Francis J. Morris Ronald C. Wendling COLERIDGE AND ‘THE GREAT DIVIDE’ BETWEEN C.S. LEWIS AND OWEN BARFIELD In dedicating The Allegory of Love to Owen Barfield, C.S. Lewis called him the “‘wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.”’ As in all true teaching relationships, however, there was in this one as much strife as discipleship. They fought each other ‘often more like mutually respect- ful enemies than friends,” wrote Lewis in Surprised by Joy, but out of this very ‘dogfight,’ emerged ‘‘a community of mind and a deep affection.” Barfield acknowledged more directly the conflict that energized their relationship when he subtitled the dedication of his own Poetic Diction to Lewis with Blake’s dictum: ‘Opposition is true friend- ship.’? Behind this aphorism is Barfield’s perhaps fuller appreciation of the irreconcilable divisions that both defined and fueled their “half a lifetime’s priceless friendship.’”* To grasp the reality of that friendship, we need to resist the easy assumption that it simply overcame their in- tellectual divisions and rendered them harmless; we need instead to take Blake’s statement seriously. One way of doing that, and so defining the dialectical and generative nature of the opposition between the two men—and its intellectual issue—is to look closely at the relationship of both to the Romantic critic, poet and philosopher, Samuel Taylor Col- eridge, whose writings contain and seek constantly to reconcile the very opposites that at once divided Lewis and Barfield and sustained the friendship between them. We will argue that their twentieth-century in- tellectual journeys trace out in biographically circumstanced real time the complementary but antagonistic routes that Coleridge’s earlier epistemological vision projected as the paths to knowledge. With the advantage of hindsight, it is not difficult to put succinctly in philosophical terms, as Lionel Adey has done, the question at issue between Lewis and Barfield: were ‘subject and object . . . ever one or always distinct’’? Lewis could never accept with confidence or equanim- ity any line of epistemological argument which suggested their oneness. Barfield’s lifelong intellectual quest, on the other hand, has been to ex- ' CS. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955), p. 200. * William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 157. > Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 3rd. ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1977), p. 38. * Lionel Adey, C. S. Lewis's “Great War” with Owen Barfield, English Literary Studies, Monograph Series No. 14 (Victoria, Canada: University of Victoria Press, 1978), p. 22. 149perience and demonstrate the possibility of just such a unity. But the sharpness of this division—and, more importantly, the intellectual and aesthetic consequences that issued from it—were a long time evolving. The young Lewis who first came to know Barfield in the post-war Oxford of the early nineteen twenties had a Romantic susceptibility to “Joy’—that is, to occasional and almost physically overpowering in- timations of a moving and non-natural ‘presence’ in commonplace, natural experience. These joyful moments, however, implied a confidence in subjective experience which Lewis was busy trying to talk himself out of by cultivating a fashionable ‘realism,’ as he called it, that “accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses.’ Indeed, the philosophical predicament in which, according to Lewis, both he and Barfield found themselves at the time was that they accepted many truths (for example, the validity of their moral judgments and the value of their aesthetic experience) which gave an objectivity to thought for which their ‘realism’ left no room. When Barfield reacted against this contradiction by immersing himself in Romantic poetry while simultaneously discovering the work of the philosophical visionary Rudolph Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, Lewis was shocked by the flaring up in his friend of the very subjectivism he was trying to suppress in himself. Here began what Lewis called the ‘Great War,’ an extended conversation between himself and Barfield which Lewis later recalled ‘‘as one of the turning points of my life.’’* In commenting on the context of their exchanges, Barfield remarked: | did a dissertation . . . that was made into the book Poetic Diction— enlarged a bit. I sent the typescript to Lewis, and he took great trouble: he went through it and he did his own kind of summary of the arguments. I think the correspondence arose out of that, but it was also sharpened so to speak and possibly continued longer than it would have been because about that time I became interested in Steiner's Anthroposophy . .. . Lewis took a Kantian view of knowledge, that it is the application of the forms of perception onto an unknown background, and if you start trying to know the things themselves, you are going to get into a mess. That was the root of the matter all the time.” At the time, Barfield recalled, Lewis was “hanging on” at Oxford waiting for an appointment as fellow, while the newly married Barfield was liv- ing at a village fifteen miles or so away: * Lewis, Surprised By Joy, p. 208 * Lewis, Surprised By Joy, pp. 205-207. ” Barfield, Tape recorded conversations between Owen Barfield and Francis J. Morris on file in the Wade Collection at Wheaton College Library, Wheaton, Illinois. 