A basic outline of the evolution of consciousness in the historic period

I have been reading Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner and Bruce Chlaton's writings about them and I thought it would help me picture their ideas by putting down in as simple an outline as I could the basic narrative of the evolution of consciousness that is in their work. For those reading this it won't serve as an alternative to reading their works but is meant to show the basic shape of their ideas in a potted form.

Literary tradition provides us with a record of recent changes in human consciousness and in this time period we can see changes. By looking at the way words and meaning develop we can see certain patterns. The word "pneuma" that once had a single meaning which held within it the separate meanings we now have of breath, wind & spirit, represents the way our current inner (spirit) and outer (breath, wind) meanings were previously unified. This represented a kind of consciousness where matter and spirit were also unified. Likewise,the reason that ancient man expressed himself in myth was not because he liked to tell fanciful stories but because that is how he experienced the world, Mythic consciousness where spiritual and physical had not yet separated was what Owen Barfield termed original participation, I remember taking a course on the Australian Aborigines, who from an external perspective with modern eyes would seem to live a life of material deprivation but instead their landscapes were rich with stories and meaning embedded in them and the world's origin was not a theory but an experience they entered into. It was however a tribal life rather than individual life. An interesting snapshot into an earlier time before they crashed into the modern world view.

From the time of the rise of Greek thought about 5 centuries before Christ till about the 15th century, we see the rise of intellectual life but still with a sense of participation. Subsequent to that the sense of individuality develops and original participation dies. Alienation emerges, in Shakespeare for instance we witness characters with individual inner life. Colin Wilson notes that the emergence of the novel marks an opening of our inner private life.

R J Reilly's book Romantic Religion has a chapter on Owen Barfield which gives an excellent overview of his works, he writes on the emerging self and the awareness of historicism:

"The seventeenth century first gives us words that indicate this perspective: progressive, antiquated, century, decade, epoch, out-of-date, primeval. Also, as an aftermath of the Reformation, we begin to find words hyphenated with self appearing in the language: self-conceit, self-confidence, self-contempt, self-pity—the centre of gravity has shifted from phenomena to self.”

We often think of thinking just in terms of what Barfield calls alpha thinking which is thinking about things, but just as important is what Barfield terms figuration. which is joining our sense information or percepts with concepts to make the things of the world, Steiner goes into detail regarding this process in his book "Philosophy of Freedom", the chair we see only exists when we have combined the concept "chair" with the percepts we experience. In thinking our world is created, interior is anterior. 

Another key historical marking point is the Galileo affair, his theory of the heliocentric solar system which is so often given as an example of the suppression of science by faith, yet I think this a facile interpretation, as the Pope was not objecting to Galileo presenting his theory but rather his insistence that it was TRUE. Barfield uses the phrase 'saving the appearances" to describe how up to this time theories regarding the workings of the material world were regarded. They were seen as systems for best describing our experiences, TRUTH was considered the nature of God and the human intellect could strive for it but not contain it. So Galilieo could be seen to be making an idol of thought and this kind of idol is now prevalent in our modern thinking. We have a lot of these eternal laws of the universe that are both scientific orthodoxy and part of modern consciousness and this is so for both religious or secular people, to go beyond these "Truths" is to the orthodox "unthinkable". 

So we have slowly built up in our minds thoughts that we worship as realities, true they have reshaped the external world with automobiles, computers, satellites, cell phones, high rise buildings etc. It's a moot point whether we would have created these things using theories rather than idols. But our ancestors would have thought these creations  magical/diabolic and I think we would be wrong to scoff at them for this interpretation. But this thinking creates from thinking a world with no inside, where the thinking that built it has been banished. Leaving a world without meaning which is not a good place. Although Steiner states that this stage is necessary for the development of the individual and an intentional act of imagination will move humanity to a new synthesis that Barfield calls Final Participation if we so choose to take that step.

Along with these dead idols of thought another striking modern obsession is looking for the smallest basic building block to find the fundamental basis of a world pictured as mechanical. Animals are killed and dissected to see what they are composed of but instead they decompose. Plants are put in blenders and the goo is examined to give an explanation for their life, form and beauty. In contrast to this, Goethe had the sense that plant and animal would yield up their nature to him through sufficient contemplation, that our senses, aided by our thoughts and are good tools for discovery. Truth is all around us, it is within us. Consciousness is the inside of creation. Steiner’s book Occult Science an Outline is an attempt to look back into the past from the inside, the opposite of H G Well's time traveller who took modern materialist thought back into the past to refashion a dead world. 

Our challenge now is to reforge the world in ourselves with abundant life and beauty, through imaginative and spiritual effort.

