Steiner: "The comfort he gets from him... (apart from the sugar plum of promised immortality) seemed something I could get very much better without him" (Adey 13). The letters, written between 1925 and 1927, chronicle Lewis's disagreement with Barfield's contention that poetry conveys knowledge and imagination disseminates truth.
The "Great War" served as a catalyst and allowed each participant to crystallize his position relative to the other. Lionel Adey thinks that Barfield got the better of the exchanges, and concludes, "Future students of twentieth-century thought may well find Barfield among the diagnosticians of a profound change in human consciousness, one comparable to the Reformation or Enlightenment." This judgment, at the present, appears overblown. However, Adey's take on Lewis's position is accurate: "[his] writing, on theology in particular, is an effort not of creative Reason but of Understanding that looks backward over the path traced by earlier scholars" (123). Lewis eventually tried to place his thought within the traditional theological trajectory and, according to Lewis, "Barfield "changed me more than I him" (Surprised 14). In Surprised by Joy, Lewis explains that Barfield delivered him from chronological snobbery, or the inability to grant credence to ideas generated prior to the Enlightenment. Once he overcame this barrier, Lewis could countenance belief in the supernatural, including Christianity (Adey 14). Lewis outlined his conversion, first to theism and subsequently to Christianity, in Mere Christianity. The book's chapters are based on transcripts of radio broadcasts Lewis made during World War II while he was at Oxford (approximately the same time Barfield published Romanticism Comes of Age). After the period of the Great War, Lewis refused to discuss Steiner and theology with Owen Barfield, much to the latter's chagrin. After Lewis's conversion to Christianity, Barfield wanted to see what relation there was between his "stance after his conversion and the kind of opinions he had before it" (Blaxland-de Lange 175). However, Lewis would not rise to the bait and refused to discuss the subject that had set off the "Great War."
BARFIELD'S Worlds Apart (1963) hints at his religious views. This philosophical novel depicts a symposium of characters who gather Friday evening through Sunday afternoon to discuss three questions: 1) Darwinian evolution (does it extend beyond the biological sphere?), 2) modern science (can it deal with phenomena distinct from the human mind?), and 3) the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. Barfield does not visibly place himself at the gathering, but he disperses his own views among the participants. One of the characters, Hunter (a professor of historical theology and ethics), will remind the reader of C. S. Lewis.
Barfield's essay "The Son of God and the Son of Man" is one of his most avowedly theological treatises. It is here that Barfield provides his definition of Christianity as "the belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God" (Rediscovery 249). This is the correct definition of Christianity, in Barfield's opinion, for the very simple reason that it cannot apply to any other religion. In this essay, Barfield distinguishes between the titles "Son of God" and "Son of Man" as applied to Jesus in the Christian New Testament. Jesus is the "Son of God" because he partakes of the divine nature and, according to the Gospel of John, became incarnate in order to reveal God to human beings. Jesus considered himself the "Son of God'" because he shared a oneness with God that is not possible for ordinary human beings. "Man" (Hebrew: adam) is a Semitic expression for humanity in general. With the preface "son of" it designates a specific human being. The term is used in Daniel 7:13-14 to describe a transcendental eschatological agent who brings the kingdom to afflicted saints. In the similitudes of Enoch (I Enoch 37-71) the term applies to a pre-existent heavenly figure who descends to earth to judge the wicked and deliver the righteous. In the New Testament, Jesus used the term "Son of Man" to refer to himself. By his use of this term, Jesus lays claim to pre-existence and announces that he will one day inaugurate the kingdom (Ladd 156).
In "From East to West," Barfield applied Steiner's scheme to Christian theology: "Through the incarnation of Christ in a human body, there was born into the world a legitimate self consciousness" (Romanticism 31). In Christ, the human ego, the true sell descended from purely spiritual heights to the earth: "Had Christ not come to earth, human beings would never have been able to utter the word 'I' at all" (Romanticism 31). The resurrection of Jesus is tied to human imagination; in fact, the resurrection makes imagination possible. "Imagination is the most precious of all our possessions, the chosen one of all our faculties to be our savior" (Romanticism 33).