150I could easily get in there and stop a night with him, and he came out and stopped with me . . . and, of course we wrote letters, We'd even meet half way and have a walk; there was a good deal of talk in between some of the letters. An allusive phrase would really em- body for us a whole hour of conversation possibly, or repeated conversations." Different from other celebrated controversies that marked Lewis’s growth as a thinker and scholar which were focused on a particular historical or cultural notion or critical theory, the exchanges during this “incessant disputation’”’ with Barfield were open ended and radical.’ ‘“The point at issue all the time,”’ Barfield recalls, “‘was: can the kind of men- tal activity which goes to the appreciation of art or poetry be applied epistemologically?’”"° Could such activity, in other words, dependent as it must be on the exercise of the perceiving individual’s imaginative faculties, produce knowledge? Lewis’s temperament and intellect were from the first set suspiciously against this notion. While he did, for a time, abandon his ‘realism’ for a philosophical Idealism of an Hegelian variety, Lewis never did ‘‘come within a hundred miles” of Steiner’s and Barfield’s Anthroposophy.’' Not only was he always uncomfortable with Barfield’s tendency to mentalize the universe, but by Barfield’s own later testimony, Lewis had little interest in his own subjectivity aside from a concern with his moral ‘‘weaknesses and shortcomings.’’'? His affection was for the external world which, despite its admitted cor- respondences with the self, had for him a reality largely independent of it. This strong Johnsonian sense of the object in Lewis—that is, of the object as distinct from the thinking subject—was the source of strength as well as of difficulty for him. In comparing his technique as a thinker with that of Lewis, Barfield has remarked that what he hoped to do was ‘‘to combine sharp logical thought with imagination somehow in the same act; and Lewis always wanted to keep them separate. He was taking a holiday from logic when he was using imagination. I always wanted to get them together somehow.’"? Well over a decade after the face to face arguments of the ‘Great War’ had subsided, Lewis was still resisting the effort to fuse logic and imagination. In his 1939 ‘‘Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare,”’ an essay devoted essentially to exploring the cognitive validi- * Barfield, Tape. * Lewis, Surprised By Joy, p. 207. ° Barfield, Tape. " Lewis, Surprised By Joy, pp. 207-209. ' Jocelyn Gibb, Light on C. S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), p. xvi. Barfield, Tape. 151ty of metaphor, the most he will allow is collaboration between the two. “T am a rationalist,”’ he says. ‘‘For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.” Since our thought— indeed the meaningfulness of discourse—is dependent on the imagina- tion’s ability to grasp metaphorical equivalence, it follows that for human thinking to be other than nonsensical there must be “‘a kind of psycho- physical parallelism (or more) in the universe.’’'* Implicit in his conclu- sion is an intense awareness of both the power of what he was elsewhere to call “the realizing imagination” and a poignant sense of its perceived limitations.'* A canny observer, one sensitive to the virtues of parabolic language whether in the form of metaphor, symbol, or myth, may discern across the divide that separates him from the observed the shadow of the thing itself. But union with it is impossible. Throughout his subsequent career as a critic and historian, Lewis’s perspective on imaginative language and literature reflects this view. It is clear that during his early years he learned from Barfield to attach real epistemological significance to metaphoric, allegorical, and symbolic language—refining his understanding of these kinds of imaginatively generated discourse as he developed as a thinker and writer. Such discourse—and the mythic fictions in which it culminates—might reach across the gulf that divides the consciousness of the knower from the known, eliciting in the understanding the transformation of meaning in- to knowledge. But it was always of things ‘out there’—of some laws, or presences, or processes, or of some yet more complex realities—that knowledge was intimated to the observer who, the more he apprehends them conceptually under normal circumstances, the less he experiences them directly. For in Lewis’s view the ordinary human dilemma is ‘‘either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste.’’ Of this “tragic dilemma myth’’—and the range of imaginatively generated discourse— “is the partial solution.’’'