The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings

by Philip Zaleski

  To describe Rudolf Steiner is to bottle a tornado. A thin, frail man with dark hair and deep-set eyes, he was, like many European esotericists—Bruno, Swedenborg, Gurdjieff—a polymath, producing, in forty years of work, over three hundred volumes of lectures and other writings, along with paintings, sculpture, architectural designs, a new system of dance, and revolutionary theories of education, medicine, and agriculture. The titles of his books range from the reassuringly earthbound—The Philosophy of Freedom, The Education of the Child—to the extravagantly outré—Occult Significance of Blood, The Mission of Gautama Buddha on Mars. He commenced his prodigious labors in the 1880s, as editor of a scholarly edition of Goethe’s scientific works; by 1904 he had become the leader of the German branch of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society; in 1913 he broke away to form his own Anthroposophical Society, dedicated to expounding “Spiritual Science”—a method of occult insight that offered, he claimed, reliable, verifiable, clairvoyant exploration of the spiritual realm.

  Armed with the discoveries of this new cognitive tool, Steiner rewrote the history of the world, describing lost ages and unknown civilizations like Lemuria and Atlantis, whose inhabitants possessed multiple psychic powers, most notably telepathy. He filled in this historical framework with teachings about reincarnation, karma, the astral planes, the Akashic Record, and other familiar elements in the European occultist’s kit. A new version of Christianity emerged, in which Christ becomes the pivot of cosmic and human evolution. Steiner spent his last decade crisscrossing Europe like a modern St. Paul, lecturing, writing, planting his legacy—Barfield heard him speak in London on August 24, 1924—before passing away in 1925, worn to a thread by his intense labors and by worry over the threat of National Socialism (as early as 1921, Hitler had ranted about Steiner being too close to the Jews). The Anthroposophical Society flourished after its founder’s death, establishing schools, farms, special-needs communities, banks, and churches on many continents; as the years passed it found its place, for most observers outside the fold, as a colorful and fruitful chapter in the story of Western esotericism and as a curious footnote in the history of Western thought.

  What attracted Barfield to this remarkable man, who has drawn his share of illustrious followers—Saul Bellow and Andrei Tarkovsky among them—but who strikes most people as a thinker inhabiting the fringe between reality and fantasy? The initial appeal lay, for Barfield, not in Steiner’s more bizarre theories—although in time Barfield would embrace most of them—but rather in an extraordinary convergence of views. He soon realized, while attending lectures in Gloucester Place and reading the Anthroposophical literature, in particular Steiner’s The Philosophy of Freedom, that his own etymological researches and Steiner’s spiritual explorations had revealed the same astonishing truth. Barfield later described it this way: “The essence of Steiner’s teachings … is the evolution of human consciousness … I, in a way, came to the same conclusion on my own before I heard of Steiner … He began where I left off. All I had done was to establish, in a hostile intellectual atmosphere, that there was such a thing as the evolution of consciousness from a more pictorial, more living, if you like, form or quality to our own. He assumes that, to start with, and builds on that this terrific edifice.”

  From this time on, Barfield harbored no doubts. Steiner was a second Aristotle, bestowing upon the world a philosophico-scientific system of breathtaking intricacy and truth that offered the key to humanity’s purpose and destiny. He was, quite simply, “il maestro di color che sanno—master of those who know” (Dante’s encomium to Aristotle in Inferno IV: 131).

  The “Great War”

  Several of Barfield’s friends scoffed at this assessment. Among them was C. S. Lewis, for whom, as we shall see, Steiner was not a man of destiny but a Pied Piper leading his disciples away from common sense as well as sound spiritual philosophy. Lewis and Barfield had met during the fall of 1919, as Oxford undergraduates and near neighbors, their residences a half mile apart. The encounter seems inevitable, for the two had a great deal in common, including love of philosophy, literature, talking, and walking. Leo Baker engineered the rendezvous. Soon a nucleus of bright young men, including Baker, Lewis, Barfield, Harwood, and W. Eric Beckett—later a celebrated lawyer knighted for work in the British Foreign Office—began assembling regularly to share poems and essays and to debate religion, philosophy, and literature. Their tastes were conservative and refined. They adored mythology, traditional art, and the Romantics, and despised all bohemian movements. They disagreed, intensely, about the existence of God, the nature of Christ, the meaning of history. These gatherings, in some ways foreshadowing Inklings meetings, cemented the bond between Lewis and Barfield. Then and always, comradely disputation lay at the heart of their relationship; in Surprised by Joy, Lewis calls Barfield not only his “Second Friend” but his “anti-self.”

