C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield’s friendship and intellectual debates

C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield’s friendship and intellectual debates joined deep affection to sustained disagreement, making friendship itself a school of thought. Barfield became the “Second Friend” who challenged Lewis from within their shared interests: years of argument did not end in a quarrel but altered Lewis’s convictions, undermined his confidence in the assumptions of his own age, and helped move him from realism toward idealism and nearer to theism.

The Second Friend

Lewis contrasted Barfield with Arthur, his “First Friend.” The first friend seemed an alter ego, someone who answered private enthusiasms with an unexpected sense of recognition; friendship with him came as naturally as raindrops joining on a window. Barfield, by contrast, was the antiself: he shared Lewis’s interests but came to them from another angle, having read the same important books and drawn what Lewis considered the wrong conclusions. That closeness in subject matter made the difference more absorbing, not less. Barfield could seem almost right and yet persistently wrong, and the intellectual distance between them kept the friendship in motion.

Their disagreements became prolonged contests. Lewis tried to correct Barfield’s heresies, while Barfield set out to correct Lewis’s; their arguments continued late into the night, night after night, and also accompanied walks through fine country. Lewis described them as learning the weight of one another’s punches, at times more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Yet the contest changed both participants: they modified one another’s thought, and a community of mind and deep affection emerged from what Lewis called a perpetual dogfight. Lewis believed that Barfield changed him considerably more than he changed Barfield. He also observed that much of the thinking Barfield later put into Poetic Diction had already become his own before the book appeared.

Anthroposophy and the Great War

The friendship’s most consequential intellectual conflict began when Barfield embraced Rudolf Steiner’s doctrines and became an Anthroposophist. Lewis was hideously shocked. He saw in the convictions of his closest friends ideas he had labored to expel from his own life, and Barfield’s choice seemed especially unexpected because Lewis had thought him protected from superstition by his free-thinking upbringing. Lewis’s distress was sharpened by the timing: their generation of returned soldiers was passing, Oxford was filling with new faces, and the question of a future career was growing more pressing. He felt that friends he had considered safe had turned toward ideas he feared, at a moment when they had particular reason to stand together.

Lewis initially interpreted their conversion through his own past attractions, supposing that his friends must share a ravenous desire for the occult. In retrospect, he judged that interpretation unfair. He came to think Barfield and Harwood were not drawn to Anthroposophy for that reason, and that the system’s difficult, reassuringly Germanic dullness would deter anyone looking chiefly for occult thrills. He had seen no harmful effect on the character of its adherents and had once observed a very good one. His later fairness did not mean that he accepted Anthroposophy: he stressed that he had never come close to doing so, while acknowledging that his early attacks on it had been hard, unjust, and bitter.

Barfield’s conversion began what Lewis called the “Great War” between them. It was not an actual quarrel, though Lewis recognized that it could have become one had Barfield answered his own argumentative violence in kind. Instead, it took the form of almost incessant disputation, sometimes by letter and sometimes face to face, and lasted for years. Lewis counted it among the turning points of his life: disagreement did not sever the friendship but gave it a sustained, consequential form.

Chronological Snobbery and the Limits of Realism

Barfield never made Lewis an Anthroposophist, but his counterarguments permanently destroyed two elements in Lewis’s thought. The first was what Lewis called chronological snobbery: uncritically treating the intellectual climate of one’s own age as authoritative and assuming that whatever had become outdated was therefore discredited. Barfield’s challenge forced Lewis to ask why an idea had fallen out of fashion. If it had been refuted, one needed to know by whom, where, and how conclusively; if it had merely faded like a fashion, its disappearance proved nothing about its truth or falsehood. Lewis came to recognize that his own age, like every other period, had characteristic illusions, particularly in assumptions so widely accepted that they seemed to need neither defense nor challenge.

The second change concerned the possibility of knowledge. Lewis and Barfield had both been realists in the technical sense: they treated the sensory universe as rock-bottom reality. At the same time, they wanted abstract thought, moral judgment, and aesthetic experience to possess kinds of validity and value that, Lewis concluded, sat uneasily with that starting point. If thought were only a subjective event, he reasoned, those claims would have to be abandoned. A consistent commitment to the sensory world, organized through instruments and science, would require going further toward a behaviorist account of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Lewis found that alternative literally unbelievable: his mind could not perform the act of accepting it. The dispute therefore compelled him to give up the realism he had defended since beginning his philosophical reading.

Lewis acknowledged that his resistance to the idealism then dominant at Oxford was partly cussedness: by nature, he was against the prevailing position. Realism also met an emotional need. He wanted Nature to exist independently of observation, indifferent and self-existing, a desire that connected with A. K. Hamilton Jenkin’s lesson in attending to the distinct being of each thing. Barfield’s argument made that position difficult to retain. To avoid the alternative Lewis found impossible, Lewis concluded that mind could not be a late-arriving by-product of the universe: ultimately the universe had to be mental, and logic a participation in a cosmic Logos.

Idealism and an Unrecognized Approach to Theism

Lewis did not at first understand this conclusion as theism. He recognized later that he may have been willfully blind, and described the philosophical resources of the time as ways of taking on some of the conveniences of theism without believing in God. The Absolute could be treated as impersonal, or as a mind that knew itself in human beings, while remaining too abstract to make demands on them. Lewis characterized this position as a religion without the danger of obedience: it spoke of an Absolute that remained safely beyond the present world and could not intervene in it.

Yet Lewis also recognized a genuinely religious strength in idealism. The Absolute contained, in his account, the reconciliation of opposites, the transcendence of finitude, and a hidden glory that gave reality its fullest meaning. It resembled Heaven, but a Heaven its adherents could never reach: to arrive there would mean no longer being the finite people they were. Lewis compared this condition to Dante’s virtuous pagans, living in desire without hope, and to Spinoza’s love of God without the possibility of wishing for a return of love. He did not regret passing through this experience. From the idealists he retained the conviction that Heaven’s existence matters more than whether any individual reaches it.

Lewis later framed the slow movement of these arguments as a catch in which he had not known the hook was already in his tongue. Bergson had shown him necessary existence, while idealism had brought him one step nearer to understanding the words of thanksgiving for divine glory. The Norse gods had supplied his first hint of that glory, but he did not believe in them; he did believe, as far as one could believe in an abstract non-entity, in the Absolute. Barfield’s friendship and opposition thus did not produce an immediate conversion. Their lasting consequence was a changed intellectual landscape in which Lewis’s defenses against theism had weakened and the possibility of belief had drawn nearer.