Paul Gosselin (2016)

Over the years I have read pretty much everything C. S. Lewis has published, even his academic works and generally I find there's always something to take away from reading something by Lewis even though I don't always agree with him about everything. Admittedly, I haven't read his published letters or any of his pre-conversion poetry, but pretty much everything else. I have also read quite a bit of the works of another Inkling, JRR Tolkien along with one novel by Charles Williams (wasn't impressed...) but one Inkling I hadn't read anything up until now was Owen Barfield, so recently I picked up a used copy of his book Worlds Apart (WA). The blurb on the cover from T. S. Eliot reads: "A journey into seas of thought very far from ordinary routes of intellectual shipping" and is a rather apt nutshell view of Barfield's book. WA contains a fair amount of whimsy, but also much serious thinking about perspectives and ideas that were dominant in the early 60s. There's some serious philosophy mixed in.

That said, I suspect I would reject much of Barfield's theology, as he was what is called an "anthroposophist"[1]. In his own time he may have been viewed as a bit of a crank (at a time when materialism was hugely dominant among the elite), someone “open to the spiritual”, but in our postmodern times Barfield would fit in just fine. When C. S. Lewis wrote these words, he may have had his friend Barfield in mind (1947: 99-100):

"Speak about beauty, truth and goodness, or about a God who is simply the indwelling principle of these three, speak about a great spiritual force pervading all things, a common mind of which we are all parts, a pool of generalized spirituality to which we can all flow, and you will command friendly interest. But the temperature drops as soon as you mention a God who has purposes and performs particular actions, who does one thing and not another, a concrete, choosing, commanding, prohibiting God with a determinate character. People become embarrassed or angry. Such a conception seems to them primitive and crude and even irreverent. The popular 'religion' excludes miracles because it excludes the 'living God' of Christianity and believes instead in a kind of God who obviously would not do miracles, or indeed anything else."

That said, Barfield did serve a useful purpose as he did help Lewis break out of his early atheism/materialism and later go on to become a Christian. And what does all this have to do with the origins debate?? Yes, thank you for your patience; I'm getting there...

Well, Barfield's book Worlds Apart sets up a fictional (somewhat Socratic) 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. During a period of three days, the characters discuss and debate first principles. The primary objective being to throw a diverse group of individuals together and get them to break out of their professional cubby-holes and reflect on fundamental issues. As I suspect would have been the case at a meeting of the Inklings (especially after a pint or two), there's plenty of odd-ballery in this book. The biologist and psychiatrist are evolutionists and the rocket scientist is deeply into scientism[2].

Now one issue Barfield is constantly bumping into in the course of the discussions is evolution. He clearly understands it to be a problem, a serious problem, and often comes back to it, but as he was writing BEFORE the creationist movement (as we know it) got started[3], he had next to no material on the scientific side to question evolution. So for the most part the criticisms draw on logic and intuition. Rather than looking to science, he looks back to his knowledge of the Classics.

Note that Barfield's book was first published in 1963. Morris and Whitcomb's Genesis Flood was published in 1961, but it is VERY unlikely Barfield or any of the other Inklings had even heard of it. And even if a copy had been placed in their hands I wonder if British snobbery might have come into play as Morris was not from a prestigious university and, besides, was an American and an Evangelical (who, due to pietistic influence, were generally quite anti-intellectual at the time). It is true that Lewis had some contact by mail with Bernard Ackworth, an early British creationist and founder of the Evolution Protest Movement. I suspect that Lewis was comfortable with a polite exchange of letters with Ackworth, but chances are he would have never thought to invite him to a meeting of the Inklings. At one point Ackworth asked Lewis for an endorsement for an anti-evolution book he was writing. Here is Lewis' response:

October 4, 1951: No, I'm afraid. I shd. lose much and you wd. gain almost nothing by my writing you a preface. No one who is in doubt about your views of Darwin wd. be impressed by testimony from me, who am known to be no scientist[4]. Many who have been or are being moved towards Christianity by my books wd. be deterred by finding that I was connected with anti-Darwinism. I hope (but who knows himself!) that I wd. not allow myself to be influenced by this consideration if it were only my personal concerns as an author that were endangered. But the cause I stand for wd. be endangered too. When a man has become a popular Apologist he must watch his step. Everyone is on the look out for things that might discredit him. Sorry.

The bold text above does highlight the real fear of being associated with creationists (“heretics” in the view of the modern elite) existed even in the 1950s... despite evolution being by that time TOTALLY dominant in science and education. But in a subsequent letter to Ackworth (September 13, 1951) Lewis seems to have come to a more radical conclusion regarding evolution:

"I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders."

