The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (17 page)

I have been seeing practically no-one with whom I can talk naturally of the things I want to talk about, and the result is that I am being forced in on myself like an ingrowing toe-nail. It has come to such a pass that I seem to be living in a land of dream. My self is the only thing that exists, and I wear the external world about me like a suit of clothes—my own body included. It—the world—seems to have about as much objective importance as a suit of clothes, and quite often I have a suspicion that I am really naked after all. When I am alone at night, I sometimes feel frightened of the silence ringing in my ears. Something inside me seems to be so intensely and burningly alive, and everything round me so starkly dead …

The anguish was nearly unbearable, as he found himself “pondering the problem of existence at most hours of the day & some hours of the night”—and this not for a few days or weeks, but for “years.” He later termed it a case of “acute depression.”

Trapped in this slough of despond, Barfield visited Switzerland. There, without warning, at the very end of his vacation, he enjoyed an instantaneous and utter remission of his world-weariness, a metanoia that he came to call his “Sophia experience,” as an unbidden transformative wisdom (
sophia
=
Greek for wisdom) flooded his mind. The volte-face came “suddenly one evening, one fine evening … the clouds sort of lifted—I know this sounds very dramatic, but it is rather essential—all the misery that I had felt, all this lifted with it.”

What scattered the clouds? To any skeptic—say, to Lewis at the same age (and he was almost exactly the same age, born only twenty days after Barfield)—the depression would be traceable to Barfield’s failed love affair, with adolescent angst a predictable emotional variation on the theme, and its alleviation just as obvious; for at just this time, Barfield met a new love interest: Matilda “Maud” Douie (1885–1980), who would become his wife. Maud, a friend of the Radfords, was thirteen years older than Barfield, but the age gap meant nothing to either of them. She entranced him with her choreography and her Scottish ballads, and they married in 1923.

Barfield, however, understood his epochal “Sophia experience” not as a rebound from lovesickness, but as a spiritual epiphany that cured a spiritual illness. Although he remained circumspect about what occurred, the broad outlines of the event are apparent. It seems to have been an episode of nature mysticism, akin to those described by Richard Maurice Bucke in
Cosmic Consciousness
(1901) and by William James with more sophistication in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902): an overwhelming sense of unity with the cosmos, accompanied by certitude and bliss. By the time Barfield had his own Sophia experience in the early 1920s, the doctrine of “cosmic consciousness” had penetrated the Weltanschauung of the age and may have helped to shape what he underwent. An apprehension of beauty was also an important component, for Barfield realized, in his ecstasy, that he “would be able to find all the beauty I had fallen for in this woman [the Radfords’ cousin] in the whole world of nature.”

This sounds banal in the telling, and perhaps it is, but Barfield’s Sophia experience brought with it a profound discovery: that the heightened perception that he had tasted previously only through poetic metaphor, especially that of Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, and the Georgians, could be experienced directly, in life as well as in art, a transforming event available to anyone at any moment. Later, he would argue in book after book that this experience had been commonplace among the ancients and that in the future it would become so again, albeit in a more self-aware, sophisticated form. The Sophia event changed his life. It “led into the whole shape and development of my literary and philosophical work,” by pointing him toward the monumental idea that would become the focus of his life’s work: the nature and evolution of human consciousness.

The Evolution of Consciousness

For over seventy years, the question of how human perception has changed (and continues to change) over the course of centuries would remain at the center of Barfield’s thought, so much so that he once observed that while there is an early C. S. Lewis and a later C. S. Lewis, there is only one Barfield from beginning to end: a man devoted to a single idea, the evolution of consciousness, and how language reveals this evolution by serving as a fossil record of human consciousness as it existed in the past and as a harbinger, with the aid of spiritual insight, of its possible future state.

