Owen Barfield

Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis’s “Second Friend,” was both an intimate companion and a formidable intellectual opponent. Their friendship took shape through disagreement: Barfield’s conversion to Anthroposophy first shocked and alienated Lewis, but their sustained arguments became a turning point in Lewis’s thought, dislodging his confidence in the assumptions of his own age and ultimately compelling him to give up philosophical realism.

Identity and Friendship

Lewis distinguishes Barfield from Arthur, the “First Friend” who reveals a companion in shared private tastes. The Second Friend is instead an “antiself”: someone who shares one’s interests but approaches them from another angle, seeming to understand the same books and ideas while drawing different conclusions. Lewis presents this near agreement as the source of fascination as well as irritation. With Barfield, friendship did not remove disagreement; it made disagreement absorbing and consequential.

Their arguments continued late into the night and on walks through the countryside. Each tried to correct the other, and Lewis remembers the exchanges as a sustained contest in which they learned the weight of one another’s arguments. The contest could make them seem like mutually respectful enemies, yet over time they modified one another’s thought. Their recurring dispute produced both a community of mind and deep affection. Lewis judged that Barfield changed him more than he changed Barfield.

Anthroposophy and the Great War

As their generation of returned soldiers gave way to new Oxford students, Barfield embraced the doctrines of Steiner and became an Anthroposophist; A. C. Harwood did so before him. Lewis was hideously shocked. He had struggled to expel from his own life the kinds of supernatural and occult interests he now associated with Anthroposophy, and he found them appearing among the friends he had considered safest. Barfield’s background in a free-thinking family, where he had scarcely encountered Christianity before school, made the change seem especially unexpected to Lewis.

Lewis initially interpreted his friends’ conversions through his own past attraction to occultism, supposing that a similar appetite was driving them. In retrospect, he acknowledged that the evidence did not support that judgment: Barfield was not seeking thrills, and Lewis came to regard Anthroposophy as difficult and reassuringly unexciting rather than as a lure to sensational experience. He also recognized that the doctrine had not damaged the character of those who embraced it and, in one case he knew, had improved it. Lewis described his later fairness as belated amends for the harsh and unjust things he had said to his friends.

Barfield’s conversion began what Lewis called the Great War between them. It was not a quarrel, though Lewis understood that his own manner could have turned it into one. Instead, the conflict consisted of almost incessant disputation, conducted by letter as well as face to face, and lasting for years. Lewis identifies this intellectual struggle as one of the turning points of his life: Barfield did not make him an Anthroposophist, but his counterarguments permanently altered what Lewis could believe.

The Challenge to Chronological Snobbery

One of those changes was Lewis’s abandonment of what he called “chronological snobbery”: the uncritical assumption that the intellectual outlook of one’s own time is authoritative, and that an idea dismissed by later generations must therefore be false. Barfield pressed Lewis to ask why a position had gone out of fashion. Had it been refuted, and by what argument? Or had it merely faded as fashions do? If it had only fallen out of use, its disappearance established nothing about its truth.

This challenge also turned Lewis’s attention toward his own historical moment. The present, Barfield helped him recognize, is a period like any other and therefore has characteristic illusions of its own. Such assumptions can be hardest to notice when they are so widely shared that no one thinks to defend or question them. Barfield’s influence thus changed not only Lewis’s attitude toward older ideas but also his method of examining the intellectual climate around him.

From Realism Toward Idealism

Their argument also exposed a contradiction in the philosophical position Lewis and Barfield had previously shared. In a technical sense they had been realists, taking the world disclosed by the senses as the bedrock of reality. At the same time, they treated abstract reasoning, moral judgments, and aesthetic experience as more than subjective events: logic could yield indisputable truth, moral judgment could be valid, and beauty could be valuable rather than merely pleasing.

Barfield convinced Lewis that these claims did not fit comfortably with a worldview in which sensory reality alone was fundamental. If thought were purely subjective, Lewis reasoned, the authority they had granted to logic, ethics, and aesthetics would have to be surrendered. A stricter sensory realism could therefore lead toward behaviorist accounts of those fields, but Lewis found that conclusion literally impossible for his mind to accept. He consequently felt compelled to abandon realism, which he had defended since beginning to read philosophy.

The change also meant relinquishing an emotional preference. Lewis had wanted nature to exist wholly independently of human observation, indifferent and self-subsistent—a desire connected to the delight in each thing’s particular being that he had learned from A. K. Hamilton Jenkin. Lewis saw that preference as one reason he had resisted idealism, then dominant at Oxford, alongside his inclination to oppose the prevailing view. Once realism became untenable to him, he concluded that mind could not be merely a late-arriving by-product of the universe: reality must, in the last resort, be mental, and human logic a participation in a cosmic Logos. Barfield’s decisive role was not to supply Lewis with a ready-made conversion to Anthroposophy, but to make Lewis’s former philosophical settlement impossible to maintain.