Hard to tell if any other Inklings would have gone so far as Lewis here, but as I read through Worlds Apart I got the impression Barfield was quite close to this view. For example WA contains rather original discussions on the incoherence of determinism (Barfield uses the term “reductionism”) along with its intellectual consequences. Basically what Barfield is saying is that Darwin was genetically/materially determined to write the Origin, Marx, Das Kapital and so on... On this basis one could disregard any arguments put forward by Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion as “of course” he was biologically determined to make these arguments. And because the arguments have been produced by genetics/social conditioning/hormones rather than logical thinking, there is no reason for anyone to take them seriously. Barfield makes some very pointed and valid comments about sexual/psychological determinism in psychoanalysis. Regarding philosophy (particularly positivism), on page 105 Barfield is relentless about the importance of metaphysics and presuppositions, even when they are unconscious/unrecognized/unadmitted. He rejects the positivist idea of a purely empirical knowledge. Barfield also has one of his characters allude (p. 164) to the fact that science is commonly limited to experience/observation[5], this then casts some doubt on evolution's scientific or truly empirical status. On pages 94-100, there is an interesting discussion on language and meaning.

On pages 144-45 of WA, one of Barfield's characters quotes "Darwin's Bulldog", T. H. Huxley, who once wrote:

Examine the recently laid egg of some common animal, such as a salamander or newt. It is a minute spheroid in which the best microscope will reveal nothing but a structureless sac, enclosing a glairy fluid, holding granules in suspension.  But strange possibilities lie dormant in that semi-fluid globule. Let a moderate supply of warmth reach its watery cradle, and the plastic matter undergoes changes so rapid, yet so steady and purpose-like in their succession, that one can only compare them to those operated by a skilled modeller upon a formless lump of clay. As with an invisible trowel, the mass is divided and subdivided into smaller and smaller portions, until it is reduced to an aggregation of granules not too large to build withal the finest fabrics of the nascent organism. And, then, it is as if a delicate finger traced out the line to be occupied by the spinal column, and moulded the contour of the body; pinching up the head at one end, the tail at the other, and fashioning flank and limb into due salamandrine proportions, in so artistic a way, that, after watching the process hour by hour, one is almost involuntarily possessed by the notion, that some more subtle aid to vision than an achromatic, would show the hidden artist, with his plan before him, striving with skilful manipulation to perfect his work.

Yes this was a world when scientists looked into their microscopes and chortled: “Ah yes! What do we have here? A simple cell of course.” Well now we know much better[6]... Barfield goes on to (politely) point out Huxley's hypocrisy in pointing out DESIGN in the biological world, but rejecting/ignoring the DESIGNER... I DO wonder if any of the Inklings had ever read Douglas Dewar's Difficulties of the Evolution Theory (1931) or Dewar's Is Evolution a Myth?: A debate between Douglas Dewar, L. Merson Davies and J.B.S. Haldane (1949). British academics in the early sixties would certainly have had access to these books if they ever wanted to...

On page 30, an evolutionist character alludes to attempts to link evolution to Nazism or communism, but flippantly adds “this reaction is out of date by now...” I wonder if, just after WWII, evolutionists may have been rather nervous that someone might have VERY explicitly connected the dots between evolution and Nazism... This would have led to a HUGE marketing crisis for evolutionists... One exception was the Scottish anatomist and anthropologist, Sir Arthur Keith, an evolutionist, who writing shortly after World War II, did connect the dots (1947: 27-28):

The German Fuhrer, as I have consistently maintained, is an evolutionist; he has consciously sought to make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution... To see evolutionary measures and tribal morality being applied vigorously to the affairs of a great modern nation, we must turn again to Germany of 1942. We see Hitler devoutly convinced that evolution produces the only real basis for a national policy... The means he adopted to secure the destiny of his race and people were organized slaughter, which has drenched Europe in blood... Such conduct is highly immoral as measured by every scale of ethics, yet Germany justifies it; it is consonant with tribal or evolutionary morality. Germany has reverted to the tribal past, and is demonstrating to the world, in their naked ferocity, the methods of evolution.

But it appears Keith was just a lonely voice in the desert, a voice that perhaps only a handful of historians briefly heard... Yes, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to observe it, does it make any noise? Shortly afterwards, the evolutionary propaganda machine went full throttle, spewing out high school textbooks, United Nations declarations and TV documentaries about the "brotherhood of Man" and all was forgotten. And all those late 19^th and early 20^th century social scientists that previously had been radical pro-eugenics and scientific racists, suddenly (and conveniently) became champions of universal rights... And all was well...

Afterthoughts on Worlds Apart
Previous comments were written having only read part of Barfield's World's Apart. After finishing WA, I came to realize this work comes in two parts, though this is not something Barfield himself makes explicit. The first part of WA is a reaction to Enlightenment ideas, particularly the militant materialism/atheism of the mid-twentieth century. Barfield clearly rejects this view and has interesting critiques to make. That said, the second part of the book goes on and takes us into Barfield's own ideologico-religious views.

