Quick Answer
The claim is that a medieval person did not merely believe different things about the sky, they saw a different sky. Barfield argues that consciousness has a history, that earlier people participated in a world of meaning rather than observing a world of objects, and that the evidence is in what words used to mean. It is a genuinely original argument, the linguistic evidence is doing more work than it can carry, and the book will permanently change how you read anything written before about 1600.
Key Takeaways
- Consciousness has a history, and that is the whole claim.
- The evidence is semantic, and semantic change has many ordinary causes he underweights.
- Not subjectivism. Something real is there; appearances are what it becomes for a given consciousness.
- Steiner is underneath it, argued in terms that do not require accepting Steiner.
- Short and slow. A hundred and eighty pages that take weeks.
🕑 16 min read
What This Book Is
Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry was published in 1957. It is short, around a hundred and eighty pages, and it advances one claim across twenty-five brief chapters.
The claim is that human consciousness has changed over recorded history, and that the change is not a matter of people acquiring better information but of the relationship between mind and world being different.
Barfield is not saying earlier people held mistaken beliefs about a world they perceived as we do. He is saying that what they perceived was not the same, because perception is not passive reception and the perceiving apparatus has a history.
The evidence he offers is largely linguistic, drawn from the history of what words have meant, and the book is in part a demonstration of a method: that the history of consciousness can be read out of the history of language.
On length and difficulty. This is a short book that takes a long time. Barfield builds carefully, each chapter depending on the last, and skimming produces the sensation of following without the substance. Twenty pages a sitting is a reasonable pace.
Who Owen Barfield Was
Barfield was born in London in 1898 and lived until 1997, which means his working life spanned almost the whole century.
He studied at Oxford, wrote an early book on the history of word meanings that remains admired, and then, needing an income, qualified as a solicitor and practised law in London for some thirty years. The philosophical writing was done outside working hours.
He was a member of the Inklings, the Oxford circle around C. S. Lewis and Tolkien, and Lewis's closest intellectual sparring partner over decades.
And he encountered the work of Rudolf Steiner in the early 1920s and remained committed to it for the rest of his life, which is the single most important fact about the intellectual content of his books and the one that has most affected their reception.
He was rediscovered late, taught in America in his seventies, and acquired a following among readers who came to him through Lewis or through anthroposophy.
Where the Title Comes From
The phrase is technical and worth unpacking because it frames the whole argument.
In ancient and medieval astronomy, the task of a model was to save the appearances: to devise a geometrical scheme that would predict where the planets would be seen, without any claim that the scheme described physical reality. Epicycles did not have to exist. They had to work.
Barfield uses this to characterise the modern situation. Physics gives us particles and fields and wave functions, and asked whether these are what is really there, the honest answer is that the models save the appearances. Our relationship to our own theories is closer to the medieval astronomers' than we admit.
The difference, and the subject of the book, is that they knew it and we do not.
The Rainbow Argument
The opening move, which is the clearest thing in the book and the fastest way to see what he is doing.
Consider a rainbow. It has a location, a shape, colours in an order. Yet there is no object there. What exists is water droplets, sunlight, and an observer positioned in a particular relation to both. Move the observer and the rainbow moves. Remove the observer and there is no rainbow at all, only droplets and light.
The rainbow is not an illusion. It is genuinely there, and it is a joint product of something outside the observer and something in them.
Barfield then applies the same analysis to a tree.
What physics describes is particles in mostly empty space, with no colour, no solidity in the experienced sense, no smell, no continuous surface. The tree as we perceive it is a joint product: something is there, and the perceiving apparatus produces from it the tree we experience.
His term for what is out there before perception does its work is the unrepresented, and his claim is that everything we call the world is the unrepresented as it appears to a particular kind of consciousness.
None of this is unusual so far. It is roughly the standard modern account of perception.
Participation
Here is where Barfield departs from everyone.
If the world we experience is a joint product of the unrepresented and human consciousness, and if human consciousness has changed over history, then the world that was experienced has changed too.
His term for the earlier relationship is participation: a condition in which the perceiver is not experienced as separate from what is perceived, and in which meaning is felt to be in the world rather than assigned to it by a mind standing outside.
What he means is not that ancient people believed spirits inhabited trees, as a theory they held about a world they saw as we see it. He means that the distinction between a tree's physical presence and its significance had not yet opened, so that what was perceived was a single thing rather than an object plus an interpretation.
