The World is a Stage

Before the scientific revolution the world was more like a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved. To such a world the convention of perspective was unnecessary. To such a world other conventions of visual reproduction, such as the nimbus and the halo, were as appropriate as to ours they are not. It was as if the observers were themselves in the picture. Compared with us, they felt themselves and the objects around them and the words that expressed those objects, immersed together in something like a clear lake of – what shall we say? – of ‘meaning,’ if you choose. It seems the most adequate word. Aquinas’s verbum intellectus was tanquam speculum, in quo res cernitur—‘like a mirror in which the object is discerned.’

Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 2nd edn (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988; 1957), pp. 94-95.