[Alder Ellis]

Hi Mike,

I assume you mean chapter 3, which is "Metaphor"?

Anyway, it's been a long time, but I went back & reread Ch. 3. The argument perhaps seems more convoluted than it really is. The upshot is usefully summarized in the ensuing chapter:

"We must, therefore, imagine a time when 'spiritus' or pneuma . . . meant neither breath, nor wind, nor spirit, nor yet all three of these things, but when they simply had their own peculiar meaning, which has since, in the course of the evolution of consciousness, crystallized into the three meanings specified...."

And here's from another book:

"Nonfigurative language, on the other hand, is a late arrival. What we call literal meanings, whether inner or outer, are never samples of meaning in its infancy; they are always meanings in their old age -- end products of a historical process." (Speaker's Meaning, 58-9)

The phrase to conjure with in Barfield is "evolution of consciousness." Modern rational, scientific consciousness has evolved from an earlier form of consciousness in which the subject-object ("inner or outer") polarity, so pronounced & seemingly absolute in modern consciousness, was experienced differently, less antithetically, in the mode of "participation." Subject & object participated in one another's reality. Hence the possibility of a language in which the word pneuma comprehends the meanings "breath," "wind," and "spirit" without ever being reducible to any of them. The analysis of pneuma (breath) as being employed metaphorically for pneuma (spirit) is taken to be a retrospective construction of modern rational consciousness, misconstruing archaic participation as modern rationalization. It is a persistent naivety of modern rationalistic minds to suppose that archaic minds worked the same way our modern rationalistic minds work.

One of Barfield's main targets in "Poetic Diction" is the absurdity of rationalizing histories of language, according to which language started out abjectly literal & material (monosyllabic grunts signifying sensory experiences) and evolved into abstraction by means of conscious metaphorical plays on the original sensory signifiers. No (says Barfield), language started out with no differentiation between that & that. It meant inextricably both.

Upshot: the evolution of consciousness, which begins in the undifferentiated participation of subject & object, has as its goal what Barfield calls "final participation," which is when the exile, having learned his lesson, returns home. The exile is modern rational, scientific consciousness. It's a variation of the "felix culpa" myth: we fall from grace unconsciously so that we can return to grace consciously, thereby multiplying grace.

In short, Barfield is in the prophetic tradition. He has big fish to fry. The discussion of "poetic diction" is a pretext, although by no means an arbitrary one -- essential, rather. It leads directly to the real point.

Hope this helps.