Meaning, Revelation and Tradition in Language and Religion

CRITICISM MEANING, REVELATION AND TRADITION IN LANGUAGE AND RELIGION / Owen Barfield P)AUL RICOEUR, in his book The Symbolism of Evil, referring to a certain sentence on which he is about to expatiate, begins: "That sentence, which enchants me. . . ." Well, there is a sentence which enchants, and has always enchanted me. In his case the sentence is "The symbol gives rise to thought." In my case it is the opening verse of St. John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." I think that "enchant" is the right verb because, if the word is hopelessly inadequate to convey the significance of that sentence to me now, I remember being curiously fascinated by it long before I was really able to attach any intelligible meaning to it, and at a time when I certainly had no intention of accepting on faith anything I couldn't understand. I happened not to have been brought up that way. Of course I was already beginning to feel the fascination of words in the ordinary sense—bits of human language—and no doubt that had much to do with it. But what connection could there possibly be between words and their history—the sort of thing that Archbishop Trench and Max Müller and M. Bréal and Logan Pearsall-Smith wrote about—and "the Word" in that fateful sentence? It is only since I started trying to arrange my thoughts on the subject of this lecture that I suddenly realized that practically all I have ever written on the subject of language and other matters connected with it could be characterized, not inaccurately, as attempts to answer that very question. The next reflection was that my best hope of imparting any sort of coherent structure to the jumble of ideas that I should be hoping to lay before you was to string them on the thread, as it were, of that underlying question. It was born in on me that that would be the best, perhaps the only way, of keeping a reasonably steady course through waters that not only run very deep, but keep ramifying into separate channels, all of which lead away from the main stream. If we ask ourselves what are the most distinctive features about the little thing we call a "word"—and it's not a question that we very often do ask ourselves—I think we shall find that the two most outstanding are these. First, a word, whether spoken or written, has a remarkable, even paradoxical, quality,—namely that it both goes out and remains where it was to start with. "Word" means, of course, not simply the ink marks on the paper or the sound in the air. There is also the meaning of the word. Without that, it would not be a word but merely ink marks or noise: And when a word is read or heard, that The Missouri Review -227 meaning goes out—goes out to another mind, or to many other minds. But all the same, this exodus does not leave the speaker or writer any poorer. He still has the meaning nestling inside him just as snugly as he had before he let it go. The second feature is already implicit in the first. In addition to the element in it that is perceptible to the senses—ink or sound— the word has a second element, inasmuch as it expresses or symbolizes, or what you will, something that is not perceptible to the senses, the something that is called its meaning. "Expresses, or symbolizes, or what you will." By putting it in that delightfully casual way, I was, of course, skimming over the surface of some of those deep waters that I have alluded to. Just this question of what exactly is meant by such terms as "symbol" and "symbolize" has attracted a great deal of attention in many different quarters, especially in the last fifty or sixty years. It has perhaps been examined most extensively in connection with literary expression, and most intensively in connection with poetry. Now, in that latter connection, you will generally find symbolism being...