BY far the most interesting aspect of Owen Barfield’s long and productive life, was his fruitful relationship with fellow writer C.S. Lewis. The pair shared a very close and affectionate friendship, something that first began in 1919 at Wadham College, Oxford, when the two authors formed the Inklings literary society along with J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams.

Lewis did not appreciate Barfield’s taste for Rudolf Steiner, but nonetheless valued him as a boon companion and believed that when it came to intellectual vigour his counterpart “towered above us all”. Such was the philosophical meeting of minds between the two men, that Lewis would later describe their association as “the Great War”. Indeed, whilst the celebrated author of the Narnia stories and an entire litany of Christian apologetics inexplicably failed to make reference to this intimate relationship in his famous autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), a January 1927 entry in his Diary clearly alludes to the fact that he and Barfield always found themselves embroiled in one debate or another:

“Was thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord, what a mess! And all the time (with me) there is the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them.”

It was during the late-1920s that “the Great War” intensified, a time when Barfield had finally left Oxford and moved to London. Rather than continue to visit one another’s homes as neighbours, therefore, the cerebral battle was fought by way of written correspondence. Lewis, after years of philosophical wrangling, would become a theist in 1929 and then finally convert to Christianity in 1931. Although he was not yet a member of the Church of England, he was still rather critical of anyone who professed to espouse a more unorthodox approach to the religion. A July 1923 entry in his Diary notes that a mutual friend, Cecil Harwood (1898-1975), had told him of a

“new philosopher Rudolf Steiner […] He seems to be a sort of panpsychist, with a vein of posing superstition, and I was very much disappointed to hear that both Harwood and Barfield were impressed by him. The comfort they got from him (apart from the sugar plum of promised immortality, which is really the bait with which he has caught Harwood) seemed something I could get much better without him.”

Despite this negative impression, it is generally considered that Barfield had the upper hand against Lewis in “the Great War”. Whilst the former is regarded as an original thinker at the forefront of a new, emergent consciousness, the latter had a tendency to look back on the scholarship of the past. Their argumentation, on the other hand, was more concerned with epistemology than metaphysics, which was hardly surprising in light of their respective belief-systems.

One of the main contentions that Lewis had about Barfield’s philosophy involved what he had said in Poetic Diction (1928) about truth and falsehood being related to the imagination. Lewis was simply not prepared to accept that anything remotely factual could be retained by the mind when it returns to a state of consciousness. This viewpoint, from Barfield’s perspective, seemed to imply that Lewis was associating poetic imagination with “falseness or triviality” and the latter responded by setting out what he presented as the “real issue between us”.

Lewis began by stating that both men agreed with Kant, Coleridge and Bradley that “the discursive reason always fails to apprehend reality” on the basis that it relies so heavily on an abstract framework of thinking. The problem, he explained, seemed to involve demonstrating that whatever had been established as “Concrete” was actually real. Lewis also noted that both he and Barfield were in agreement that abstract reason combined with sensory experience and habitual behaviour provides – by way of the phenomenal realm – a “substitute for knowledge”. However, Lewis suggested that the point at which Barfield’s views diverged from those of his own involved the latter’s belief that the combination of reason, experience and habit can be used to produce a “knowledge of the supersensible” that is just as effective as that of the purely sensible. For Lewis, the emphasis lay with “the real and the phenomenal” and not “the sensible and the supersensible” at all. Barfield responded in a letter of July 28th, 1927:

“Truth to you (correct me if I am wrong) is something you look at (mentally of course), while reality is something you are but never see. And I think I am also right in supposing that you restrict the sphere of ‘true-false’ to the phenomenal, while the real, you think, one only ‘contacts’ via moral (and possibly aesthetic) intuition. You then affirm that you see no reason why these intuitions should have any connection at all with judgements, except as possible objects of them […] What I want to say at the moment is that I do not normally think of truth in that manner at all. To me it is not a sort of accurate copy or reflection of something, but it is reality itself taking the form of human consciousness. At the stage at which truth appears, or true thinking, there is no distinction possible between the thought and the object thought of […]”

Of course, Lewis favoured the prevailing Cartesianism that maintains a rigid division between the thought-processes of the human mind and the fact or object that is under observation. For Barfield, subject and object are grounded in one and the same reality and he was not prepared to entertain the idea that true reality could be temporarily suspended for the purposes of modern, philosophical speculation.

That Lewis was only prepared to include within the sphere of knowledge those things he regarded as “objective fact,” Barfield argued, was a purely literal approach and one he would later classify as a form of “idolatry”. Lewis therefore sought to apply knowledge and truth to consciousness on this basis alone, whilst Barfield insisted that “inspiration-imagination” can also enable us to establish knowledge about reality by overcoming the abstract nature of “strict logic and the laws of thought”.

Lewis responded by suggesting that both he and Barfield valued imagination in the sense that the term need not be associated with fantasy, although he took issue with Barfield’s claim that such a faculty is capable of providing truth and that the human mind “can become aware of its own activity in thinking as something other than the content or object of thought”. Barfield eventually tired of his correspondent’s “rationalist pedantry” and sent Lewis a metaphor to outline his position in more comprehensible terms:

“Supposing you are looking through a piece of coloured glass without knowing it. Now suppose someone tells you that this is so, and you set to work to rub off the colouring matter. You will then see more perfectly the reality which you have always been seeing to some extent, i.e. as coloured. The glass and its colouring matter being part of reality (though more your private concern than the rest of it), you may say, if you will, that you are now seeing a different reality; but since you never really saw the colouring matter, but only through it, while now, though you can no longer see through it, you can actually see the powder lying about on the ground, your objection is perhaps on the peevish side. It amounts, in fact, to saying that you cannot both look and not look through coloured glass at the same time.”

What rankled more than anything else, was that Lewis seemed completely incapable of grasping Barfield’s use of metaphor and was even suggesting that knowledge is something that is merely “administered” to a passive recipient. Barfield implored Lewis to use the same “delicacy of perception” that he applied to art and poetry. He ended this particular exchange by begging his fellow combatant to recognise that they at least shared some common ground. Nevertheless, “the Great War” would continue for many years to come.