* This understanding of the imagination’s important but limited func- tion shaped and influenced Lewis's criticism as well as his apologetic and fictional work. It leads him with striking consistency to value as essentially canonical writers like Dante, Milton, and Spenser whose poetry propagates mythical understanding, and to be a good deal less ap- preciative of the microscopic examinations of isolated and subjective con- sciousness that post-Romantic art, and even Donne and the “« Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare,”’ in Selected Literary Essays by C. S. Lewis, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 265. ‘* Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p- 206. “* Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 65. 152metaphysicals, offer. It accounts as well for the thematic center of vir- tually all of his own fictions. This relentless objectivism of Lewis lent a certain trenchant, common sense earthiness to many of his observations. Likewise, his capacity for selfless immersion in the literary and historical past explains the critical vigor of a book like The Allegory of Love. And when, after his conver- sion to Christianity in 1931, the non-self in which Lewis was so interested became the divine, more and more his natural attentiveness turned to religious awe, a sense of this world’s transiency, and a devout mind- fulness of moral duty. But there was a price to be paid for this outward- looking attitude. Lewis was excellent at differentiating his own from other minds by conceptualizing experience into powerful abstract or allegorical statements of its meaning to him. But his objectivism involved a correlative detachment from life, a lack in his writing of the lived immediacy of experience so that his genius, as Barfield has also noted, was one of will (like Augustine’s or Loyola’s or John Wesley’s) rather than one of imagination.'’ Barfield’s genius, by contrast, is clearly of the imagination, specifically of the philosophical imagination. The mind evidenced in most of his writing concerns itself less with ordering experience into concepts and arguments than with staying immediately present to the idea or object under discussion. Resisting abstraction from experience, he instead dif- fuses his mind into the object, seeking a living unity with it. At the center of his thought is Barfield’s belief in an illuminating transpersonal imagination whose influence fathers the evolution of human con- sciousness which, in turn, generates profound consequences in the human understanding of physical nature, observed reality, time, and history. Supporting this belief is his Coleridgean notion of how consciousness itself works, how it constitutes representations (ideas or images) of the outside world, and how its participation in that outside world completes that world’s felt reality, while realizing its own. It is an oversimplification, but not a misleading one, to say that Bar- field’s work concentrates on the how of knowing, and not on what may be known. In his early work, these linked notions are developed primarily out of his own literary and linquistic experience. In Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (1928), for instance, he identifies at the core of aesthetic experience a “‘felt change’ in the consciousness of the observer, whose experience of the outside world depends entirely on what the mind brings from within to the sense data or to the language which precipitates the experience. The change in consciousness allows the individual to bring more than could be brought before and activates a faculty enabling the " Gibb, p. xvii 153observation of what could not be observed before, as well as the recogni- tion of previously occult resemblances and analogies. In the imposing language of Coleridge, this change is ‘‘a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite J. AM.’’'* Barfield labels it more modestly a form of participation of the knower in the known, one that obviates the distinction between subject and object, and one which suggests how misleading is the idolized image engraved in the mind of so much post-Renaissance science and thought, a picture of a world wherein inert phenomena—the only and ultimate reality—are peered at longingly by an isolated human consciousness sealed inside a vacuum of meaninglessness. Inspired by Coleridge, Barfield has steadily insisted on the truth that subject and object are one. For neither Coleridge nor Barfield, however, does this oneness mean that an external world does not exist, that it can be somehow completely absorbed into mind as in the tradition of philosophical idealism. It means rather that objects are not accurately conceived as simply ‘out there,’ wholly divided from the perceiving mind. When we talk of ‘perceiving an object,’ says Barfield in What Coleridge Thought, the ‘object’ is already ‘‘a construct,” owing to our minds “‘its very presence as an object.’’'’ The reason we have such difficulty even imagining this unity, he goes on, is that the Cartesian isolation of con- sciousness from the phenomena it contemplates has so completely dominated the Western mind from the seventeenth century to the pre- sent day. What Coleridge had learned, however, from Kant and the tradi- tion of German Idealism generally was how pervasively this assumption of the objectivity of phenomena afflicts our culture, and how a philosophically more accurate conception of the mind’s actual relation- ship to reality might be worked out.° One consequence of modern Western objectivism, in the thought of both Coleridge and Barfield, is that we live under the ‘despotism of the eye.’’?' Philosophy, however, involves the quest for a truth beyond the senses, one that requires an act not of sight but of imagination. Coleridge’s whole philosophy of nature and of mind, which Barfield has both elucidated and expanded, is intended to undermine Cartesian ™ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), Vol. I, p. 304. \ Barfield, What Coleridge Thought (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 18. * The extent of Coleridge’s indebtedness to German Idealism, and whether he acknowledged it sufficiently, is of course a much vexed question. For Barfield’s spirited rejection of the frequently made charge that Coleridge is a plagiarist, see his review of Norman Fruman’s Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel in The Nation 214 (June 12, 1972), pp. 764-65. ™ Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1, p. 107; Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 19. 154dualism and prepare the reader’s own philosophical imagination to receive the truth of the mind’s oneness with its objects. ‘Nature,’ for Coleridge, is the entire realm of the non-self. Whether a particular object in nature is what we call ‘inorganic’ or organic, a rock or an insect, it is for Cole- ridge alive and composed of two forces in polar relation to each other. One of these forces, which we may call the inside of the object since our physical eyes do not see it but only the evidence of it, is the active power within the object, Coleridge’s natura naturans or nature natur- ing. But there is also in the object according to Coleridge an opposing force, which he calls natura naturata. This is the ‘outness’ of nature, the phenomenal side of it that we do see, and it is the product of natura naturans. These two opposing forces exist in the object in a relationship of polar- ity, as already mentioned, which in Coleridge means that they are manifestations of a single power which is antecedent to them both, just as positive and negative poles manifest a power in the magnet.” This power, in Coleridge’s philosophy, is ‘Life’ and the law by which life manifests itself in polar opposites is universal, extending from the most infinitesimal of particles all the way up to God. ‘Opposites’ here means “two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity.’ They are, in yet another Coleridgean definition, the “‘two conflicting principles of the FREE LIFE and the CONFINING FORM.”’™ As existing in any particular object in nature, the one force is active, the other passive. The passive force (natura naturata) is that in the object which distinguishes its individual life from all of life; it is the principle by which a particular living object detaches itself from the life of the universe and confines itself to its own separate form: ‘‘totality dawning,”’ as Cole- ridge says, “into individuation.” The active force (natura naturans), on the other hand, is the principle of “FREE LIFE,” the force connec- ting a particular form of life to the total life of the universe. Coleridge overcomes the Cartesian dualism of mind and nature by asserting the identity of the ‘‘Life”’ in nature with the ‘‘Life’”’ in mind. The “Life” in mind, in other words, manifests itself in the same law of polarity as exists in nature, only on a higher, more complex level » Coleridge, Theory of Life, in Selected Poetry and Prose of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Donald Stauffer (New York: Random House, The Modern Library, 1951), p. 578; Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 52. » Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, |, p. 297; Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 28. > Coleridge, “‘On the Principles of Genial Criticism,” in Biographia Literia, ed. J. Shaweross (London: Oxford University Press (1954], Vol. Il, p. 235; Barfield, What Cole- ridge Thought, p. 31. * Coleridge, Theory of Life, p. 577; Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 52. 155of organization. The active power, or natura naturans of the mind, is thinking, while its polar opposite is thoughts. Coleridge himself uses several different metaphors to illustrate this polarity of thinking and thoughts in the life of the mind. Leaping, for instance, requires both a voluntary act of resistance to gravitation and then a yielding to gravita- tion which, “‘by its re-action, aids the force that is exerted to resist it.””