Response to Steiner Studies video on Owen Barfield Saving the Appearances

I have been invited by the Steiner studies channel to do a response video to his video on Owen Barfield’s book “Saving the Appearances” and it’s relationship to Steiner’s thought. I have previously done one video on Barfield which was cut off due to environmental noise, I intended to do a follow up, but I am thinking that it would be good to do a number of videos. Originally I had thought I would need to get a full understanding of Barfield’s work, but I think instead I’ll treat it as a work in progress, where the act of making the video is the means by which I grapple with his thought..

So lets start Steiner Studies rolling the original video, I’ll put a link to the original video in the description:

I have been thinking about Owen Barfield and his book “Saving the appearances” Barfield is a very interesting writer thinker and one of the great interpreters of Rudolf Steiner’s work. And his book saving the appearances is his seminal philosophical work. Originally he intended it to be a book to make the case for Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy and spiritual science, but the book became it’s own thing it became self contained.

  

Now I haven’t done any videos on Rudolf Steiner and he is certainly a hard person to explain, I am not an expert of Steiner and I think it is very difficult thing to be. I also think he is a very difficult thinker to grapple with for quite a few reasons. 

So a few words about Steiner. he was born in Austria in 1861 and lived till 1925. He was a gifted student and his first major claim to fame was editing Goethe’s scientific papers, this lead to his first book “A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe’s World Conception” which was followed by his original work “The Philosophy of Freedom”   which Steiner continued to think of throughout his life as his seminal work. I feel a sense of jeopardy in trying to characterise this book, I’d say it was a theory that posited that  in true thinking we could both grapple with reality and find individual Freedom. 

Neither of these books made much of a splash at the time and I feel few have really tried to grapple with them and their influence may be yet to come. However Steiner has been an influential figure,  here in New Zealand for instance,  half way around the world from where Steiner was born we have Waldorf kindergartens and schools based on Steiner’s education theories. Biodynamic farming also came about by farmers seeking advice from Steiner. Such influences have not endeared him to the academic Intelligencia. 

Then there is Anthroposophy which Steiner foundered, this came about by being asked to give a talk to the Theosophical Society and from this he started to acquire a genuine following, he became the leader of the Austian/German branch of the Theosophical society. Many people have assumed from this that Steiner’s thought has its genesis in Helena Blavatsky’s work. Steiner has always denied this saying he always spoke from his own spiritual sight and Steiner parted from the Theosophical society to found the Anthroposophical society. He wrote a good number of books on Anthroposophy and delivered a huge number of lecture series that were recorded and have been issued in book form.  This large body of Anthroposophical work has effected the way people look at Steiner for the intensely spiritually inclined it has been a source of attraction but for many Atheists and Christians it has served as an easy excuse to ignore him. Owen Barfield certainly did not do so.

However there is a very close relationship between Saving the Appearances and Steiner’s philosophy and I wanted to talk about that relationship a little bit because there does seem to be an apparent tension between Saving the Appearances and Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom or Steiner’s Epistomology  and I want to go into that tension a little bit because I think that tension reveals something about both Barfield and Steiner. 

Now Barfield was a member of the writers circle known as the Inkling, he was a friend of CS Lewis and Tolkien. He was an influence upon Lewis becoming a Theist, but he did not have the religious upbringing that Lewis had. Barfield’s early books the fairytale The Silver Trumpet was the first mythic publication i think by an Inkling. Further his two books a history in English Words and poetic Diction were quite influential on Tolkien’s thinking on language and the nature of mind. I am pretty sure these were developed prior to his discovery of Steiner, so Barfield’s discovery of Steiner was one of convergence rather than conversion. There is never a sense that Barfield is being constrained by Steiner’s thought but that of joyful sharing. But as Steiner’s early books were pretty much ignored so  Barfield also has been on the outside of intellectual fashion and there has been little engagement with his work. Even his good friend Lewis on becoming a Christian refused to continue their intellectual fight.

First of all where is the tension coming from? Barfield goes to great lengths in the first part of his book. to demonstrate and prove that the world of appearances and everything around us that we touch smell see hear feel is just a system of collective representation. That is to say a system of mental representation. Representation within our mind that just happens to have a mind happens to have the same collective representation. 

My feeling on this is that there is always a caveat with Barfield and what he is doing here is leading us from what is the common currently accepted world view. The subtitle to Saving the Appearances is “A study in Idolatry” what he is trying to show us is that there is an idolatry in this modern world view that is shared by almost everyone. 

Now you might say this sounds an awful lot like someone like Kant or Schopenhauer would say. That is that the world is a mental representation so Barfield sounds like he is on the side of the Kantians. Who both of these thinkers Steiner goes at great length to argue against.So why is Barfield in the side of the idea that the world is a mental representation.

