Part 1:
Owen Barfield was one of the Inklings, a group of Oxford academics who got together in order to write the stories which they thought the world was missing. The most famous were C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.
Barfield wrote a book, “Poetic Diction,” which inspired Tolkien. The basic idea, as far as I understand it, is that certain terms used to designate broader ideas than they do now.
I was thinking of this idea in connection to what I see as a real restriction of the meaning of terms such as word, virgin, reason and others.
The new definitions for things are always less spiritual, always more materialistic, always vulgar and coarse.
One of the most obvious points where we can see that this process has occurred is in the term logos, where the difference between the old and the new meaning is so obvious that we no longer even translate the term into one from our own language. Or we capitalize it “Word,” to at least acknowledge that something has slipped away.
Surely there is much more to logos than what we mean by the comparatively pedestrian English “word.”
Logos and other terms show that we ourselves have gradually become blind to certain truths—and this blindness has passed into language.
But in a more interesting sense, this blindness has not passed into language, in that the terms themselves carry their ancient meanings in a shadowy sense, in their old definitions and in the very structure of language itself.
This, I think, is Barfield’s main idea.
Focusing on the example of logos. What is the difference between the ancient logos and our modern “word?”
There is something incantatory about logos. It seems to flare with some primordial fire, some ancient power. I think this comes from its close association with the truth. It is hard to imagine a false logos, but a false word is just a lie. The old logos also has a sense of rational coherence. One cannot imagine logos without meaning. Indeed, the word is often translated as “reason.” But meaningless words are common.
This is my impulse towards a theory which accounts for the difference between “word” and “logos:”
There have been so many lies across history that we no longer see the close connection between the word and the truth. Besides lies, the world has also been flooded with nonsense, with things that are “not even wrong.”
Language certainly began in truth, so closely united to truth that human beings, at first, naïvely identified the two. But when lies and nonsense become common, they demand not only their own categories within language (their own words), but they lead to changes in the meaning of the terms which they parasitize, changes which cut those original terms off from the fullness of their meaning.
Terms lose their meaning, not in reality,¹ but because human sense has narrowed (although we perceive this as a sharpening).
One could say that our modern “word” is infinitely more precise and therefore more useful. There are no real exceptions to it—so it is, in some sense, more perfect than logos. Yet something essential has been lost. Or rather, all but the essential has been lost. We have gone from a lavish feast to stale bread and brackish water. Or even from bread and water to Soylent.
Consider another term, “virgin.” Inconceivable that its sole meaning should be “one who has not engaged in sexual intercourse.” Like our modern idea of “word,” the term is extremely precise, yet this is only because it has been stripped of all that is not absolutely essential to it.
But that extremely restricted sense is how we define it, thus how we think of it. Or rather, that is how we have come to think of it, thus how we define it.³
We think of it in that way because we have somehow become blind to the fullness of virgin.
In its original meaning the term which we translate today as “virgin” must have comprised a whole wealth of meanings, including “stainless,” “maiden,” “girl,” “youthful,” “pure,” etc.
The modern term is almost clinical, binary. Take its application to the Mother of God. Surely “Virgin ” means more than what we think when we hear it today. But you have to infer that from the representations of her which were made by people who saw more clearly than we can today.
While I was looking into the prophecy in Matthew which references Isaiah (the first prophecy in the New Testament which the text itself indicates has been fulfilled by Christ), I was confronted with this mystery. The term parthenos seemingly evolved over the course of Greek history. That words change their meaning is no great discovery. The idea is that these meanings become more and more limited. They increase in their sharpness of focus, but in this process, a great deal is lost.
To be clear, I think there’s more to this than shifting connotations. Perhaps some residual connotation of all the things I mentioned still hangs around the modern term “virgin.” But I’m proposing that the original term really contained all the meanings, and more! And that is what it really means. That is the thing (that is, the concept pre-existing consciousness) which the term once designated, and we can no longer see the fulness of that thing. Because of our mistakes, we can only see the smallest part of it. There has been a narrowing of our minds, a shrinking of our faculty of comprehension.
