Owen Barfield: First and Last Inklings

G. B. Tennyson

In 1919 two relatively new Oxford undergraduates met each other for the first time over tea in the quarters of a fellow student. They could not know that they were making literary history. They not even know that the meeting was the beginning of a lifelong friendship that would be both social and intensely intellectual. But in retrospect it is clear that the meeting was a notable literary event as well as the beginning of a long friendship--for it was the first encounter of two extraordinary minds. The two students were Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis.

C. S. Lewis went on to become an enormously popular writer of fiction, theology, and literary criticism, read by millions throughout the world. Barfield is one of the most original and penetrating thinkers of our time, known to a smaller but highly discriminating and dedicated readershiFrom the time of their first encounter, Barfield and Lewis found that they deeply agreed and disagreed with each other on important questions. They continued doing so until Lewis' death in 1963 and, as will become clear, even beyond. The story of the friendship of Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis is the story of their individual geniuses and, by anticipation and implication, the story of the group arising from the friendship known as the Oxford Inklings. The story of their long friendship is also a fitting way to introduce to a wider public the thought and career of Owen Barfield.

FIRST INKLINGS

When Barfield and Lewis met, each had been released only months before from military service in the conflict that had ended late in the previous year, the war then still known as the Great War. A Generation later it would come to be known as the First WORLD War, but the Great War was the current term at that time and one that Barfield and Lewis would, by the mid-twenties, appropriate for an extended though unbloody debate of their own. But in 1919, when the two met in Oxford in the rooms of a mutual friend named Leo Backer, they were more interested in forgetting the unpleasantness of the late war that in reliving it. It was the stimulation of intellectual combat and exchange that they sought after having both had their earlier enrollments at Oxford interrupted by the war years. Each was voracious reader and each had literary aspirations. Each would find in the other simultaneously a kindred spirit and a worthy intellectual antagonist.

Barfield and Lewis were exactly the same age, Barfield having preceded Lewis into the world by almost three weeks in November 1898. Both came from professional families: Barfield was from a solicitor's family in London; Lewis was also the son of a solicitor, but he was from Belfast in Ireland (not yet "Northern Ireland" with all that that implies). At the time of their meeting in 1919, both were resident in their respective Oxford colleges: Barfield at Wadham College, Lewis at University College. For the next several years, they would both be living in and around Oxford as they pursued their degrees at the heightened pace encouraged by an overcrowded postwar university. They would see each other frequently, engaged in the kind of lively discussions of topics great and small that have marked student life since at least the time of the first Academy.

But with Barfield and Lewis, there was a special quality to their exchanges, best captured in Lewis' account of his friendship with Barfield as he recalled it many years later in his spiritual autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955). There Lewis calls Barfield the type of everyman's Second Friend (Lewis' First Friend, whom he calls a kind of alter ego, was his boyhood friend in Ireland, Arthur Greeves):

But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the antiself. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not be your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. He has read all the right books but has got all the wrong things out of every one. It is as if he spoke your language but mispronounced it. How can he be so nearly right and yet, invariably, just not right? . . . . When you set out to correct his heresies, you find that he forsooth has decided to correct yours! And then you go at it, hammer and tongs, far into the night, night after night, or walking through fine country that neither give a glance to, each learning the weight of the other's punches, and often more like mutually respectful enemies than friends. Actually (though it never seems so at the time) you modify one another's thought; out of this perpetual dogfight a community of mind and a deep affection emerge. But I think he changed me a good deal more than I him.

Characteristically, Barfield agrees with Lewis--and disagrees. In various writings and discussions about Lewis since Lewis' death now collected in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1990), Barfield claims that he and Lewis "argued . . . (as we argued most things that we argued at all) on his ground rather than on mine--psychological, philosophical, aesthetic," as he, Barfield, "staggeringly, incoherently, and with [Lewis'] help," would seek to advance a particular notion. Barfield sides with another commentator who had written that in conversations with Lewis he felt "he was wielding a peashooter against a howitzer" Barfield writes: "I have felt much the same all my life. Or was it more like trying to run alongside a motorcar in top gear?" Barfield doubts that he changed Lewis more than Lewis changed him. But of one thing he is certain and on this he and Lewis would be in agreement: "In our agreements we always, both of us, were arguing for truth not for victory, and arguing for truth, not for comfort."