I just want to say a little about Steiner and Kant that comes from Steiner’s Autobiography which I   think is one of his key works. As a young man Steiner was compelled to get and understand Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Steiner says “In my boyish way I was striving to understand what human reason might be able to achieve towards real insight into the being of things” And Steiner tells of the intensity of his reading of Kant, he writes  “Many a page I read more than 20 times in succession. I wanted to reach a decision as to the relation sustained by human thought to the creative work of nature.” Steiner goes on to say “It seemed to me that thinking could be developed to a faculty  which would actually lay hold upon the things and events of the world. A “stuff which remains outside of the thinking which we can merely “think towards” seemed to me to be an unendurable conception.” Steiner then makes a remark that is key to his work as a whole and where he diverges from Kant “ Whatever is in things, this must also be inside of human thought.”

My favourite contemporary Christian thinker is David Bentley Hart and i want to quote him to show that these concerns aren’t unique to Barfield and Steiner. I have stressed that “thinking” for Steiner and Barfield is an incredibly important process, in my previous Barfield video I talked about the different kinds of thinking that Barfield delineated. Hart has spoken a lot about Modernity, the last 400 years, and the rise of science and the predominance of a certain kind of thought, which Barfield designates as alpha thinking. Hart writes:

SHOULD SCIENCE THINK?

The question is not quite as facetious as it might sound; it is really rather metaphysical; and it is a question that will ever more inevitably pose itself the more the sciences find themselves constrained rather than liberated by the mechanistic paradigm to which they have been committed for four centuries now. I should note, however, that it is also a question that makes sense only if one is using the word “think” with the perversely distinctive connotation given it by Martin Heidegger when he advanced the somewhat Orphic claim that “”science does not think.” For there is, he insisted, an enormous and inviolable distinction to be drawn between the calculative and quantitative concerns of the scientist on the one hand and, on the other, the properly philosophical or contemplative act of reflection that is the exclusive province of the genuine thinker.

I’ll link to the entire article in the description. 

This is not a negative value judgement on the intelligence of scientists, but a comment on the nature of their thinking, and they share suppositions that are now common to the general population that developed in modernity and which are unquestionably accepted but which is not common to human thinking throughout history. Barfield sees an Idolatry in these unquestioned suppositions.

And yet at the same time Barfield is trying to express and justify Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy. In the course of the book and towards the end of the book Barfield writes an interesting passage he says we cannot save souls unless we first save the appearances and of course hence the title of the book so this is an important passage in the book. He says we cannot save souls unless we first save the appearances. I think it’s in this sentence where Barfield and Steiner meet and where the tension is resolved. But what does this mean Saving Souls?

This is a fascinating quote from Barfield and very important and I agree that it is in harmony with Steiner, I’ll quote the full paragraph shortly but I’d say that the tension is not so much between Barfield and Steiner’s thought as between Steiner’s thought and  our common cultural inheritance which Barfield is addressing. The resolution between Steiner and Barfield is in thinking, which Barfield spends so much time examining, breaking it down into figuration, alpha and beta thinking. The nature of language it’s origins and development. In humanities earlier state of Participation and our coming state of final participation. All this strikes me as a reformation of ideas  essential to Steiner’s thought.

To repeat Steiner’s statement earlier:

“ Whatever is in things, this must also be inside of human thought.”

Now I’ll read the paragraph from Barfield on Saving Souls and saving the appearances:

it may be objected that all this talk of the relation of man to the phenomenal world is cold stuff having little or nothing to do with religion, whose field is the soul and its salvation, But this “watertight” attitude is itself a product of idolatry. What the psalmist wrote of the old idols is true of the twentieth century. “They that make them are like unto them” The soul is in a manner all things, and the idols we create are built into the souls of our children; who learn more and more to think of themselves as objects among objects; who grow hollower and hollower. In the long run we shall not be able to save souls without saving the appearances, and it is an error fraught with the most terrible consequences to think that  we shall. 

Woe, this gets at the heart of the issue for me. Our modern thinking and perception has problems in it that effect both the secular and the religious. I have felt for a long time that the fundamentalist that see authority “out there” in the good book, are not that far from the scientist who seeks the answers “out there” in matter. Meaning and participation are not found there. Barfield is saying this is the reason that religion and culture is in crisis in the west.

Another way we could express saving the Appearances would be to say if we believe   that the world is a mere representation within our subjective mind then if we can demonstrate that the world of appearance has an actual life in it and has its own reality then simultaneously we can see that within our own minds there is something real and living so by coming to a new relationship towards the appearances we are simultaneously able to elevate our own conception of our own minds from the mere projection of the unrepresented particles into something living and real and I’d imagine that this is where Barfield’s Saving the Appearances comes into harmony with Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom.

I think you’ve touched on the heart of it here when you say “within our own minds there is something real and living” which is another way of expressing Steiner’s statement

“Whatever is in things, this must also be inside of human thought.”