This unfortunately is where I radically part ways with Barfield. Amongst other things to take into consideration is the fact that Barfield was a follower and promoter of the German philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), the founder of anthroposophism and a known Freemason. Barfield was of course an old friend of C.S. Lewis as they'd met when they were teenagers. At the time Lewis was a materialist/atheist and Barfield and Lewis had a rather intense exchange, including disagreements about Steiner, which later became know as the “Great War” and as a result Lewis began to break out of his materialism.

But, that said, as to Lewis' becoming a Christian, Barfield had little input[7]. Taking into consideration Barfield's attachment to Steiner and promotion of anthroposophism, it is entirely quite possible that Barfield himself may have been a Freemason. While at times Freemasons may go public about their beliefs (when they find it useful to do so), living Freemasons will most often conceal their true beliefs as this helps them gain access to circles of power or influence and circumvents close scrutiny of their views or motivations. Claiming as Freemasons famous dead individuals is an amusing game Freemasons like to play, but living Freemasons are generally more coy about their true beliefs. There are of course different flavours of freemasonry. Some are/were deists (such as Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin). In the English-speaking world, most Freemasons are of this variety. Among the French, most Freemasons tend to be atheists/materialists rejecting both gods and the supernatural. Then there is a spiritualist variety of freemasonry that is open to the “supernatural" in any form (including the occult) and certainly Steiner would be part of this current.

But getting back to WA, after an involved discussion about what thinking is, one of the characters portrayed by Barfield begins to alluding to out of body/astral projection experiences (p. 176-177) as well as reincarnation (p. 185-186). Unsurprisingly, this is couched in rather vague terms as of course such ideas would have been considered unmentionable heresy in most intellectual circles of the mid-twentieth century West. Regarding Barfield's promotion of out of body/astral projection experiences, the thought occurs that the character Wither (whose ghost haunts the premises of the NICE) in Lewis' That Hideous Strength may have in fact portrayed Barfield.

Barfield may well be considered as a precursor to postmodern thought, though he never uses the term "postmodern" himself[8]. One thing worth thinking about is that while Barfield makes much about “the spiritual dimension”, he rarely brings up the question of Truth and whether there is some standard for Truth, such as the Bible let's say, that would allow one to discern between true or false “spiritual” manifestations. Regarding Truth, the closest Barfield comes to discussing this plainly is:

Ranger: I suppose if you believe in revelation, you aren't allowed to believe it goes on, like science does, but you have to believe it has happened once and then stopped!
Burrows: Whatever beliefs we hold about the value and the ultimate source of their revelations, it was the unconscious, rising to the surface, out of which the prophets spoke. There seems to be no logical or physiological reason why the technique should not be re-acquired. Whether there is any point in calling it “initiation”...

Basically Barfield is saying that Truth is a work in progress... In the course of a discussion on the “spiritual”, the matter of accessing the “spiritual” comes up and one of the characters has this to say:

Secondly, I have maintained that the immaterial realm from which the material is derived is accessible to direct observation by a human being who has trained himself adequately to the task. (p. 194)

This would apply in the case of a shaman or medium for example... Barfield goes on to note:

Ability in spiritual science does not depend only on mental training in the ordinary sense nor only on mental training in the special sense which I have tried to define. In the last resort it depends on a principle that is alien to our present ideas though it has been, and is, acknowledged at almost all times and places except the West during the last few hundred years[9]. I mean the principle of initiation. Anyone who knows anything about it at all knows that according to that principle a person does not become an initiate merely by growing more acute or more learned; he has actually to become a different kind of man.[10] (p. 202)

Whatever Barfield's true beliefs, the views expressed above are quite compatible both with occultism as well as Freemasonry which is a very hierarchical religion where access to higher levels of “knowledge” restricted to the few deemed worthy of the highest levels of initiation. In Surprised by Joy C.S. Lewis describes his immediate reaction to Barfield's conversion to Anthroposophism. At the time Lewis was still an atheist. He wrote (1955: 206):

First Harwood (still without changing his expression), and then Barfield, embraced the doctrines of Steiner and became anthroposophists. I was hideously shocked. Everything I had labored so hard to expel from my own life seemed to have flared up and met me in my best friends. Not only my best friends but those whom I would have thought safest; the one so immovable, the other brought up in a free-thinking family and so immune from all "superstition" that he had hardly heard of Christianity itself until he went to school. (The gospel first broke on Barfield in the form of a dictated list of Parables Peculiar to St. Matthew.) Not only in my seeming-safest friends but at a moment when we all had most need to stand together. And as I came to learn (so far as I ever have learned) what Steiner thought, my horror turned into disgust and resentment. For here, apparently, were all the abominations; none more abominable than those which had once attracted me. Here were gods, spirits, afterlife and pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation. "Why–damn it–it's medieval," I exclaimed; for I still had all the chronological snobbery of my period and used the names of the earlier periods as terms of abuse.