Barfield was disappointed that Lewis would not continue their theological discussions after the Second World War and penned a conscious imitation of St. John's prologue (John 1), also known as the hymn to the Logos:
It remains an open question whether Lewis ever saw Barfield's effort: "I don't think I ever showed it to him, though I felt a strong impulse to do so. If I did, then he paid scant attention to it; if I didn't, it was because I was afraid of his paying scant attention to it" (Blaxland-de Lange 175). According to Steiner and Barfield, the Logos represents Cosmic Intelligence (Reilly 21). Logos (word) is related to the Greek verb lego: to speak. With the rise of Greek rationality, logos plays an increasingly important role. For Socrates, it is related to such words as truth, knowledge, virtue, law, nature, and spirit. For both Socrates and Plato, a harmony exists between the logos of reason and the logos of reality. Although it refers to speech and revelation, logos has a metaphysical reality. Particularly appropriate for our interpretation of Barfield is the use of the term by Philo of Alexandria, who viewed the divine logos as a mediating figure between the transcendent God and the world. In John's Gospel, the incarnation of the pre-existing logos marked its transition to history. Traditionally, a barrier remains between the transcendent and the immanent spheres of existence. In the person of Jesus Christ, the transcendent logos (the eternal God) breaks into the immanent, human sphere. As St. John points out in the Prologue to his Gospel, the world was brought into existence through the agency of the Word (logos). The combination of the logos with Christological pre-existence identifies the historical figure of Jesus with the World of the divine creator (Kittel 131).
God manifests God's self in Christ, revealing that God's nature and power are immanent in human individuals. In the anthroposophic view, this is not only the wisdom of God, but also the wisdom of humankind. However, Barfield also sees a reciprocal action: that immanent, temporal humanity also attains transcendent status. Barfield was not a kenotic theologian; he argued for a polar relationship between God and humanity. For Lewis, God remained transcendent and the immanent status of the Godhead was limited to the time that Jesus spent on earth. For Barfield, God as the Son descended from above and died on the cross. God the Father remained firmly in the transcendent sphere. Lewis strongly disagreed with Barfield's view of the deification of human kind; in fact, he abhorred the idea. The relationship between humans and God was not an evolving one for Lewis. For him, the chasm between creator and creature remains fixed, and the revelation that bridged that chasm occurred in the past and is finished.
ANY deeply held literary point of view has religious implications (Reilly 4), and Barfield was a passionate Romantic. He strongly held to the immanence of God in humanity and the cosmic transformation of God's consciousness into the individual consciousness. The incarnation of Jesus was the historical turning point in this regard, whereby God became immanent by means of human imagination. Barfield attempted to deal with the question faced by many Christians: How do human beings come to terms with a God who exists forever above and beyond them? Barfield found the answer in Romanticism: the human imagination.
Works Cited
Adey, Lionel. C. S. Lewis's "Great War" with Owen Barfield. Victoria, B.C.: U of Victoria P. 1978.
Barfield, Owen. The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays. Middlelton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1977.
--. Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1963.
--. Romanticism Comes of Age. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co, 1944.
Blaxland-de Lange, Simon. Owen Barfield: Romanticism Comes of Age: A Biography. Forest Row, England: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2006.
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978.
"The Creed of the Christian Community." The Christian Community. 2010. 6 Jul 2010 <http://www.thechristiancommunity.org/creed.htm>.
Kittel, Gerhard. "Lego." Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Ed. Gerhard Kittel. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromily. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1964. 69-143.
Ladd, George E. A Theology of the New Testament. Revised ed. Grand Rapid, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1993.
Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life. London: G. Bles, 1955.
--. Allegory of Love; a Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1936. N. pag.
