Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry [Paperback]

Owen Barfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 15, 1988

Saving the Appearances is about the world as we see it and the world as it is; it is about God, human nature, and consciousness. The best known of numerous books by the British sage whom C.S. Lewis called the "wisest and best of my unofficial teachers," it draws on sources from mythology, philosophy, history, literature, theology, and science to chronicle the evolution of human thought from Moses and Aristotle to Galileo and Keats. Barfield urges his readers to do away with the assumption that the relationship between people and their environment is static. He dares us to end our exploitation of the natural world and to acknowledge, even revel in, our participation in the diurnal creative process.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a book of very high distinction. It is basic, profound, original, and difficult. Time may seal it as a masterpiece...It contains an entirely original approach to Christian perplexities, and it refounds Christian hope on a new and sound base. It is a great book, and it takes one into new worlds of opportunity." --Church Times

Review

"We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free ... from the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our 'common sense'" (Saul Bellow )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan; 2nd edition (August 15, 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 081956205X
• ISBN-13: 978-0819562050
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #89 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Science & Religion

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

96 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Redemption of the Senses: Barfield's Saving the Appearances, January 2, 1998

By 

Daniel J. Smitherman "phenomenologist" (Missoula, MT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Paperback)

Saving the Appearances stands out among Owen Barfield's many books as his most straightforward explication of the evolution of consciousness. Barfield preps the reader with the philosophical puzzles of perception, but then goes way beyond perceptual psychology. He puts those puzzles side by side with what in the West is taken to be common sense regarding the nature of reality, common sense as informed by science.

The implications of this juxtaposition of perceptual facts and scientific method are profound and demanding: a) human consciousness and the appearances of the everyday world are correlates of one another, and have been so throughout human history; and b) there is no other reality "behind" those appearances of the everyday world. Barfield pays close attention to the history of human languages, specifically the phenomena of change of meaning in words through time. These changes reflect the changes in human perception and thinking, and thus are clues and markers to the evolution of human consciousness.

Barfield then traces out the implications for us today, for our thinking about art, about science, and about religion and spirituality. Other and more extended implications have been drawn from Saving the Appearances by Theodore Roszak (Where the Wasteland Ends), Morris Berman (The Reenchantment of the World), Stephen Talbott (The Future Does Not Compute), Neil Evernden (The Social Creation of Nature), and others. There are many, many books out now concerned with consciousness: what it is; what it isn't; its relation to the body; how can we study it. And there are almost as many books about the evolution of consciousness. These are written by philosophers, scientists, psychologists, historians, and metaphysicians of all sorts.

Unique to Saving the Appearances is the combination of Barfield's keen logic and congenial style, and his wide-ranging and powerfully synthesizing mind. What is unique for the reader is the possibility of the opening up of the field of the senses, whereby one sees more than one did before. Reading, and wrestling with, the line of thinking in Saving the Appearances offers the possibility of the redemption of the senses. Saving the Appearances is not the work of an amateur, though it is congenial enough for an amateur to read, and careful and thoughtful enough for a scholar to refute. It will bear close scrutiny and deep meditation.

50 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Brave Plunge into Deep Waters, June 21, 2003

By 

Mennonite Medievalist (Cleveland, TN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Paperback)

I finish this book thinking that it might have changed my life; if it has, I might not know it, since I don't understand lots of it, but I find my mind going back to play with the concepts, like an emerging tooth, probing just where my ignorance hurts, trying to tug the sure worthwhile thing out of the sting.

Barfield writes a history of consciousness from undifferentiation to differentiation. At first, humanity perceived themselves at one with all things (he names it, eventually, pantheism). Then, humans began to separate items out of that indiscriminate morass and think about them. Next, humans began to compile these various meditations into patterns. This necessarily separates the humans themselves from the things they analyze. We feel alienated from the world, individual. This is about where we are presently on the history of consciousness.

Barfield proposes, as best I understand it (and I write this review for myself as well, to nail these things to my memory), that only by the imaginative capacity, the creation of meaning (from within the human by the Spirit of God), can we achieve full participation in and unity with what we perceive around us, a mature participation of true knowledge, not the blind instinctive participation of the older time. We are evolving toward this final, spiritual participation--the sanctified imagination. At the same time, we fight off the tendency to create dead perceptions of reality and call them idols.

Those who object to this prescription as an element foreign to Barfield's more religiously innocuous historical commentary would do well to consider why Barfield believes humans originally participated with the world--we and nature are both perceptions of the Divine, and therefore related.

The terms are rather hazy in the book; this isn't my discipline, and I was still trying to decipher some bedrock vocabulary by page 127 (which is a very good page and clarified some things for me, although I spent a disproportionate amount of time on it). It's a mercilessly difficult read. Barfield does crack a joke in the second chapter; see if you can find it. Otherwise, matters are a bit murky, chiefly because of his terminology, which for definition relies on an equally opaque context.

Questions which remain for me: what exactly are idols? I'll have to read the book again sometime to find out. I understand (better) how the human race has evolved in consciousness as we relate to the world around us---how does this theory apply to our social relationships with other humans (and God)?

At any rate, this metanarrative carves a tremendous amount of sense from ancient, medieval, church, Romantic, scientific, and modern worldviews, and in some ways anticipates the postmodern, although I do not think Barfield would have predicted it or considered it an evolutionary advance. Consciousness is perhaps the fundamental issue of human existence. This book, despite its difficulty, explains consciousness better than anything else I've seen (which, I admit, may not say much for my outside reading).

19 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You think a bit differently after reading this book, May 11, 2000

By 

Peter Silverman "Evanstonian" (midwest USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (Paperback)

A good work of philosophy doesn't make the reader want to argue with the author, it makes the reader want to ask more questions. If so, then this is a great book of philosophy. Even though I don't agree with all of Barfield's arguments or his conclusions, my world view is changed - on how see the nature of the scietific process; on how I read litterature, both ancient and modern; about the underlying assumptions of how I see the world and how these assumptions came to be. There are so many weak and shallow books on conciousness being being published now, read this for its depth.