A Metaphysical Appreciation of C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield’s ‘Great War

Abstract The recent publication of the renowned ‘great war’ letters between Inklings C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield has reinvigorated scholarly discussion regarding their respective views on the ‘truthfulness of the imagination’. However, in focusing primarily on their epistemological differences and rarely considering the high view Lewis affords the imagination in his fiction, analyses of the ‘great war’ tend to over-accentuate Lewis and Barfield’s differences. A metaphysical appreciation sheds fresh light on the ‘great war’, casting a more Barfield-friendly Lewis whose shared high view of the imagination is more in line with that of his fiction and later non-fiction.