Again in Surprised by Joy Lewis provides an overview of his relation to Barfield (1955: 199-200)

My next [friend] was Owen Barfield. There is a sense in which Arthur and Barfield are the types of every man's First Friend and Second Friend. (...) 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

Lewis goes on to point out the few positive results of his relation with Barfield (1955: 207-208)

Barfield never made me an Anthroposophist, but his counterattacks destroyed forever two elements in my own thought. In the first place he made short work of what I have called my “chronological snobbery,” the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also “a period,” and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them.

In his novel Perelandra, in the last half of the story there is a long battle between the main character, Ranson and the evil UnMan/Weston. At one point the UnMan makes the following assertion (1943: ch. 13)

“Then there’s Spiritualism,” said Weston, ignoring this suggestion. “I used to think it all nonsense. But it isn’t. It’s all true. You’ve noticed that all pleasant accounts of the dead are traditional or philosophical? What actual experiment discovers is quite different. Ectoplasm — slimy films coming out of a medium’s belly and making great, chaotic, tumbledown faces. Automatic writing producing reams of rubbish.”

I have to wonder if Lewis was in fact thinking of Barfield (and his Anthroposophist spiritual directors) when he wrote this... And in That Hideous Strength, there's another passage where Ransom is reflecting on the ideology of the NICE, involving a merging of evil spiritual and material powers, something not altogether alien to Barfield's thinking (ch. 9, 5):

A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. Doubtless that had been the will of the dark eldils for centuries. The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stilling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done.You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists.Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe.

Here, I have to wonder if these are thoughts that occured to Lewis as a result of his Great War with Barfield. In conclusion I would state that while Barfield certainly was an intelligent man and gifted philosopher, but given his beliefs, sad to say it may not be a bad thing after all that he has been largely forgotten...

References

BARFIELD, Owen (1963/1971) Worlds Apart : A Dialogue of the 1960s." Wesleyan University Press Middleton, CN (coll. Philosophy 617) 211 p.

CWS (2009) The Great War (CS Lewis, Owen Barfield, and—Anthroposophy). (Blog: Recondite Cogitations)

DEWAR, Douglas (1931) Difficulties of the Evolution Theory. E. Arnold & Co. London 

DEWAR, Douglas (1949) Is Evolution a Myth?: A debate between Douglas Dewar, L. Merson Davies and J.B.S. Haldane. C.A. Watts/Paternoster Press London

FERNGREN, Gary B. (1996) C. S. Lewis on Creation and Evolution: The Acworth Letters, 1944-1960. PSCF 48 March pp. 28-33.

HUXLEY, T.H. (1860) The Origin of the Species. [review article] Collected Essays

KEITH, Sir Arthur (1947) Evolution and Ethics. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York

LEWIS, C. S. (1945) The Funeral of a Great Myth. pp. 82-93 published in a collection of Lewis essays entitled: Christian Reflections William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids MI [1967]

LEWIS, C.S. (1944) Perelandra. (English, PDF, Canadian public domain text)

LEWIS, C.S. (1945) That Hideous Strength. (English, PDF, Canadian public domain text)

LEWIS, C. S. (1947/1990) Miracles: A Preliminary Study. Fount Publications London

LEWIS, C. S. (1955) Surprised by Joy. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich New York 238 p. Ebook

Notes

[1] - There's a dark side to Owen Barfield. Seeing Anthroposophy was founded by Rudolf Steiner who was a Rosicrucian and had links with Freemasonry, this may well have been the case with Barfield as well... cf : Rudolf Steiner & Freemasonry.

[2] - Somewhat along the lines of the worldview of the character Weston in Lewis' Space Trilogy. That said, as an afterthought, it has occurred to me that the conversation between Weston and Ransom we find in chapter 7 of Perelandra may in fact have been inspired by the "Great War" between Lewis and Barfield...

[3] - And of course long before the Intelligent Design movement was even thought of...

[4] - That said, when Lewis put his own knowledge in literature and mythology to use, he could make very pointed and valid criticisms of evolution. See for example his essay : The Funeral of a Great Myth.

[5] - See also a discussion on page 25 about the limits of perception/observation and, logically, about the limits of science.

[6] - And we are now aware that the “simplest” single-celled organism is capable of doing something that even the most advanced super-computer can not, that is, make functional, self-replicating copies of itself...

[7] - Many Christians may be tempted to view the Inklings as an informal Christian association, but when the views of Barfield are taken into consideration, this must be revised. It would appear that anyone reacting to or rejecting the materialism that so dominated the twentieth century would have been candidate for admission...

[8] - That I am aware of.

[9] - Since the Reformation ??

[10] - This is what most Christians would call a conversion. And if Barfield is talking about conversion, then this raises the question : To what religion ??