chronological snobbery

Chronological snobbery names the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is thereby false, while the beliefs common to one’s own age escape comparable scrutiny. C. S. Lewis presents it as a powerful but defeasible prejudice: Owen Barfield’s challenge taught him to ask how an old idea had fallen from favor, and to recognize that the present, too, has characteristic illusions.

Definition and Test

Lewis defines the habit through a question of intellectual history rather than a general preference for the past. A belief’s disappearance is not itself a refutation. One must ask whether it was conclusively answered, and by whom, where, and how—or whether it merely faded like a fashion. If it simply died away, its decline tells nothing about its truth or falsehood.

The test cuts in both directions. Once the past is no longer dismissed merely for being past, the present can no longer be treated as a neutral standard. Every age is a period, Lewis argues, and each has characteristic illusions. These are especially likely to persist in widespread assumptions so deeply ingrained that people neither feel obliged to defend them nor dare to attack them.

Barfield’s Challenge

Lewis identifies Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy as the beginning of their years-long intellectual contest, which he calls the Great War between them. It was an almost incessant disputation, conducted both by letter and face to face, but never a quarrel. Barfield did not make Lewis an Anthroposophist; his counterattacks nevertheless destroyed two elements of Lewis’s thinking, chronological snobbery among them.

Barfield’s challenge made Lewis reconsider the authority he had granted to the assumptions of his own time. The important question was no longer whether a doctrine sounded modern or obsolete, but what had actually happened to it in argument and history. That change of test weakened the easy confidence with which Lewis had dismissed positions inherited from earlier periods.

Consequences for Belief and Knowledge

The habit had helped Lewis maintain a materialist outlook even as his reading and experience pulled against it. His classical education presented him with religious ideas in Virgil, yet teachers and editors treated such beliefs as sheer illusion without explaining how Paganism might prefigure or be fulfilled by Christianity. Lewis found himself asking why Christianity should be accepted as the lone true religion among what appeared to be a thousand others of the same general kind. Barfield’s encouragement of a more respectful attitude toward Pagan myth helped shift that question: Lewis began asking where religious hints might reach maturity, rather than simply separating one true faith from a mass of false ones.

The dispute also unsettled Lewis’s theory of knowledge. He and Barfield had accepted the sensory universe as rock-bottom reality while continuing to treat abstract thought, moral judgment, and aesthetic experience as sources of genuine truth or value. Barfield argued that this combination was inconsistent. If Lewis kept a strictly sensory account of reality, he would have to accept a behaviorist account of logic, ethics, and aesthetics—an alternative Lewis found literally impossible to believe. He consequently gave up realism, the position he had defended since beginning to read philosophy, and admitted that mind could not be treated as a late-arriving by-product of the universe.

The Wider Reassessment

Other encounters reinforced the pressure against Lewis’s assumptions about modernity. In George Gordon’s discussion class, he met Nevill Coghill, whose Christian supernaturalism and archaic-seeming virtues—chivalry, honor, courtesy, freedom, and gentillesse—gave the past a living intellectual and moral presence. Coghill dealt chronological snobbery another blow: Lewis had to consider whether what seemed archaic might be civilized, and what seemed modern barbaric.

Lewis later connected this change to the pattern in his own reading. Writers he most valued, including George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Johnson, Spenser, Milton, Plato, Aeschylus, and Virgil, were religious; writers closer to his theoretical sympathies seemed entertaining but thin. His recollection that the beliefs he asserted most vigorously were those he had resisted and accepted late makes chronological snobbery more than a detached error in historical judgment. It had been part of the resistance he came to recognize in himself.