Perhaps because once you fail to contemplate God and focus on created things, your soul begins to die. Instead of rising and expanding forever as it attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible uncreated being, it either stagnates as it tarries on His creatures or, even worse, contracts as it clings to the only truly comprehensible things, human works—artifacts, social conventions… in other words, the world. Man never creates anything that is not comprehensible in what it is (I mean when considered as a human creation).² That is the great temptation and the great tragedy of the city, that it is a place where it is possible to crowd out the mystery of existence in favor of those few things which we are able to control.
So, to recapitulate:
Over history there has been a narrowing of our conceptual understanding, of our comprehension. Things lose everything except that which is the bare minimum necessary for their existence. The name of this process is death. The abundance of youth yields to old age, which is a kind of subsistence—and at last death itself reduces one to a bare soul, that absolute minimum thing one can be. A person cannot be one single thing less than a soul without ceasing to exist altogether. And sin and death are essentially the same thing, the latter an objective correlate of the former.⁴ This is why I propose those impossibly wooly stories, perhaps prima facie absurd if for no other reason than because of their vagueness, about why this narrowing has been happening.
They’re just sloppy guesses, attempts to flesh out the underlying reality of sin. But without any reservation I do attribute this narrowing to human sin, to moral evil.
People shrink, they pale as they are filled with death (as they lose their life)—they understand less and less, and they fill this new void with some kind of… cleverness. Or analytical stupidity. Look at any redditor, any “rationalist.” One gets the impression that no one has ever really understood as little as they do.
What indeed am I trying to say? The human race, collectively, has been losing its native understanding of things. We are cut off more and more from the primordial meanings which are proper to what they really are.
For example: “word” used to mean, among other things, the invisible counterpart to a thing (roughly corresponding to our understanding of the Platonic idea, a pre-existent spiritual being). Or the truth-bearing expression of a person’s understanding or will. This is the origin of those curious idioms which now seem scarcely comprehensible—and certainly impossible for most of us to utter in the first person—such as “I give you my word,” “my word is my bond,” etc.
Part 2
Another term, closely related to logos but distinct from it, is reason. I believe that the whole trajectory of the west is intimately connected to a misunderstanding, really a narrowing of the meaning of this word, reason.
What is the problem with the west?
Just for one thing — consider that there are people who actually wish to be animals. In fact, it’s common to feel like animals understand more than we do, that they are wiser than us, more deserving of love. How could anyone believe this if they had not first become blind to what we are?
Today we perceive reason as something oppressive. This power which our forefathers believed was both our distinctive and highest faculty, we see as restricting, repressive, burdensome. Somehow we believe that freedom and happiness are found outside of its lifeless, almost mechanical operation. That it somehow conflicts with love.
Some people make a heroic effort to blame this misunderstanding on voluntarism, a psychological tendency which favors the primacy of the will over and against the intellect. We have just gotten so selfish, the story goes, that we reject reason itself, because rational thought inevitably checks our unfettered desires. Along with reality itself, we resent reason, which yields the truth about it—rather than accepting things as they are, we choose to shoot the messenger and bury our heads in the sand, etc. Perhaps there’s some truth to this. But I suspect that it’s just a disguise to accuse us all of rottenness.⁵ It strikes me as rather curmudgeonly. Most importantly, I don’t think it addresses the main issue.
I think that we have forgotten what reason actually is. When we say the word, we are thinking of something different than what the medievals or ancients were thinking of.
We think of it as purely deductive reasoning. We don’t see that it includes understanding, not just reasoning. That it has a passive, and not solely an active part. Perception, I mean a kind of ratio, a kind of proportion between the mind and the thing considered, is as much a part of “reason ” as what we now call reasoning (i.e: actively making discursive inferences). Seeing this suddenly made so much sense to me of Catholic theology. Why, I had wondered, had reason been so lionized? Why was the tedious and even perfunctory act of linking together syllogisms seen as the operation of our highest faculty? There is also a rather unpleasant solipsism to it in that it is something which occurs entirely in your own head, an operation performed on sense data which we have already received. But reason’s most important action is in seeing.⁶
Not to say that the solution to our blindness about reason lies in correcting our internal thoughts— rather, this impulse itself shows our error. The solution is not in reason, at least not as we understand it. It’s not a matter of deduction, not even a matter of knowing (this is what separates Christianity from Gnosticism)⁷. You have to really see, and you can’t see unless God shows you. In fact, in a sense, seeing just is God showing you.
