OWEN Barfield’s final work of fiction, Eager Spring (1985), appeared at a time when most of his literary activities were either devoted to reviewing texts produced by other Anthroposophists or writing introductions for them on request. More crucially, in July 1985 he made an appearance at the Bio-Dynamic Agricultural Association (BDAA) conference at Hawkwood College in Gloucestershire and spoke about the dangers of factory farming, deforestation and pollution. Barfield informed his audience that the well-meaning efforts of the BDAA and many other green and conservationist organisations, such as Friends of the Earth, would simply be in vain unless they were prepared to discard their “mental shackles” and receive “help from elsewhere”.

Whilst appreciating the contribution made by Rupert Sheldrake’s A New Science of Life (1981), which had discussed the importance of formative causation and morphogenetic fields, Barfield stressed that it is important to proceed beyond the level of theory and actually experience such matters by way of perception. Following in the footsteps of Rudolf Steiner, Barfield explained that

“habit of thought can become so deeply ingrained that it goes down into the unconscious and prevents people from seeing the obvious consequences of their conscious thought. The habit that I refer to is the assumption that nothing is real that cannot be actually or notionally perceived by the senses.”

Thus, we arrive back at the errors of Cartesianism and the separation of matter and spirit. From Barfield’s perspective, when scientists fail to account for the invisible forces behind natural phenomena they never stop to consider whether they can be attributed to the same forces at work in human consciousness. As he suggested, this imperceptible power is nonetheless physical and no different to electro-magnetic forces. The scientist will gladly concede that it amounts to a life-force, but not that it relates to what Barfield calls “mind in nature”. Indeed, it remains a fact that

“etheric forces are operative in human consciousness as in physical nature. There’s the rub. Re-thinking biology will not prevail without re-thinking the whole phenomenal world […] Science has been busy reducing biology to physics. There could be a very different marriage between the two! But only if both of them acknowledge, not merely invisible forces in nature, but mind in nature.”

Getting scientists to understand the importance of identifying the life-force with mind in nature, he believed, is a truly unenviable task and yet without doing so it is impossible to arrive at the stage whereby one conceives of oneself beyond the limitations of the body. These thoughts, inspired by Steiner’s Knowledge of the Higher Worlds (1904) and aired at the aforementioned conference, are what led Barfield to set about writing Eager Spring.

Described by Simon Laxland-de Lange as a “parable for the modern environmental movement,” Barfield’s novel opens with two university students – Leo Brook and Vi Fisher – strolling across the Sussex Downs and remarking upon the fact that the water at a local spring has completely dried up. We soon learn that iron manufacturers have been felling the trees in the area for a number of centuries, in order to fuel the huge requirements of the country’s shipbuilding industry.

Stumbling across a remote cottage surrounded by a forest of deciduous trees, the pair encounter a man called Harry Coppard and learn that he has single-handedly replenished the land after damage caused by loggers. As Coppard informs his guests:

“For centuries past, humanity has been despoiling the earth for its own purposes. But the earth was a living creature, and living creatures can die. It was time for man to start giving back to the earth as well as taking from it…”

Later in the novel, as the two students are married, we discover that Leo is a fairly dull and unadventurous archaeologist and Vi a more lively and imaginative character with a keen interest in mythology. The fact that one of her university colleagues – John Herapath – is an Anthroposophist, allows her to understand that mankind’s relationship with the earth has become toxic and this drives her away from Leo. At one point, Vi elaborates upon her newfound belief that

“the spirit first created mankind, and the earth, and then entered them. But then it retired from the natural world in order to constitute man a free autonomous being. It then became his task to give back to the Earth the spiritual life with which it had been endowed.”

Reminded of her encounter with Coppard and his little forest, Vi is determined to do something about the desecration suffered by Eager Spring and many other places. Arranging to meet with Coppard, who has now joined an environmental group known as the Earth-Lovers and managed to revive the spring, Vi is told that a new threat is looming on the horizon. Known as “biocide,” a dangerous new chemical has been used by local farms in the treatment of livestock and the Earth-Lovers have recently managed to persuade the authorities to ban it.

Despite this initial success, surplus quantities of the chemical have since been dumped at a number of secret locations and one of these turns out to be Eager Spring. Alarmed by the high levels of contamination found at the site, Coppard has a theory that much of the contaminated waste is being dumped overseas in the Third World. Meanwhile, as Vi tries to prevent the waste being transported to the docks at Southampton, some of it gets onto her clothing and she becomes seriously ill. Although the “biocide” company is eventually fined, Vi harbours few illusions about the magnitude of her struggle against the multi-nationals who are poisoning the environment throughout the world:

“It was useless. She herself and those like her were attacking a giant with a pea-shooter, an armoured giant, secure therefore against even more powerful missiles than theirs. They were dreaming that it is possible to wound the invulnerable…”

Vi decides to write a conte, or short story, and the literary endeavour takes up around one-third of Barfield’s novel. This story within a story sees Vi create a character of her own, Godfrey, who is an exploitative iron manufacturer that tries to steal the land and possessions of a young woman called Maria. Although the woman quickly disappears from the story, with the implication that she may have been murdered, Godfrey is soon confronted by a young Italian troubadour (Paolo) who wants to avenge her death.

Unable to forge the weapon that can finally rid the world of Godfrey’s pernicious influence, Paulo nonetheless kills his counterpart after being supplied with the requisite knowledge by a certain Dr. Gropewell. The latter, a well-read intellectual who has travelled extensively and familiarised himself with the traditions of St. Patrick and St. Columba, has employed the services of an elderly man by the name of “the ironmaster” – a curious allusion to Wayland the Smith of Germanic legend. This “ironmaster,” it seems, had been smelting the metal from a fallen meteorite for a number of years and it is this mysterious connection with the heavens which Barfield – through Vi Fisher – makes use of to portray Godfrey’s death as

“a cloud of smoke that positively became a dragon before it drifted westward against the prevailing wind, losing its shape as it went.”

Somehow, by conjuring up the evocative symbolism of Godfrey’s startling demise Vi avoids being overwhelmed by the oppressive forces of materialism and technocracy in all their nakedness and brutality. Despite this, even Leo begins to wake up to what is happening in the world.

Finally, at the root of Barfield’s efforts to employ such dramatic imagery at the heart of a tale about environmental destruction lies a desire to put the world to rights without having to wage battle against the perpetrators. Rather than fight fire with fire, therefore, Barfield wished to use Anthroposophical knowledge to proceed from a state of darkness into the light. That same knowledge, as Steiner himself would have agreed, is a creative response to the positivism of modernity. One neither reacts, nor submits.