The consequence, which he presses hard, is that the history of religion is not a history of mistaken beliefs about the world. It is a record of what the world was like when perceived by a consciousness organised differently, and the beliefs are secondary to the perception.
The claim is easy to misunderstand in two directions and both should be resisted. It is not the sentimental version, in which ancient people were more spiritually attuned and we have lost something by becoming clever. And it is not the dismissive version, in which they were confused and we have corrected them. Barfield is arguing something structurally stranger: that perception is a relationship with two terms, that one of the terms has changed, and that neither the earlier nor the later arrangement is simply the correct view of a fixed object.
The Evidence From Words
The method, and the reason a linguist by training was the person to make this argument.
Barfield's earlier work established the observation the whole book rests on. Trace almost any abstract word back far enough and it becomes concrete. Words for mental and spiritual states are, without exception, derived from words for physical things.
The conventional explanation is metaphor. Early people had concrete vocabulary, and when they needed to talk about inner states they borrowed physical words as comparisons, and the comparisons hardened into abstractions.
Barfield rejects this and the rejection is the hinge of the book.
Metaphor, he argues, requires two things already distinguished. To say the wind is like the spirit, you must already have wind and spirit as separate concepts. If the two were not separate, there is nothing to compare.
His alternative: the words were not metaphors but single undivided meanings, and the split into physical and mental senses happened later as consciousness differentiated. The unity in the word records a unity in the experience.
The Breath Example
The case he returns to most often and the one worth having in detail.
The Greek word pneuma means breath, wind and spirit. The Latin spiritus does the same. The Hebrew ruach likewise. In each case a single word covers what modern English distributes across at least three.
The metaphor explanation says: they had a word for breath, noticed a resemblance to the invisible animating principle, and extended the word.
Barfield says: there was one thing, and the word named it. The moving air outside, the breath in the body, and the animating principle were not three things a speaker was comparing. They were one phenomenon, and the later separation into three is what happened to the perception, recorded in what happened to the word.
He builds similar cases across a range of vocabulary, and the accumulation is genuinely impressive as a body of observation.
The Historical Sequence
The narrative arc, which occupies the middle of the book.
Original participation: an early condition in which the perceiver is embedded in a meaningful world, with no experienced separation. Barfield locates this in the ancient world and finds it strongly in Hebrew and Greek material.
A long withdrawal: participation weakens over centuries. He traces stages through Greek philosophy, through the shift the Hebrew prophets represent, and through the medieval period, where he argues participation is still present but has become a matter of doctrine rather than direct experience.
The scientific revolution: the decisive break, in which the world becomes an assembly of objects with no inherent meaning, standing over against an observer who supplies meaning from inside. Barfield does not treat this as a catastrophe. He argues the detachment was necessary, that individual freedom and the possibility of objectivity depend on it, and that it could not have been skipped.
The present: a condition in which we take the world of separate objects to be simply what is there, having forgotten that our own consciousness contributed to producing it.
Idolatry
The book's subtitle names the diagnosis, and it is a sharper claim than the word suggests.
An idol, for Barfield, is a representation mistaken for a reality. The word does not primarily mean a religious image; it means anything we treat as independently real when it is in fact a joint product of the world and our own perceiving.
Modern consciousness, on this account, is idolatrous in a way earlier consciousness was not, because we have forgotten our own contribution. The medieval astronomer knew his epicycles were a device. We do not know that about the objects we perceive, because the participation that would have made our involvement obvious has faded.
The consequences he draws are not merely epistemological. A world of objects with no inherent meaning is a world that can be treated purely instrumentally, and he connects the loss of participation to the environmental and cultural consequences of that instrumentalism.
That connection was unusual in 1957 and reads as prescient now.
Final Participation
The book's constructive proposal and its most speculative section.
Barfield holds that the present detached condition is a stage rather than a destination. Original participation was given and unconscious; the participant did not know they were participating. The scientific revolution removed it, at the cost of meaning and at the benefit of freedom.
What he proposes as the next development is a participation that is conscious and voluntary: a recovered sense of the world as meaningful, entered deliberately by a self that has been through the detachment and retains its independence.