THE GREAT WAR

The questions must indeed arise: What truth was it that Barfield and Lewis were arguing for? Of course, there is no record of those early discussions pursued as the two walked through fine country without either of them glancing at it (surely an exaggeration, given the love both of them had for nature); but by happy accident the continuation of those undergraduate discussions has been preserved, at least in part, through letters and other surviving documents. These in turn have examined and the central points of the debate reconstructed in Lionel Adey's excellent study C. S. Lewis' "Great War" with Owen Barfield (1978).

What happened was that by 1925, Barfield had married and moved to London to pursue a career as a free-lance writer (later to become and attorney), and Lewis had secured a position as a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was to remain for almost thirty years. But the two eager students of literature and philosophy were not about to abandon their arguments for truth, so they continued their debate through letters containing treatises with seriocomic names like the "Summa," "De Bono et Malo," "De Toto et Parte." They called this extended exchange that began first in conversations at Oxford and continued by letter through the second par of the decade of the twenties the "Great War," in memory of the one that both had fought in just before their Oxford meeting. The Barfield-Lewis "Great War," then, can be taken as a shorthand term to comprehend the decade-long discussion that was a kind of anticipation of the intellectual and social fellowship that came to mark the group gathered round Lewis at Oxford from the thirties to the fifties, known as the Inklings. The difference is that the INKLINGS were more deliberately social, more initially in agreement and hence less intellectually combative than the Barfield-Lewis association of the twenties, though there was always a considerable intellectual charge to Inklings sessions. but what both groupings wee interesting was still the pursuit of truth.

But what was that truth? It was in the final analysis the truth of meaning and the truth of belief. What is meanings? Where does it come from? How do we know what we know? What are the mental instruments by which we know what we know? How do we know what we believe and why? And, above all, what re we to believe? Lewis paints his pictures of Barfield in terms of this latter question and in terms of his own quest for belief in the decade of the twenties, for that, according to the account in Surprised by Joy was, consciously or otherwise, the chief thrust of Lewis' intellectual activity in the Oxford years. Typically, Barfield is less autobiographical in his accounts of the early discussions with Lewis, and he represents the exchanges in more purely cerebral terms. The difference may lie in the fact that by the early twenties, through a process that Barfield has never dwelt on from the autobiographical point of view, Barfield had arrived a philosophic and religious position that had not changed significantly from that time to this, though it has certainly deepened. As Lewis wrote: "[Barfield] was of course not so learned then as he has since become; but the genius was already there." Barfield more ruefully, and certainly overmodestly, speaks of being always the "same old Barfield," writing the same book again and again." The important point is that by the mid-twenties Barfield had grasped the central tenets of the philosophy that he would espouse for the rest of his life, while Lewis was still struggling to come to a firm philosophic and religious position.

By the early twenties Barfield had accepted the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, the found of the philosophy as Anthroposophy, literally "the wisdom of mankind." Though Lewis stresses the Germanic obscurity, occultism, and finally the dullness of Steiner's teachings, he was most disturbed in the early twenties by the fact that it was also Christian. Steiner's views were firmly rooted in Christian Trinitarian thought, but they also embrace Christian mysticism and much eastern mystical thought as well--hence what Lewis called "occultism" and hence, too, much of Lewis' dismay.

Lewis, for his part at the time, was still questing; and despite his alarm at Barfield's movement in a religious direction, he recognized retrospectively that he himself was moving in that direction as well. Barfield and others contributed to Lewis' acceptance of a belief in the Absolute, that nineteenth-century idealist concept that was held to be final ground of being but at all the same thing as God, let alone the same thing as any organized religious body. By the end of the decade, Lewis had accepted theism and, by the end of the next decade, Christianity.

Barfield is insistent that this movement on Lewis' part cannot in any simple and direct way be credited to Barfield himself. For one thing, he was no longer resident in Oxford during the, for Lewis, crucial second half of the twenties; for another, the "Great War" epistolary exchanges, though intense and at times extensive, were also intermittent, carried on amidst busy lives on both sides devoted to other things, and were scarcely the main activity of either one of them during these years. Nevertheless, that Barfield's thinking and exchanges with Lewis were broad contributing factors in Lewis' conversion must be acknowledge. The "Great War," Lewis wrote, "was one of the turning points of my life."

