Barfield: Under the Radar
I just happened to think to check Facebook for an Owen Barfield group, and sure enough, there is an account in his name. I'm not going to supply a link, because the knucklehead who created it had his/her tongue in cheek, I think, or they are just an idiot. Anyway, there were several comments posted by 'fans' of Owen Barfield (this is the lingo of Facebook), one of which mentioned the modesty of Barfield's presentation of revolutionary ideas in Saving the Appearances. The commenter mentioned that most people aren't too comfortable with the chapters in SA about Steiner and Christianity. I suspect that he's right.
I wonder if the overall effect of Barfield's stylistic modesty, the advocacy of Steiner's work, and the language of Christian theology, have worked to almost completely hide the revolutionary ideas? When I was working on my master's thesis in Philosophy, the subject of which was Saving the Appearances, one of my committee members asked how Barfield's thought was anything more than perceptual psychology. This man was a diehard pragmatist, and was a student of Richard Rorty, so I'm not surprised, now, that he was quite blind to the deep historical aspects and implications of the man's thought. But that's no excuse: he was a philosophy professor! And still, it suggests that Barfield's work flies under the radar even with philosophically minded folks (I can't say that this committee member was a philosophically minded reader of Barfield, because I can't say that he ever read Barfield).
Another professor in that department, in a meeting in which I was appealing my dismissal from the program (they didn't like my thesis work), stated, in a way that he seemed to think was conclusively damning to my appeal, 'You came into this program a Barfieldian, and you're leaving a Barfieldian.' His point was that I was un-self-critical.
Something I've noticed about almost every synopsis of Barfield's work I've read that was written by someone who stated their sympathy with his work, is that they all same almost the exact same things. Almost the exact same phrasing. What that suggests to me is that those of us who study and try to explicate Barfield's work haven't yet broken the code - we haven't yet been able to really translate Barfield's revolutionary ideas into our own words. He's still flying under the radar.
Comments
Regarding the lacking concepts of a fall and of a Christ: you are mistaken on both counts. They are simply not explicated in traditional Christian terms.
That doesn't mean, though, that Barfield really did hold traditional Christian beliefs about both - I don't think he did. In any case, he certainly doesn't explicate such traditional beliefs in anything of his that I've read.
Barfield's signal contributions are different entirely - he wasn't a Christian theologian. If you're interested in not only understanding, but perhaps even experiencing, that semantic unity - that is, consciousness correlative to semantic unity - then Barfield's the way to go.