Barfield’s first step in examining the question, in the wake of the Sophia experience, came in August 1920, when a little essay, “Form in Poetry”—his first published prose work—appeared in the
New Statesman
. The essay offers a vigorous response to the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell’s
Art
(1914), a widely read work that argues that one arrives at the meaning, value, and significance of a work of art by looking at its “significant form”—in the case of a painting, the play of line, shape, and color. Subject matter counts for nothing. Bell’s disciples applied the same principles to poetry, contending that a poem’s art lies in its sound, stress, and cadence, and that its content—for example, the ideas and events it may present—is irrelevant. To this Barfield tartly answers that it follows that “Hey-diddle-diddle ranks as an idyll.” Instead, he proposes that the form of a poem unfolds in the reader’s consciousness and is different for each reader, that every word in a poem is “the final objective record for each person of the whole series of thoughts or sense-impressions received by him every time he has spoken or heard that word,” and that the art of poetry consists in the juxtaposition of these thoughts or sense-impressions. That is to say, “the poet’s material … is memory.” Contra Bell and his disciples, a poem does not mean only how it says; it means what each reader reads in it when he brings his full experience to bear upon it. This leads ineluctably to the unstated but implicit conclusion that words transmit more than sound, even more than lexical meaning—more, that is, than the sort of information one might find in a dictionary; words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

The radical idea that words carry such hidden cargo is elaborated in a second essay that Barfield published two years later in the
London Mercury
for December 1922. He begins his piece, “Ruin,” by quoting with approval Maupassant’s declaration that
les mots ont une
â
me
(“words have a soul”). Making industrious use of the
OED
, he then bares the soul of the English word “ruin” by exploring its etymology (here one may note that Emerson declared in “The Poet” that “language is the archives of history,” and in “In Praise of Books” that dictionaries are “the raw material of possible poems and histories,” and one wonders about the extent of his influence on Barfield, largely unacknowledged apart from scattered references in the latter’s 1931
Poetic Diction
and a few essays). Barfield finds in the Latin origin of “ruin,”
ruo
, “a large sense of swift, disastrous movement.” This sense would not last. “Ruin” changes—or evolves—through the writings of Chaucer, Gower, Spenser, Shakespeare (in the latter’s writings it becomes “a warm and living thing”), Milton, Pope, Dryden, and others, each contributing to its shifting meaning, to the import of the word’s “four magical black squiggles, wherein the past is bottled, like an Arabian Genii, in the dark.” By the late eighteenth century with its Enlightenment, neoclassical, and satirical sensibilities, “ruin” had been bled of its original power, speed, and terror, becoming “all tumbledown walls and mossy masonry.” The case is exemplary; “ruin” is but one of ten thousand “ancestral words embalming the souls of many poets dead and gone and the souls of many common men.” It is also, Barfield proclaims in an ending burning with eschatological fever, a word with a bright future. For all words, all language, invented so that people can relate to one another, are “striving still towards that end and consolation.” As language “grows subtler and subtler, burying in its vaults more and more associations, more and more mind, it becomes to those same spirits a more and more perfect medium of companionship. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Barfield’s task from now on would be to illuminate these dark vaults, this past, this future; in so doing, he would uncover an understanding of history scarcely guessed at by the vast majority of his contemporaries. Words contain the “souls” or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness. And by scrutinizing the record of how words change and of how we coin new words with new meanings, Barfield is beginning to grope toward his great discoveries: that consciousness is not the same now as it was in the past or will be in the future; that in the deep past, human consciousness “participated” directly in nature, it was alive, vigorous, and resplendent, but not fully aware of itself; that our modern consciousness is utterly different, aware of itself and able to analyze and reflect upon itself, while at the same time enervated, depressed, wallowing in materialism, atheism, and despair; and that the future offers hope of a new golden age, in which we will recapture our primordial vigor while retaining our modern self-awareness.

