Landon Loftin and Dr. Max Leyf return to the show to talk about the book which they co-wrote together, What Barfield Thought.
S6E43: “What Barfield Thought” (Download)
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Show Notes
Introduction
Drop-In
Quote-of-the-week
The benefits to be derived from serious and sustained attention to Barfield’s work extend far beyond merely academic concerns, and moreover, do not depend upon one’s acceptance of all or even most of his conclusions… C.S. Lewis, for instance, serves as a near-perfect model of a largely unconvinced man who nevertheless benefited immensely from a lifetime of critical engagement with Barfield’s ideas…. We believe that Barfield’s star is on the ascendant and a proper appraisal of his work is only beginning
Landon Loftin and Dr. Max Leyf, What Barfield Thought
Chit-Chat
Toast
- Landon has had another child and is working on his PhD.
- Max celebrated ten years of Rolfen practice, has continued to teach and has become engaged!
- David was drinking water.
- Landon was drinking a Pumpkin Ale and Max was drinking some coffee.
Biographical Information
Landon Loftin is a husband, father of two. He teaches for Gravitas, a global extension of the Stony Brook School .
Max Leyf is a certified Rolfer, philosopher, and anthroposopher from Anchorage, Alaska. He blogs at Theoria Press and is the author of The Redemption of Thinking.
They are co-authors of “What Barfield Thought: An introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield”.
Guest Biographical Information
Discussion
01. “Guest background”
Q. I only gave brief bios for each of you, so would you mind telling the listeners a little bit more about yourselves?
–
02. “Encountering Barfield”
Q. How did you each come across Barfield and decide to make him an area of study?
03. “Book Genesis”
Q. How did the two of you come together to write your book, What Barfield Thought: An Introduction to the Work of Owen Barfield?
- Owen A. Barfield
- The Owen Barfield Literary Estate
- Max refers to the following section of Lewis’ spiritual autobiography:
My next was Owen Barfield. There is a sense in which Arthur and Barfield are the types of every man’s First Friend and Second Friend. The First is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like rain-drops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman. When you set out to correct his heresies, you find that he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither gives a glance to, each learning the weight of the other’s punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another’s thought; out of this perpetual dog-fight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him. Much of the thought which he afterwards put into Poetic Diction had already become mine before that important little book appeared. It would be strange if it had not. He was of course not so learned then as he has since become; but the genius was already there.
C.S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, Chapter 8
04. “Barfield’s Life”
Q. You begin your book with a chapter describing the life of Owen Barfield, his beliefs and his interaction with the Inklings. What do people really need to know about him?
For ignorance plus the love of truth is already wisdom, and learning without it still folly
Owen Barfield, Death
Awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.
Socrates
The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)
For of course we do not want to know our Friend’s affairs at all. Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living… No one cares twopence about any one else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)
05. “Language”
Q. Anyone who has read any Barfield will immediately realize that language was crucially important to him, and that’s the subject of the subsequent chapter. What was Barfield’s understanding of language and the reason for its importance?
… in our own language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust. But there is this difference between the record of the rocks and the secrets which are hidden in language: whereas the former can only give us a knowledge of outward, dead things—such as forgotten seas and the bodily shapes of prehistoric animals and primitive men—language has preserved for us the inner, living history of man’s soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness.
Owen Barfield, History in English Words (Chapter 1)
Material objects are necessarily kinds of scoriae of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature
The full meaning of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames– ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction
Over the perpetual evolution of human consciousness, which is stamping itself upon the transformation of language, the spirit of poetry hovers, for ever unable to alight. It is only when we are lifted above that transformation, so that we behold it as present movement, that our startled souls feel the little pat and the throbbing, feathery warmth, which tell us that she has perched. It is only when we have risen from beholding the creature into beholding creation that our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres.
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction
06. “Poetry”
Q. Many of the Inklings loved poetry, but it had a special place in Barfield’s understanding of the world and language. How would you describe it?
- “Ancient Semantic Unities” are discussed in S4E55 – AH – “After Hours” with Dr. Robert Koons
Mr. Barfield has shown, as regards the history of language, that words did not start by referring merely to physical objects and then get extended by metaphor to refer to emotions, mental states and the like. On the contrary, what we now call the ‘literal and metaphorical’ meanings have both been disengaged by analysis from an ancient unity of meaning which was neither or both. In the same way it is quite erroneous to think that man started with a ‘material’ God or ‘Heaven’ and gradually spiritualised them. He could not have started with something ‘material’ for the ‘material’, as we understand it, comes to be realised only by contrast to the ‘immaterial’, and the two sides of the contrast grow at the same speed.
C.S. Lewis, Miracles (Chapter 10)
- Ruach (Breath, wind)
The world, like Dionysus, is torn to pieces by pure intellect, but the poet is Zeus; he has swallowed the heart of the world; and he can reproduce it in a living body.
Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction
07. “The Evolution of Consciousness”
Q. Okay, so now in your book we come to the Barfieldian topic, the Evolution of Consciousness. What is it, and what isn’t it, because to uninitiated modern ears it could evoke many different ideas.
The Evolution of Consciousness is a theory that poses a process of fundamental change in relation between the human mind and the material world, affecting not only how people have perceived and understood the world, but also the fundamental character of that which is perceived, that is the world itself. This change involves, among other things, a movement from the conscious participation in the life of nature, characteristic of pre-modern consciousness, to the self-conscious observation of nature, which characterizes modern consciousness.
What Barfield thought, Landon Loftin and Dr. Max Leyf
So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh; and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
Genesis 2:21-23
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
08. “Final Participation”
Q. From the Evolution of Consciousness your book then logically moves to the culmination of this evolution, Final Participation. What is it and what will the world be like when it’s achieved?
Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate.
David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 18:3
09. “Crisis of meaning and future studies”
Q. As we wrap up, what do you think is the future of Barfieldian studies in the 21st Century? Are there any particular books or ideas of his which you think will be explored further by scholars and mined for gold?
For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.
The Magician’s Nephew (Chapter 5)
As a man is so he sees
William Blake
