Owen Barfield

“ For to one Semitic tribe the passionate inner world of its thoughts and feelings had remained almost more real than the outward one of matter and energy. The language of the Old Testament is alone enough to tell us that, while the Greek Aryans had been pouring their vigour into the creation of intellectual wisdom and liberty, the Hebrews had been building up within themselves an extraordinary moral and emotional life, as narrow as it was intense. The two streams of evolution, stronger for having been kept apart, were destined to meet and intermingle. ”

“ Through the Church and the poets to the dramatist and the novelist, and through them to the common people—there is no soulful drawing-room ballad, no cinema-plot, no day-dream novelette or genteel text on the wall of a cottage parlour through which, every time the hackneyed word is brought into play, the authentic spirit of Plato does not peep for a moment forlornly out upon us. ”

“ Now this insatiable appetite of the Greek mind for thinking and philosophy is a phenomenon in the history of the Western outlook as sudden and unaccountable as the appearance of the Aryan peoples on the stage of history. As far back as the seventh or eighth century B.C. we find, side by side with the popular Greek mythology, a developed and intricate system of philosophy—a kind of language and thought, in fact, which, as the labyrinthine history of our own tongue is enough to show us, could not possibly have sprung up in the night. ”

“ In the city state of Athens, for the first time among the Aryans, there began to grow up something which an educated man of to-day would be willing to recognize as a civilization. In that clear air of a marvellous political freedom—a social atmosphere which could have condensed from none but Aryan moral ideas—the matured, age-old wisdom of Egypt and the East was absorbed by these youngsters and transformed in a few hundred years into a science, an art, and a philosophy of their own which have never been wholly surpassed. ”

“ Looking back down the corridors of time from the particular perspective to which we have attained in the twentieth century, far away in the past—it may be in the Stone Age—we seem to be able to perceive a remarkable phenomenon. At some particular spot in the vast plains stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia it was as though a fresh spring bubbled up into the pool of humanity. Whether it represented the advent of a new “race-type”, what a race-type exactly is, and how it begins are questions which we must leave to others to settle. That spring was the Aryan culture. ”

“ But not to realize that with the appearance of a poetic tradition which can give rise to such a poem as “I sing of a maiden” something quite new, something with no perceptible historical origin, enters into humanity, is to cultivate a deaf ear to literature, and to mistake quite as grievously both the method and the object of understanding history.
If medieval Europe is cut off from Greece and Rome by her imaginative conception of women, she is cut off even more completely by her abstention from slavery. ”

“ It was a cosmos in which the spirit and spontaneity of life had moved out of Nature and into man. The magic of Persia, the Muses of Greece, the witches and fairies and charms and enchantments of Romance—all these had been locked safely in man’s bosom, there to sleep until the trump of Romanticism sounded its call to imagination to give back their teeming life to Nature. “O Lady”, wrote Coleridge in that most heartrending of all poems, wherein, like the disconsolate knight awaking on the barren heath, he reports the decay in himself of this very power ”

“ In the Dark Ages heresies which attempted to explain away the significant paradox of Christ’s simultaneous divinity and humanity were hunted down with the utmost rigour, and it is probable that a vivid sense of the dignity of the individual human soul was at the bottom of a good many actions which now seem to us like the very stultification of such a conviction. This great inner world of consciousness, we may suppose, which each individual was now felt to control in some measure for himself, was a thing to fear as well as to respect. ”

“ Perhaps the most significant of all is school itself. Words for ‘teaching’ and ‘learning’ among the Romans inevitably came to express unacademic ideas. When they did want a word for academic processes they had to borrow it, like ‘schola’, from Greece. Yet, curiously enough, the original meaning of ‘schole’ in Greek was not school at all. What the Roman felt about the whole business of book-learning and disputing and thinking and talking philosophy is indeed conveyed to us clearly enough by the meaning of the Latin ‘schola’, from which we have taken school. ”

“ We have imbibed them with our vocabulary and cannot without much labour and research disentangle the part that is due to them from the rest of our consciousness. Let us try, for a moment, to realize with our imaginations as well as with our intellects the world in which our fathers dwelt—a world created abruptly at a fixed moment in time, and awaiting a destruction equally abrupt, its inhabitants for ever to be the same, and for ever struggling, not to progress or to evolve into something different, but merely to become once more exactly like the first man and woman. ”

“ Perhaps it can best be expressed as a new consciousness of the individual human soul. On the one hand the sense of its independent being and activity, of bottomless depths and soaring heights within it, to be explored in fear and trembling or with hope and joy—with delight and mirth, or with agony, anguish, despair, repentance—and on the other hand that feeling of its being an inner world, which has since developed so fully that this book, for example, has fallen naturally into two halves. ”

“ He invented the new word ‘poiotēs’, ‘what-ness’, as we might say, or ‘of-what-kind-ness’ and Cicero translated it by the Latin ‘qualitas’, from ‘qualis’. Language becomes a different thing for us altogether if we can make ourselves realize, can even [7] make ourselves feel how every time the word quality is used, say upon a label in a shop window, that creative effort made by Plato comes into play again. Nor is the acquisition of such a feeling a waste of time; for once we have made it our own, it circulates like blood through the whole of the literature and life about us. ”

“ The great Aryan family did not lose touch long enough. When Rome came, and with her Christianity, the missionaries naturally assured the believers in Thor and Wotan that Thor and Wotan were not. And coming, as they did, from a developed civilization, they not only ousted the old Teutonic gods from the language, but brought with them a supply of ready-made Greek and Latin words, many of which—did they but know it—drew their peculiar shades of meaning from a pagan mythology which they held in equal abhorrence. ”

