Belief in Thinking: Owen Barfield and Michael Polanyi

Abstract

Owen Barfield is a literary critic in the Romantic tradition, who looks to the history of science, especially to the crucial period of the seventeenth century, for clarification of the relationship between poetry and religious belief in his own time. Michael Polanyi is a scientist who looks to the language of religious faith to help illuminate the function of science in an open society, which he sees beginning in the seventeenth century and which he wishes to defend in the twentieth. The theories of both men meet and overlap on the questions of imagination and the place of art in society. Polanyi contends that appreciating the structure of a work of art can help us to acknowledge the importance of similar principles in procedures of scientific investigation. Barfield sees the poem as a structure wherein forgotten original meanings are made conscious by the yoking of incompatibles as metaphor, and argues that the nature of metaphor in modern literature is deeply influenced by the scientific revolution. From divergent starting points in fields in which they are distinguished, both men find themselves concerned with science in relation to religious belief, and both find in the activity of imagination the paradox of faith within which man as scientist and artist is constrained to operate.