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A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, The Last Inkling, And The Evolution Of Consciousness Kindle Edition

by Mark Vernon (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 78 ratings

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Christianity is in crisis in the West. The Inkling friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, analysed why. He developed an account of our spiritual predicament that is radical and illuminating. Barfield realized that the human experience of life shifts fundamentally over periods of cultural time. Our perception of nature, the cosmos and the divine changes dramatically across history. Mark Vernon uses this startling insight to tell the inner story of 3000 years of Christianity, beginning from the earliest Biblical times. Drawing, too, on the latest scholarship and spiritual questions of our day, he presents a gripping account of how Christianity constellated a new perception of what it is to be human. For 1500 years, this sense of things informed many lives, though it fell into crisis with the Reformation, scientific revolution and Enlightenment. But the story does not stop there. Barfield realised that there is meaning in the disenchantment and alienation experienced by many people today. It is part of a process that is remaking our sense of participation in the life of nature, the cosmos and the divine. It's a new stage in the evolution of human consciousness.

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Mark Vernon's A Secret History of Christianity rescues Owen Barfield from undeserved obscurity in the shadows of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis but in the process does so much more than that. By tracking Barfield's careful attention to how words are used and what they say about the users, he lifts our eyes, expands our horizons and reintroduces imagination into our shared religious life. We are richer for reading him, and Barfield, and listening carefully to what they have to say. -- Nick Spencer, author of The Evolution of the West

About the Author

Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster, psychotherapist and former Anglican priest. He contributes regularly to programmes on the BBC, writes and reviews for the national press including the Guardian and the Church Times, as well as giving talks and leading workshops. Vernon works as a psychotherapist in private practice and has also worked at the Maudsley hospital in south London. He lives in London, UK.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07W6GFPZK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Christian Alternative (August 30, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 30, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 922 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 215 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #703,847 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #19 in Religion Literary Criticism
- #105 in Religious Literature Criticism
- #396 in Mysticism (Kindle Store)

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4.3 78 ratings

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Mark Vernon

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Mark Vernon is a writer, broadcaster, psychotherapist and former Anglican priest. He contributes to programmes on the radio, writes and reviews for newspapers and magazines, gives talks and podcasts. His books have covered themes including friendship and God, ancient Greek philosophy and wellbeing. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and other degrees in physics and in theology. For more see www.markvernon.com.

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Tim Dolan

The "Open Secret" of Christianity in flashes of illumination!

Reviewed in the United States on December 31, 2019

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For the modern thinker about the nature of Life, Beingness, Science, Meaning, Earth and Cosmos this book offers the adventure of a lifetime. Revealing the major "axial shifts" of humanity across millenia The Secret History of Christianity is giving me vital insight into the current psychological transformation that we moderns have entered into beginning about 500 years ago. Via concrete examples we can see how Human consciousness freed itself from collective enthrallment to the gods resulting in our own self awareness and subsequent alienation (which we are endlessly elaborating on presently). Thankfully this binary dillemma is giving way to a third possibility of encountering the nouminous, magical universe from the inside without compromising our individuaity. I enthusiastically recommend this book!

15 people found this helpful

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Michael Kelley

Very good exposition on Barfield and Christian anthroposophy

Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2022

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Mark Vernon is a very good writer and this book is very engaging as well as giving a great exposition on Owen Barfield's Christian faith and his anthroposophism. However, Vernon takes for granted many "higher critical" assumptions and as such, this book should not be read by someone who has not yet taken the time to engage with the flaws in higher criticism. Great book, but should only be read by the seasoned Christian.

4 people found this helpful

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John H. Beck

Find new meaning in Christianity and all religions

Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2019

As someone who often attends Anglican/Episcopal services in Los Angeles, has read all of Barfield and gone on to Coleridge (the immense philosopher known almost entirely now as just a poet), and works with the great initiatives of Rudolf Steiner, I find this a very helpful book for the thoughtful Christian or student of religions.

One hundred and fifty years ago in the USA religion still spoke deeply into the minds and hearts of most people, including the best educated. Now it has little intellectual respect and is being abused by political power seekers and other charlatans. Like the other great religions it changed humanity profoundly. Why? How? This book will help you understand that a "reframing" or new perspective on Christianity for our times can bring it back to the forefront of all the most important questions -- including human evolution and our post-AI future. Serious Christians should want that.