What appears to have been the essence of the Barfield-Lewis debate was the question of knowledge, of epistemology, of how we know what we know. Lewis, ever the total logician, believed that we know all that we know through reason--often as not, reason operating on empirical facts, but, in any case, reason, exercising itself through traditional logic and the traditional syllogism. Barfield, while acknowledging the necessity of logic and even crediting Lewis with making him aware of that necessity, also held that we know through the active participation of the imagination working not so much on the facts as in cooperation with them--and ultimately in cooperation with Mind itself, with Mind or Logos recognized as the necessary universal ground of all meaning. Barfield was, in short, already advocating a kind of revitalized Romanticism. This is what he means in the title of a collection of essays that would appear a good many years later, Romanticism Comes of Age (1944; rev. ed. 1966).

INTERIOR IS ANTERIOR

That Barfield had already arrived at his neo-Romantic and, as we would now say, "holistic" position is apparent from two of his early books, published in the twenties. Barfield's first book was, significantly enough, a fairy tale first (The Silver Trumpet, 1925); Lewis' first publications were volumes of verse. These facts serve to remind us of the fundamentally literary orientation of both men, despite the fact that the "Great War" was mainly a philosophic debate.

The literary character of Barfield's first nonfiction works is evident from the titles, History in English Words (1926) and Poetic Diction (1928), but these also express Barfield's leading philosophic ideas. That both of these works have gone trough subsequent editions and remain in print to this day is a sign of their continuing relevance and their representative character in Barfield' thought. Both provide substance for understanding Barfield's views in the "Great War" and how those affected Lewis. No wonder that Barfield dedicated Poetic Diction to C. S. Lewis with the epigraph from Blake, "Opposition is true friendship." More important, both books are excellent introductions to the thought of Owen Barfield as it would be expounded from the mid-twenties up to the present time, well after the close of the private "Great War," after which Barfield and Lewis, though always close friends, saw each other only infrequently.

And what are these ideas? What is Barfield's thought, that Lewis and others have so mindful of it? What is Barfield's truth? The straightforward and academic title of Barfield's book History in English Words would not seem likely to give the answers to such questions any more than the equally direct and unassuming title of Poetic Diction. Both, however, advance the sort of idea that C. S. Lewis had been debating with Barfield throughout the twenties in their "Great War." Both books give us good ideas as to Barfield's notion of truth.

History in English Words is Barfield's exploration of the meaning of etymology--a simple enough understanding, one might suppose, but not in Barfield's hands. In his study of the changes in the meanings of words over time, Barfield came to see not mere change alone but development, indeed evolution, though hardly evolution of the Darwinian kind. In his examination of the development of language, Barfield saw a window onto earlier attitudes and perceptions, which he recognized to be a window earlier forms of human consciousness. People in earlier times did not simply mean something slightly different by the use of a given word; they perceived something different.

The way in which Barfield came upon this insight is worth explaining, both to clarify the insight, which is fundamental to Barfield's philosophic position, and to illustrate the way in which Barfield comes at things "from a different angle." Traditional studies of etymology, or word origins, approached the history of the language with the (usually unconscious) assumption that words and language were "built up" over time. Once the kinship of various language families had been established (and it is indeed a very real kinship), there was a search for the common "root" of words out of which languages were presumed to have been built, rather like a search for the original quarry from which the stones had been hauled away to construct a building. The underlying assumption was that the farther back one went in time, the simpler and more literal language was until eventually one found the basic building blocks, the loose quarry stones, that over time had been put together to form the modern complex languages that we know. The point at which the construction began, so to speak, was the "metaphoric period" of language, during which the basic words arising out of the root sounds were applied metaphorically to other things; in this model, the word for breath or wind, to take a classic Barfield example, came to be applied to the concept of spirit.

This view is still widely held: Most people believe, if they think about it at all, that language began as grunts to designate specific physical things such a tree or a stream--with perhaps a few sounds to designate crude and elementary feelings such as fear or anger--and that these "primitive" sounds gradually took on greater complexity and depth of meaning, being transferred to other nonmaterial things.