He locates the beginnings of this in the Romantic poets, particularly in Coleridge's account of imagination as a genuinely productive faculty rather than a decorative one, and he treats poetic imagination as the working model of what final participation would be.
Whether this is philosophy, prophecy or wishful thinking is a fair question. It is where the anthroposophy shows most clearly, and it is the section where readers unpersuaded by the framework will find the least purchase.
The Objections
Three, and the first is decisive for many readers.
The evidence is thin for the claim. Barfield needs a change in perception. What he has is a change in vocabulary. That gap is large and he does not close it.
Unfalsifiability. No observation could count against the thesis, because any evidence of earlier people perceiving as we do would be explained as our reading our own consciousness into their records, which is precisely what the theory says we do.
Selection. The linguistic examples are chosen, and languages contain a great deal of semantic history that does not fit the pattern, including words that moved from abstract to concrete and words whose changes have documented mundane causes.
The Weakness in the Method
The central objection deserves developing, because it is where a careful reader should push hardest.
Semantic change is well studied and it has many ordinary drivers. Words narrow and broaden. They shift by association, by euphemism, by borrowing, by phonetic accident, by contact with other languages, and by the ordinary need to make new distinctions as circumstances require them.
A society that develops a technical vocabulary for mental states because it has developed institutions concerned with mental states does not thereby demonstrate that its members perceive differently. It demonstrates that they have acquired a reason to distinguish.
Barfield's inference requires that the absence of a distinction in vocabulary indicates its absence in experience. That is not obviously true and in many cases is demonstrably false: speakers routinely perceive differences their language does not lexicalise, and the research on colour vocabulary and colour perception has made this a well-worked field.
None of this shows Barfield is wrong. It shows that his evidence is compatible with a much less dramatic explanation, and that he does not do the work of ruling that explanation out.
The Steiner Question
The elephant in the book, and the honest thing is to name it plainly.
Barfield was a committed anthroposophist from his early twenties. Steiner's system includes a detailed account of the historical development of consciousness through successive epochs, with the loss of an earlier participatory awareness and its future conscious recovery as central features.
The argument of this book is that account, presented philosophically, with the clairvoyant sources removed and replaced by linguistic evidence.
Two readings are available and both are defensible.
The generous one: Barfield found independent support for a position he had arrived at through Steiner, and offering that support in publicly checkable terms is a legitimate and difficult intellectual project.
The critical one: he began with the conclusion and assembled evidence for it, which explains why the evidence fits so neatly and why alternative explanations receive so little attention.
The honest position is that the second reading is hard to dismiss and does not by itself make the argument wrong. A conclusion reached for bad reasons can still be true, and the evidence has to be assessed on its own.
Readers should simply know the framework is there, because the book does not foreground it and its structure is otherwise puzzling.
Lewis and the Inklings
The literary connection that brings most readers here.
Lewis and Barfield conducted an argument over several years in the 1920s, which Lewis called the Great War, over anthroposophy and over the status of imagination. Lewis dedicated a book to him, described him as the wisest of his unofficial teachers, and said the argument had permanently changed his thinking.
Lewis never accepted anthroposophy and became a Christian instead. What he took was the conviction that imagination is a means of apprehending truth rather than a faculty for producing pleasant fictions, and that conviction runs through everything he subsequently wrote.
Tolkien's account of sub-creation, and his argument that myth can carry truth rather than being a lie however beautifully told, belongs to the same conversation.
Readers who came to Barfield through the Inklings should know that this book is considerably more demanding than anything Lewis wrote for a general audience, and that the demand is not a matter of style.
What Survives the Objections
Three things, and they are worth the difficulty.
The rainbow analysis. The observation that the perceived world is a joint product, and that we systematically forget our own contribution to it, is correct and is more consequential than it first appears.
The reframing of old texts. Whether or not medieval people perceived differently, Barfield's argument makes it impossible to read them as holding quaint theories about the world we see. At minimum, the possibility that they were describing something rather than speculating badly is one a reader now has to entertain, and it improves the reading enormously.
The diagnosis of idolatry. The claim that we treat our models as the furniture of reality, having forgotten they are models, is not exotic. It is what happens, and the consequences he traces from it are visible.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you are interested in whether consciousness has a history, which is a question almost nobody takes seriously and which this book takes seriously for a hundred and eighty pages.