At the same time this book is complicit in the concealment of the greatest thinker of the last thousand years, the consciousness scientist Rudolf Steiner. Barfield reached his own insights independently, but spent his adult life engaged with Steiner's work, of which Christology is a central part, beginning with "Christianity as Mystical Fact" which shows the deepest relationship between Christianity and the ancient mysteries that preceded it everywhere, and going on to lecture cycles on each of the gospels.

So read Mark Vernon's book first, and Barfield, and Coleridge (and Emerson), but note that while Steiner's name doesn't appear in this book, you may want to go on to his wider and deeper waters.

33 people found this helpful

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Daniel

Great

Reviewed in the United States on August 30, 2019

I was given a free ARC of this book for tablet, but bought a copy anyway. The author deserves his part of the money, and I want a hardcopy of the material of which I have a respect for. If not a belief in.

6 people found this helpful

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Stephen N. Greenleaf

No-So-Secret But Worthwhile History of Christianity via Barfield

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2019

I came to this book through the back door; that is, it was not the “Secret History of Christianity” that grabbed me (not a unique title), but the subtitle “the Last Inkling and the Evolution of Consciousness.” This phrase no doubt referred to Owen Barfield and his line of thought about the evolution of consciousness. Barfield has been on my radar for years as I’ve sought to become more familiar with his deep insights. While Barfield is a lucid writer, his thought dives deep and sometimes can leave the reader adrift. And unlike his more famous Inkling companions C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Barfield never reached great numbers with his works (which only included a relatively small amount of fiction and poetry). So, I thought, perhaps this work would reveal more about Barfield’s project to me.

Alas, it did not. After an initial cursory introduction to Barfield’s key notion of “original participation” followed by “withdrawal participation” and “reciprocal participation,” and a nod to French anthropologist Lucien Levy-Bruehl about his idea of “participation mystique,” Vernon plunges directly into a history of the Hebrew Bible through the lens of the concept of “participation.” From that starting point, he moves on into a review of ancient Greek culture through the same lens. In both traditions, the earlier manifestations of those cultures were marked by “original participation” with the world around them. As Vernon describes it, the phenomena refer “to the felt experience of participating in life. Original participation dominates when there is little distinction between what’s felt to be inside someone and what’s outside because the boundaries of individual self - consciousness, which today we take for granted, are not in place.” (p. 3; loc. 264.) Or as Barfield describes it: “Early man did not observe nature in our detached way . . . . He participated mentally and physically in her inner and outer processes.” (p. 3; loc. 269.) Vernon proceeds to take the reader through a brief history of the Hebrew Bible to illustrate this phenomenon and the eventual shift away from a consciousness marked by original participation to one of “withdrawal participation,” which is marked by a shift away from immersion in the surrounding world into a greater sense of individuality. As Vernon describes it, “An awareness of separation, even isolation, is felt. A person will begin to sense that they have an inner life that is, relatively speaking, their own. (p. 3; loc. 273.)

After completing his brief but illuminating history of the Hebrew Bible, Vernon moves across the street, as it were, and does the same with ancient Greek culture, displaying the same dynamic at work. Like the Hebrew prophets, the emerging Greek philosophers (culminating in Socrates) promote a greater sense of individuality and individual agency. The world of Achilles in the Illiad is significantly different from that of Socrates. As Vernon points out, another way to look at this shift is to discern a growing sense of individuality and use of introspection by individuals.

