Xin Mian Pai

The New Look was C. S. Lewis’s attempt, during his first two years at Oxford, to replace romantic and supernatural preoccupations with what he took to be good sense. It offered a period of relative peace by directing him toward the ordinary and toward unconditional acceptance of the universe. Yet the confidence of this intellectual retreat proved vulnerable: the spiritual commitments of close friends brought back what it had excluded, and Owen Barfield’s arguments would eventually undermine assumptions on which it rested.

Formation and Aims

During his first two years at Oxford, alongside studying Mods and beginning Greats, Lewis consciously assumed an intellectual New Look. He resolved to abandon pessimism and self-pity, avoid flirtation with supernatural ideas, and put aside romantic delusions. He understood good sense as a retreat from the kinds of experience and speculation that had previously occupied him. Its governing impulse was caution: after what he calls a nightmare fortnight, he chose the beaten track, the approved road, and the well-lit center. For several months, “ordinary” and “humdrum” seemed to name the most desirable conditions.

One pressure behind this change was Lewis’s encounter with an Irish parson who had lost his faith but retained his living. The man read and spoke incessantly about evidence for human survival, while his critical mind left him unable to satisfy himself. Lewis was particularly repelled by what he took to be a desire for personal immortality detached from belief in God, hope for moral improvement, or affection for reunion with the dead. He later recognized that his judgment had been harsh and that he had been too young to consider whether the man’s underlying longing might be for happiness denied him in life. At the time, however, the encounter made the question of immortality distasteful, and Lewis resolved to shut it out.

The new psychology supplied a second rationale for restraint. Lewis and his contemporaries valued Imagination, but worried about confusing it with psychological fantasy or wishful thinking. He reconsidered the delectable mountains and western gardens that had mattered to him, associating them with erotic reverie and nightmares of magic. He concluded that such images were not themselves the object of desire: they were flashes or by-products of Joy, symbols that could not satisfy the longing they seemed to promise. But the New Look distorted even this insight. Rather than reconsider his idolatry of the images, Lewis condemned the images themselves, declared that he had seen through them, and resolved to have no more Avalon or Hesperides.

Acceptance and the Recasting of Joy

Henri Bergson offered a further support for the New Look. Lewis found in his reading a refutation of the possibility that the universe might not have existed. He began to apprehend necessary existence as an attribute of reality, though he attached it to the universe rather than to God. This shift weakened the distinction between pessimism and optimism: if reality was not an arbitrary alternative to nothing, Lewis reasoned, there was no sense in blaming or praising the whole. Resistance to the universe seemed futile when the person resisting was himself part of it.

Lewis’s resulting position was a kind of Stoical Monism: the universe was to be accepted totally, without reservation, and loyally. He describes the peace this gave him as perhaps his nearest approach to religious experience since prep school. It also ended, he hoped permanently, any idea of negotiating or compromising with reality. The New Look thus did not merely make romantic images suspect; it offered a comprehensive discipline of assent, replacing the imagined possibility of escape with acceptance of what existed.

Joy remained part of Lewis’s vocabulary, but the change of outlook altered how he described it. He labeled it aesthetic experience, called it valuable, and spoke about it often, while judging that it came rarely and amounted to little when it did. The contrast is central to the New Look: Lewis retained the category of Joy while reducing its force, treating it as an aesthetic phenomenon rather than allowing it to direct him beyond the images through which it had first been felt.

Friends and the Return of the Excluded

The outlook was tested when A. C. Harwood and then Barfield embraced Rudolf Steiner’s doctrines and became Anthroposophists. Lewis was shocked that the ideas he had worked to exclude appeared in the lives of his closest friends, at a time when he believed they needed to stand together. He associated Anthroposophy with gods, spirits, afterlife, pre-existence, initiates, occult knowledge, and meditation. Still governed by chronological snobbery, he dismissed it as medieval and treated its apparent distance from modern assumptions as evidence against it. He regarded himself as safe from persuasion, but felt lonely and deserted.

Lewis initially attributed to his friends the same appetite for occult experience that he thought might have drawn him toward such beliefs. Later, he judged that the evidence had not supported this assumption. He came to see that neither friend sought the kind of excitement he had feared, and he acknowledged that he had made hard, unjust, and bitter remarks about Anthroposophy. This retrospective correction matters: the New Look’s response to what it excluded was not simply intellectual disagreement but a readiness to misread the motives of people close to him. Lewis never became an Anthroposophist, but fairness eventually required him to revise his account of both the doctrine’s attraction and its effects on its adherents.

Barfield’s Challenge and the Outlook’s Limits

Barfield’s conversion began what Lewis calls the Great War between them: years of almost incessant dispute, conducted in person and by letter. Lewis distinguishes this intellectual conflict from a quarrel; Barfield did not answer Lewis’s own argumentative violence in kind. Although the debates never made Lewis an Anthroposophist, Barfield’s counterarguments permanently dismantled two elements of his thought, making their opposition a turning point in his intellectual life.

First, Barfield challenged chronological snobbery: the unexamined assumption that an idea is discredited simply because it belongs to the past. Lewis came to insist that an outdated belief must be examined on its merits. Had it actually been refuted, and by what argument? Or had it merely faded like a fashion? The latter tells nothing about its truth. This reasoning also turned scrutiny on the present: every age has characteristic illusions, and the most persistent may be those so widely accepted that no one thinks to defend or question them. The New Look had relied on the authority of modern good sense; Barfield’s challenge revealed that such confidence could itself be historically limited.

Second, Barfield exposed an inconsistency in the kind of realism Lewis and his associates had held. They treated the sensory universe, as disclosed through the senses and coordinated by science, as fundamental reality, while continuing to claim that logical thought could yield indisputable truth, moral judgment was valid, and aesthetic experience was valuable. Lewis came to see that these claims did not fit comfortably with a view that made consciousness merely subjective. Following that view toward a behaviorist account would require reducing logic, ethics, and aesthetics in ways he found literally impossible to believe. He was therefore compelled to give up realism, a position he had tried to defend since beginning his study of philosophy. The New Look had sought safety by excluding speculation; its encounter with Barfield instead opened a sustained examination of the assumptions beneath that safety.