Thank you very much for this. I have just read "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams" By Carol and Philip Zaleski. This introduced me to Owen Barfield for the first time. It was an amazing book and part of that was the introduction to Barfield, that all these writers were influenced to some extent by the idea that Barfield explores most fully and which you talk about here, that consciousness changes over time. Tolkien's work has a strata of change over time. Lewis seeks to connect us to a different kind of mind that was present in the Middle Ages. I'm very much looking forward to exploring Barfield's ideas.
This talk is absolutely wonderful! I have nearly finished Saving the Appearances - and just discovered this video today - it was SO helpful in better understanding the thought and importance of Barfield for this pivotal time in history. I can't wait to listen to Malcom's other talks on the Inklings!
A wonderful introduction to Barfield. I hope everyone will take some time to read and study at least one of the works Malcom Guite mentions here, for really Barfield's works need to be read in their full flow of argument and exposition. Also the work of Rudolf Steiner and Christo-anthroposophy which both influenced Owen Barfield quite significantly.
I am interested in CSLewis concept of "second friendship" laid out in Surprised by Joy" Understand the Lewis is mainly thinking of his friend Owen Barfield as a significant "second friend". Would like to learn more about these two as Friends
I have just finished Saving the Appearances and it was an experience. Barfield is similar to Kant, tho he never mentions him. Owen Barfield puts academic philosophers in the shade!
Very helpful talk, thank you. Night Operation sounds like a description of current affairs, except we're all just sitting indoors in stead of underground, afraid of life and each other, scared of some invisible microbes, clinging to our physical lives as we destroy actual life, and forgetting the most important light in life, each other, our faces, smiles, and wondering if these things really are as important to us or even as nice as the stories say.
Great Talk ---- Rudolf Steiner in one of his lectures says same things as Barfield. Steiner --- Even if the Gospels never existed you would still through your consciousness be able to come to the same conclusions, just by using your interllect. Steiner compares it to Geometry -One can understand mathematics out of one’s own intellectual forces and the laws of space without referring to Euclid’s geometry book.
Thank you. I found the examples of 'pneuma' and Odin's bargain very useful. Regarding how the analytical blindness can be understood in a positive way and transcended, I don't see that the pursuit of meaningful separate personhood is so helpful. It seems to me to involve another search, reminiscent of the same drive that led Odin to his roots and blinded him. Meaning is transient anyway, Barfield points out it is a product of change. So perhaps the true lesson of modernity is that the demand for temporal meaning, including separate personhood, doesn't actually lead anywhere. Thus Christ does not seek to preempt the Father's revelation, he waits on it. And he does nothing on his own behalf.
Great comment, and thank you. I''m confused on your point of Odin's bargain. Odin lost an eye, but wasn't blinded, and is said to have gained wisdom. Just wondering what your angle was, but I am responding from two years after, so I understand if you are not in the same headspace.
@@clintonhaws8984 Did Christ make any similar bargains? He did not grasp (or crave, to use buddhist terminology) the way Odin did, or the way Adam and Eve did in the garden of Eden. It's foundational that Christ rejected Satan's lures in the desert, for instance. In this sense Odin was already blind, but I am also (like Guite) seeing his bargain as an allegory for the loss of integrated vision that has come with the ascendancy of reductionist knowledge. On the other hand, Christ's story hints that the integrated vision is not something that needs to be acquired - it's already fully present, just obscured by the grasping demands for knowledge, power, separate selfhood etc.
One more comment when i first watched this I was wondering "what about Steiner?". Towards the end Malcolm Guite did talk about Steiner but said basically that he didn't regard him highly. I find this silly, he had been speaking with such passion about Barfield's ideas and nearly all of them exist in Steiner. If he thinks these ideas are so great he needs to recognise Steiner's greatness. I'm fine with the idea that Barfield fleshed out and embodied these ideas in ways that made them more accessible to us, but the fact that these ideas are so powerful and that Barfield himself acknowledged and admired Steiner so much, should lead us to do the same. Unfortunately Steiner is very easy to misrepresent, we have to understand that he is often using metaphors for concepts we don't otherwise have, he can't be taken literally and in says so repeatedly in his writings.
Malcom's presentational stance is laudable, especially the characteristic bravura. Orpheus's wife was Eurydice, not Persephone. Owen may also take note if he does not want his Grandpa--- who championed epeolatry----to frown in his grave. You have to reread his books slowly to marvel at his incisive acumen.
