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I’m glad you’ve been reading Owen Barfield’s Worlds Apart; it’s a wonderful book. You’re rather worried, however, about Barfield’s “anthroposophical leanings”—and rightly so, I might add!—and you therefore write to ask, “speaking as one Christian to another”, whether I think this author is always “right”?
That’s a difficult question to answer when it comes to a dialogue, especially one with so many interlocutors and with such a degree of complexity. It seems, as I believe you’ll agree, that Barfield’s views are more or less evenly distributed between Burgeon and Sanderson. But having said that, I’m not sure how much we’re committing him to. However much it may be, do note the author’s characteristic sense of fair play in giving ample space to the objections of his friend C. S. Lewis, here represented by the character Hunter. As I see it, the provocative, dialectical interplay between these (and the other five) participants in some ways undercuts the very question of rectitude.
Note too the modesty of the Barfieldian voices, especially that of Sanderson, the more overtly and self-consciously anthroposophical of the two. If you recall, in response to the question of how indebted he is to Rudolf Steiner (the founder of Anthroposophy), Sanderson responds that while he feels he has personally verified one dimension of Steiner’s teachings and has a strong intuition as to the truth of a second, there’s a third dimension that eludes him entirely. Given my own conversations with Barfield during the last couple decades of his life, I suspect he would have said much the same in relation to Sanderson’s contributions to the dialogue.
As for how “Christian” all this may be, well, that of course was something Barfield and Lewis argued about in their decades-long “Great War”, the main points of which argument Barfield has nicely recapitulated in Hunter’s various objections to Burgeon and Sanderson. Whatever we end up saying about certain more subtle and controversial points—Are our physical bodies in some sense a function of a fallen consciousness? Does the spiritual life consist (in part) in cultivating a “controlled clairvoyance”?—the central claim that originally gave rise to the “War”, and arguably the central claim of this book—namely, that our knowledge is in some sense a participation in the creative work of the Logos—is an unexceptionably Christian idea, an idea reflected (among numerous other places, from the Alexandrian Fathers on down) in fellow Inkling J. R. R. Tolkien’s doctrine of sub-creation.