Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield (November 9, 1898 – December 14, 1997) was a British Christian philosopher, author, poet, and critic. His Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry is on the 1999 100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century list by Philip Zaleski.

Barfield was born in London. He was educated at Highgate School and Wadham College, Oxford and in 1920 received a 1st class degree in English language and literature. After finishing his B. Litt., which became the book Poetic Diction, he worked as a solicitor. He died in Forest Row in Sussex.

The Inkling
Barfield has been known as "the first and last Inkling". He was in effect a founding member of the Inklings group based in Oxford. He had a strong influence on C. S. Lewis, and an appreciable effect through Poetic Diction on J. R. R. Tolkien.

Lewis was a close friend of Barfield from the mid-1920s, and called Barfield "the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers". That Barfield did not look at philosophy merely intellectually as illustrated by a well-known interchange that took place between Lewis and Barfield. Lewis one day made the mistake of referring to philosophy as "that profession". Barfield seems to have been subtly indignant in replying that "to Plato philosophy was not a 'profession'. It was a Way." Lewis apparently took Barfield's strongly felt point to heart. (See Lewis, Surprised by Joy.)

Anthroposophy
Another angle is as an advocate of anthroposophy. Barfield began a lifelong study of the work and thought of Rudolf Steiner, also in the 1920s, and many of his earlier essays were published in anthroposophical publications. In return, a study of Steiner's basic texts throws light on Barfield's work.

Influence and opinions
Barfield might be characterised as both a Christian thinker, and a learned anti-reductionist writer. By 2007 all of his books are in print again and include Unancestral Voice; History, Guilt, and Habit; Romanticism Comes of Age; Rediscovery of Meaning; Speaker's Meaning; and Worlds Apart. History in English Words seeks to retell the history of western civilization by exploring the change in meanings of various words.

His short book Saving the Appearances explores some three thousand years of history. He finds that the evolution of life and of nature is inseparable from an evolution of consciousness. The idea of matter as completely devoid of anything akin to mind, emerges as a mistaken idea, one in conflict with both physics and philosophy. Similar conclusions have been reached by others, and the book has influenced for example, the physicist Stephen Edelglass (who wrote The Marriage of Sense and Thought), and the Christian existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel, who wanted the book to be translated into French.

Barfield was also an influence on T. S. Eliot (who was to teach the young John Betjeman at Barfield's old school, Highgate School) who called Barfield's book Worlds Apart "a journey into seas of thought very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping". It is a fictional dialogue between a physicist, a biologist, a psychiatrist, a lawyer-philologist, a linguistic analyst, a theologian, a retired Waldorf School teacher, and a young man employed at a rocket research station. Over a period of three days, the characters get down to first principles.

In Poetic Diction, Barfield proposed that many concepts among which we now distinguish were at one time unified, and that this is reflected in the history of many words. For example, the single Greek word pneuma (which can be variously translated as "breath", "spirit", or "wind") reflects, according to Barfield, the ancient unity of the concepts of air and spirit. In her book Splintered Light, Verlyn Flieger analyzes the influence of Barfield's Poetic Diction on the thought and writing of J.R.R. Tolkien.

More recent discussions of Barfield's work appear in Stephen Talbott's The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst, Neil Evernden's The Social Creation of Nature, Daniel Smitherman's Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness, and Morris Berman's The Reenchantment of the World.

Saul Bellow, the Nobel-Prize winning novelist, wrote: ''We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free … from the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our ‘common sense'.''

Works

 * Poetic Diction: A Study In Meaning (Faber & Gwyer 1928)
 * Law, Association and the Trade Union Movement, Pamphlet No 2 of the Threefold Commonwealth Research Group, set up in 1933
 * Romanticism Comes of Age (1944) essays
 * This Ever Diverse Pair (1950) as G. A. L. Burgeon
 * Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960's (1963)
 * Saving the Appearances: a study in Idolatry (1965)
 * Unancestral Voice (1965)
 * The Silver Trumpet (Eerdmans 1968)
 * Speaker's Meaning (1971) c.1967
 * History, Guilt, and Habit (Wesleyan University Press, 1981)
 * What Coleridge Thought (1971)
 * The Voice of Cecil Harwood (1979)
 * The English Spirit: A New Approach through the World Conception of Rudolf Steiner (1962) with D. E. Faulkner Jones
 * History in English Words (1985) with a foreword by W. H. Auden
 * Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1989) edited by G. B. Tennyson
 * Das Kind und der Riese — Eine orphische Erzählung (Stuttgart 1990)
 * Evolution — Der Weg des Bewusstseins. Zur Geschichte des europäischen Denkens (Aachen, 1991)
 * A Barfield Sampler (1993) edited by Jeanne Clayton Hunter and Thomas Kranidas
 * A Barfield Reader (1999) edited and with an introduction by G. B. Tennyson

Related Works

 * Diana Pavlac Glyer The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent State University Press. Kent Ohio. 2007. ISBN 978-0-87338-890-0