To summarize:
Reason is primarily a matter of seeing, not of working on what has been seen (that is, it is not primarily discursive, not primarily “in-house”, but primarily intuitive and relational). It is a kind of seeing which one does with the soul. It is an act in which there is some resonance between the conscious being and the invisible (that is, spiritual) reality which it perceives.
Thus contemplation of God is not the solitary act of linking together the inferences which one already knows inside one’s mind, but of seeing one’s creator with the eyes of the heart.
To walk this back from theology (where I am even less qualified to speak) to the level of nature—we ought to see at least reason itself in this way. I mean we should see that the core of our being consists not just of the psyche’s action on concepts but of the act of passively receiving them from the outside world. And that it is possible for our vision to gradually become impoverished by the overactivity of the discursive faculty. Again, this is a good definition of ideology. The overactivity of the discursive faculty caused by or leading to the presumption that we can comprehend or explain everything.
I don’t know if poetry can help open our eyes to what things really are. But (good) poetry is certainly the result of its author doing this. You drop the blinders and dare to see things as they are.
- I mean that the things which they designate remain the same, despite our progressive blindness.
- When a man creates a ladder, the ladder is functionally comprehensible. It is just some thing that helps a person to ascend to some other space. But considered as wood, as matter, it is incomprehensible, in the sense that no one person could ever fully understand all the facts about it, as an angel could. Art is more complicated. Indeed it seems like art is somewhere between nature and artifice, particularly because art is so full of meaning that it can seem inexhaustible in the same sense that natural things are.
Perhaps this is because art is mimesis, “holding up a mirror to nature.” This is very interesting, but off-topic... - On the issue of linguistic determinism, I think that real changes in the world precipitate changes in our thinking which then pass into language. There is probably some feedback where language reinforces itself, but it did not begin with language. It’s a chicken and egg problem, which is to say that there is a real beginning (the egg), but that real beginning passes into a self-reinforcing cycle.
- James 1:15: “After desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.”
- Although I guess you could say the same about what I’ve written. I didn’t mean to imply that we aren’t rotten, or even that it’s wrong to point out that we are, just that it’s wrong to pretend you’re doing something else.
- I suspect I’m going too far here (by saying “most important”), perhaps if only to over-correct against the opposite tendency, which I think is so strong in all of us, to see reason as this purely internal, purely discursive thing. But if I’ve gone too far in any of this, I apologize. I don’t mean to diminish the goodness of the act of deductive reasoning except inasmuch as it has been disproportionately inflated to make up for the absence of the portion of reason which is made up of seeing. It’s also possible that my ideas are just a reaction against my own idiosyncratic temperament, that the act of discursive reasoning really is the highest and only part of our highest faculty. In other words, maybe I am the one who is warping language so that it fits into my own narrow beliefs. That would be a bitter irony!
- Gnosticism, in essence, consists of the (false) belief that salvation is a simple matter of coming to some purely intellectual knowledge of a hidden mystery. That the end of life is accomplished if and only if one learns (or figures out) some obscure secret. If only it were that easy! I think that in America in the 90s there was some gnostic undercurrent to the culture. They were certainly some of the most purely intellectual times we have seen before or since. I think that this was the expression of a sense that it was only enough to know. It was the information age, after all. The dream was that knowing would free us from all our burdens and in the end save us. It’s very important to separate what I see as this essay’s fundamental insight from this gnostic tendency. It’s not enough to know something. You have to see. That is, the mind has to couple with some external being. Of course we are always already doing that already. But I think that some of our minds are too active. Ideology itself is this obsession with imposing conceptual structures on the world without ever pausing for a moment of passivity. Also, please don’t confuse what I’m saying with quietism, with the belief that it’s preferable to be totally passive and indifferent towards everything. I don’t wish to discard “active” discursive reasoning, only to set it in its proper proportion alongside the passive part of our reasoning faculty.
