Owen Barfield On Resurrecting Language & The World

The most prominent members of the Inklings–a group of Christian writers who met at Oxford’s Eagle & Child Pub in the 1930s and 1940s–were C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. You may also know of novelist Charles Williams. A key member of the Inklings, though, is not so well known, though he profoundly shaped both Lewis’s faith and Tolkien’s fantasies: the philosopher, poet, critic, and lawyer Owen Barfield.

Barfield’s influence went beyond the Inklings to include, according to his Wikipedia entry, such different writers as the modernist poet T. S. Eliot, the Nobel prize winning American novelist Saul Bellow, and the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom. Cultural critic James Hillman called Barfield “one of the most neglected important thinkers of the 20th Century.”

All of these figures were living under the shadow of Modernism, with its post-Enlightenment rationalism, scientific materialism, and progressive dismissal of the past. The modernists dismissed “mythological thinking”–including religion–as remnants of a primitive mindset that has nothing to offer the “modern mind.” Such reductionism, though, ruled out much of what human beings continue to find most precious: classic literature, aesthetics, meaning, morality, faith, etc., etc.

What Barfield did, quite persuasively, was to define and recover the value of “mythological thinking.” And, in doing so, to show “modern minds” a way forward that affirms spiritual transcendence and the life of the imagination.

I was generally aware of Barfield’s contributions, but I had never delved into the specifics of what he had to offer. Part of that was being leery of his involvement with anthroposophy, that New Agey spiritualism that was supposed to be compatible with Christianity, unlike its even more occult cousin theosophy, grounded in Eastern religions. Both of these movements were also reactions against stultifying Modernism. I don’t think either of them are compatible with Biblical Christianity, though I don’t deny that Barfield was a Christian who witnessed to Lewis and was instrumental in his coming to faith.

Anyway, I had never read anything by Barfield, but I have to give a big tip of the hat to long-time member of the Cranach community Steven Bauer for putting me on to this video from K. R. Queen. An attorney (like Barfield) and former campus minister, Queen is interesting in his own right as a convert to Christianity, an apologist, and author. (See his website and his YouTube channel.)

In this video, he discusses and applies Barfield’s most important book: Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning., a book whose prosaic title falls far short of its scope and impact. In trying to discover what Owen Barfield did for Lewis and Tolkien, Queen says that he found insights that can “change how you view everything”! This video, he says, “will change the way you read and how you write, just as it did for Lewis and Tolkien.” It could very well do that!

I am print-oriented, not image oriented, so I would much rather read a text than watch a video. I made an exception for this one, and I’m glad I did. The video takes 18 minutes and 22 seconds. I urge you to watch it.

A Synopsis of the Video

To whet your appetite, let me give a brief synopsis. . . .

Barfield explores the connection between language and reality, as well as the “history of consciousness” as it is preserved in language. Modernist evolutionists have assumed that language began as collection of grunts that referred to tangible objects, later developing into more complex systems of conveying ideas and higher nuances of thought. But, as Barfield shows, ancient languages are more complex than modern languages. They are also more poetic, working with vivid imagery charged with rich meaning.

By looking at the etymology of language (that is, the history of our words), we can trace the history of how people thought and experienced their worlds. For example, the Greek pneuma (Latin spiritus, Hebrew ruach) means wind, breath, and spirit. These aren’t three different meanings; rather, the ancients construed them as manifestations of one reality, a force that can’t be seen but can be felt, that moves through everything, and that gives life.

Barfield sees three phases in the history of human consciousness, which he traces by studying language:

(1) Participation: Human beings experience themselves as being part of a meaningful world. They are part of nature, feeling no separation and participating in its life. Society participates in reality and its meaning.

(2) Non-Participation: The Enlightenment separated matter from meaning, subject from object, ourselves from the rest of the world. “We started to see ourselves not as part of the world but as observers of it.” Our language developed accordingly: We can describe and categorize. The concrete imagery of our language was turned into abstractions.

Queen gives the example of the word “contemplate.” It derives from the Latin “con,” meaning with, added to “templum”; that is, temple. Contemplation referred to the revery of the mind and the heart associated with worshiping in a temple. For us, though, it is just another synonym for “think about.”

Physical reality no longer has the meaning or life it once had; that is to say, it is dead. The same can be true of language. But our words are fossils of a richer, more meaningful reality.

(3) Final Participation: But that too is a temporary phase. We cannot go back to “participation” directly. That was spontaneous and non-reflective. Post-Enlightenment, we must deliberately become aware of the meaning of the reality all around us and deliberately find language to describe that meaning. Reading and writing poetry and imaginative stories can recover that sense of meaning. Reality and Language can be resurrected. (Queen provides evidence that this is what Lewis and Tolkien were trying to do, which is the key to the sense of wonder that Middle Earth and Narnia evoke.)

All of us can join this final participation by learning to “read” physical reality in the same way we read a book. It is possible to approach a book in terms of the paper it’s written on and the chemical properties of the ink. But what is important for a book is its meaning, which cannot be seen or measured in the same way the marks on paper, or the bits and bytes on a screen, can be. But the meaning is there all the same. We must read with our imagination, playing the images conjured up by the words in our own minds and heart. In our non-participation phase, we treated nature like that, assuming it has no meaning, that we can know it solely by learning its physical characteristics. Queen cites the conversation in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader between the non-participating Eustace Scrubb and a Star. “In our world, a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” The Star replies, “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.”

Modernist science tells us what a thing is made of, which is a useful service. But it cannot tell us what the thing is. For that, we need to know its meaning. We can read reality because reality too has its Author. Queen asks, “Do you think the Author of creation made anything meaningless?”

Note, by the way, how Barfield’s thought ties in to J. G. Hamann’s emphasis on language–which he pushes on to the centrality of the Word of God–and his critique of mental abstractions.