With the advent of the Hellenistic Age in the wake of Alexander the Great and his successors, these two lines of thought—Hebrew and Greek—begin to encounter one another and interact. Out of this mixture arises the life of Jesus and the coming of Christianity. It’s at this point that I must quibble about the first part of the title of this book, “the Secret History of Christianity.” What Vernon writes about in this section and the sources he draws upon is not Dan Brown material. Rather, the sources that Vernon draws upon are neither secret nor very unorthodox. (Although he does cite the Gospel of Thomas, which is outside of the sanctioned Scriptures, but that’s about as far out of the mainstream that he goes.) Vernon’s portrait of Jesus draws upon the Four Evangelists and Paul to demonstrate that Jesus was taking his followers deeper into the interior life. Vernon demonstrates his argument with quotations from the Gospels and Paul that should prove familiar to any reader. He emphasizes the message of interiority preached by Jesus and the desire of Jesus to prompt a metanoia—a change of mind (or heart-mind, as I’m persuaded may prove a more adept translation). Vernon argues that Jesus didn’t intend to set down new sets of rules to follow, but instead, he intended to change our awareness; to find the root of our conduct on the inside. (I can’t help but recall the scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the supposed messiah (Brian) loses a sandal while attempting to flee the crowd and the crowd takes this as a directive to shed their sandals--or something. Ah, literalism.) In short, Vernon provides a convincing and attractive portrait of Jesus that comports with Barfield’s theory of “participation” and that comports with sound Biblical scholarship. Sorry, no lost gospels or secret societies here.

Vernon continues his tour of Christian culture and belief through the early Church on to Augustine, whose interiority further expands this Christian insight and who develops the idea of the will to better understand an individual’s volition. Vernon follows this path continuing up through the Renaissance, which—contra Burkhardt—Vernon argues does not provide a definitive break with medieval culture and belief. But the Reformation, which follows upon the Renaissance and does alter the course of the evolution of consciousness. The Reformation, in the words and works of Luther and Calvin and their followers, placed a significantly increased emphasis on the individual’s conscience. The Reformation, along with the Scientific Revolution, altered the ways that individuals saw themselves and their world. The advent of the printing press, like the advent of literacy and private reading in earlier times, greatly facilitated (or perhaps more it’s more accurate to say, helped cause) this change in consciousness. Humanity became more aware of how to manipulate the world around it and gained an increased sense of individual agency. But these gains came at the cost of losing much (and in some cases all) of the sense of belonging to the cosmos that had survived through the Renaissance. Christianity, as a result, tended more toward literalism and faith as belief rather than trust. This trend has continued up through the present, but Vernon identifies signs that humanity may be ready to move into a mode of “reciprocal participation.”

Vernon identifies “imagination” as the key to reaching a state of reciprocal participation. In this argument, Vernon echoes many of the themes that Gary Lachman identified in his 2017 publication, Lost Knowledge of the Imagination. As both authors note, imagination is not another word for fantasy; both authors draw upon Samuel Taylor Coleridge for guidance in describing the role and function of imagination and its distinction from what Coleridge labeled as “fantasy.” Also, Vernon discusses the body of poetic and visual works of William Blake as a master of an informed imagination.

Thus, while I didn’t experience an in-depth dive into Barfield’s thought (although Barfield’s work does resurface prominently toward the end of the book), I did receive a persuasive application of how Barfield’s perspective can apply to the history of Western Christianity. An for those who want a helpful introduction of Barfield’s project, one can turn to Gary Lachman, who refers to Barfield frequently, and at depth in his works ASecret History of Consciousness and Caretakers of the Cosmos. And as to having a not-so-secret history of Christianity added to the piles of books written about the history of Christianity, Vernon’s effort is worthwhile. The fact the sources that Vernon draws upon are not occult doesn’t mean that the project isn’t valuable; it is. While not secret, his understanding of Christianity is not widespread so far as I can discern. The description that he provides is one that could prove useful as we go forward to meet the challenges ahead. He hopes to see Christianity (along with other wisdom traditions) bridge the gap between our alienation from the world around us (and ourselves) and the gifts that individuality and science have brought to us. This is a noble and vital enterprise, and one that deserves our thanks—and our reading time.

36 people found this helpful

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Cass

What a Waste of Time & Money

Reviewed in the United States on July 29, 2021

Bart D. Ehrman writes better, goes deeper, and says more. Read Dr. Ehrman's work if this topic interests you, Mark Vernon is a disappointment.

2 people found this helpful

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Ms Rebecca King

Powerful little book, alive with the potential of human spirit through ages and now

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 14, 2019

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Really enjoying reading this beautifully written book, with super turns of phrase and great facts. Explores new ways of understanding the experience of faith and enlightenment by taking time to detail mindsets and experiences from ancient history to present day. Enjoying Mark Vernon's podcasts too.

