Fruit and the Fall: Metaphor and Fundamentalism

Owen Barfield tells us, “The besetting sin today is the sin of literalness or idolatry…” (Saving the Appearances, 161-162)

By “sin,” Barfield means not a shame-inducing act but a mental habit of which we are guilty and for which we suffer.

By “literalness or idolatry,” Barfield means, at least in part, what academics have come to call “reification,” our ingrained tendency to mistake abstract or metaphorical words, ideas, or concepts for reality.

A prime example from the last century is the suffering inflicted on the world by our belief—perhaps now overcome, or in the process of being overcome—that “intelligence,” because we had a word and, we believed, a meaning for it, was an actual, unitary “thing” that could, because it existed, be measured, say, by an IQ test.

Another current example of literal-mindedness, it seems clear, is what in other contexts is called fundamentalism, taking a religious text as literally true. But, as Douglas Sloan has pointed out, a fundamentalist attitude does not belong to the religious alone. Atheists, scientists, economists, anthroposophists, anthroposophical critics, anyone who takes a dogmatic attitude with regard to a set of assumptions or beliefs may be called a literalist or fundamentalist.

Anyone who asserts truth without remaining open to contradiction or the possibility of being proved wrong may be called a literalist or fundamentalist. This does not mean that the claims of fundamentalists—religious, scientific, economic, anthroposophical—are wrong. They may be—and probably often are—true in any number of ways. But the assertion of truth, the close-minded, hierarchical, smug sense that one knows better than another (even if presented in the guise of open-minded, democratic, and humble discourse) AND the simultaneous assumption or assertion that the truth exists beyond any method for discovering or proving it, adds to conflict, strife, and suffering in the world. What else can fundamentalist assertions do but compete blindly and, in the end, meaninglessly?

Literalness goes even deeper than reification or fundamentalism, and the consequences are profound. Perhaps the most egregious of these is this: When we lose what we might call our “sense of metaphor,” our sense that reality stands behind our symbols (that symbols—words, concepts, works of art or technology—in and of themselves have no particular value), when we mistake symbols for reality, we cut ourselves off from creation. We suffer, again, a fall.

We eat the fruits of the tree while denying the existence of the tree that produced them. But trees need tending, and a tree that we ignore may grow in strange ways, produce strange fruit, or die.

Finally, Barfield goes beyond identifying the sin of idolatry to its consequences: “It will, I believe, be found that there is a valid connection, at some level, however deep, between what I have called literalness and a certain hardness of heart.” (He also addresses a remedy to idolatry, but that’s for another time.) The years between the time Barfield wrote this and the present—a period that saw the rise of fundamentalism in the world—demonstrate exactly this.