The problem with the traditional theory of language, unnoted or ignored by students of etymology, is that such evidence as there is regarding earlier states of languages does not support the "root" concept at all. Barfield recognized that the farther back we go in the study of language, the more complex, the more apparently metaphorical--not the simpler--language is seen to be. Earlier forms of modern languages, as well as contemporary examples of isolated and so-called primitive languages, tend to be more elaborate in vocabulary and structure than "civilized" languages, with vast long single-word phrases, "holophrases," used where modern languages would employ a series of discrete words. In other words, early language does not use single words for tree or stream, but whole utterances than mean something like "the willow that grows beside the stream." The development of language, Barfield saw, was the progressive separation into specific parts of a former unity. That former unity Barfield called original participation; the term participation become a Barfieldian byword. Likewise, the imaginary "metaphoric phase" of language so beloved of nineteenth-century language theorists had never existed. Rather, the metaphor was part of a single unified perception that included what we would think of as both the literal and the metaphorical. There was not a word for wind subsequently applied to spirit; there was a word that simultaneously meant both, that conveyed a conception that later ages would separate. This progressive differentiation of an earlier unity is what actually constitutes the evolution of language.

The study of the evolution of words and language revealed further an evolution of consciousness, a term now firmly associated with Barfield (and tellingly used as the title for the 1975 Festschrift for Barfield edited by Shirley Sugerman). Like words and language, human consciousness has evolved and is evolving. That is to say, the study of the earlier unified perceptions revealed in words and their progressive differentiation into ever more precise but also ever less spontaneously whole kinds of meaning signaled to Barfield that the human consciousness had itself changed and developed over time. As he was to put it later in a brilliant example in Saving the Appearances, if we were to see through the eyes of a medieval man, we would be astonished by the way in which everything seemed to be connected, interpenetrating, and spread out before our view; whereas, if a medieval man were to see things through our eyes, he would exclaim, "Oh! Look how they stand out!" Human consciousness has separated things out from one another and has itself changed over time in a way that can be grasped through the study of the evolution of words.

The early C. S. Lewis as well as the later, more orthodox C. S. Lewis rejected such a notion, insisting that human consciousness has been the same throughout human history. But the early and later C. S. Lewis accepted an important aspect of Barfield's historical and linguistic insights, namely that there is such a thing a "chronological snobbery," and that the early Lewis had been guilty of it until cured by Barfield. Chronological snobbery--the notion that anything that has passed out of fashion is therefore invalid and irrelevant and that the present age is superior to all others because it is the present age--is still with us, though Lewis himself has done much to combat it in writings factual and imaginative.

Through the study of words and language that led him to see human consciousness as having evolved and evolving, Barfield was able to entertain the idea that revelation may also be a continuing process--not a single historical event, although Barfield is also unwavering in his conviction that the event of the Incarnation was a momentous turning point in human history. The early and yet more the later C. S. Lewis certainly saw the Incarnation as central, but he rejected the notion that there could be any revelation after the initial Christian one. But again, an aspect of this idea had its impact on the early Lewis. This was the Barfieldian conception that Mind precedes matter, that Mind cannot evolve from matter, Darwinism presumed, but that Mind is anterior to matter and is "given" as language was originally given. "Interior is anterior," says a character who represents the Logos in Barfield's Unancestral Voice (1965), This concept of the primacy of Mind was the second lesson, after that of chronological snobbery, that Lewis acknowledged that he learned from Barfield. It delivered him from pure materialism; it obliged him to admit "that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic Logos." Though Barfield later questions, "What am I supposed to have taught him? He continues to deny everything I say!" the answer lies in good measure in those two principles that Lewis credits to Barfield, the deliverance from chronological snobbery (which is the basis for Lewis' sympathetic literary studies as well as for his imaginative creations of other worlds) and the conviction that the Logos contains the universe, that Mind precedes matter (which helped to lead Lewis to idealism, then to theism, and finally to Christianity).