  The meetings of this proto-Inklings circle continued through much of the 1920s; so, too, did private exchanges between Barfield and Lewis. Often their discussions became full-scale battles. “We went at our talk like a dogfight,” remembered Lewis, while Barfield confessed to having “a reputation among my own friends of being argumentative.” Lewis, he was glad to say, enjoyed the pugilism: “Most people—here, especially, Lewis was different—are apt to flinch at the verbal aggression, taking it as a kind of personal attack or even as a kind of contempt … nobody but Jack could argue so freely, hitting so hard, but knowing it won’t hurt.” For a time, Barfield shared with Harwood a thatched cottage near Beckley, a few miles outside Oxford; Lewis would often cycle over to carry on the argument. The three companions formed a perfect debating circle, a study in types: Barfield, slender, elegant, gently but insistently advancing esoteric doctrines; Lewis, boisterous and belligerent, his face turning bright red as he bellowed objections and distinguos; Harwood, quiet and observant, the go-between—“a summoned voice rather than a vociferous one” Barfield described him. These jousts enhanced the idyllic nature of the relationship: young men, in the peak of youth and intellectual fervor, joyfully clashing ideological swords. Recalling one such happy day, Lewis wrote in his diary: “We got into conversation on fancy and imagination: Barfield cd. not be made to allow any essential difference between Christina dreams [wish-fulfilling fantasies] and the material of art … At supper I drank Cowslip Wine for the first time. It is a real wine, green in colour, bittersweet … After supper we went out for a walk, into the woods on the edge of Otmoor. [The] black and white cat, Pierrot, accompanied us like a dog all the time. Barfield danced round it in a field—with sublime lack of selfconsciousness and wonderful vigour—for our amusement and that of three horses.” Lucky horses, blessed young men!

  Barfield, in love with Maud, vibrant with life, on the track of cosmic secrets, was not only dancing, he was writing at top speed: poems, reviews, literary criticism, philological analyses. In 1925 he published his first novel, The Silver Trumpet. It is an anomaly in his work, a witty fairy tale for children, free of philology or theorizing about the nature of consciousness. The plot reads like a burlesque of Hans Christian Andersen, with a wicked princess plotting her good sister’s death, turning people into toads, driving a kingdom to ruin, only to see her machinations thwarted by a pure-hearted prince, a good-natured dwarf, and a benevolent witch. What to make of it? One critic has seen in the tale a prophecy of the rise of fascism, but this seems a stretch; what depth it possesses lies in the central image of the silver trumpet, whose glorious peal, sounded at key moments throughout the tale, invariably jolts the characters into a higher, purer, more noble mode of perception and understanding. The Barfield scholar Simon Blaxland–de Lange points out that the trumpet signals the same “felt change of consciousness” that Barfield believed was wrought in the imagination by poetry. He may well have had this analogy in mind while composing his tale; he likely also had in mind the passages from the Book of Numbers in which God commands Moses:

  “Make two silver trumpets; of hammered work you sh
all make them; and you shall use them for summoning the congregation, and for breaking camp … on the day of your gladness also, and at your appointed feasts, and at the beginnings of your months, you shall blow the trumpets over your burnt offerings and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings; they shall serve you for remembrance before your God: I am the Lord your God.” (Numbers 10:1–2, 10)

