Owen Barfield On C S Lewis

'Owen Barfield on C.S. Lewis' is a collection of essays and lectures about the author, theologian, and literary scholar, C. S. Lewis. Barfield and Lewis were close friends for 44 years, from their Oxford days after WWI to Lewis's death in 1963. Barfield's reflections on their relationship ended only with his own passing, in his hundredth year. Barfield was instrumental in converting Lewis to theism. However, the two disagreed on many points, and it is that creative dialectic which defines and irradiates their friendship: "In an argument we always, both of us, were arguing for the truth, not for victory" (Owen Barfield). C.S. Lewis on Owen Barfield: "The wisest and best of my unofficial teachers." "Barfield towers above us all." To Walter Field: "You notice when Owen and I are talking metaphysics which you don't follow: you don't notice the times when you and Owen are talking economics which I can't follow. Owen is the only one who is never out of his depth."

Collective portrait of the man through the eyes of writers and friends who knew him. For contents, see Author Catalog.

C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis's Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times. In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. The result is an extraordinary account of the ideas, affections and vexations that drove the group's most significant members. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years-and did so in dazzling style.

A representative selection from the major writings of the man C. S. Lewis called “the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.”

This new study by Lionel Adey is unique in its attempt to trace the development of C.S. Lewis as a maker and reader of books. Adey shows how the two sides of Lewis's personality, "Dreamer" and "Mentor" affected his writing in its various modes.l