Owen Barfield, Romanticism Come of Age

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was a philosopher, poet and critic who is the least well-known of the Oxford Inklings that included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. This authoritative biography was written in active cooperation with Barfield himself, and shows the influence of Coleridge and Steiner on his work, while recounting ‘Great War’ between him and Lewis – it also contains a biographical sketch in his own words, which forms the basis of the first part. The second part on elucidation and recognition explains the main arguments expounded in his lectures – many focused on the evolution of consciousness - in American universities, while the third is subtitled ‘the man of letters’ and describes his relationships with other key literary figures including Saul Bellow and Walter de la Mare, along with his close bonds of love and friendship – his wife fundamentally disagreed with his commitment to anthroposophy, a view shared by Lewis, who neither understood nor appreciated the originality of Steiner’s approach as the culmination of romanticism.

Although the many chapters give rise to multiple interesting themes, I will confine my remarks here to the contrast between the approaches of Barfield and Lewis, who disagreed in a friendly way on many fundamental philosophical issues. For Lewis, truth was representational, while for Barfield ‘it is reality itself taking the form of human consciousness’ in the empirical tradition of Goethe and Steiner. Barfield emphasises freedom, while Lewis stresses devotion and religious belief grounded in transcendence, rather than in the immanent direct knowing of gnosis. There is a striking exchange arising from Lewis’ ‘Summa’ against anthroposophy, to which Barfield formulated a detailed response criticising not only the structure of thought, but also the relative absence of feeling.

For Lewis, we can only contemplate by ceasing to be the object of contemplation, and we can never know ourselves. However, for Barfield there is a force that overcomes separation, which is known as love: ‘its whole nature is such that it enables me to become another soul and yet to remain separate, to go out into another being and yet remain within myself. Its whole function is to mediate between the One and the Many.’ (p. 167) He then adds that ‘because this force is at the core of all human conscious experience, it is impossible to speak of it. It is only possible to attempt to live it.’ I found this an extraordinary insight and a good indication of the profundity of Barfield’s thinking in which the ultimate discovery is that ‘I am the Whole.’ For Lewis, this would be heresy, even blasphemy – in this respect, I am with Barfield. There are many gems to be gleaned here, even in a single chapter.