If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? If you answer with a resounding “No!” then Barfield is your man. In fact, his first chapter is a restatement of this very cliche: he asserts that a rainbow only “exists” if it is being perceived by a conscious being.

He goes on to develop his idea of the evolution of consciousness, which goes something like this:

1. “reality” (whatever that is…) must be perceived in some way by a consciousness (when it is not, he calls it the “unrepresented” and, like Wittgenstein, passes over it in silence)

2. therefore, reality depends (partly?) on our consciousness (we create “representations” and “appearances” in our mind)

3. when we recognize this, we “participate”; when we don’t, the appearances become “idols”

4. history is the story of man “originally participating,” but over time his appearances become idols as he strengthens the me/other divide of what he perceives (his evidence, such as it is, is covered more fully in his prior two books History in English Words and Poetic Diction)

5. we need to recover this awareness of the connection of our consciousness to creating reality and participate again in full awareness (“final participation”)

6. Christ’s incarnation is a special event which heralds this transition

If you think the above is a clever bit of psychologizing but seriously flawed as a metaphysical theory, well Barfield says that’s just because you are an idolator. You are in thrall to the idols of the scientific revolution, which has destroyed participation altogether and offered nothing in return.

Barfield claims at the outset that “this is not a book about metaphysics” and then goes on to base his entire thesis on a dodgy metaphysics, having disposed himself of the necessity to justify his metaphysical assumptions. Let us grant him his entire system without the underlying metaphysics. Now ask, “why is participation better? What if a falling tree rainbow does make a sound sight?” In that case, non-participation is entirely valid, possibly superior.

There is a lot more I could critique (especially his attacks on science), but I will leave that for another day. I’ve already made some relevant points in my reviews of Poetic Diction and CSL’s The Discarded Image (the latter cites this book).

Nevertheless, this is a fascinating, challenging and stimulating book. Highly recommended for Inklings fans, theology nerds, and Christians duped by Deepak Chopra.

You know how Atlas Shrugged is basically an excuse to write the long-ass philosophical speeches by d’Anconia and Galt? That’s rather the case here. I think Lewis does a good job of imagining how the temptation of Eve might’ve actually gone down if, you know, it had actually ever happened, which it did not.

A friend of mine considers the Space Trilogy in the tradition of Verne/Wells-style sci-fi and I think he is certainly right. Still, I feel vaguely uneasy about using the word ‘science’ to describe them because they are based so fundamentally on Lewis’ religion as to be almost un-science-fiction.

Having already read the two Charles Williams books that bracket Many Dimensions chronologically – War in Heaven and The Place of the Lion – I can see how this book sits along a continuum between them in terms of their ideas and the quality of the writing. As such, I rate Dimensions as a solid 3.5 stars. The Stone of Suleiman is a more coherent plot device than his Graal but still suffers from some consistency problems due to its physical nature that Williams’ avoids entirely in Lion by discarding the notion of a holy object altogether.

Many Dimensions is a misleading title. Despite a few musings about what is now known as the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, this novel isn’t about many dimensions at all. Instead, it is concerned with the four dimensions we all are aware of–space and time–and what the Law (capital L) that governs them is truly like. We might refer to this as the “Law of Nature,” but (for reasons I will discuss below) Williams prefers the term “Organic Law.” What exactly he means by this is often unclear, but it quickly transcends the legal context in which it is introduced (a main character is a judge who is writing a book on the evolution of human law over time) to apply to the metaphysical questions raised by the Stone.

Organic Law and the Stone

Here’s what we can glean from the text about Organic Law:

“[L]aw as a growing and developing habit of the human mind, with its corollary of the distinction between organic consciousness expressed in law and inorganic rules imposed from without” (42).

