Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Jared C. Lobdell
Not Least of the Inklings

By now, the name of the Inklings--that Oxford group which used to meet in C.S. Lewis's rooms--has become tolerably well-known, even if the group is not always well-defined. But the name of Owen Barfield, philosopher, wit (recall his collaboration with Lewis on the case of Mark v. Tristram ), Inkling, solicitor, Steinerite, latest and perhaps last in the great English intellectual tradition of the gentleman amateur, seems somehow to come in most men's minds as a kind of afterthought to the names of his confreres. It should not be so, and the proof is here, not only in Professor Reilly's study (which is devoted more to Barfield than to any of his fellow Inklings), but also and especially in Barfield's own book on Coleridge.

Coleridge is certainly not an easy subject to write on, still less an easy subject to interpret. For one thing, it is practically necessary to dismiss from one's mind the thing for which Coleridge is best known--his poetry--if one wants to discover the pattern of his thought. (It is true I once heard a former teacher of mine, the author of a perceptive book on Coleridge, argue that "Kubla Khan" could be used as evidence of Coleridge's political philosophy, but that I think was an aberration.) For another, Coleridge was a Christian, perhaps the last substantial philosopher who could be so described and whose Christianity was not the starting point but the conclusion of his philosophy.

For yet another, Coleridge's leisurely and parenthetical style has a tendency to put the modern reader off--it savors of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century divines and nineteenth-century novelists and travelers. And finally, Coleridge stands athwart the course of the great proto-Darwinian Myth of Evolution, desiring us to unlearn what we have learned and to see that true history--indeed, true evolution--isthe history of Mind, "the gradual Evolution of the Mind of the World, contemplated as a single Mind in the different stages of its development."

For him mind did not evolve from matter: matter, like mind, is sentient, a part of shaping Nature (natura naturans ), proceeding according to the Law of Polar Logic, wherein--so far as I can tell--opposites are not contraries. Moreover (and this is, I think, an example of Polarity), man becomes man both by individuation and through society. I do not wish to attempt here any real summary of Coleridge, or even of Mr. Barfield's summary of Coleridge My point is rather that in Coleridge we have a long unsuspected for only just suspected) key to the thinking of an increasingly influential group of men--barring Tolkien, perhaps, on whom Coleridge's influence resolves itself chiefly into the distinction between primary and secondary creation--and that it will require all the help Mr. Barfield and Professor Reilly can give us to turn the key.

Probably it would be best to read Professor Reilly's book first, even though it lies at one additional remove from the source. (It is, incidentally, a very good study: Walter Hooper, who is C. S. Lewis' literary executor, tells me, he thinks it quite the best book done yet on the Inklings. I find it weakest on Tolkien.) Though Mr. Barfield's study of Coleridge is, in Professor Reilly's words, "not only worth seeing but worth going to see," it is Professor Reilly's own study that makes it relatively easy for us to see it. Owen Barfield's idiosyncratic mind and style are not the stuff of common reading.

Yet What Coleridge Thought ought to be read and pondered as few other books that have been or (I venture) will be published in this decade. For we should not, like the Ancient Mariner, slay any source of our enlightenment, even by neglect and we have much to learn from Coleridge, in politics no less--even more--than poetry, if only we can penetrate the depths of his thought. If we do not penetrate those depths, if we use him only as a source for a few convenient quotations and the idea, it may be of the nation as church, we do neither ourselves nor assuredly him the justice Mr. Barfield's work would have us do.

And it is pleasant to have an introduction to Mr. Barfield as well.

Source:  Jared C. Lobdell, "Not Least of the Inklings", in National Review, Vol. 24, March 17, 1972, pp. 292-3.