IMAGINATION AND THE LOGOS

In Poetic Diction, Barfield advanced a position consistent with his argument in History in English Words but also more radical. The book is not only an instructive literary study of the character and kinds of Poetic Diction; it is also a statement, Barfield's earliest full-scale such statement, of the nature of knowledge and of the role of the imagination in knowledge. It was this issue--the role of the imagination--that most divided and agitated Barfield and Lewis during the "Great War." Lewis believed and largely professed so to believe for the rest of his life (even though his practice did not always support his stated belief) that the imagination was a fine and useful aspect of the human mind, especially when it came to literature, but that it was not an instrument of knowledge: that role was reserved to the faculty of reason. Barfield argued then as now in the tradition of the great Romantics (especially Coleridge but latterly Goethe and Steiner as well) that the Imagination (and for these purposes it must be capitalized) is more than an amusement or a plaything but is the agency by which we truly perceive and comprehend anything at all: "Both what they half-create,/And what perceive," as Wordsworth put it, and "We receive but what we give" in Coleridge's formulation.

Barfield argues that the mind must and does go at least halfway in meeting the phenomena (often called by Barfield the "unrepresented," by which he means whatever it is that is "out there") before the phenomena can have any significance, any form, any coherence. The phenomena do not make the mind: the mind makes the phenomena. Without an interior concept of tree, house, barn, street, the human mind would look upon the objects we commonly designate by those terms with almost total incomprehension. But where does the mind acquire these concepts that enable it to make sense of the phenomena? Barfield's answer is through the Imagination.

Students of literature are well acquainted--perhaps too well acquainted to think about it properly--with the definition of the primary Imagination that Coleridge advances in his Biographia Literaria: "the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM." Recast in more accessible terms, Coleridge is saying that the limited human mind (the finite mind) in exercising the Imagination repeats and recapitulates what the unconstrained divine mind (the infinite I AM) is eternally engaged in by creating and sustaining the universe. The universe would not be there if God did not imagine it and continue to imagine it. Put even more simply, the Imagination is what the mind does when it functions at all, and it does so by virtue of participation in the Logos--in other words, by the grace of God. Also, though Barfield will develop this concept more fully later, the Imagination works through polarity, the holding in creative tension of opposed though not contradictory idea. Through metaphor, the mind demonstrates the creative tension in polarity and brings forth new meaning.

What Barfield did in Poetic Diction and has continued to do for sixty years more is to take the central concepts and insights of Romanticism seriously and to apply them to language, literature, history, and philosophy. In terms of his concept of the Imagination, Barfield defers always to the priority of Coleridge, Goethe, and Steiner, all of whom see the Imagination in essentially these terms. Barfield also defers to the primacy of Coleridge in regard to the concept of polarity, another issue--along with the idea of transformation--that divided Barfield and Lewis. All of these Barfield credits to his ROMANTIC forebears. What Barfield's modesty does not permit him to say or perhaps even to realize is that he, Barfield, has made all of this clearer and more susceptible to practical application than any of his illustrious predecessors. That is why Romanticism has come of age in Barfield.

SAVING THE APPEARANCES

With the publication of Poetic Diction, with Barfield's permanent residence in London, and with entering the practice of law by the early thirties, the first and most intellectual of Barfield's friendship with C. S. Lewis came to an end. Though they remained firm friends, though they took annual or semiannual walking tours together when circumstances permitted (and on these walks did not neglect to glance at fine country, as is made clear in the recreation of one of those walks in Walter Hooper's Through Joy and Beyond, 1982), and though Barfield functioned as Lewis' solicitor (a role engagingly depicted by Barfield in his brilliant minor classic from 1950, This Ever Diverse Pair), never again would they pursue the same kind of intellectual debate as characterized the "Great War.," never again would they go at it "hammer and tongs." Barfield regrets this change in their relationship, but he cannot fully account for it, as it was Lewis who saw to it that nothing like the "Great War" would again occupy their time. On this matter the interested reader can consult "Lewis and/or Barfield" in Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, one essay among many in the collection that shows how Barfield has continued to argue with C. S. Lewis after Lewis' death.

Of course Barfield was not chiefly engaged in instructing C. S. Lewis, grateful as we can be for his having done a good deal of that in the twenties. Poetic Diction and History in English Words gave excellent instruction to a larger public as well, and had not the Great Depression come along, Barfield's early achievement would surely have been a launching pad for a full-time literary career. Instead Barfield spent the next twenty-five years as a practicing solicitor who took what free time he could to continue his writings. That these were as numerous as they were in the thirties, forties, and early fifties is testimony to Barfield's dedication to the life of the mind; but of course they are not so numerous as we could want. They include the already mentioned Romanticism Comes of Age and This Ever Diverse Pair.

