Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis, theologian and literary scholar, and Owen Barfield, philosopher and London solicitor, were longtime friends. G. B. Tennyson, editor of these papers by Barfield on Lewis, believes this relationship of "two immense intellects" "one of the most absorbing literary friendships of the twentieth century." Lewis called Barfield the "wisest and best of my unofficial teachers"; to Barfield, C. S. Lewis was "the absolutely unforgettable friend." They had been friends and disputants from their Oxford days after the First World War until Lewis's death forty years later. Barfield was his solicitor and trustee in the later years. This is vintage Barfield as well as an astute appraisal of C. S. Lewis's personality and beliefs. In essays, interviews, several poems, and a fragment of fiction, Barfield writes of "the individual essence" of C. S. Lewis, his brilliance, his "absolute honesty of mind," his lack of interest in collectivities-races, nations, movements-his interest only in the individual soul, his "irrepressible bent for comedy," his "keenness in pursuing any point of difference or doubt to its final conclusion." Barfield writes about himself, also, as a way of understanding his friend: "In an argument we always, both of us, were arguing for truth, not for victory, and arguing for truth, not for comfort." Both trusted the imagination, but they differed on its relation to knowledge-"[Lewis] was in love with the imagination" and "to search for any link between myth and fact was for him a crucial error." C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield had in common an awareness "of the silliness and the triviality of the time" and the conviction that the contemporary loss of the idea of sin was a disaster. But they also disagreed from the first, as Barfield explains, especially about theology, about the nature of God, the process of history. Lewis saw revelation as finished; Barfield saw it as a "continuing process," as he did human history. Lewis considered hierarchy necessary and healthy; Barfield regarded it as an evolutionary phase. Although C. S. Lewis died in 1963, Barfield's reflections on their relationship and analysis of its meaning ended only with his own death, in his hundredth year, in 1997.

Biographies & Memoirs

Barfield, Owen

Arts & Literature

Barfield Pr

The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays

"Owen Barfield has unusual ideas about human nature and reality.. Now this seasoned British thinker.offers a collection of [essays] that reflects the entire range of his interests, including the philosophy of science, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, aesthetics, literature, linguistics, and religion.. He is a prophet of the New Consciousness who has been around a long time; and he may well be the most comprehensive and critically incisive of them all." -The Kirkus Reviews

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

"Owen Barfield has unusual ideas about human nature and reality.. Now this seasoned British thinker.offers a collection of [essays] that reflects the entire range of his interests, including the philosophy of science, physics, biology, psychology, metaphysics, aesthetics, literature, linguistics, and religion.. He is a prophet of the New Consciousness who has been around a long time; and he may well be the most comprehensive and critically incisive of them all." -The Kirkus Reviews

Unancestral Voice

"In the great English tradition of the lay specialist, Barfield, a lawyer, modernizes the Platonic dialogue format to focus on the philosophic problems of reality and ways of knowing.. This is the solvent mind at its best-distinguished exchanges giving provocative, open-ended results at every point. Highly recommended. of permanent value." Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

"In the great English tradition of the lay specialist, Barfield, a lawyer, modernizes the Platonic dialogue format to focus on the philosophic problems of reality and ways of knowing.. This is the solvent mind at its best-distinguished exchanges giving provocative, open-ended results at every point. Highly recommended. of permanent value." Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

What Coleridge Thought

Please put price both in barcode and separately on back cover.

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free. from the prison we have made for ourselves by our ways of knowing, our limited and false habits of thought, our 'common sense.' -Saul Bellow Few books [besides History, Guilt and Habit] . would provide a better basis for a serious discussion of modern mentality, or a better closing for a course in great books or the history of ideas. Readable at all levels. -Choice There is scarcely a single term that comprehends the range of Owen Barfield's interests and learning, though 'philosopher' would probably do as well as any, but all of his interests have been grounded in is study of history, which is to say something more than that he is a student of history. He is rather a knower of history and a thinker about it. -from the "Foreword" by G. B. Tennyson Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

History, Guilt and Habit

United States

Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960's

"In the great English tradition of the lay specialist, Barfield, a lawyer, modernizes the Platonic dialogue format to focus on the philosophic problems of reality and ways of knowing.. This is the solvent mind at its best-distinguished exchanges giving provocative, open-ended results at every point. Highly recommended. of permanent value." -Choice: Books for College Libraries Owen Barfield, who died in 1997 shortly after entering his hundredth year, was one of the seminal minds of the twentieth century, of whom C. S. Lewis wrote "he towers above us all." His books have won respect from many writers other than Lewis, among them T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkein, and Saul Bellows, and John Lukacs. He was born in North London in 1898 and received his B.A. with first-class honors from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1921. He also earned B.C.L., M.A., and B.Litt. degrees from Oxford and was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He served as a solicitor for twenty-eight years until his retirement from legal practice in 1959. Barfield was a visiting professor at Brandeis and Drew Universities, Hamilton College, the University of Missouri at Columbia, UCLA, SUNY-Stony Brook, and the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. His books include seven others published by The Barfield Press: Romanticism Comes of Age, Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960s, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning, What Coleridge Thought, The Rediscovery of Meaning, and History, Guilt and Habit.

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Barfield Pr publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Barfield Pr

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Barfield Pr publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis

Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis

The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays

The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays

Unancestral Voice

Unancestral Voice

What Coleridge Thought

History, Guilt and Habit

Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960's

Worlds Apart: A Dialogue of the 1960's