“ Apart from the adoption of a few Latin words, changes seem to have been few and insignificant during the fifteenth century, and we may assume that, for the first half of it at any rate, the Hundred Years’ War was occupying too many of our energies to leave much time for cultural growth. Nevertheless, from developments such as those which have been pointed out in some of our legal terminology we can feel something of the way in which the genius of the English language was steadily, if slowly, reasserting itself and claiming its right to a separate personality. ”

“ Words themselves are felt to be alive and to exert a magical influence. But, as the period which has elapsed since the beginning of the Aryan culture is only a tiny fragment of the whole epoch during which man has been able to speak, it is only in glimpses that we can perceive this; in a word here and a word there we trace but the final stages of a vast, age-long metamorphosis from the kind of outlook which we loosely describe as ‘mythological’ to the kind which we may describe equally loosely as ‘intellectual thought’. ”

“ It has only just begun to dawn on us that 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. ”

“ The freedom of women produced the poetry of sexual love. Love became a religion, the idols of whose worship were ever present. It was as if the statues of Apollo and the Muses had been endowed with life and motion, and had walked forth among their worshippers; so that the earth became peopled by the inhabitants of a diviner world. ”

“ In their works the pomps and frivolities of that decaying world pass in procession before our eyes; the tenuous old Roman gods and goddesses rub shoulders in the popular imagination, on the one hand, with powerful relics of the Egyptian Mysteries, and on the other—already in the second century—with full-blooded medieval witches and demons; while the polite scepticism and graceful dissipation of the educated raises its eyebrows and shrugs its shoulders at the credulous fervours of Christians and their numerous fellow-cranks. ”

“ It reveals the evolution of consciousness.
In the common words we use every day the souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. The more common a word is and the simpler its meaning, the bolder very likely is the original thought which it contains and the more intense the intellectual or poetic effort which went to its making. ”

“ The meaning which inspiration possessed up to the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries carries us right back to the old mythical outlook in Greece and elsewhere, when poets and prophets were understood to be the direct mouthpieces of superior beings—beings such as the Muses, who inspired or “breathed into” them the divine afflatus. Through Plato and Aristotle this conception came to England at the Renaissance and lasted as an element of aesthetic theory well on into the eighteenth century, if it can be said to have died out altogether even now. ”

“ Myth was in some way in the blood of the Romans; it was a living part of their national history, and in spite of all their artificiality and scepticism there is no evidence that they ever deliberately created gods and goddesses of the fancy, in whom they neither believed themselves nor expected anyone else to believe. We imagine them incapable of grasping, for instance, such an idea as that which found expression in the brand-new eighteenth-century verb, to personify. ”

“ Side by side with the conception of the human being as a “thinker”, we find an instinctive feeling that the human race is especially represented by its male portion. To the Aryan outlook, wherever we find it, the human being is man, and God is God the Father. What exotic matriarchies may have held sway before humanity began to worship logic and masculinity we cannot say, for our language throws light only on that tiny portion of humanity’s inner and outer history which is the peculiar contribution of the Aryan races ”

“ Meanwhile another branch of the Aryan family had found its way into Italy, and there, in the eighth century before our era, had founded the city of Rome. It is noticeable that the pitch darkness in which the early doings of all the Aryans are lost often seems to flash into a spark of myth or legend at those moments when they come into contact with other races. ”

“ It was the philosophy of the Lake School that the perception of Nature—that is to say of all in Nature that is not purely mechanical—depends upon what is brought to it by the observer. Deep must call unto deep. ”

“ The consciousness of ‘myself’ and the distinction between ‘my-self’ and all other selves, the antithesis between ‘myself’, the observer, and the external world, the observed, is such an obvious and early fact of experience to every one of us, such a fundamental starting-point of our life as conscious beings, that it really requires a sort of training of the imagination to be able to conceive of any different kind of consciousness. ”

“ In quantity (a translation of the Greek ‘posotes’—‘how-muchness’—and seemingly formed by Aristotle on the analogy of Plato’s ‘poiotēs’, from which we have quality) we can perhaps see the beginning of that interest in the calculable aspect of the objects of the visible world from which the exact sciences have arisen. The human mind had now begun to weigh and measure, to examine and compare; and that weighing and measuring has gone on—with intervals—for twenty-three centuries. ”

“ Practically all philosophy since his day has worked outwards from the thinking self rather than inwards from the cosmos to the soul. In England, not long afterwards, we find the brand-new expressions, ‘the ego’ and egoism, coming into the language from French philosophy, while the English thinker, Locke, adopts the new (1632) word consciousness, defining it as ‘perception of what passes in a man’s own mind’, and at the same time impresses on the still newer self-consciousness [49] its distinctive modern meaning. ”

“ Had one of her heroines, however, succeeded in emerging from that endless round of incredibly dull activities which she contrives to make so incredibly interesting, and had this enterprising young woman then attempted to breast the intellectual currents of the age, she would have been startled to find that that sarcastic consciousness of a war between sense and sensibility, which was her creator’s inspiration, was a spent stream flowing from the remote past. ”

“ And so, when we come across some particularly popular word like reason in eighteenth-century literature, we are sometimes tempted to lay down the book, while imagination goes groping vainly round the impenetrable fringe of that mysterious no-man’s-land which lies between words and their meanings. ”

“ Again, our word glamour, a later form of gramarye, suggests an almost mystical reverence for the ‘grammar’ which—along with most of the other branches of medieval learning—was derived entirely from the works of Aristotle. The popularity and general use of term, which began life as a subtle technicality of Aristotelian logic, reminds us again of the universal study of that writer in the Middle Ages, and spice—a corrupted form of ‘species’—is but another indication of the way in which the jargon of classical philosophy crept into their everyday thought. ”