yeoldeinklings

[yeoldeinklings]

Perennialism vs. Redemption

Perennialist - someone who thinks only the lasting ideas should be focused on in education. Things don't really change.

Barfield's ideas and philosophies came to center on the notion that human consciousness had been individuated for a purpose in the past, but that it was headed for a future where we would once again be connected, would regain paradise, without losing our individuality.

This lead him to Christ, albeit unconventionally. He saw in the teachings of Christ (being one with the Father and yet himself, etc..) the things he had arrived at by other means. He came to see Christ as the turning point in the evolution of human consciousness.

From an interview with Barfield near the end of his life:

Barfield: I can understand the tendency to turn back to the past.... But in the long view I cannot doubt that what is so understandably sought for now in the past (or, as might be objected, in the “eternal” outside time and space, for which the “past” often seems to stand in Perennialist thought) will eventually be found to lie in the future, though “with a difference”— the very difference for which the whole process was set in motion! We only have this abyss to cross, this intersection of time and eternity, the horizontal and the vertical. And this is the Christian symbol par excellence. Wetmore: This Christian image of the intersection at the center of the cross, is it so relevant to your view? Barfield: Indeed it is. God became Man. The Incarnation of the Word is the meaning of human history. Christ was resurrected and the great process of the Redemption of Creation began. This is too complex a subject to go into lightly, and I, in any case, am not qualified to give the answers. But, ultimately, we are talking again here of the overcoming of the polarity of I and the World. Since the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection, I cannot see how the final meaning of the evolutionary dimension, the redemptive dimension, however difficult it may be to reconcile it with the Perennialist position, can be denied.