  In Barfield’s tale, the silver trumpet serves a sacramental role, bridging through its music—the music that Barfield so loved, that he valued more than poetry—heaven and earth, instilling in all who hear it conscience, repentance, and renewal. It works miracles, too, for through its pure notes a decrepit king is brought back to his senses and a dead princess back to life. With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that The Silver Trumpet trumpets a new literary movement, for it marks the first publication of fantasy fiction by an Inkling-to-be, a harbinger of all the golden works to come. Lewis rejoiced at its call, “in which with prodigality [Barfield] squirts out the most suggestive ideas, the loveliest pictures, and the raciest new coined words in wonderful succession. Nothing in its kind can be imagined better.” So he wrote in his private diary, far from his friend’s eyes and therefore most likely his honest assessment of the book’s virtues. The Times Literary Supplement concurred, calling it “one of the best new fairy stories this year.” Thirteen years later, the Tolkien family added its applause, as Lewis relayed to Barfield: “I lent the Silver Trumpet to Tolkien and hear that it is the greatest success among his children that they have ever known. His own fairy-tales, which are excellent, have now no market; and its first reading—children are so practical!—led to a universal wail ‘You’re not going to give it back to Mr. Lewis, are you?’ … In fine, you have scored a direct hit.” The bull’s-eye was not to be repeated. Barfield’s future fiction output, apart from philosophical works in the form of imagined symposia, would consist of unremarkable short stories and plays and a realistic, unpublishable novel. He opened the vein of mythopoeic gold for his fellow Inklings but failed to mine it successfully himself; the loss is palpable.

  While Barfield worked on The Silver Trumpet, his debates with Lewis mounted in intensity. The turning point came when he and Harwood confessed their enthusiasm for Rudolf Steiner. Lewis was aghast, exclaiming in his diary (July 7, 1923) that “Steiner seems to be a sort of panpsychist, with a vein of posing superstition, and I was very much disappointed to hear that both Harwood and Barfield were impressed by him.” Many years later, in Surprised by Joy, he would provide more details about his reaction: “I was hideously shocked,” he writes, for “here … were all the abominations … gods spirits, after-life and pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge, meditation. ‘Why—damn it—it’s medieval,’ I exclaimed.” His revulsion may seem extreme but should not surprise, for during the early 1920s he was still a self-proclaimed pagan, a proponent of élan vital, in love with energy, growth, and truth—all of which, he was convinced, perished the instant supernatural considerations entered the conversation. Barfield and Harwood had gone over to the enemy. Lewis would win them back if possible; in any event, he would fight them tooth and nail. So opened his first great analytical campaign, which he described as “an almost incessant disputation … which lasted for years” to de-anthroposophize Barfield, in large measure by denying any value to the imagination, upon whose wings Steiner had soared into the higher world of supersensible realities, as a vehicle for the discovery of truth. Lewis called this prolonged debate the “Great War,” a nod to its duration, ferocity, and high stakes, the intellectual counterpart to that other Great War both disputants had experienced firsthand.

  The Barfield-Lewis “Great War” lasted from 1923 or 1924 until 1931. It was waged via letters, treatises, and poems, and in one-on-one and group debates, at home and on walking tours. This last venue deserves special notice, for philosophical rambles in woods and fields, from pub to pub, lasting from an afternoon to several days, would become a favorite activity of the Inklings. Barfield was the first to suggest the practice. Lewis, Baker, and Harwood readily agreed, other friends joined in, and soon these latter-day Peripatetics tramped the countryside while tussling over God, literature, art, and a thousand other subjects. Many of the participants wrote about these walking tours; almost all accounts place Lewis at the center. Thus the future Inkling Nevill Coghill: “we used to foregather in our rooms or go off for country walks together in endless but excited talk about what we had been reading the week before … we walked almost as fast as we talked—disputing and quoting, as we looked for the dark dingles and the tree-topped hills of Matthew Arnold … Lewis, with the gusto of a Chesterton or a Belloc, would suddenly roar out a passage of poetry that he had newly discovered and memorized … we had, of course, thunderous disagreements and agreements…”

  How one longs for a recording of this thunder! At least we have some of the written documents, and while they may not capture the youthful joy and abandon that must have imbued these country walks, they possess their own, more polished, charm. The title of one of the principal texts, Lewis’s Clivi Hamiltonis Summae Metaphysices contra Anthroposophos, modeled upon Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles, suggests the schoolboy vigor and jocularity—and the sophisticated attacks—that characterized the “Great War.” Barfield countered with Replicit Anthroposophus Barfieldus; later broadsides include Lewis’s De Bono et Malo, Barfield’s De Toto et Parte, and Lewis’s rejoinder, Commentarium in Tractatum De Toto et Parte. Twice in later life, Barfield tried unsuccessfully to get the major documents into print, but the publishers he approached ruled, perhaps correctly, that the “Great War” documents, in their prolixity and their recondite obscurities, would hold little interest for the public, even a public ravenous for Lewisiana.

