The synergy of CS Lewis and Owen Barfield

I have a new essay on L. Jagi Lamplighter's Superversive Inklings blog.

An excerpt:

Starting with Lewis; we can see that he was the more creative and accomplished writer, and that he was able to express instinctively more than he could (or would) comprehend explicitly. For example, there are depths, there is heart and resonance in Lewis’s imaginative fiction – especially the Narnia stories but also the Planetary trilogy, and also in his imaginative essays such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce – that are absent from, and even contradicted-by, Lewis’s theoretical and explicitly-Christian writings.

Barfield was a deeper, more rigorous and honest theoretician than Lewis. Indeed, Barfield understood Lewis and Lewis’s writing, better than Lewis understood himself. In this sense, Barfield was ‘larger’ than Lewis – but Barfield could not accomplish what Lewis did – so it could be said that Lewis expressed Barfield better than Barfield expressed himself!

This is why they are complementary.


Read the whole thing...