Rudolf Steiner's Vision for the Future - Anthroposophical Society in ...

Book Review
The Future of the Ancient World: Essays on
the History of Consciousness
by Jeremy Naydler
Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 2009. 311 pages
Review by Frederick J. Dennehy
In 1957, Owen Barfield, a literary scholar and solicitor
known to the world principally through his close association
with C.S. Lewis, published a slim but elegant book entitled
Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. At the time it
was a difficult book to characterize, including as it did some
history, some philosophy, and something about the contrast
between science and religion. When the copies of the first
edition were sold out, that was it; it
was not reprinted.
Then in 1965, a paperback edition
of the book was issued in the
United States. Within a respectably
wide circle of readers, it was considered
not only a success but a revelation.
Over the next twenty years, it
woke thousands out of a dogmatic
slumber induced by a steady diet of
positivism, narrowly construed
linguistic analysis, and an assorted
menu of reductionist soporifics. The
book was not a history of ideas but a
history of consciousness—an account
of the evolution of consciousness. It emphasized
that contemporary physical
science, and most philosophy, was
wholly in agreement about the extensive
participation of the human mind in the creation, or at
least the evocation, of the “appearances”—or, more
familiarly, “nature.” It challenged its readers to explain why
the fact of that participation was always left out of any
considerations outside the strict spheres of physics and
54 • being human
philosophies—such subjects, for instance, as the histories
of language, civilization, thought, and even the earth.
One of Barfield’s enduring gifts to his readers has been
to enable us to see the ideas and practices of past civilizations
not as gropings in a laborious progression toward the enlightened
present, not as depositories of superseded knowledge to
be glanced at with a knowing smile, but as different ways of
seeing, to be respected and, if possible,
to be imaginatively replicated.
Barfield did not invent the idea of
the evolution of consciousness. It can
be traced, in related form, to Hegel. Although
Barfield’s own exposition owes
a great deal to Rudolf Steiner, he had
developed the core of his notion independently
during his studies at Oxford
in semantics and poetry, before he
heard of Steiner. Barfield’s extraordinarily
powerful contribution to the
study of the evolution of consciousness
lies in the clarity of his exposition as
much as in its structure. He demonstrates
its validity in myriad examples
drawn from every age in the spectrum
of time. Barfield never loses sight of the
heart of the matter. There has been an
evolution not only of the “outside” world but the “inside,”
and not only of ideas but of consciousness, of the way we see.
Some of us grasp this and some of us don’t. Most of those
who grasp it are prone to forget it very quickly.
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