When two people look at the same chair their perceptions are different in and of themselves, but the perceptions in and of themselves never make up the chair, the chair exists when those perceptions are integrated into the conception of the chair and strangely it is that conception that is shared between the two people and it is in this shared conception that they experience the same chair.

So thanks again Steiner Studies for inviting a response. I think there is plenty more scope for further exploration.

Original Steiner Studies Video:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Zkv2PUW2gWU

Should Science Think? David Bentley Hart:

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/12/should-science-think

My previous Owen Barfield video:

https://youtu.be/sCSqKGTowZs

C S Lewis

I first came to Lewis in the 1980s through his Narnia books and Space Trilogy, at that time I liked a lot of his images, his mythic imagination but thought Lewis did way too much Christian preaching and that his Christian beliefs did not fit seamlessly into his stories but jutted out making them unshapely. By comparison I thought George MacDonald's book Lilith was a thoroughly marvellous work where imagination and Christian teaching worked together seamlessly. But I also held an antipathy toward Christianity then which I no longer hold.

I read my daughter the Narnia stories while she was growing up, she liked them and read some of them on her own and we watched the 3 Disney Narnia movies that came out and unlike many others, we liked them all.

But it is only in the last decade that my appreciation of Lewis has grown and that i have read more widely of his works.

Lewis was the central figure in the Inklings, all the key Inklings were primarily friends with Lewis and secondarily with one another,  the Inklings' original meetings were held in Lewis' rooms at Oxford. My appreciation of Lewis has grown, I appreciate him as a person and a writer although he is not my favourite or I think the greatest Inkling. Lewis' work may have the broadest scope combined with a pretty popular reach, his polemics probably lack the intensity that the other three Inklings (Tolkien, Charles Williams & Owen Barfield) have in spades. They are perhaps the closest thing we have to a modern circle of Prophets and Lewis was the everyman, being the most sensible and prosaic particularly in his popular book of Christian apologetics "Mere Christianity". While his Narnia books while the four main children feel very ordinary the books are filled with a certain outlandishness of imagination mixing Father Christmas, fawns, talking animals a witch and a Lion who serves as the Jesus of Narnia.

Owen Barfield writes of Lewis "C S Lewis was for me, first and foremost, the absolutely unforgettable friend, the friend with whom I was in close touch for over forty years, the friend who might be regarded hardly as another human being , but almost as a part of the furniture of my existence..."

But Barfield also writes about Lewis' influence on him as a thinker "I told him (Lewis) that ... it was he that taught me to think at all" and that he was impressed that Lewis refused to take philosophy as a merely academic exercise.

Lewis was a good Christian, he got Owen Barfield to act as his personal lawyer to administer the  significant funds Lewis earned from publishing and funnel it into charitable activity. Lewis was certainly not materialistic in the sense of wanting to acquire significant possessions and material wealth. I don't know if Lewis wrote about divine poverty, I don't think I have read anything.

Barfield obviously loved Lewis as a friend and admired him as both a writer and a human being, it is very easy for us to do the same.

There is a key story in Lewis life regarding World War I, he made a promise with one of his fellow soldiers Paddy Moore that if either one of them failed to survive the War they would look after the Parent of the other, Paddy Moore did not survive so Lewis ended up living with and in a sense looking after Mrs Moore, now anyone that has read Lewis biography will experience a certain amount of pain about this as Mrs Moore seems to have been a selfish and domineering person who not only impacted Lewis but also his older brother Warnie, I don't know if people connect Warnie's drinking with Mrs Moore but it certainly doesn't seem to be a stretch. I came across a comment recently about Warnie raising the issue of Mrs Moore and being bluntly cut off and that it was not a subject that could be discussed. Was this a feature of Lewis, he did a similar thing to Barfield in cutting off their great War discussion, that Barfield was able to continue somewhat and find resolution by writing about it after Lewis death. But in the case of Mrs Moore it has often been framed that Lewis had to do what he did because of his promise, but I don't think so Lewis chose to interpret his promise in a certain way, if someone takes responsibility for their parents all they need to do is make sure they are financially sound and to visit them regularly, living with them is surely not required. If Lewis thought he was being a good influence on her I can see no evidence of that and allowing her free reign with her petty tyrannies was surely not doing any good for her character and was certainly causing his brother very real suffering.