5 people found this helpful

DC Ryan

The least known but perhaps most important Inkling!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2021

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Owen Barfield was a friend and associate of Oxford's Inklings group of writers and thinkers, who include the far more well-known JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, but arguably Barfield's ideas are more far-reaching and of greater import than the latter two authors. Taking a long duree view of the history and development of human spirituality and religion, Barfield persuasively demonstrates (admittedly from his own unashamed Christian respective) that the events in Judea c. 33AD were a pivotal moment for all humankind. Non-Christians too will have something to gain from this thoughtful work, wherein Barfield speaks of several transformations of consciousness that took place in the millennia before Christ; the development of personal responsibility and a sense of the self as individual being that arose in 7th century BC Greece, at the same period when the Israelite people were being held captive in Babylon, and spoke through their prophets - and also, strangely, the revolutionary teachings of the Gautama Buddha in India around the same time. Readable and not laden with academese double-talk, yet an erudite and deep-thinking work.

3 people found this helpful

chris brown

Review

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 16, 2021

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Great book which I enjoyed and excellent service.

2 people found this helpful

David C

A glass half full

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 23, 2019

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The evolution of human consciousness and Christianity is an interesting subject for a book, but it is surprising to read such a book that makes no reference to Rudolf Steiner, especially when its author acknowledges Owen Barfield as a key inspiration. For Barfield freely acknowledged himself his immense debt to Steiner in the development of his thinking, especially concerning the evolution of consciousness, which itself constitutes such a central element in Steiner’s own thought.
Some people may find difficult Steiner’s epistemology or concept of mind, his spiritual ontology anthropology and psychology, and his account of the grand sweep of the history of human consciousness. But the English-speaking world is fortunate in having an interpreter of Rudolf Steiner in Owen Barfield, much as Coleridge, earlier, had served the English mind easier access to German Romanticism. Barfield presents the main lines of Steiner’s cogent and systematic account of the evolution of human consciousness and its teleology in an English accent, if not in its fullest Germanic thoroughness and detail.
Mark Vernon gives a good, though simplified account of part of this evolution in the excellent first five chapters of his book, particularly when discussing the evolution of the individual in the Jewish Biblical account, and in a parallel discussion of Greek philosophy, and he is sound on both subjects, and particularly interesting when he shows too how they interact. His inspiration in this approach, says Vernon, was provided by Barfield’s concept of humanity’s original ‘participatory’ consciousness - which fades under the shadow of man’s growing earthly, rather than cosmic, self-consciousness, and of his growing individualism.
The insights of Barfield and Steiner might have helped Vernon further in a discussion of the earlier mysteries and Mystery Schools in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia and elsewhere, which constitute an important part of this developing story, but which are not included in his historical account. Their insights might too have helped him also in explaining how thought occurs, and in what it consists, an increasingly important question in this subject, as we approach Christianity and then move into the modern age.
For unfortunately, Vernon’s great narrative strength fades from chapter six onwards, and the rest of the book is reduced from reasoned argument to mere illustration and an appeal for a more poetic and mystical approach to life, to complement our scientific naturalism or scientism - a common cry!
We may agree with the author that the Church of England could profit from a greater sense of immanent spiritual vitality and from fresh thinking, but mysticism is subjective and solipsistic and an appeal to mysticism, however contemporary, will never supply fresh thinking.
The grounded and critical objective Spiritual Science (or ‘anthroposophy’) of Barfield and Steiner, however, does supply fresh thinking and, most crucially, provides that vital bridge, for which our age now calls, between subjective mysticism and objective science.
Only briefly and in passing does Vernon touch upon the subject of spiritual exercises: these are something which Barfield and Steiner regarded as essential for the attainment of this new participatory higher consciousness connected with the imagination and beyond, and in practicing these exercises we need to participate, rather than just to observe, in an effort of will.
Such exercises, of a specific kind, are indeed a necessary element, according to Spiritual Science, towards the achievement of final participation, paradise regained, as explained at great length in the works of Rudolf Steiner. Higher sense-free, or body-free consciousness, can develop from imagination, through to inspiration, and then on to intuition.

