What is the Meaning of “Christ in us” According to Owen Barfield?

“They will not let us help them,” Aslan explained. “They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own mind...

According to Owen Barfield, “Christ in us” is that seed of the Word sown deep in our soul that is able to grasp the Whole – and truly “understand the parable of the world.”

At the end of the parable of the sower, Jesus poignantly said,

“Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?”

Somehow Jesus ties our ability to understand ANY parable to whether we “get” the parable of the sower – not merely with our minds, but internally, in our spirit.

He says, “He who hath ears to hear, let him hear.” In other words, Logos is being sown, but it takes a certain state of consciousness to recognize it.

We get the parable of the sower – experientially, not cerebrally – when we “have eyes to see, and ears to hear.”

When we awaken and start seeing beyond mere appearances, we truly “get” the parable of the sower.

And then the whole world becomes a parable. We start “understanding any parable” when we first get the parable of the sower through our immediate experience.

It is that Seed in us that looks at the Sun and sees the heavenly Bridegroom.

It is that Seed in us that looks at trees and sees the Ents.

It is that Seed that hears the gentle murmur of a brook and hears the Music of Iluvatar.

It is that Seed that looks at people around them and sees their divine glory beyond their appearances.

C.S. Lewis’s dwarves in The Last Battle represent those “who do not have eyes to see and ears to hear.”

But not because they can’t see or hear, but because they refuse to see and hear.

Lewis writes that they refused to “be tricked” into believing that they actually were in the “new Narnia” and insisted that they were still in the stable. Aslan himself could not convince them otherwise.

“They will not let us help them,” Aslan explained. “They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own mind, yet they are in that prison, and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

In Tolkien’s Leaf by Niggle, a similar tension is heard in Tompkins’s assessment of Niggle’s art. He looks at his paintings disparagingly and says:

“Private day-dreaming. He could not have designed a telling poster to save his life. Always fiddling with leaves and flowers. I asked him why, once. He said he thought they were pretty! Can you believe it? He said pretty! ‘What, digestive and genital organs of plants?’

What Niggle saw as beauty Tompkins saw as digestive and genital organs of plants.

Why? Because of his chosen lens. Tompkins saw only what meets the eye – the mere appearance. But he didn’t see what was behind the appearance. He refused to transcend the image through imagination.

Refusal to see through the world makes the world empty and hollow, devoid of all spirituality whatsoever.

I refuse to transcend the images with imagination (properly speaking, with faith as the ability to see the invisible). I refuse to go beyond the symbol to what it symbolizes. I take a sign for the thing it points to.

By starting to worship the image, we disconnect ourselves from the invisible realm of the ultimate Meaning. By putting an image on a pedestal, we disconnect ourselves from Faerie – a land where we discover who we are.

To reverse the curse, we need to go all the way from the lost image to imagination.

And you can only do it when you intentionally change your lens from non-participation to participation.

Dead images can be resurrected.

And all we need is the Second Adam, “the Christ in us,” which is our only hope of glory.

Barfield wrote in Saving the Appearances:

In Christ we participate finally [in] the Spirit we once participated originally.