** The mind, similarly, makes an active and expansive effort in thinking, an effort which implies a counteracting force to which the mind then yields in forming individual “thoughts.” Like the yielding to gravity, however, this contraction into thoughts serves as a base from which fur- ther active thinking may take place. The acts of composing, or of remembering a name, provide Coleridge with further examples of this same polarity of thinking (in which the mind expands outward, seeking to attach itself to the wholeness and oneness of life) and thoughts (in which the mind withdraws temporarily back into itself, readying itself for still other forays outward). And again, the important point in both analogies is the contribution which the retire- ment from active effort makes toward that very effort: Now let a man watch his mind while he is composing; or, to take a still more common case, while he is trying to recollect a name; . . . Most of my readers will have observed a small water-insect . and will have noticed, how the little animal wins its way up against the stream, by alternative pulses of active and passive motion, now resisting the current, and now yielding to it in order to gather strength and a momentary fulcrum for a further propulsion. This is no unapt emblem of the mind’s self-experience in the act of thinking. There are evidently two powers at work, which relatively to each other are active and passive; and this is not possible without an intermediate faculty, which is at once both active and passive. (In philosophical language, we must denominate this intermediate faulty in all its degrees and determinations, the IMAGINATION. But in common language, and especially on the subject of poetry, we appropriate the name to a superior degree of the faculty, joined to a superior voluntary controul over it)?’ The “IMAGINATION,” then, is the very life of the mind manifesting itself in this polarity of expansive power and productive passivity or yielding. But Coleridge asserts more than that the imagination merely parallels the antecedent unity in nature which gives rise to a similar polar- ity of free life and confining form. He asserts that the life in the mind and the life in nature are one and the same life, that the propelling power * Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1, p. 124. » Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1, pp. 124-25. 156in nature (natura naturans) and in the mind (the imagination) are iden- tical powers which become, in his version of Trinitarian Christianity, identical also with the Logos of St. John—the ‘‘Word”’ who in the begin- ning was ‘‘with God’’ and who was and is God.** Coleridge’s philosophy of mind and nature, as here baldly summarized, is an explicitation in philosophical and theological terms of a way of knowing that is demonstrated in his poems. His early ‘The Eolian Harp,’ for instance, reveals divisions in perspective that complement and complete each other—and predict, as well, the habitual epistemological relation of Barfield with Lewis. Coleridge’s mind alter- nates productively in the poem between an active, centrifugal power ex- citedly experiencing and asserting its oneness with the life in nature and a passive, centripetal force at once resisting that identification and, through the solidness of that very resistance, aiding it. Many, including Barfield, have commented in a general way on the Romantic poets’ use of the wind-harp as a metaphor of mind.”* Cole- ridge’s particular use of it in this honeymoon poem, however, is especially interesting in that the harp strings, when first introduced, are presented as passive recipients of the breeze which plays upon them and to which they respond half yieldingly, creating music. We have here a metaphor containing the very polar oscillation of ‘‘coy’’ yet cooperative respon- siveness with ever more expansive activity that Coleridge’s philosophy attributes to the mind itself. Furthermore, this interplay results in what may be called an excited stasis, the famous eight line reflection (26-33) on ‘“‘the one Life within us and abroad” which was interpolated into the poem in 1817, some twenty-two years after its original composition. It is one of those cen- trifugal moments that occur so frequently in Coleridge’s poems, where the mind retires within itself to gather the wisdom of its preceding ac- tivity. Then, this reflection itself immediately becomes a starting point for yet another, significantly different, kind of Coleridgean interchange with nature (lines 34-43). This time, however, instead of simply observ- ing with Sara his natural surroundings he is now observing himself observ- ing a nearby scene, tranquilly musing “upon tranqui The water-bug’s “‘alternative pulses of active and passive motion” were “no unapt emblem,” Coleridge said in an above quoted passage, ‘“‘of the mind’s self experience in the act of thinking.”’ It is possible, in other words, not only to think in polar opposites but to experience that polarity. This movement from taking into one’s mind not only the objects ™ Barfield, What Coleridge Thought, p. 113. » Barfield, “The Harp and the Camera,” in The Rediscovery of Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1977). 