Reilly, R. J. Romantic Religion: A Study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams, and Tolkien. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1971.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Nature of Anthroposophy. Blauvelt, NY: Rudolf Steiner Publications, 1964.
BARFIELD found something magical about certain combinations of words, and his experience of poetry affected his apprehension of the outer world. The poetic combination of words led him to the Romantic Poets and to their conception of imagination. For Barfield, it was a very short logical jump to posit that the human imagination conveys truth. Barfield's Romanticism Comes of Age (1944) contains essays he wrote under the auspices of the Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain between 1926 and 1932. It was Steiner who introduced Barfield to Goethe and opened up the writing of the English Romantics, especially Coleridge. Barfield, following Steiner, divides the evolutionary process of human consciousness into four stages extending from 10,000 BCE to the present time, encompassing the Ancient Indian Period, the Ancient Persian Period, the Egypto-Chaldean Period, and the final two stages, which have the most relevance for Barfield's theology: the Age of the Intellectual Soul (which he dates BCE 750 to CE 1450) and the Age of the Consciousness Soul (CE 1450 to the present). During these final two stages, according to Barfield, Steiner's Intellectual Soul begins to converse with the Consciousness Soul. The soul is searching for meaning and seeking to overcome the distinction between subject and object. In his essay "Of the Consciousness Soul," Barfield describes the typical experience of the conscious soul: "At first this may be a certainty of pure feeling, and then perhaps a conviction, an absolute knowledge, of the truth that resides in beauty and imagination. This is the stuff of which the English Romantic Movement was made" (Barfield Romanticism 78). In other words, according to Barfield, Coleridge and Steiner are describing the same thing: genuine creative imagination.
Barfield had high praise for Steiner: "future historians of Western thought will interpret the appearance of Romantic philosophy towards the close of the eighteenth century as foreshadowing the advent of Rudolf Steiner (Barfield Romanticism 19) and acknowledged him as il maestro di color che sanno: the master of those who teach (Barfield Romanticism 11). Barfield was disappointed to discover that individuals who shared his interest in literature had little time to listen to his observations on Steiner. By the same token, people who shared his devotion to Steiner were not anxious to hear his thoughts on language and literature. When Romanticism Comes of Age first appeared in 1944, the Anthroposophists were apparently tarred with the same brush as Nazi Germany. As a result, Barfield goes to great lengths in the book to distance the thought of Goethe and Steiner from Nazi propaganda and reiterate his abhorrence of the Nazi regime.
Barfield's allegiance to Anthroposophy and his dependence on the thought of Rudolf Steiner set off his "Great War" with C. S. Lewis. Barfield met C. S. Lewis shortly after the First World War and before enrolling at Oxford. The "Great War" is a series of letters between Barfield and Lewis that arose from Lewis's attempt to dissuade Barfield from following Anthroposophy. Barfield contended that the claims of Anthroposophy were objectively true. Lewis said that this was nonsense--Anthroposophy has nothing to do with science, scientific investigation, or the scientific method. Lewis regarded Steiner as a superstitious panpsychist and was disappointed to hear that Barfield was impressed by Steiner: "The comfort he gets from him... (apart from the sugar plum of promised immortality) seemed something I could get very much better without him" (Adey 13). The letters, written between 1925 and 1927, chronicle Lewis's disagreement with Barfield's contention that poetry conveys knowledge and imagination disseminates truth.
