Barfield Scholarship
Essays, Book Chapters, and Monographs
on Owen Barfield and His Work

Corbin Carnell
The Influence of Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis

The other key influence among Lewis' friends was Owen Barfield, his solicitor and friendly intellectual combatant for more than forty years. R. J. Reilly in his fine study Romantic Religion shows Barfield as the Coleridge-like theorizer for the Inklings. He was the one who got them thinking most deeply about the imagination, the relations of imagination, reason, and language, and who got across not a little of the Anthroposophy he had adapted from Rudolf Steiner.

With Reilly's help I find several principles in Lewis' thought which seem to have developed through Barfield's influence:

1. The reality of thought as beyond the neurological, as having connections with extrinsic reality. Barfield develops Steiner's idea that the mind is related to thought as the eye is to light. No one suggests that light is simply something that goes on in the eye. Light is really there and thought is real also. For if something like Plato's World of Ideas or Jung's Race Memory does not exist, then thinking may be only the twitching of brain tissue. Lewis hammers this point home repeatedly in his books, especially in Mere Christianity and The Abolition of Man but also in That Hideous Strength and numerous essays.

2. The counterattack on chronological snobbery. Barfield believed that mind or spirit preceded matter, that modern man is impoverished by his lack of mythic and metaphoric consciousness, that presentism is a sure way to sharply limit one's understanding of reality. Lewis elaborates this idea further in, for example, his introduction to a translation of St. Athanasius.

3. The fact that spiritual life is immanent in phenomena. Barfield explains how the European mind has cut itself loose from its environment and has become less and less the actor, more often the spectator. Now this is an idea Lewis frequently voiced in his early poetry, but it seems certain that Barfield's corroboration of it gave him the courage to embrace it in prose, where one is philosophically more vulnerable. For Lewis' best discussion of the subject see his preface to D. E. Harding's The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (New York: Harper, 1952).

4. The necessity of knowing through the imagination. Barfield develops this idea in a way which could have come from Coleridge, and though it was uphill work to defend it: when Barfield wrote Poetic Diction in 1928, the idea seems to have many supporters today among scientists, especially physicists. Lewis mentions in Surprised by Joy and elsewhere what an important book Poetic Diction was for him, and Barfield may well have dedicated it to him precisely because these two anti-selves had thrashed out so many of its ideas so vehemently.

Of course, Barfield also has some key ideas which Lewis did not accept: the way Goethe used the esemplastic imagination, the notion that God Himself undergoes an evolution of consciousness (Lewis' uneasiness about Teilhard de Chardin suggests he could not follow Barfield closely on that concept), and the idea that the Word is the cosmic process on its way from original (unconscious) to final (conscious) participation in God (though it is possible to find this idea in Till We Have Faces).

As dazzling as some of Barfield's ideas are, they appear to be Platonism again (or common sense, some would say), philologically considered in terms which make sense in our day. Lewis' Platonism is unmistakable and it is not surprising that he would find reading Kierkegaard "like walking in sawdust." Lewis found in Platonism a comprehensive way to reconcile reason's dialectic with the reasons of the heart. To settle for anything less than such a reconciliation, he felt, would be to betray his experience of art, mind, and the everyday world.