The Coming of Rudolf Steiner

At this stage in his life—he was in his twenties—Barfield had worked these ideas out in haphazard, inchoate form. A new perspective was needed in order to place them in a reliable or at least internally coherent historical, scientific, and philosophical framework. It came from an unexpected quarter: Anthroposophy, the teachings of the Austrian spiritual seer Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). Barfield discovered Steiner during a summer in Cornwall spent in the company not only of the Radford sisters but of his old classmate Harwood and Harwood’s future wife, Daphne Olivier. After hearing Steiner lecture in Stuttgart, Olivier had become an enthusiast, and before long she and Harwood were attending talks at the headquarters of the Anthroposophical Society in Gloucester Place, London. When Barfield heard about Steiner, his initial skepticism quickly melted. He came to realize that “Steiner had obviously forgotten volumes more than I had ever dreamed,” embraced his occult teachings, joined the society, and made much of his membership card (number 15), signed by Steiner himself. Admiration soon gave way to adulation; Steiner became for Barfield a philosopher with a “stature … almost too excessive to be borne,” “a key figure—perhaps on the human level,
the
key figure” in the evolution of consciousness, a man in whom “we observe, actually beginning to occur, the transition from
homo sapiens
to
homo imaginans et amans.
”

To describe Rudolf Steiner is to bottle a tornado. A thin, frail man with dark hair and deep-set eyes, he was, like many European esotericists—Bruno, Swedenborg, Gurdjieff—a polymath, producing, in forty years of work, over three hundred volumes of lectures and other writings, along with paintings, sculpture, architectural designs, a new system of dance, and revolutionary theories of education, medicine, and agriculture. The titles of his books range from the reassuringly earthbound—
The Philosophy of Freedom
,
The Education of the Child
—to the extravagantly outr
é
—
Occult Significance of Blood
,
The Mission of Gautama Buddha on Mars.
He commenced his prodigious labors in the 1880s, as editor of a scholarly edition of Goethe’s scientific works; by 1904 he had become the leader of the German branch of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society; in 1913 he broke away to form his own Anthroposophical Society, dedicated to expounding “Spiritual Science”—a method of occult insight that offered, he claimed, reliable, verifiable, clairvoyant exploration of the spiritual realm.

Armed with the discoveries of this new cognitive tool, Steiner rewrote the history of the world, describing lost ages and unknown civilizations like Lemuria and Atlantis, whose inhabitants possessed multiple psychic powers, most notably telepathy. He filled in this historical framework with teachings about reincarnation, karma, the astral planes, the Akashic Record, and other familiar elements in the European occultist’s kit. A new version of Christianity emerged, in which Christ becomes the pivot of cosmic and human evolution. Steiner spent his last decade crisscrossing Europe like a modern St. Paul, lecturing, writing, planting his legacy—Barfield heard him speak in London on August 24, 1924—before passing away in 1925, worn to a thread by his intense labors and by worry over the threat of National Socialism (as early as 1921, Hitler had ranted about Steiner being too close to the Jews). The Anthroposophical Society flourished after its founder’s death, establishing schools, farms, special-needs communities, banks, and churches on many continents; as the years passed it found its place, for most observers outside the fold, as a colorful and fruitful chapter in the story of Western esotericism and as a curious footnote in the history of Western thought.

What attracted Barfield to this remarkable man, who has drawn his share of illustrious followers—Saul Bellow and Andrei Tarkovsky among them—but who strikes most people as a thinker inhabiting the fringe between reality and fantasy? The initial appeal lay, for Barfield, not in Steiner’s more bizarre theories—although in time Barfield would embrace most of them—but rather in an extraordinary convergence of views. He soon realized, while attending lectures in Gloucester Place and reading the Anthroposophical literature, in particular Steiner’s
The Philosophy of Freedom
, that his own etymological researches and Steiner’s spiritual explorations had revealed the same astonishing truth. Barfield later described it this way: “The essence of Steiner’s teachings … is the evolution of human consciousness … I, in a way, came to the same conclusion on my own before I heard of Steiner … He began where I left off. All I had done was to establish, in a hostile intellectual atmosphere, that there
was
such a thing as the evolution of consciousness from a more pictorial, more living, if you like, form or quality to our own. He assumes that, to start with, and builds on that this terrific edifice.”