Someone´s Review of Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield, Friend of CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein

an'l Danehy-Oakes Difficult in places, but worth it / Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry Paperback – 1957/August 15, 1988 by Owen Barfield (1898-1997) Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2015 Verified Purchase Owen Barfield was, for C.S. Lewis, the "Second Friend" - "the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. 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?" In _Saving the Appearances_, one can see clearly how Lewis must have felt about Barfield's opinions. To call the book heterodox would be to miss the point; certainly the influence of Steiner's anthroposophy is that, but there is so much in it that (I think) Lewis could have agreed with, were it not that he would disagree with the premises that led to the conclusions in question. Barfield's book is a dense one, perhaps even more so than the theological works of his fellow-Inkling Charles Williams. But (like Williams) it is readable, though some passages take serious rumination to even begin to understand. And, like Williams, he is an orthodox Christian but takes his orthodoxy to unusual conclusions, as if he were seeing it from another angle than most of us do. It is a history and philosophy of the nature of human consciousness, among other things. "This book is a study in idolatry, and especially that last and greatest step in idolatry which we call the scientific revolution." At the end of the Middle Ages, Barfield says, we lost the last dregs of something he calls "original participation," the unity of the perceiving subject with -- not the object, which is "the unrepresented" -- but the _phenomena_, our perceptions of the unrepresented. (Thus far, he is in agreement with Korzybski's General Semantics.) Barfield suggests that what we call "reality" is in fact our _collective_ representations of, not the unrepresented (to which we have only this mediated access) but the phenomena. If you and I can agree that my shirt is blue, then that blueness is a collective representation for us. Barfield begins by asking, of the phenomenon called the rainbow -- is it really there? Certainly there are raindrops refracting light and causing it to come to our eyes in a peculiar way: but there is no "there" there, if we try to chase the rainbow to its end, we come a cropper; there is no end and in a very real sense no bow. With this as his first cracker, he proceeds to attack the nut of phenomenology. "Original perception," Barfield suggests, was done away with in parallel by two movements in the West. The Graeco-Roman movement, which studied the phenomena as independent of ourselves (think of Plato's cave), ultimately gave rise to the scientific revolution, so breaking once and for all our unity with the phenomena. The philosophers of this movement sought (and seek) to "save the appearances" by explaining why the phenomena are as they are, in terms of the unrepresented. At roughly the same time as the Graeco-Roman movement, however, there was the Israelite movement, which sought to break our unity with the phenomena by declaring any unity with them, any numinous quality felt in them, idolatry, worship of images. This movement, of course, led ultimately to Christianity (and later to Islam). Starting from the idea that there was but one God, and not the gods worshipped by neighboring peoples, the priests and prophets of Judaism sought to separate the numinous from the phenomena completely, so that the phenomena "declare" the greatness of God, but God is not to be found _in_ them; indeed, he says, the Jews were not interested in the phenomena but in _morality_. It is in Christianity that Barfield sees the greatest possibility of our achieving "final participation." It is not surprising, he says, that we have not yet achieved the Kingdom proclaimed by Christ: after all, the two thousand years since He lived and died and was resurrected are piddling compared to the aeons that preceeded Him. (Barfield also suggests that we are radically misunderstanding when we think about the world before humans. There was no human consciousness in those days, so no phenomena, and so the world, which we build from phenomena, was something radically _other_.) Along the way I find Barfield saying things that I have struggled to say over the years; interpreting things, and especially things in Scripture, that have always been somewhat opaque to me ... and sometimes coming up with some wild ideas that strike me as utterly ridiculous. But there is more than sufficient wheat in _Saving the Appearances_ to justify sorting out the chaff.