“[H]e defined law provisionally as ‘the formal expression of communal self-knowledge’ and had an excursus comparing the variations in law with the variations in poetic diction from age to age” (152)

“Arglay said […] the law of cause and effect isn’t really understood. Since whatever you do is bound to be justified, justification is produced.” (153)

[citing Bracton] “where the will rules and not the law is no king” (214) … “What did you do if you had decided to believe in God? […] you gave up your will to His.” (215)

[describing Arglay’s work] “attempting to formulate once more by the intellect the actions of men” (254)

The idea of legal norms being determined by the “poetic diction” of their age is a notion that appears to be borrowed from Owen Barfield’s books History in English Words and Poetic Diction. Both were published prior to Dimensions (1926 and 1928 respectively) and also introduce some of Barfield’s ideas about the evolution of consciousness that are fully fleshed out in his later work Saving the Appearances (1957). (I have only read History so far and so my understanding of Barfield’s later ideas may be incomplete or inaccurate.) In History, Barfield argues that the transition from organic to inorganic (ie. derived from consciousness or not) can be seen in the language used to describe the concept of the “laws of Nature.”

The ‘laws of Nature’ were conceived of by those who first spoke of them as present commands of God. It is noticeable that we still speak of Nature ‘obeying’ these laws, though we really think of them now rather as abstract principles–logical deductions of our own which we have arrived at by observation and experiment. (148-149)

For Barfield, this idea began as an organic one–the laws sprung from God’s will–and even the modern “inorganic” version is nevertheless an organic product of modern human minds. Barfield’s formulation begs the question: which is the cause and which is the effect? Did inorganic physical laws give rise to consciousness or does organic consciousness give rise to inorganic physical laws?

Regardless of whether the borrowing is intentional or accidental, Williams beats Barfield to the punchline with this book. In the world of Many Dimensions, the existence of the Stone demonstrates that consciousness governs Nature. The Stone itself contradicts physical law and these powers can be controlled by the will of its possessor. It is also shown to have a will of its own to which the truly pious should fully submit themselves.

Organic Law and Economics

As a formulation of “the actions of men” Organic Law is also an attempt at economics–the discipline that economist Ludwig von Mises called a science of human action. In this light, the idea that economic law changes over time depending on the varying self-knowledge of the human participants is a Marxist view that Mises rejected as incoherent. Mises argued that the premise that man employs means to the fulfillment of definite ends within the constraints of finite resources remains true.

However, Williams’ world contains the Stone of Suleimann–a source of infinite means. In Misesian terms it cannot be an economic good because it is not scarce: the Stone can be infinitely replicated. Nevertheless, all the business men in Williams’ story fail to realize these economic implications. (Perhaps they are all Keynesians!) The most foolish (Montague) expect to turn the Stone into a commodity to be sold. The less foolish (Sheldrake, et al) yet persist in thinking its use could be limited. The Stone is the ultimate example of Shumpeter’s creative destruction. It threatens not only to overturn the economic status quo as Sheldrake fears, but economics itself. A world in which everyone possesses a Stone has no limits of space or time or subjective valuation (since everyone can read minds) or possibly even material resources (it is unclear how much control over inanimate matter one has). Williams invites us to imagine a world in which human action would become impossible if Barfield’s premises are correct, but fails to conclude that they must therefore be wrong. Instead, Williams prefers the ridiculous scenario of a material world governed by consciousness that requires an abject disavowal of one’s consciousness. This conclusion would be enough to make me think that Williams was not intending to comment on economics if not for the disproportionate amount of time he spends discussing the economic implications of the Stone’s use.

I have to conclude that Williams simply had an overly narrow view of economic thought as greedy and materialistic. To be fair, many people think this. Sadly this is wrong. Economics is built on voluntary trade for mutual benefit and there is only one character who understands this: the Mayor of Rich. Knowing the healing powers of the Stone (which make no sense, by the way) which can be used without diminishing anyone in the process, he sees the moral imperative to use it to heal people. Williams tries to claim this use is morally equivalent to creative destruction but this is false; an unemployed union truck driver can find a new job in a non-travel industry if the Stone proliferates, but a blind man has no recourse to sight otherwise. Furthermore, any physical damage done by the creative destruction wrought by the Stone could immediately be healed by the Stone. Williams offers no cogent defense for denying the Stone to people it could heal. That is simply not something the “good guys” are the slightest bit concerned about. They are too busy worrying over the supposed blasphemy of dividing a Unity which upon division remains a Unity regardless to care about cancer patients. The only answer for the suffering that Williams has is that they should just resign themselves to being screwed over by the Unity. It is 1,000x more obscene to hoard the means to alleviate suffering on the grounds of piety.