In the epistemology of Steiner, as in Kant’s, perception consists in our concept or thinking meeting the percept, what our senses perceive, and thus identifying meaning in it for us. Kant famously struggles however with the limitations of our senses, which according to him give us only an ‘appearance’ of an object, not direct perception of the object itself, the ‘thing-in-itself’. Kant could not accept that thoughts are out there in the world and not just in in human minds, and Kant thus makes complicated something that others, such as Aristotle for example, saw as quite straightforward. Nor is this a problem for Steiner.
For Steiner our original participation, by which we knew the inwardness of things directly, is compromised by the effect of our growing and evolving self-consciousness, which entails a growing separation between our self and the world. Things in their entirety -in their inner and outer aspects combined - are such that we necessarily limit our original perception in order to become self-conscious, this is the inevitable trade-off, so that the effect of this self-consciousness is to obscure from our sight some part of what is out there in the real world. Hence the limit to our perceptions. We have an intimation of this in the perception we had as a child, which begins to fade as we reach self-consciousness and say ‘I’. This obscured element, which comprises thinking, we therefore need to re-provide from ourselves, as a concept or thinking, in order to perceive. We re-provide to the outer world that same thing we took away from it in the first place, thinking, and thus make it whole. Thinking is common to both us and the created outer world, but by laying claim to our self-consciousness we obscure from our sight that thought-related part of the outer world that is indeed a rightful part of it. To express this in another way, the intensity of our self-consciousness drowns out what quietly lies out there. This understanding of thinking and perceiving transcends and resolves Kant’s problem, and with this are resolved German Idealism’s problem concerning subjectivity and objectivity, and philosophy’s body-mind problem. It is for such insight that Steiner has been called ‘the twentieth century’s best-kept secret’.
We perceive the world aright by contributing concept to raw sense data, but all this while our perception remains tied by the senses to our body and the world. But we can however also develop further our own sense-free perception through thought exercises, and become able to see and experience the world, the cosmos and ourselves unrestricted by our bodily senses; and we are able to develop and mature this experience through so-called imagination, inspiration and then intuition, witnessing respectively in imagination a simultaneous time-free two dimensional tableau of our entire life, as known in near-death experience and near-drowning, then in inspiration actually experiencing this in the context of past lives, not merely observing it, and then in intuition finally experiencing the fuller context of this in the living cosmos. An important aspect of these exercises involves our quietening, reducing and putting aside that powerful modern self-consciousness which has prevented original participation. We must also remove the perspectives of ego, passion and subjectivity that prevent us from seeing things as they really are, even to the extent of approaching a nearly God-like perspective.
These are the possibilities of disciplined body-free knowledge and experience, that take us far beyond contemporary mundane sense-bound thinking and experience. Barfield and Steiner offer a cogent and intelligible account of the teleology of both original and final participatory consciousness and experience. It should be added that our efforts to accelerate this process require dedication, hard work and patience, as well as moral development, if we wish to bring on this higher knowledge, which is a renewed and, most importantly a conscious, participation.
Although this is only a thumb-nail sketch, it is not difficult to understand the principles of such knowledge. There is much greater depth, as you can imagine, to their fascinating story but such are the main lines that Barfield and Steiner would propose in explaining the evolution of human consciousness, a subject that Vernon partially covers in his first five chapters. Applying such ideas to Vernon’s later chapters and to more modern times, would furnish his later material concerning the evolution of consciousness with useful direction and coherence.
It is interesting to follow the evolution of human consciousness from both sides, both that of the known and that of the knower: on the one hand the development of what and how we know, and on the other hand how our self-consciousness, soul, ego, or personhood, develops in us as knowers into an ever-richer identity as this evolution proceeds.
The nexus which connects self-consciousness, materialism and the possibility of freedom on this our planetary home, entails also the restriction of man’s earlier cosmic sense of reality, restricting it to a reality contained in this non-cosmic, merely sub-lunar sphere. Materialism, for a time at least, is the price we pay for individual freedom. It is from this restriction that a cosmic Christianity, such as perhaps Vernon seeks, potentially redeems us.
As Steiner remarks: ‘Christianity itself is shocking – God became man. Man must accept greatness or perish. Greatness involves, first of all perhaps, all kinds of creative activity: free moral decisions and intellectual and artistic accomplishments of supreme value. Man’s faith involves co-creation of a spiritual universe. For courage one must eradicate from the soul all fear of what comes to meet us from the future. We must look forward with absolute equanimity to whatever comes and we must think only that whatever comes is given us by a world-direction full of wisdom. It is part of what we must learn in this age, namely to act out of pure trust in the ever-present help of the spiritual worlds. Truly nothing else will do if our courage is not to fail us. Let us discipline our will and let us seek the re-awakening from within ourselves every morning and every evening.’
In brief, then, Spiritual Science can be the overarching bridge across, that transcends the limitations of both mysticism and natural science; and to attain to a higher participatory consciousness involves doing and effort. A cosmic Christianity is a part of this.
Clearly Vernon is straining in the same direction that Steiner and Barfield took, in a worldview that is internally consistent and has strong explanatory power, and importantly he is working it out, with great courage, for himself.