Lewis' work is multifaceted he did Christian apologetics, imaginative allegory, science fantasy, children's fantasy, adult myth, literary criticism and autobiography as well as a extensive letter writer not just to his friends family and peers but also to numerous fans that wrote to him

I will end with a number of selections from his works that have particularly stood out for me:

On Re Reading:

In literature the characteristics of the 'consumer' of bad art are even easier to define. He (or she) may want her weekly ration of fiction very badly indeed, may be miserable if denied it. But he never re-reads. There is no clearer distinction between the literary and the unliterary. It is infallible. The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. A novel once read is to them like yesterdays newspaper. One may have some hopes of a man who has never read the Odyssey, or Malory, or Boswell, or Pickwick: but none (as regards literature) of the man who tells you he has read them, and thinks that settles the matter. It is as if a man said he had once washed, or once slept, or once kissed his wife, or once gone for a walk. Whether the bad poetry is re-read or not (it gravitates suspiciously towards the spare bedroom) I do not know. But the very fact that we do not know is significant. It does not creep into the conversation of those who buy it. One never finds two of its lovers capping quotations and settling down to a good evening's talk about their favourite. So with the bad picture. The purchaser says, no doubt sincerely, that he finds it lovely, sweet, beautiful, charming or (more probably,) 'nice. But he hangs it where it cannot be seen and never looks at it again. 

On why we should read old books:

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. ALL contempo-rary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united - united with each other and against earlier and later ages - by a great mass of common assumptions. We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask; "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt (note: this was written in 1943) or between Mr H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us .in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them. 

On The Scottish writer George MacDonald whom Lewis called his master, and in his autobiography he said he baptised his imagination:

Most myths were made in prehistoric times, and, I suppose, not consciously made by individuals at all But every now and then there occurs in the modern world a genius — a Kafka or a Novalis — who can make such a story Mac-Donald is the greatest genius of this kind whom I know But I do not know how to classify such genius To call it literary genius seems unsatisfactory since it can co-exist with great inferiority in the art of words—nay, since its connection with words at all turns out to be merely external and, in a sense, accidental Nor can it be fitted into any of the other arts It begins to look as if there were an art, or a gift, which criticism has largely ignored It may even be one of the greatest arts, for it produces works which give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets It is in some ways more akin to music than to poetry or at least to most poetry It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt It arouses in us sensations we have never had before, never anticipated having, as though we had broken out of our normal mode of consciousness and 'possessed joys not promised to our birth It gets under our skin, hits us at a level deeper than our thoughts or even our passions...

Definition of Myth from "An experiment in Criticism", this book should be read by anyone that has studied literature, it serves as something of an antidote to the possession by fashionable literary theories and an encouragement to surrender oneself to great pieces of literature and be receptive towards them

The pleasure of myth depends hardly at all on such usual narrative attractions as suspense or surprise. Even at a first hearing it is felt to be inevitable. And the first hearing is chiefly valuable in introducing us to a permanent object of contemplation—more like a thing than a narration—which works upon us by its peculiar flavour or quality, rather as a smell or a chord does. Sometimes, even from the first, there is hardly any narrative element. The idea that the gods, and all good men, live under the shadow of Ragnarok is hardly a story. The Hesperides, with their apple-tree and dragon, are already a potent myth, without bringing in Heraldes to steal the apples... The experience is not only grave but awe-inspiring. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us. The recurrent efforts of the mind to grasp—we mean, chiefly, to conceptualise—this something, are seen in the persistent tendency of humanity to provide myths with allegorical explanations. And after all allegories have been tried, the myth itself continues to feel more important than they. I am describing and not accounting for myths...

And lastly an except from "Out of the Silent Planet", the first book of Lewis Space Trilogy, the books in this trilogy are quite odd mixing quite a bit of didactic dialogue but Lewis also has these richly imaginative depictions and here I love how he recasts our experience of space:

But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him.. He had read of 'Space': at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now—now that the very name `Space' seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the earth with so many eyes—and here, with how many more, No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the heavens which declared the glory—the

'happy climes that ly 

Where day never shuts his eye 

Up in the broad fields of the sky: 

David Bentley Hart

David Bentley Hart is an intellectual Christian and so, to many in our secular culture, must seem like a mythical beast. Western culture has its roots in Christianity and through reading Hart I have become more aware of these roots. It is like being able to see a new richness in what was already there. I grew up learning almost nothing of Christianity from school, family or friends and that’s the norm now. The irony is that secularity grew out of Christian culture, it is a further development of Protestant reform. So much of contemporary Christianity presents itself or is presented to us as a caricature,  in beliefs of fundamentalism and predestined eternal torment etc. Atheists are overjoyed that these Christians meet their expectations and can be written off so glibly.

The catalyst for this blog was watching a symposium on youtube organised by Hart entitled Mind Soul World: Consciousness in Nature. 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLajs77Y9ipluZ2zlrC4Ru9LGfEWcPrGm-

Watching this gave me the weird feeling that youtube is actually a good thing and I could spend my time watching material that expands my interests. The entire symposium is well worth watching, but I admit that a number of the papers were entirely beyond me, particularly the lectures on "Intentionality and the Transcendent Ends of Consciousness". One of the reasons I write this blog is to clarify my own thinking, but also I think endevours like this help diseminate ideas and hopefully help them to enter into broader social discourse. 