The "Great War" served as a catalyst and allowed each participant to crystallize his position relative to the other. Lionel Adey thinks that Barfield got the better of the exchanges, and concludes, "Future students of twentieth-century thought may well find Barfield among the diagnosticians of a profound change in human consciousness, one comparable to the Reformation or Enlightenment." This judgment, at the present, appears overblown. However, Adey's take on Lewis's position is accurate: "[his] writing, on theology in particular, is an effort not of creative Reason but of Understanding that looks backward over the path traced by earlier scholars" (123). Lewis eventually tried to place his thought within the traditional theological trajectory and, according to Lewis, "Barfield "changed me more than I him" (Surprised 14). In Surprised by Joy, Lewis explains that Barfield delivered him from chronological snobbery, or the inability to grant credence to ideas generated prior to the Enlightenment. Once he overcame this barrier, Lewis could countenance belief in the supernatural, including Christianity (Adey 14). Lewis outlined his conversion, first to theism and subsequently to Christianity, in Mere Christianity. The book's chapters are based on transcripts of radio broadcasts Lewis made during World War II while he was at Oxford (approximately the same time Barfield published Romanticism Comes of Age). After the period of the Great War, Lewis refused to discuss Steiner and theology with Owen Barfield, much to the latter's chagrin. After Lewis's conversion to Christianity, Barfield wanted to see what relation there was between his "stance after his conversion and the kind of opinions he had before it" (Blaxland-de Lange 175). However, Lewis would not rise to the bait and refused to discuss the subject that had set off the "Great War."
BARFIELD'S Worlds Apart (1963) hints at his religious views. This philosophical novel depicts a symposium of characters who gather Friday evening through Sunday afternoon to discuss three questions: 1) Darwinian evolution (does it extend beyond the biological sphere?), 2) modern science (can it deal with phenomena distinct from the human mind?), and 3) the relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind. Barfield does not visibly place himself at the gathering, but he disperses his own views among the participants. One of the characters, Hunter (a professor of historical theology and ethics), will remind the reader of C. S. Lewis.
Barfield's essay "The Son of God and the Son of Man" is one of his most avowedly theological treatises. It is here that Barfield provides his definition of Christianity as "the belief that Jesus Christ was the Son of God" (Rediscovery 249). This is the correct definition of Christianity, in Barfield's opinion, for the very simple reason that it cannot apply to any other religion. In this essay, Barfield distinguishes between the titles "Son of God" and "Son of Man" as applied to Jesus in the Christian New Testament. Jesus is the "Son of God" because he partakes of the divine nature and, according to the Gospel of John, became incarnate in order to reveal God to human beings. Jesus considered himself the "Son of God'" because he shared a oneness with God that is not possible for ordinary human beings. "Man" (Hebrew: adam) is a Semitic expression for humanity in general. With the preface "son of" it designates a specific human being. The term is used in Daniel 7:13-14 to describe a transcendental eschatological agent who brings the kingdom to afflicted saints. In the similitudes of Enoch (I Enoch 37-71) the term applies to a pre-existent heavenly figure who descends to earth to judge the wicked and deliver the righteous. In the New Testament, Jesus used the term "Son of Man" to refer to himself. By his use of this term, Jesus lays claim to pre-existence and announces that he will one day inaugurate the kingdom (Ladd 156).
In "From East to West," Barfield applied Steiner's scheme to Christian theology: "Through the incarnation of Christ in a human body, there was born into the world a legitimate self consciousness" (Romanticism 31). In Christ, the human ego, the true sell descended from purely spiritual heights to the earth: "Had Christ not come to earth, human beings would never have been able to utter the word 'I' at all" (Romanticism 31). The resurrection of Jesus is tied to human imagination; in fact, the resurrection makes imagination possible. "Imagination is the most precious of all our possessions, the chosen one of all our faculties to be our savior" (Romanticism 33).
Barfield was disappointed that Lewis would not continue their theological discussions after the Second World War and penned a conscious imitation of St. John's prologue (John 1), also known as the hymn to the Logos:
Behold, there was a certain philosopher!
And the philosopher knew himself that he is one.
And the Word, having become one in the philosopher, was in
God.
And the Word was the light of his philosophy.
And the Light was shining in his philosophy
And the philosopher knew it not.
And the Light was in the philosopher,
And his philosophy came into being through the Light,
And the philosopher knew it not.
The philosopher said that no one
Under any circumstance could ever behold the Light.
