Sophia Perennis Publications has just brought back into print eight books by Owen Barfield, colleague of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who has been acclaimed one of the most original minds of the 20th century; his Saving the Appearances remains a universally recognized classic. The titles newly available are:
The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays
Romanticism Comes of Age
Speaker’s Meaning
Worlds Apart
History, Guilt and Habit
Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis
Unancestral Voice
What Coleridge Thought
Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 in his hundredth year, was one of the most original minds of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot wrote of his Saving the Appearances that it was “one of the few books which made me proud to be director of the firm which published them.” C.S. Lewis wrote that “he towers above us all,” describing Barfield as “the wisest of my unofficial advisers.” But his books have won respect from many writers other than Eliot and Lewis, among them J.R.R. Tolkien, John Lukacs, and Saul Bellow. His lifelong passion was the history of meaning, which he illumined from many sides, always against the backdrop of the evolution of consciousness (he wrote that “the full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames — ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them”). He drew much inspiration from the works of the Austrian thinker Rudolf Steiner, and in his efforts to uncover the deeper significance of the Imagination as a faculty of knowledge within an evolutionary context, turned especially to the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who for him served as an exemplar of this faculty, as Goethe had done for Steiner. Barfield’s writings are full of life and insights well fit to inspire a new generation of thinkers.
Check out each of these new publications in our Amazon Store.