I recommend watch this symposium as i am unlikely to do it justice, what I will say is just a little on the ideas that it has reinforced for me, I am not claiming this is any sort of accurate summary of the materials. Secularity assumes that the onus is on the Theistic to prove the existence of God, however  Theism has the upper hand in being able to account for the primary experience we have of mind/intentionality/rationality. Whereas the secular gravitates to the materialist which sees an outer nature in many ways dead, certainly in terms of meaning, that is, it is seen as essentially mindless, random and meaningless, so where our own rationality intentions and goals come from is at least problematic and the most logically cogent approaches tend towards arguments that eplain consciousness away as some kind of illusion. An approach that isn't generally satisfying for common joe and jane, and may be one of the reasons why there aren't large numbers of militant atheists. Christians however who say in the beginning was the Logos (Word/Rationality) have the advantage of being able to place our rationality and intentionality easily within this divine framework. 

Also obvious from watching this symposium is the wealth and depth of intellectual tradition that these speakers were familiar with and large intellectual landscapes that play little part in popular culture. Canonical authors Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Gegory of Nyssa, Thomas Aquinas, Berkely, Descarte, Kant, Goethe are familiar territory for these intellectuals and should be a key element in our education. Across the talks a criticism of modernity emerged,a sense of something having gone wrong with our philosophy/metaphysics at the start of modernity 15/16th C.  John Milbank even suggested that perhaps there is an alternative supressed occult hermetic tradition that we would be better connecting to, represented in thinkers like Robert Fludd. He didn't mention any other names but this caused me some excitement as I had been quite inspired by Franes Yates books on the Hermetic tradition which to me also suggested another road not taken where the external world maintained its sense of holiness. Instead science diverged from alchemy/occult theory, driven perhaps more from a desire to avoid heresy than sustained rational argument and possibly through a failure of Christian metaphysics at the time. Milbank has elsewhere argued that secularity rather than being a neutral space is infact a metaphysical invention. 

That the world presents itself to intelligably to us increasingly strikes me as a wonder.

I'm riding my own hobby horse here and I'm not giving a good idea of what Hart so here so to right the balance I'll quote the opening paragraph from Hart's introductory essay:

The occasion of this colloquium is a book project on the nature of consciousness and the metaphysics of the soul; ... as one of many subventions for research on “the place of mind within nature.” As far as that designation goes, however, one of my aims is to invert its terms and argue that the mystery of consciousness is better approached by an inquiry into the place of nature within mind. The conclusion toward which I am working is, quite frankly, one of “theistic idealism” (using that phrase in as generously compendious a way as possible). My overarching argument is that consistently physicalist emergentist accounts of the origins of consciousness invariably fail; that scrupulous reflection on the nature of consciousness yields a picture to which certain classical understandings of the soul (Western and Eastern) are far better suited than is any kind of materialist reductionism; that these understandings of the soul inevitably entail a concept of the soul as having its ground and end in infinite divine mind, and as indeed being essentially an instance of restricted participation in the unrestricted consciousness of God; that the irreducibly transcendental orientation of intentional consciousness becomes intelligible only when seen in light of this transcendent reality; and that ultimately, perhaps, it is necessary to conclude that consciousness and being are inseparable, because in God they perfectly coincide. That, at least, is the grand design; but the discrete steps by which it will unfold will be fairly modest to begin with, and I hope sufficiently rigorous throughout. 

Well I'm looking forward to the book and I hope that it is aimed sufficiently at a popular audience for me to be able to appreciate it. I have read 3 Bentley Hart books in the last few years, one of which was an introductory History of the Church which I appreciated, but the other two had a greater impact upon me. I'll give a very pithy account of them. They were:

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies

The main title of this book is actually the publishers and it takes a shot at and hopes to draw on the popularity of Richard Dawkins book "the God Delusion". But while the book takes a few introductory shots against the New Atheists: Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett & Christopher Hitchens who all take a stridently antagonistic approach to Christianity, instead it is more a historical essay that is better expressed by the sub title which was the author's original title. The historical essay really seeks to show us that the all too common claims made against Christianity of having a violent past and suppressing Reason, Science and Progress, by giving the examples of the Crusades, the Inquisition the destruction of the Library of Alexandria and the trial of Galileo. Hart gives a nuanced look at history and while seeing plenty to be appalled by, yet shows that the picture is over simplified to the point of being deceptive. It is well worth a read, I will say that the reader new to Hart is likely to be struck by his invective, for instance this on Sam Harris' book "The End of Faith":"‘little more than a concatenation of shrill, petulant assertions, a few of which are true, but none of which betrays any great degree of philosophical or historical sophistication’"

The other book of Hart's I have read is called

"The Experience of God: Being Consciousness Bliss"

This book Hart describes as simply an effort to define the term God "in obedience to the classical definitions of the divine found in the theological and philosophical schools of most of the major religious traditions". Hart is undertaking this because in contemporary debates "the contending parties are not even talking about the same thing." He goes onto to define how the concept of God is not another thing amongst things but the basis of being, not the caricatured Zeus like figure amongst the clouds. It is a good sized book and I will not do it justice but I do recommend it.

