Barfield and Lewis's ideological debate

Barfield and Lewis’s intellectual dispute, which Lewis called the Great War, was a years-long exchange that transformed the assumptions through which he understood history, knowledge, and religious belief. Barfield did not convert Lewis to Anthroposophy, but his arguments dismantled Lewis’s chronological snobbery and exposed a contradiction in his materialism, carrying him toward idealism and nearer to theism.

Origins and Course

The dispute began with Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy. Lewis initially interpreted the change through his own prior fascination with occultism, suspecting that his friend had been drawn by the same appetite for occult excitement that had once attracted him. In retrospect, he acknowledged that this judgment was unfair: Barfield was not seeking thrills, and Lewis later made amends for the harsh and bitter things he had said about Anthroposophy.

What followed was not a rupture in the friendship. Lewis emphasized that the conflict never became a quarrel, although he recognized that it might have done so had Barfield answered his own vehemence in kind. Instead, their Great War took the form of almost incessant disputation, conducted both by letter and face to face, and continued for years. Lewis identified it as one of the turning points of his life.

The Challenge to Chronological Snobbery

Barfield’s counterarguments first broke down Lewis’s chronological snobbery: the unexamined assumption that ideas discredited by a later age must be false simply because they are out of date. Lewis came to see that an idea’s disappearance might indicate that it had been refuted, but could also reflect the passing of intellectual fashion. Its historical fate alone established neither its truth nor its falsehood; the question was what had happened to it, and how conclusively.

This reassessment changed the position from which Lewis judged the past. If earlier periods had their characteristic illusions, then his own age was also only a period, with assumptions that might be so widely embedded that few thought to question or defend them. The dispute therefore challenged not merely his attitude toward old ideas but the presumed neutrality of the intellectual climate in which he had formed his own beliefs.

From Realism to Idealism

The deeper argument concerned the mismatch between Lewis’s realism and the value he continued to assign to human thought and experience. He and Barfield had accepted the sensory universe as rock-bottom reality, while also treating logically disciplined abstract thought as capable of truth, moral judgments as valid, and aesthetic experience as valuable. Barfield persuaded Lewis that those claims did not sit consistently with a view in which consciousness was merely subjective.

If Lewis held fast to the sensory world as the only fundamental reality, he would have to accept a more thoroughgoing account in which logic, ethics, and aesthetics were explained in behaviorist terms. Lewis found that alternative literally unbelievable: his mind could not perform the act of belief it required. He was therefore compelled to give up realism, a position he had defended since beginning to read philosophy.

The change also displaced an emotional preference. Lewis had wanted Nature to exist independently of observation, indifferent and self-sustaining; realism suited that desire as well as his resistance to the dominant idealist philosophy at Oxford. Once Barfield’s criticism made realism untenable to him, Lewis concluded that mind could not be a late-arriving by-product of an otherwise self-sufficient material universe. He moved instead toward the view that reality was ultimately mental and that human logic participated in a cosmic Logos.

Idealism’s Religious Nearness and Distance

This move did not immediately amount to theism. Lewis could still treat the Absolute as distinct from God: an impersonal or remote principle that reconciled opposites and promised a hidden glory behind ordinary appearances, without making demands on human beings. In his account, this was a quasi-religion that allowed religious language while preserving distance from anything to obey. Its attraction and limitation were joined: the Absolute suggested something like Heaven, yet a philosophy that defined human beings as appearances left them unable to reach it.

Lewis nevertheless regarded this interval as genuinely formative rather than simply mistaken. The idealists had taught him to value Heaven’s existence independently of whether any person could attain it. At the same time, the idealist passage and Henri Bergson’s argument for necessary existence brought him closer to the language of divine glory. Lewis retrospectively pictured the change as an advance made without recognizing its destination: he had not yet identified the Absolute with God, but the intellectual ground beneath his materialism had shifted.

Wider Consequences for Belief

The dispute altered how Lewis approached religion beyond philosophy. Earlier, his reading of Virgil had confronted him with Pagan religious ideas treated by teachers and editors as illusion, while Christianity was accepted as a singular exception without an explanation of how the traditions might relate. Under those assumptions, religions appeared to be a mass of natural human error, with Christianity labeled true. That framework helped make his own faith difficult to sustain.

Barfield’s encouragement of a more respectful attitude toward Pagan myth helped unsettle that opposition. Later, as Lewis and Griffiths both believed in God and remained willing to learn from Pagan as well as Christian sources, Lewis no longer treated the question as a choice between one true religion and a thousand false ones. He asked instead where religious hints had reached maturity or fulfillment. In that changed framework, Paganism could be understood as religion’s childhood or prophetic anticipation, while the search for fulfillment narrowed, in Lewis’s account, to Hinduism or Christianity. The Great War did not settle the question by itself, but it helped make that more historically attentive and comparative inquiry possible.