Read it if you read old texts and have wondered whether the writers meant what they said.
Read it if you came through Jung or through the Inklings and want the most rigorous version of the underlying claim.
Read it alongside McGilchrist, who makes a related argument about historical change in the mode of attention on entirely different evidence, and alongside Hoffman for a modern version of the joint-product claim.
Do not read it quickly, do not read it as history, and do not accept the linguistic evidence without asking what else could explain it.
What is worth keeping, whatever you conclude about the large thesis, is the habit Barfield is trying to install. When you look at anything, some of what you are seeing came from outside you and some of it was supplied by the apparatus doing the looking, and the two are not separable by inspection. That is true of a tree and it is more obviously true of a person, a situation, a conversation. The idolatry he names is simply the forgetting of the second half. Nothing follows from remembering it except a certain looseness about your own certainty, which is a small thing to gain and considerably harder to hold than it sounds.
A hundred and eighty pages that will slow down everything you read afterwards.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's anthroposophical background and of the weakness in its method is set out above and is independent of the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Saving the Appearances about?
Owen Barfield's 1957 argument that human consciousness has changed historically, that people in earlier periods perceived the world differently rather than merely believing different things about it, and that the history of language records the change.
Who was Owen Barfield?
An English writer and solicitor, 1898 to 1997, closely associated with the Inklings circle that included C. S. Lewis and Tolkien. He worked as a lawyer for decades while writing philosophy, and was a lifelong student of Rudolf Steiner's work.
What does the title mean?
It is a phrase from ancient astronomy, describing the task of devising a model that accounts for observed planetary motions without claiming the model is physically real. Barfield uses it to characterise the modern relationship to scientific theory generally.
What is participation?
Barfield's term for a relationship in which the perceiver is not separate from what is perceived. He argues that earlier consciousness participated in nature, experiencing meaning as present in things, and that this faded rather than being abandoned as an error.
What is the linguistic evidence?
That words for spirit, breath and wind were single undivided words in ancient languages, and split later. Barfield argues this reflects an experience in which the distinction did not yet exist, rather than a poetic comparison between separate things.
What is the main objection?
That language change does not straightforwardly evidence changed perception. Semantic shift has many ordinary causes, and inferring that earlier speakers experienced the world differently because their vocabulary was less differentiated is a substantial leap.
How does Steiner figure in it?
Substantially, though not always explicitly. Barfield accepted Steiner's account of the historical development of consciousness and spent his career arguing for it in terms that did not require accepting Steiner's clairvoyant claims.
What is final participation?
His proposal that the detachment achieved by modern consciousness is a stage rather than an endpoint, and that a further development is possible in which the participation of earlier ages is recovered consciously and voluntarily rather than lost.
Is it a difficult book?
Yes. The prose is dense, the argument proceeds by careful stages, and it assumes familiarity with the history of philosophy and science. It is short and it takes considerably longer to read than its length suggests.
What was C. S. Lewis's relationship to it?
Lewis called Barfield the wisest of his unofficial teachers and credited a long argument between them with changing his thinking fundamentally. Lewis never accepted the anthroposophy, and the intellectual debt runs through his work.
Does it support the idea that reality is subjective?
No. Barfield holds that something real exists independently and that what we call the world is the product of that reality meeting a particular kind of consciousness. Both terms are required and neither alone produces appearances.
Who should read it?
Readers interested in the history of consciousness, in the philosophy of perception, or in the intellectual background of the Inklings. It is demanding and it will permanently change how you read old texts.
Take the question, hold the answer loosely
Barfield may be wrong about the evidence and he asked a question almost nobody else has taken seriously: whether the way human beings perceive has itself changed, and whether the record of that change is sitting in plain sight in what our words used to mean. That question does not require his answer. It requires only that you stop assuming that people who wrote about the world before the seventeenth century were describing the same world you see, badly. They may have been. They may not. Reading them with the possibility open is a better way to read them, and it costs nothing but the certainty.
Sources & References
- Barfield, Owen (1957). Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.
- Barfield, O. Poetic Diction, the earlier work on semantic history.
- Steiner, Rudolf. Writings on the historical development of consciousness.
- Lewis, C. S. Correspondence and published references to Barfield.
- Linguistic scholarship on semantic change and its ordinary mechanisms.
- Research on the relationship between colour vocabulary and colour perception.