Hart is a figure who I would love to see regarded as one of the premier cultural critics but who instead is unfortunately rather marginal. He is highly intelligent, culturally rich and deeply Christian thinker and writer. I am not sure that he is a great innovator but he is I think an astute commentator on modernity and well worth exploring.

World Views and Meaning in a Civil Society

This is a post I intended for the George MacDonald Facebook page, I thought maybe it would be better hosted here.

George MacDonald lived at one of the turning points in our culture. Victorian England was still ostensibly a Christian culture, you can see in his novels that church attendance was the norm but he also documents how this was increasingly a social show and he often depicts sincere atheists in a better light than insincere Christians. 

By the time of the Inklings (A literary discussion group comprising CS Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield, et al), they were exceptions by being Christian intellectuals in a largely secular culture, particularly in the intellectual culture. Lewis wrote a very good book “The Discarded Image” which dealt with the way throughout the middle ages Christian philosophers, scientists and poets viewed their conception of the ptolemaic world view. Lewis didn’t see this world view as fundamentally Christian but it was used in a Christian context. In this view there was a participation with the world the world macrocosm was reflected in the microcosm of man. Within this view we have the Christian idea that in the beginning was the Word, so we have meaning at the centre of existence.

We now live in a secular society where the ruling paradigm is  materialism that looks for truth with a microscope or telescope “out there” in the world and I don’t see that much difference to the fundamentalist Christians who see the truth as “out there” in a book. MacDonald had a very strong imaginative sense of participation with God, where Truth is seen and experienced as fundamental.

The US election has just passed and one of the things that really strikes me about it, is how much cynicism there is about our societies basic building blocks. There is a sense that our politicians are bought and corrupt, no one is trustworthy, other building blocks like the nuclear family are both far less robust than they had been and generally not even considered as important. There are plenty of people who think 911 was an inside job, that global warming is liberal hoax, that Shakespeare didn’t write his plays and that jesus Christ did not exist. It is now pretty mainstream to think Western culture in all it’s varieties including Government and Business is simply an oppressive patriarchy. CS Lewis spoke about how this inclination to see through everything means that you end up seeing nothing. All of these impulses are deconstructing, I don’t think we’ll find a beautiful world if all we do is take things apart. When rationality that starts off with the presupposition of meaning ends with the conclusion that all meaning is subjective, then it should be no surprise that our discourse becomes increasingly frivolous. Instead of arguing the nature of meaning and the world, university students seem more concerned with where they sit on an entirely fluid gender spectrum.

Are we going to be able to build a new intellectual spiritual paradigm to replace that ‘discarded image”? Personally I think Owen Barfield may represent a possible direction.  I don’t think religion is simply a matter of individual salvation, it is used as a basic building block for civil society. Sorry if these are rather gloomy reflections.

 I thought this was going to end in a question for people to discuss, maybe the question is what do people think of the idea that a world view that sees meaning as fundamental (as religious views generally do) is necessary for healthy functioning society? Is their such a world view and how does it get taken up by society at large?

Owen Barfield - Saving the Appearances

The Inklings were a small group of Oxford writers and friends who would meet weekly to read aloud and discuss their works in progress. The two most famous members were JRR Tolkien who wrote the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings (these were the first novels I read with pleasure) and C S Lewis who wrote the Narnia books and was influential with his books of Christian apologetics. Tolkien and Lewis' output extend beyond the popular works in very interesting ways.  But there were also two other significant Inklings, Charles Williams who wrote fascinating contemporary novels where the spiritual world would break through into this world and strange books of theology. Lastly there was Owen Barfield.

Barfield isn't as well known as Tolkien and Lewis and this is partly because he can be hard to read, but he influenced them both. He is hard to read largely because his ideas are contrary to so much modern thought and assumptions. Barfield engaged with Lewis in what they termed the Great war. This was a dialogue between them that would lead to Lewis moving from Atheism to Theism and  curing him of his "chronological snobbery", more on that later. Barfield's early fairytale the Silver Trumpet was a success in Tolkien's house and his writing on Language in A History of English Words and Poetic Diction were influential, within the Inklings. Amongst the Inklings he is probably the most significant thinker.