With the publication in 1957 of his brilliant study Saving the Appearances, Barfield entered upon the third stage of his career. Two years its publication, he retired from the practice of law to devote himself once again full-time to writing, lecturing, and serving as visiting professor at a number of American universities. (Barfield's American public, as he has often gratefully pointed out, is both larger and more enthusiastic than his British one.) The third career, a rich fulfillment of the one he started on in the twenties, has lasted for more than thirty years, during which time Barfield has published a large number of articles and reviews and an impressive number of additional books, including Worlds Apart (1963), Unancestral Voice (1965), Speaker’s Meaning (1967), What Coleridge Thought (1971), The Rediscovery of Meaning (1977), History, Guilt, and Habit (1979), Orpheus 1983), and now in his ninety-first year, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis (1990).

Though each of these books enlarged and enriched Barfield's views, space does not permit individual examination here, only a few summary remarks and some specific attention to one of them. For further introduction to Barfield's thought, readers should turn to Speaker’s Meaning and The Rediscovery of Meaning, both of which make especially clear Barfield's ideas on the origin and generation of meanings. These might be followed by History, Guilt, and Habit for understanding Barfield's analysis of the modern dilemma and by Worlds Apart, a stimulating fictional Platonic symposium among representatives of various contemporary worldviews. What Coleridge Thought is a brilliant exposition of Barfield's great predecessor but very much a book for those who already know a great deal of Coleridge, as will be the forthcoming edition of Coleridge's Philosophic Lectures that Barfield has already completed. Orpheus is an arresting verse drama that reminds us that Barfield has all along been a poet as well as a philosopher.

But the book among the later Barfield writings that has rightly gained the most devoted following is Saving the Appearances. It is here that Barfield shows what modern idolatry is and here that he explicates, indeed brings stunningly to life, his concept of participation. Barfield shows what original participation was--crudely put, an early at-one-ment with the Logos--and why the evolution of consciousness beyond that stage has had so much loss connected with it. but Barfield also shows himself no laudator temporis acti, as C. S. Lewis rather delighted in being; for Barfield tries to show that there is a stage forward, one that will transcend and transform (two favorite Barfield concepts) original participation into what he calls "final participation." Only Barfield's own treatment can do justice to his argument. No one interested in Barfieldian though fail to seek out that treatment first hand.

LAST INKLINGS

It was during the decades of Barfield's London career as a solicitor that the Inklings were meeting in C. S. Lewis' rooms in Oxford. It was during that same period that Lewis gained, first, distinction as a scholar, then broad public readership and acclaim for his popular works. Lewis returned the compliment of Barfield's dedicating Poetic Diction to him by dedicating his first scholarly book, The Allegory of Love, to Barfield as "the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers." Their friendship remained firm, but Barfield could be only an occasional participant in the sessions of the Inklings at Oxford. Still, one cannot but feel that the fellowship of Inklings was in some measure the repetition in the social and intellectual life of C. S. Lewis of the primary, earlier, creative Barfield-Lewis fellowship of the twenties.

However that may be, the Inklings ultimately gave their name to the entire group of like-minded literary people who are seen, despite individual indifferences, to share a general philosophic and literary disposition and to constitute, if not a literary movement, then surely a considerable literary current in twentieth-century English letters. That two of them, J. R. R. Tolkien and Lewis himself, became world-wide bestselling authors is certainly what has drawn attention to the group as a grou Humphrey Carpenter in his The Inklings (1979) concludes rather lamely that the group had nothing more in common than being the friends of C. S. Lewis. Others see far more philosophic unity among them and are disposed to refer to them as the "Oxford Christians," which they consider a more accurately descriptive term than Inkling. R. J. Reilly in his thoughtful Romantic Religion (1971) treats the four major literary figures among the Inklings--Barfield, Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams--as embodying a broadly shared outlook that finds its "most fundamental version" in the work of Owen Barfield.

Barfield, then, the wisest and best of Lewis' unofficial teachers, turns out even in absentia to have been also the wisest and best of the teachers of the Inklings. And of us as well, if we will but let him.