And when he had beheld that Light, the philosopher insisted
That its name was LORD.
And his philosophy bore witness about the Light,
That it is the Word and life of mankind,
And about the philosopher,
That he was not born of the flesh,
Nor of the will of the flesh,
Nor of the will of man,
Nor through a command of the Lord,
But of God.
And the philosopher did not receive the witness.
(Blaxland-de Lange 175-6)
It remains an open question whether Lewis ever saw Barfield's effort: "I don't think I ever showed it to him, though I felt a strong impulse to do so. If I did, then he paid scant attention to it; if I didn't, it was because I was afraid of his paying scant attention to it" (Blaxland-de Lange 175). According to Steiner and Barfield, the Logos represents Cosmic Intelligence (Reilly 21). Logos (word) is related to the Greek verb lego: to speak. With the rise of Greek rationality, logos plays an increasingly important role. For Socrates, it is related to such words as truth, knowledge, virtue, law, nature, and spirit. For both Socrates and Plato, a harmony exists between the logos of reason and the logos of reality. Although it refers to speech and revelation, logos has a metaphysical reality. Particularly appropriate for our interpretation of Barfield is the use of the term by Philo of Alexandria, who viewed the divine logos as a mediating figure between the transcendent God and the world. In John's Gospel, the incarnation of the pre-existing logos marked its transition to history. Traditionally, a barrier remains between the transcendent and the immanent spheres of existence. In the person of Jesus Christ, the transcendent logos (the eternal God) breaks into the immanent, human sphere. As St. John points out in the Prologue to his Gospel, the world was brought into existence through the agency of the Word (logos). The combination of the logos with Christological pre-existence identifies the historical figure of Jesus with the World of the divine creator (Kittel 131).
God manifests God's self in Christ, revealing that God's nature and power are immanent in human individuals. In the anthroposophic view, this is not only the wisdom of God, but also the wisdom of humankind. However, Barfield also sees a reciprocal action: that immanent, temporal humanity also attains transcendent status. Barfield was not a kenotic theologian; he argued for a polar relationship between God and humanity. For Lewis, God remained transcendent and the immanent status of the Godhead was limited to the time that Jesus spent on earth. For Barfield, God as the Son descended from above and died on the cross. God the Father remained firmly in the transcendent sphere. Lewis strongly disagreed with Barfield's view of the deification of human kind; in fact, he abhorred the idea. The relationship between humans and God was not an evolving one for Lewis. For him, the chasm between creator and creature remains fixed, and the revelation that bridged that chasm occurred in the past and is finished.
ANY deeply held literary point of view has religious implications (Reilly 4), and Barfield was a passionate Romantic. He strongly held to the immanence of God in humanity and the cosmic transformation of God's consciousness into the individual consciousness. The incarnation of Jesus was the historical turning point in this regard, whereby God became immanent by means of human imagination. Barfield attempted to deal with the question faced by many Christians: How do human beings come to terms with a God who exists forever above and beyond them? Barfield found the answer in Romanticism: the human imagination.
Works Cited
Adey, Lionel. C. S. Lewis's "Great War" with Owen Barfield. Victoria, B.C.: U of Victoria P. 1978.
Barfield, Owen. The Rediscovery of Meaning, and Other Essays. Middlelton, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1977.
--. Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1963.
--. Romanticism Comes of Age. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co, 1944.
Blaxland-de Lange, Simon. Owen Barfield: Romanticism Comes of Age: A Biography. Forest Row, England: Temple Lodge Publishing, 2006.
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978.
"The Creed of the Christian Community." The Christian Community. 2010. 6 Jul 2010 <http://www.thechristiancommunity.org/creed.htm>.
Kittel, Gerhard. "Lego." Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Ed. Gerhard Kittel. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromily. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1964. 69-143.
Ladd, George E. A Theology of the New Testament. Revised ed. Grand Rapid, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1993.
Lewis, C. S. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of my Early Life. London: G. Bles, 1955.
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