As an ironic demonstration of why Barfieldian ideas and their theological implications are an attractive just-so story that is nevertheless wrong, this book really nails it. Unfortunately though, Williams is deadly serious.

Sorina over at The Oddest Inkling tweeted a link to a great review of Charles Williams’ Witchcraft over at the Vintage Novels blog. I read and reviewed the book in May, but Vintage Novels’ review prompted me to further explain my reaction to the book which I’ve copied here for my own future reference.

I read Witchcraft back in May and while I appreciated Williams’ treatment of the subject, I found the case made for the existence of a continuous, coherent occult tradition extremely flimsy.

The early section on pre-Christian paganism and folk belief was solid as were the historically late sections on de Rais and La Voisin, but the threads connecting these are extremely tenuous and better explained as pious inventions that were emulated by psychopaths and hucksters rather than the other way around.

I found Williams’ credulity eye-rolling and ironic because it is the same credulity that the pious had throughout the period Williams discusses. That credulity imagined into existence the very thing it wanted to not exist–not just in the figures of one or two actual moral monsters like de Rais who took inspiration for their crimes from the lore built up over the centuries by believers, but in the undisputed fact that the vast majority of moral monsters documented in this book were people who killed and tortured in the name of anti-witchcraft belief.

While the comparison with modern witchhunts regarding sexual abuse is an apt one, it should be noted that the existence of deviant sexual behavior does not require an elaborate occult religious tradition (what Williams calls Goetia), the evidence for which is effectively non-existent. What is documented here is a religious tradition that builds up an elaborate occult mythology over time through legitimized trumped-up accusations and theological speculations. It is a bizarre reaction to remain credulous while reading case after case of people getting tortured and killed over extremely unlikely witchcraft practice only to get to de Rais hundreds of years later and point and shout “See! It IS real!”

It is not clear that witchcraft was a “great evil” that the Church had to address, although I concur that the Church did indeed make “grievous mistakes.” Among those mistakes is inadvertently inventing witchcraft and killing a whole lot of people over it. And it didn’t stop at Salem as Williams does–many lives were ruined in the 1980s and 90s “satanic ritual abuse” moral panic.

I quite enjoyed reading this little collection of early poems, although the poetry is merely decent bordering on bad. For instance, he uses the forced “the XXX green” (where XXX is a noun of something from Nature) about 10 times to end a rhyming line. Here’s the most cringe-worthy abuse of syntax: “His eyes stared into the eyes of me / And he kissed my hands of his courtesy.” The eyes of me, LOL.

There are some good passages though too. Here’s my favorite:

I lost my way in the pale starlight
And saw our planet, far and small,
Through endless depths of nothing fall
A lonely pin-prick spark of light,
Upon the wide, enfolding night,
With leagues on leagues of stars above it,
And powdered dust of stars below–

I like this passage because it reminds me to take CSL’s atheism at his word. CSL addresses God so many times in this work that one begins to suspect that he’s more theist than he cares to admit to himself. If you don’t believe God exists, then you shouldn’t be mad at him for being evil and cruel because he can’t be evil or cruel if he is non-existent. My interpretation is that at this stage of his life he is atheist intellectually, but theist emotionally. It doesn’t make sense otherwise. Nevertheless, it would be uncharitable to simply dismiss the young CSL as “not a real atheist,” as much as I would like to based on many of the confused ideas herein.

That’s the weirdest thing about this whole collection. It is coming on the heels of the horrors of the Great War, and yet Lewis blames a non-existent God for the cruel world rather than the humans who have demonstrably screwed it up. Likewise, he ascribes Beauty and value to “the escape” of his mythological contemplations but does not thereby acknowledge that this too is from Man if his premise of atheism is correct. If the young Lewis was confused about theism he was equally confused about atheism.

This collection is very much worth reading for Inklings fans. It provides first-hand insight into the musings of the atheist C.S. Lewis and the three-stage argument of the lyric cycle–from The Prison House of materialism to The Escape of faerie–is a fascinating early glimpse at the more mature ideas of the Inklings crew.

The ancient songs they wither as the grass
And waste as doth a garment waxen old,
All poets have been fools who thought to mould
A monument more durable than brass.

Archive.org has a scan of the book. You can find various HTML or ebook editions online, but the poetry formatting is generally crap.