Great War with Barfield

Great War with Barfield was C. S. Lewis’s name for the years-long disputation between himself and Owen Barfield, which began around 1922 and became a turning point in Lewis’s life. Barfield did not make Lewis an Anthroposophist; instead, their arguments challenged the assumptions behind Lewis’s materialism and realism, teaching him to question the intellectual authority of his own age and to reconsider the relation between mind and reality.

Background and Beginnings

The conflict took shape as Lewis’s inherited confidence in materialism was already under strain. His classical education had presented the religious ideas of writers such as Virgil as illusions, while treating Christianity as a singular exception without explaining why it deserved different treatment. Lewis found that distinction increasingly difficult to sustain. Later, reading W. B. Yeats’s prose and then Maeterlinck brought him into contact with non-Christian writers who took seriously a spiritual world beyond or around the material one. Their authority introduced a possibility—not yet an assent—that materialism might not be the only intellectually credible position.

By the summer of 1922, when Lewis finished Greats and began a fourth year at Oxford reading English, he thought the Great War with Barfield had begun. Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy was its immediate occasion. Lewis regarded the doctrine with strong suspicion and later acknowledged that he had said hard, unjust, and bitter things about it to his friends. The ensuing dispute was not a personal quarrel: it consisted of almost incessant argument, conducted both by letter and face to face, and continued for years.

The Challenge to Chronological Snobbery

Barfield’s arguments first broke down what Lewis called chronological snobbery: the uncritical assumption that the intellectual climate of the present is authoritative and that ideas become discredited simply by becoming old-fashioned. Lewis came to see that an idea’s disappearance does not prove it false. It must be asked whether the idea was actually refuted, and, if so, where and how; if it merely faded like a fashion, its decline establishes nothing about its truth.

This reversal also made the present itself historically visible. Lewis recognized that his own age, like every other period, had characteristic illusions, especially in assumptions so widely shared that people neither challenged nor defended them. Barfield’s intervention therefore changed not just Lewis’s estimate of the past but his sense of the present: modernity was a period with limits and blind spots, not a neutral standpoint from which earlier thought could simply be dismissed.

The Problem of Knowledge

The second major consequence concerned the foundations of Lewis’s thought. He and Barfield had been realists in the technical sense, accepting the world disclosed by the senses as ultimate reality, while also claiming that abstract thought could yield indisputable truth, moral judgment was valid, and aesthetic experience had value. Barfield persuaded Lewis that these claims did not fit comfortably together.

If thought were merely subjective, Lewis reasoned, its claims to truth and value would have to be abandoned. A strict commitment to the sensory world as the only reality would require accepting behaviorist explanations of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. Lewis found that alternative literally unbelievable: he could not make his mind perform the act of belief it required. He was therefore compelled to give up realism, a position he had defended since beginning his philosophical reading.

The change also touched a preference Lewis recognized in himself. He had wanted nature to exist independently of human observation, indifferent and self-existing; that view suited his resistance to the dominant idealism at Oxford as well as an emotional need for a reality other than the mind. Once he could no longer defend realism without accepting what he considered an impossible account of thought and value, he had to allow that mind was not merely a late-arriving by-product of the universe. He came to understand the universe as mental in the last resort and logic as participation in a cosmic Logos.

Scope and Significance

The dispute’s importance lies in the limits as well as the reach of its effect. Lewis explicitly maintained that Barfield never converted him to Anthroposophy. What Barfield did was unsettle the assumptions with which Lewis had dismissed old ideas and the framework through which he had tried to explain knowledge. The result was neither a simple exchange of one doctrine for another nor an immediate return to Christian belief, but a lasting change in what Lewis considered intellectually defensible.

The arguments also formed part of a broader reorganization in Lewis’s thinking about religion. As he began to treat Pagan myth with greater respect, he moved away from the question of which religion alone was true among many simply false traditions. He instead asked where religious traditions had reached maturity and whether Pagan intimations had found fulfillment. Lewis later identified the Great War with Barfield as one of his life’s turning points: its lasting achievement was to make his own age’s assumptions, and his own account of reality, open to examination.