New Look

The New Look was C. S. Lewis’s early Oxford effort to make intellectual safety, ordinary life, and acceptance of the universe a defense against romanticism and supernatural belief. It briefly gave him peace, but the program’s exclusions proved unstable: the spiritual interests of his closest friends confronted him with what he had tried to expel, and Owen Barfield’s arguments eventually overturned key assumptions about historical progress and knowledge. In retrospect, the New Look was not a settled destination but a disciplined retreat that helped expose the limits of his materialism and reshaped the questions through which he approached religion.

A deliberate retreat

During his first two years at Oxford, while studying for Mods and beginning Greats, Lewis set out to adopt what he called an intellectual New Look. He resolved to abandon pessimism and self-pity, avoid supernatural speculation and romantic delusions, and judge and act with what he regarded as the greatest good sense. The change was pointedly a retreat from the romantic concerns that had previously occupied much of his life, not simply a new interest added to them.

A particular horror of the pursuit of immortality helped make exclusion seem like prudence. Lewis had met an Irish parson who had lost his faith but retained his position and now searched obsessively for evidence of human survival. Lewis understood the man to want personal continuance without belief in God, the Beatific Vision, self-improvement, or reunion with the dead. He found this desire contemptible and concluded that thoughts capable of leading toward such monomania should be shunned. The episode helped make the whole question of immortality distasteful to him, strengthening the New Look’s determination to keep such questions out.

The psychology then circulating at Oxford gave Lewis another vocabulary for suspicion. He worried that the delectable mountains and western gardens associated with his imagination were fantasies: images that had drawn him into erotic reverie or occult excitement. Yet his earlier experience had suggested something more complicated. Those landscapes had not been the thing desired but symbols arising from Joy; attempts to treat them as the ultimate object had failed. Under the New Look, he forgot that distinction. Rather than reconsidering his tendency to make symbols into objects of worship, he condemned the images themselves and believed he had seen through them.

Safety, acceptance, and their limits

For a time, Lewis made the ordinary into a principle of safety: the beaten track, the approved road, the center, and the lights on. For several months after a disturbing fortnight, “ordinary” and “humdrum” named what he most wanted. This was more than a preference for routine. It was a refusal of imaginative and spiritual directions that he feared might lead him away from a secure path.

His reading of Henri Bergson contributed to a different kind of reassurance. Lewis believed he had found a refutation of the thought that the universe might not have existed. The attribute of necessary existence consequently entered his thinking, although he attached it to the universe rather than to God. If reality was not an arbitrary alternative to nothing, he reasoned, neither praise nor blame of the whole could make sense. Even a defiance of the universe would be part of the universe’s own action. He concluded that one must accept reality totally and loyally, without reservation or a proposed compromise. This Stoical monism brought him a great sense of peace and, as he later described it, came closest to a religious experience since his preparatory-school days.

The New Look did not eliminate Joy, but changed the name and value Lewis assigned to it. He called it aesthetic experience and considered it valuable, while observing that it came seldom and seemed to amount to little when it did. The contrast is revealing: a period committed to limiting romantic expectation preserved a term for the experience, but recast it as an aesthetic category rather than treating it as evidence of a desired supernatural reality.

Friends bring the excluded back

The intellectual shelter grew harder to maintain as Oxford changed around Lewis. The generation of returned soldiers began to pass, new faces appeared, and questions of a career became more pressing. In this setting, first A. C. Harwood and then Barfield embraced Rudolf Steiner’s doctrines and became Anthroposophists. Lewis was hideously shocked: the supernatural subjects he had labored to remove seemed to have reappeared in his best friends, whom he had considered especially unlikely to embrace them.

Lewis initially interpreted their change through the motives he imagined he would have had himself. He suspected a ravenous desire for occult experience and saw Anthroposophy as a return to the dangers the New Look was meant to exclude. His later account corrects that judgment: he came to think the evidence had shown from the start that his friends were not seeking thrills, and that Anthroposophy’s difficulty and intellectual character would deter such seekers. He also acknowledged that he had never observed it damaging the character of those who embraced it, and had known one instance in which it had a good effect. This retrospective fairness did not mean he came close to accepting Anthroposophy; it did mean that his original condemnation had been unjust.

The disagreement with Barfield became an almost incessant disputation, conducted in letters and in person over a period of years. Lewis called it the Great War between them, while emphasizing that it was never a quarrel, despite the violence he allowed himself in argument. The conflict became a turning point not because Barfield converted him to Anthroposophy, but because the counterarguments forced him to examine the intellectual ground on which he had built his own position.

The assumptions the New Look could not preserve

Barfield first dismantled what Lewis later termed chronological snobbery: the uncritical belief that the intellectual climate of one’s own age is authoritative and that ideas which have fallen out of fashion are thereby discredited. Lewis came to see that an idea’s disappearance does not establish its falsehood; one must ask whether it was refuted, and, if so, how, or whether it simply faded like a fashion. The same scrutiny then turns on the present: every age has its characteristic illusions, often concealed in assumptions so widely shared that no one thinks to defend them.

Barfield’s second challenge concerned the theory of knowledge underlying their earlier realism. Lewis and his contemporaries treated the sense-revealed universe as fundamental reality while also claiming that logical thought could yield indisputable truth, moral judgment was valid, and aesthetic experience was valuable. Barfield persuaded Lewis that these claims sat uneasily with a view in which thought was merely subjective. A strictly sensory account, Lewis concluded, would require surrendering such claims or accepting behaviorist accounts of logic, ethics, and aesthetics—an alternative he found literally unbelievable. He was therefore compelled to give up realism, although he recognized that his attachment to it had also answered an emotional desire for a nature independent of observation, indifferent, and self-existing.

The later religious context makes the New Look’s exclusions especially significant. Lewis recalled that the intellectual strain of living for the gods and heroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Lancelot and the Grail while believing only in atoms, evolution, and military service had not simply disappeared at Oxford. Elsewhere in his account, his reading of Virgil had made other religions seem like naturally arising errors beside Christianity, which was labeled true without explanation of why it alone deserved different treatment. Encounters with W. B. Yeats’s serious belief in magic, and then with Maurice Maeterlinck’s engagement with Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism, had already placed a disturbing “Perhaps” inside his materialism. These earlier doubts illuminate what the New Look sought to contain, not a problem it conclusively settled.

By the later stage of his movement toward Christianity, Lewis described the question differently. Rather than choosing one simply true religion against a thousand false ones, he asked where religion had reached maturity and where Pagan hints had been fulfilled. He treated Paganism as a childhood of religion or a prophetic dream and considered Christianity alongside Hinduism as the remaining possible answers, while judging Hinduism to have disqualifications. This was a substantial change from the New Look’s flight from romanticism and supernatural thought. The period’s legacy lies in the tension between its promise of peace through exclusion and the intellectual pressure that eventually made reconsideration unavoidable.