  Yet the “Great War” circled around a vital subject—the nature of the imagination—and is well worth revisiting. Barfield believed that the imagination was a legitimate tool for acquiring objective truth. It was a delicate instrument, often abused, but if properly employed—as he believed it to be in the case of Steiner’s Spiritual Science—it provided access to knowledge unavailable to ordinary perception. Lewis, on the other hand, argued that the imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly. Truth, he believed at this time, was always somewhat elusive. “We must be content to feel the highest truths ‘in our bones’: if we try to make them explicit, we really make them untruths,” he said to Harwood. In a letter to Barfield, he drew three sketches that characterized his views. The first shows Lewis tied to a post and looking into a mirror to catch a glimpse of whatever reality is revealed by reason (the primary instrument for investigation into truth claims) and controlled imagination; the second shows “a gentleman” (Barfield) also tied to a post, attacking the mirror with a hammer and chisel to get at the esoteric reality that lies behind it; the third shows the same Barfieldian gentleman assaulted by a phantom (the embodiment of occultism) unleashed by his irrational hammerings.

  Needless to say, Barfield rejected these caricatures. To grasp the intensity of his conviction, however, and to understand how and why he came by his conclusions regarding the nature of truth, consciousness, and their interplay, it will help to turn to two books that he wrote while the “Great War” raged, books that advance his case with all guns blazing.

  History in English Words

  In 1926, Barfield published History in English Words, his first full-length philosophico-philological treatise. Note the preposition in the title. Barfield’s aim is not to recount the history of English. He is attempting something far rarer: to see how words capture history, how “words may be made to disgorge the past that is bottled up inside them, as coal and wine, when we kindle or drink them, yield up their bottled sunshine.” In many ways, then, the book is an expansion of his essay on the word “ruin,” but encompassing a much vaster set of examples, the fruit of countless hours of meditation upon the Oxford English Dictionary and its semantic and etymological treasures. History in English Words may also be considered
the opening chapter of Barfield’s one and only book, which took him a lifetime to write.

  On one level, History in English Words is a compendium of entertaining facts. The author tells us, for example, that in the sixteenth century “Sir John Cheke began a translation of the New Testament in which none but native words were to be used; and we find in his Matthew moond for lunatic, hundreder for centurion, frosent (from-sent) for apostle, crossed for crucified, freshman for proselyte, and many other equally odd-sounding concoctions.” In a provocative passage about the evolution of words, he reports that “for the Romans themselves the old goddesses called the Fata, or Fates, turned quickly into an abstracted notion of destiny. But contact with the dreamy Celts breathed new life into their nostrils, and ‘Fata’ in late Latin became spiritual once more. The sharp sounds were softened and abraded until they slipped imperceptibly into Old French ‘fée’ (Modern English fay), and so fa-ery and fairy. Demon is the result of a similar metamorphosis.”

  This erudition is enjoyable but little more than a jeu d’esprit. Happily, Barfield employs these philological bonbons as a foundation for substantial fare, arguing that words make possible, and the study of words reveals, new avenues of knowledge. For example—this is the first instance in the book—scientists coined the phrase “high tension” in order to signify the relationship between two bodies carrying an electric charge (“I was anxious … to obtain some idea of the conducting power of ice and solid salts by electricity of high tension”—Michael Faraday, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1833). But in less than a century, the phrase had become a metaphor for emotional stress between two people (“Eugene, strung to the highest tension, does not move a muscle”—George Bernard Shaw, Candida, 1898). “The scientists who discovered the forces of electricity,” Barfield contends, “actually made it possible for the human beings who came after them to have a slightly different idea, a slightly fuller consciousness of their relationship with one another.” Similarly, while scrutinizing “absolute,” “actual,” “attribute,” and a score of other words that pertain to the relation between matter and spirit, he observes that medieval thinkers not only drew these words (or their Latin equivalents) from the pagan Greeks but modified them to carry richer and more subtle meanings. “No one who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the Middle Ages.”