A. C. Harwood

A. C. Harwood is an Oxford friend of Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis, remembered above all for his unflappable composure and for becoming an Anthroposophist alongside Barfield. His conversion shocked Lewis and helped begin the years-long “Great War” of argument between Lewis and Barfield, a dispute that unsettled Lewis’s chronological snobbery and his materialist account of knowledge.

Identity and Character

Harwood was Barfield’s friend at Wadham and soon became Lewis’s friend as well. He was poor and without prospects, yet carried himself, Lewis recalled, like a nineteenth-century gentleman with money in the Funds. His defining quality was imperturbability: his expression remained unchanged in argument and in practical trouble alike. On a walking tour, after a wet evening exposed a serious map-reading mistake and the travelers faced the uncertain prospect of finding beds five miles away at Mudham, Harwood kept the same composed expression. Lewis stresses that this was neither a mask nor a sign of stupidity; it was an enduring feature of his character.

Lewis compares Harwood to Horatio in an age of Hamlets: a figure of steadiness who did not wait for Fortune to halt him. The comparison makes composure more than a comic mannerism. Harwood’s calm persisted through ordinary uncertainty and, Lewis says, through the usual sorrows and anxieties that tested him later. The account offers no catalogue of those trials, but emphasizes that they did not dislodge the quality Lewis had observed.

Friendship and Intellectual Conflict

Harwood belonged to the circle of Oxford friends whom Lewis regarded as good by the standards of both pagan ethics and his own youthful outlook. They believed that truthfulness, public spirit, chastity, and sobriety were obligations to be attempted, and Lewis accepted those standards in principle. His portrait of Harwood thus joins personal steadiness to a shared seriousness about conduct, without suggesting that the friends’ ethical commitments arose from the same religious beliefs.

The decisive rupture in Lewis’s expectations came when Harwood and Barfield embraced Steiner’s doctrines and became Anthroposophists. Lewis was appalled: ideas he had tried to exclude from his own life seemed to have reappeared in two of his closest and, in his view at the time, least likely friends. He initially interpreted their choice through his own former attraction to occult subjects, imagining that they had succumbed to a craving for occult thrills. In retrospect he judged that reading unfair. He found Anthroposophy difficult and reassuringly dull for anyone seeking excitement, and saw no general damage to the character of those who adopted it; he had even known it to have a good effect.

Harwood’s conversion formed part of the setting for the Great War between Lewis and Barfield, but Lewis distinguishes the ensuing dispute from a personal quarrel. It was an almost incessant exchange, conducted both in letters and face to face, and lasted for years. Lewis admits that he spoke harshly and unjustly about Anthroposophy, later regarding this account as a belated amends to his friends. Harwood is not presented as the principal debater in the episodes Lewis describes; his importance lies in the shared turn he and Barfield took, and in the shock that turn produced in Lewis.

Influence on Lewis’s Thought

Barfield’s counterarguments, rather than Harwood’s direct instruction, are the explicit source of two major changes Lewis attributes to the dispute. The first was the destruction of his chronological snobbery: the habit of assuming that a belief was discredited simply because it belonged to an earlier period. Lewis came to insist that an idea’s disappearance does not establish that it was refuted; one must ask how, where, and by whom it was answered. This shift also made his own age visible as a historical period with characteristic assumptions and possible illusions.

The second change concerned knowledge. Lewis had accepted the sense-revealed universe as ultimate reality while also treating logical thought, moral judgment, and aesthetic experience as genuinely valid. Barfield persuaded him that those claims sat uneasily with a strictly realist account. If thought were only subjective, Lewis reasoned, then the authority he had given to logic, ethics, and aesthetics could not be retained without qualification; a behaviorist explanation of them was an alternative he found impossible to believe. He consequently gave up realism and accepted that mind could not be treated as a late by-product of an otherwise wholly independent material universe. Harwood’s place in this history is indirect but consequential: his and Barfield’s adoption of Anthroposophy precipitated the conflict through which Lewis’s inherited intellectual certainties were challenged.

Narrative Significance

Harwood’s portrait is brief but structurally important in Lewis’s retrospective account. His unchanged expression during both a practical mishap and heated debate supplies a concrete counterpoint to Lewis’s own alarm when friends embraced ideas he had rejected. Lewis first treated their choice as a return of dangerous irrationality; later fairness required him to revise that judgment. The contrast shows the limits of his earlier assumptions about other people’s motives and makes the intellectual conflict more than an abstract contest of systems.

Harwood is therefore significant less as a fully narrated biographical subject than as a friend whose convictions helped expose the instability of Lewis’s position. The text gives him a distinctive presence—poor, steady, and unruffled—while locating the detailed argument chiefly in Lewis’s exchanges with Barfield. His role in the memoir connects friendship, moral esteem, and intellectual change without making Harwood’s own conversion identical to Lewis’s eventual religious development.