The Four Loves – Chapter 4 (“Friendship”)
C.S. Lewis Doodle
Notes
Friendship and Modernity
…very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value [to Affection and Eros] or even a love at all. To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it.
The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it. And the possibility of going through life without the experience is rooted in that fact which separates Friendship so sharply from both the other loves. Friendship is…the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious and necessary…The pack or herd…may even dislike and distrust it.
…all that had once commended this love [to the Ancients] now began to work against it. [For modernity,] …it had not tearful smiles and keepsakes and baby-talk enough to please the sentimentalists. There was not blood and guts enough about it to attract the primitivists.
Secret Homosexuality?
It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual… The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden… Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend…
Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality… On a broad historical view it is…not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step.
Contrasting the friendship and the love affair
Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But [in friendship]… we possess each friend not less, but more as the number of those with whom we share… increases.
Companionship/Clubbableness: the matrix of friendship
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things… We had to plan the hunt and the battle. When they were over we had to hold a post mortem and draw conclusions for future use… We enjoyed one another’s society greatly: we Braves, we hunters, all bound together by shared skill, shared dangers and hardships, esoteric jokes – away from the women and children… [The woman] certainly often had rituals from which men were excluded. When, as sometimes happened, agriculture was in their hands, they must, like the men, have had common skills, toils and triumphs…
Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”
Making new friends
…the shared activity and therefore the companionship…may be a common religion, common studies, a common profession, even a common recreation. All who share it will be our companions; but one or two or three who share something more will be our Friends. In this kind of love, as Emerson said, “Do you love me?” means… “Do you care about the same truth?”
That is why those pathetic people who simply “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends… There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.
Philia and Eros intertwined
When the two people who thus discover that they are on the same secret road are of different sexes, the friendship which arises between them will very easily pass – may pass in the first half-hour – into erotic love. Indeed, unless they are physically repulsive to each other or unless one or both already loves elsewhere, it is almost certain to do so sooner or later. And conversely, erotic love may lead to Friendship between the lovers… Nothing so enriches an erotic love as the discovery that the Beloved can deeply, truly and spontaneously enter into Friendship with the Friends you already had…
Suppose you are fortunate enough to have “fallen in love with” and married your Friend… suppose it possible that you were offered the choice of two futures: “Either you two will cease to be lovers but remain forever joint seekers of the same God, the same beauty, the same truth, or else, losing all that, you will retain as long as you live the raptures and ardours, all the wonder and the wild desire of Eros”
Benefits for the society
It could be argued that Friendships are of practical value to the Community… Communism, Tractarianism, Methodism, the movement against slavery, the Reformation, the Renaissance… nearly every reader would probably think some of these movements good for society and some bad. The whole list, if accepted, would tend to show, at best, that Friendship is both a possible benefactor and a possible danger to the community. And even as a benefactor it would have, not so much survival value… [but] something (in Aristotelian phrase) which helps the community not to live but to live well
Benefits for the individual
Others again would say that Friendship is extremely useful, perhaps necessary for survival, to the individual…. But when we speak thus we are using friend to mean “ally”. In ordinary usage friend means… more than that. A Friend will, to be sure, prove himself to be also an ally…will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies… But such good offices are not the stuff of Friendship. The occasions for them are almost interruptions… It is almost embarrassing. For Friendship is utterly free from Affection’s need to be needed.
Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive… No one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually… bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
Growing in Friendship’s Appreciative Love
Every step of the common journey tests his metal; and the tests are tests we fully understand because we are undergoing them ourselves. Hence, as he rings true time after time, our reliance, our respect and our admiration blossom into an Appreciative Love of a singularly robust and well-informed kind. If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is “about”, we should not have came to know…him so well. You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes… better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative Love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before all the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company.
Can men and women ever be friends?
From what has been said it will be clear that in most societies at most periods Friendships will be between men and men or between women and women. The sexes will have met one another in Affection and in Eros but not in this love. For they will seldom have had with each other the companionship in common activities which is the matrix of Friendship… they will usually have nothing to be Friends about. But we can easily see that it is this lack, rather than anything in their natures, which excludes Friendship; for where they can be companions they can also become Friends. Hence in a profession (like my own) where men and women work side by side… such Friendship is common.
At present, however, we fall between two stools. The necessary common ground, the matrix, exists between the sexes in some groups but not in others… But this, though an impoverishment, would be tolerable if it were admitted and accepted. The peculiar trouble of our own age is that men and women in this situation, …bedevilled by the egalitarian idea that what is possible for some ought to be (and therefore is) possible to all, refuse to acquiesce in it.
Fixing the opposite sex…
…the “cultivated” woman who is always trying to bring her husband “up to her level”. She drags him to concerts and would like him to learn morris-dancing and invites “cultivated” people to the house… The middle-aged male has great powers of passive resistance and (if she but knew) of indulgence…
Something much more painful happens when it is the men who are civilised and the women not… If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation which means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in… But the efforts soon fail… Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share… She may be quite as clever as the men whose evening she has spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things…
Truly spiritual?
This love, free from instinct, free from all duties but those which love has freely assumed, almost wholly free from jealousy, and free without qualification from the need to be needed, is eminently spiritual. It is the sort of love one can imagine between angels. Have we here found a natural love, which is Love itself? Before we rush to any such conclusion let us beware of the ambiguity in the word spiritual… There is spiritual evil as well as spiritual good. There are unholy, as well as holy, angels. The worst sins of men are spiritual.
Issue #1: Suspicions of authority, emboldened opinions and deafness to outsiders
…the common taste or vision or point of view which is thus discovered [between friends] need not always be a nice one. From such a moment art, or philosophy, or an advance in religion or morals might well take their rise; but why not also torture, cannibalism, or human sacrifice?… Friendship… can be a school of virtue; but also…a school of vice.. It makes good men better and bad men worse…
Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour… these same views and standards become once more indisputable. It is therefore easy to see why Authority frowns on Friendship. Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion… The danger is that this partial indifference or deafness to outside opinion, justified and necessary though it is, may lead to a wholesale indifference or deafness.
[A man] sees that [his friends] are splendid and counts himself lucky to be among them. But unfortunately the they and them are also, from another point of view we and us. Thus the transition from individual humility to corporate pride is very easy…
Issue #2: Suspicions of the majority
Every name [the majority] give such a circle [of friends] is more or less derogatory. It is at best a “set”; lucky if not…a “mutual admiration society”. Those who in their own lives know any Affection, Companionship and Eros, suspect Friends to be “stuck-up prigs who think themselves too good for us”… [T]hey would seem to be right in diagnosing pride as the danger… Just because this is the most spiritual of loves the danger which besets it is spiritual too. Friendship is even, if you like, angelic. But man needs to be triply protected by humility if he is to eat the bread of angels without risk.
Issue #3: The language of Scripture
Friendship is very rarely the image under which Scripture represents the love between God and Man. It is not entirely neglected; but far more often…Scripture ignores this seemingly almost angelic relation and plunges into the depth of what is most natural and instinctive. Affection is taken as the image when God is represented as our Father; Eros, when Christ is represented as the Bridegroom of the Church… Perhaps we may now hazard a guess why Scripture uses Friendship so rarely as an image of the highest love. It is already, in actual fact, too spiritual to be a good symbol of Spiritual things…
When God sends us friends
…[we might mistakenly think that] we…have chosen one another… that we have ascended above the rest of mankind by our native powers. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ…can truly say to every group of Christian friends “You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The Friendship is not a reward for our discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others.