157themselves but the relation of one’s own mind to those objects occurs frequently in Coleridge’s poems. It is the kind of reflexive knowledge (what Barfield calls beta thinking), as opposed to reasoning on data abstracted from experience (Barfield’s alpha thinking) that typifies Cole- tidge and, through Coleridge, Barfield as well.** Both recommend it as the only knowledge truly generative of more knowledge. In “The Eolian Harp” such reflection generates a speculation sug- gesting that the harp is as apt a metaphor of nature as it is of mind: And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely fram’d That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, ‘At once the soul of each and God of all? (44-48) Implicit, then, in this poem of Coleridge’s early twenties is his whole later philosophy, so congenial to Barfield, of the identity of nature with mind, natura naturans with the imagination. But surprisingly (in fact, disastrously) to some readers, the poem then concludes with a strong rejection of all such philosophical speculation as over-bold, irreverent, and vain. Those taught by Coleridge and Barfield to think more in polar than in logical contraries, however, will not find the poem’s ending self- contradictory. From its very first words (‘“My pensive Sara!’’), Coleridge has made his new bride a jointly thoughtful observer of the surrounding scene. And in keeping with its procedure of moving from objects to the mind in relation to those objects, the poem now moves at its close to that other perceiver and to her perspective on all that has been seen and said so far. Sara’s perspective, though logically contradictory to her husband’s, has been generated by his as its polar opposite. Hers is another of those moments of contraction and detachment as necessary to the whole truth of the poem as are his opposed, expansive speculations on ‘‘the one Life”’ and the “‘organic Harps.’’ These aggressive reachings out of the mind affirm, as the philosophies of Coleridge and Barfield are forever affirming, a unity which from her perspective melts outward things into thoughts, thereby destroying the valuable sense of nature’s solidity and of its difference from the human and especially the divine. From her common sense and orthodox Christian point of view, one that C.S. Lewis’s temperament would have found eminently congenial, the ‘“‘shap- % Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957), passim. 158ings’? of her husband’s mind are ‘Dim and unhallowed;”’ being still too much in process, they lack the form and finish of thoughts ade- quate to get us through a world as dark, bewildering and in need of redemption as this one. They are, furthermore, proud thoughts in their effort to enclose within a comprehensible world an “‘Incomprehensible”’ God, toward whom the more appropriate attitudes are praise, reverence, and gratitude. This is, without question, a cold ending to a warm poem. But “The Eolian Harp,” like all of Coleridge’s work, strives to contain the ir- reconcilable opposites represented in Barfield’s epistemological insistence on unity and Lewis’s on difference. The sense attributed to Sara of an almost unbridgeable gap between mind and world—similar to Lewis’ own—though it does not predominate in Coleridge, is very strong in him as many of his later, darker poems (‘‘Limbo,”’ for example, and “Ne Plus Ultra’’) clearly show. So also was the corresponding sense of a transcendent God who alone could heal this division and toward whom, therefore, our over-riding duties are piety and the exercise of moral choice. Lewis came deeply to share all these sentiments. As Bar- field himself has said, early on in their relationship Lewis wouldn’t have had this feeling of the gulf between the creator and the created. Quite the contrary, he sort of identified the two on the lines of subjective idealism . . . I doubt whether later on after his conversion he would have regarded the imagination as the most important vehicle of meaning . . . Other forms of relevation were more important to him.”* According to A.C. Harwood, ‘‘the great divide’’ between Lewis and Anthroposophy was that he regarded it as “‘anthropocentric,’’ lacking a “‘conception of creatureliness.”” Once, says Harwood, ‘“‘when we were talking about freedom, he made a statement I have never forgotten: “I was not born to be free—I was born to adore and obey.’”? Barfield was, as Lewis says, his ‘“‘antiself,’’ the friend with whom he disagreed about everything.” In Coleridgean terms, they were polar opposites. But Barfield’s subjectivism was in Lewis, as was Lewis’ objectivism in Bar- field. The integrity and completeness of their relationship required that the divisions they discovered between each other, they found also within each other. And it was against these polar opposites, contained also in Coleridge, that they defined themselves. ™ Barfield, Tape. * A. C. Harwood, ‘‘About Anthroposophy,” in C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, ed. James T. Como (New York: Macmillan, 1979), p. 29. » Lewis, Surprised By Joy, p. 199. 159