A fuller picture perhaps than Vernon’s concerning the evolution of human consciousness is given in ‘Renewing Christianity - Rudolf Steiner’s ideas in practice’ by James Hindes (Floris Books 1995).
Hindes carefully outlines an evolution of human consciousness that today leads us onto a new dynamic Christian path and towards the attainment of deep spiritual knowledge - neither vague faith nor the dogmatic assurances of others - and its practical application to life. With this knowledge one has one’s own inner certainty and this is a path of becoming, not just of resting in being. We read in the book’s final chapter, ‘Religion and the Future of the Earth’:
‘In response to requests, Steiner held a series of lectures in June and October of 1921 in which he presented the fundamentals of how a Christian Church could function in the modern age…Recognising the inadequacies of modern theology and the plight of institutional Christianity, a number of young ‘anthroposophists’ approached Steiner with the question whether he regarded an independent movement for the renewal of religion desirable or necessary…Led by Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a well-known pastor and author in the German Lutheran Church, forty-five mostly young men and women (it was clear to all from the beginning that women would participate fully as priests) founded the priesthood of the Christian Community, a Movement for Religious Renewal, in 1922 in Dornach in Switzerland. The founders had heard Steiner describe the sacraments and their sevenfold aspect. He also discussed the essentials of a renewed theology, of a deepened and enriched pastoral care and community life. His listeners were astonished by his knowledge of theology and its history, by the masterly handling of even the most practical aspects of congregational life. Complete freedom of thought as well as belief in the full cosmic reality of the sacraments were united in this movement.’
Steiner had always set himself to put mysticism on a scientific basis, as his autobiography recounts:
‘I felt duty bound at that time to seek for the truth in philosophy. I had to study mathematics and natural science. I was convinced that I should find no relation with them unless I could place their findings upon a solid foundation of philosophy. But I beheld a spiritual world as a reality. In perfectly clear vision the spiritual individuality of everyone was manifest to me.’
As a result of this quest, Hindes’s book concludes:
‘Knowing the aims of God and his angelic hosts, knowing how they plan to achieve those goals enables us to work with them. This knowing became possible because of Steiner’s method of approach to esoteric knowledge. As we have seen it was a method founded essentially on the traditions of philosophic idealism of Middle Europe. In his hands this tradition made possible a genuine integration of the scientific spirit of the West and the world of the spirit realized when humanity crosses the threshold into the realms of mystical and occult experience. Only such an integration makes it possible for us to approach the hidden spiritual world without losing the greatest achievement of the West: the inner spiritual freedom that goes with clear independent thinking. Christianity and Christian love will ultimately only survive and thrive on the earth to the extent that this inner spiritual freedom and clear, independent thinking becomes a part of our human being.’
Barfield and Steiner offer a ‘secret history of Christianity’ and an ‘evolution of human consciousness’ that attempt to plumb the depths of the subject and embrace its full historical scope; and they have furthermore translated such insights into action. It is interesting that through his own independent research Mark Vernon is able to acknowledge Barfield’s work and makes a start in the same extraordinary direction.

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