In their “perpetual dogfight”—a phrase lifted from the war, of course—Barfield influenced Lewis in at least two profoundly important ways. He persuaded Lewis to abandon his “chronological snobbery,” the assumption that the dominant intellectual fashion of the day makes every mode of thought from the past either suspect or irrelevant. This philosophical pose, given birth by the Enlightenment, grew to maturity after the conflagration of the First World War, into which so many cherished Victorian ideals had vanished.
