Keeping Up Appearances

I had just a little bit to say about Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances. But when I sat down to write, I wondered if I could tie in the exquisite British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances in any way. And I’m pleased to say I can! Hyacinth Walton has married a man named Richard Bucket. Now to most Brits, the name Bucket has connotations; its homonymity with a practical piece of farming equipment brings to mind a sense of respectable yeomanry, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, a comfortable and reliable goodness. But Hyacinth has a delusional sense that she occupies by natural right a higher position in the traditional British social hierarchy than the place of respectable yeoman. So she pronounces the name “Bouquet,” a name that doesn’t just mean an arrangement of flowers; it’s a French word and carries with it overtones of elegance and nobility and carefully trained charm. It’s a good joke, and it’s funny in every single episode.

Owen Barfield, also, was interested in the connotations and overtones in words. The first Barfield book I read, Poetic Diction, I enjoyed so much I read it twice. Here, basically, Barfield says that older languages reveal that their speakers had a richer view of the world than we do. Ancient and New Testament Greek is sometimes said to be a poetic language because every noun has both a literal and a figurative meaning. Pneuma, for instance (you’ll forgive me for transliterating instead of using Greek script), actually means “breath” and “wind” but figuratively means “spirit” or “life force.” A common view (at least I’ve heard it’s common: I haven’t actually read any linguistic history that says this) says that early people saw a person breathing and saw a tree swaying in the wind and came up with a word for the motion of air and then later imagined an unseen entity and, with poetically minded people leading the way, decided that the word for the concrete thing could be applied to the immaterial or abstract thing as well. On the contrary, Barfield argues that early speakers of Greek didn’t see these as two different meanings: they thought of an immaterial life force being carried by wind and breath, they came up with a word for the conglomerate, and they meant everything all at once when they used the word pneuma. Barfield was a friend of Lewis and Tolkien and a frequent attendee of the Inklings meetings at the Eagle and Child in Oxford. I admire Lewis and Tolkien; I liked Barfield’s argument about language; ergo, I concluded Barfield was a reasonable, respectable guy. A Bucket, if you will.

Saving the Appearances begins by saying the same thing from a different angle. Here, Barfield starts with the planets. Ancient people looked at the lights that moved against the background stars and, believing in gods or angels and crystalline spheres, “saw” all of these things when they looked up. We register the same points of light, but we “see” globes of rock or gas revolving around the sun according to laws discovered by Kepler and Newton and Einstein. Now, Barfield claims that the earlier view is one that views material objects as connected to immaterial things; in his words, he says that the ancients viewed concrete things as “participating” in the abstract. (I suppose he got his term from Plato, who taught that beautiful things “participate” in the ideal of Beauty.) Science, Barfield says, has pulled apart the meanings of the sight and dismissed the immaterial part. I’d like to point out that Kepler’s laws are every bit as immaterial as angels or Plato’s ideals. But I get Barfield’s point: the ancients saw meanings actually existing in words and in things that we think of only as poetic, symbolic references. The same patterns of light waves may strike my retina and Julius Caesar’s, but we see different things. So far so good.

But halfway through Saving the Appearances, Barfield becomes a crank, and he lost me. He says that our view of the planets, our thought that we now actually know what they are, is a form of idolatry, since we don’t actually know the real nature of the unseen particles that make up the planets. The ancients were wrong, but only in that they saw the planets as participating in the wrong things. To escape our idolatry, we have to have a new stage of participation, one that “realizes the directionally creator relation.” He apologizes for the awkward phrase but confesses that he can find no better way to describe what humanity needs. Near the end of the book he says that a new morality, surpassing Christian morality as much as Christian morality surpassed pagan, involves man’s obligation to awaken to “final participation” (our intentional reshaping of the way we see things – I think). Jesus’s explanation of the Parable of the Sower talks about the ears to hear and about eyes that don’t see, and Barfield says that, at last, we can now understand Jesus’s words, that we now know that He meant hearing and seeing in Barfield’s way of looking at things. (Barfield reminded me of Hegel at this point: the goal of the unfolding of the universe across eons is for humans to see things the way Barfield sees them. So humble.) Original participation, he says, was paganism, and the Scientific Revolution should be thanked for leading us to the idolatry of the images so we could break free and fulfill our purpose to “realize the directionally creator relation.”

So I was wrong, I suppose, in thinking that Barfield was a reliable yeoman. No, no! Barfield was a Bouquet among Buckets. Well, if that’s so, I’m happy being a Bucket.