I did find "Saving the Appearances" difficult and I can't describe it as Barfield would, but this could be a very significant book. It is a major reassessment of the way we see ourselves and history, it questions the very nature of the way modern people think. We are used to thinking of the evolution of the external world but we are not used to thinking of the evolution of consciousness, this is an oversight that could have profound repercussions. History is generally written with a contemporary mind or consciousness reinterpreting the past through our sensibility, but if we read works from an earlier time period and we allow ourselves to listen for the meanings and impressions of that time we then start to see a different world view to our own. We see that the issues and significance of ideas and events were different and they had different suppositions.  If we turn from literature and it's relatively small time scales to the sciences that talk confidently about millions of years of geological time, then the possibility of a disconnect and re-interpretation from modern consciousness becomes massive. Barfield makes the observation that when Scientists talk about the distant past, they are inferring how it would appear to a contemporary human being had they been there. But obviously, no contemporary human consciousness was there.

Barfield posits three types of thought. Figuration, Alpha and Beta thinking. The external world only makes sense to us through our original figuration, figuration as I think is mostly our language and underlying thought forms. The basic blocks of our thinking that we participate in when we experience the world. Alpha and beta thinking is abstract thinking not different in kind but in subject. Alpha thinking is thinking about the contents of figuration.  Alpha thinking is about concepts relating to the external world, scientific concepts like gravity, laws of motion are all alpha thinking.  Beta thinking is thinking about thinking i.e. philosophy.

We sort of know that all inquiry begins with consciousness, but then we forget this as we analyse our world, we abstract ourselves and our consciousness from our thoughts of the world. If we look back at the middle ages and before, we see thinking where the nature of the macrocosm cycles through the microcosm. It seems that this abstraction came about not through logical exposition but through the successes of alpha thinking in shaping our world and as the books title says "saving the appearances" that is having concepts that can accommodate that which we see e.g. theories of motion, gravity etc.

That in short are the bare bones of this book, but Barfield thinks about thinking with an intensity that is startling, maybe you won't agree with where he goes with this, but I think he is well worth engaging with.

Reflections upon reading CS Lewis' Allegory of Love

I first came to Lewis through reading his Narnia novels, not in my childhood but in my twenties. While I enjoyed these books I wasn't that excited by them. I was very aware that he was a Christian apologist which at that time I did not regard as a point in his favour. But I have slowly come to see that Lewis has a sensibility well worth exploring and I have also come to appreciate the Christian cultural/spiritual tradition.

Lewis has a number of different facets to his work. The Mythic/Fantasy Imaginative works, Christian Apoligetics, Philosophy/Theology, Social Commentator and Literary Criticism and analysis. This last category of his writing I think is often overlooked now, partly because of the fame of his Narnia books and the rise in appreciation in the US particularly of his overtly Christian writing.

In recent times I have read two works of his literary analysis by CS Lewis "The Discarded Image" which explores the cosmological conception of the Middle Ages and how it appears in literature. And Now the "Allegory of Love" which is an exploration of Allegorical tradition of Courtly Love. Both books are impressive works of scholarship but also very engaging reads.

Lewis has said that when reading every second book should be an old one and one of the reasons for that is that by reading old books we discover a sensibility different from our own. If we could read books from the future they would serve the same purpose, unfortunately we haven't figured out how to do so. Sci Fi is possibly an imaginative attempt to satisfy that desire. Old books can let us see our own time with other eyes.

Lewis dedicated this book to fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield and a central strand of thought that he may have picked up from Barfield is that through literature we can explore the way consciousness develops. "Allegory of Love" explores literature from the Middle Ages and some things that we may regard as fundamental had not emerged, for instance the romantic love story that leads to marriage which now seems such a cliche. In Courtly love adultery was the norm and it is interesting to see the way a new mode of love hammers itself out in the imaginations of the poets. Whether they were leading or following the social trend I don't know, but in those works we can see the transformation.

Another interesting development that Lewis seems to be tracing is that of the expression of the inner life through literature, which first found expression in Allegory and Lewis focus primarily on the Romance of the Rose for this, where the different parts of the personality are depicted as separate personifications. Later he claims that it was possible to do the same thing more realistically. The Romance of the Rose Lewis claims is the most consistent and structural Allegory, the later works he explores use Allegory only in part, mixed with other modes of expression.

I'm not going to give a survey of the whole book which is rich in ideas, and I admit I was not able to digest it all,  partly because I didn't have sufficient familiarity of the texts he discusses. But even so I was captivated by Lewis easy engagement with these works from the Middle Ages leading up to Spenser's Fairy Queen. That engagement drew me with him through all 450 pages. This book could well serve to generate enthusiasm to read these early texts.

It was also interesting how Lewis' familiarity with the Middle Ages is reflected in his Narnia books. The odd mix of mythologies, images, ideas lumped together that makes the Narnia books is stylistically typical of works from the Middle Ages.

Hopefully this will spur me to read Chaucer's Troilus and Cressida and the entire Fairy Queen other books discussed. It would be great to return to this book again when I am more familiar with the imaginative country it explores.