For the Fun of It: Discussing Friendship with C.S Lewis (Part One)

I have been reading  The Four Loves by C.S.Lewis, and conversing with the text as I go along. The topic is Friendship. M stands for me, and CSL for the great master himself. CSL's remarks are in quotation marks, because I am getting them directly from the text. I plead guilty for placing what he says in the context of my questions and comments, but I do not think I do violence to his meaning or intent.

M: I know friendship is downplayed today, and I was wondering, was it like that in the old days too? 

CSL: "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."

M: So, how did this seismic shift regarding friendship take place? If it was so esteemed in the old days, why is it so unappreciated today?

CSL: "The first and most obvious answer is that few value it because few experience it."

M: How can you say that? Today more and more people have tons and tons of friends. When I get online for example, I can get connected to friends all over the world by email and/or Facebook. And even off-line, I can be talking to or texting some friend or other all day long on my cell phone. Friendship seems to be more omnipresent and appreciated than ever before. Don't we have a natural hunger for friendship which, as human beings, moves us to connect to other human beings? It seems to me that friendship is a basic, natural instinct hardwired into our make-up. Isn't friendship as natural to us as breathing and loving?

CSL: "Friendship is...the least natural of loves; the least instinctive, organic, biological, gregarious, and necessary. It has least commerce with our nerves; there is nothing throaty about it; nothing that quickens the pulse or turns you red and pale. It is essentially between individuals; the moment two men are friends they have to some degree drawn together from the herd. 

M:  That's astounding. Are you telling me that erotic love is more basic than friendship? That Eros is more elementary than friendship? That friendship is not erotic? What about affection? Isn't affection basic to our human nature? Isn't affection also part of friendship? Doesn't Eros always enter into affection? Aren't Eros and affection always mixed together, and aren't both always a part of friendship?

CSL: "Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship. The species, biologically speaking, has no need of it." 

M: I'm not used to thinking about Eros, affection, and friendship in a way that distinguishes them so clearly from one another. But I think I see what you mean. Eros used to be enough to ensure propagation of the species. Affection used to get us through the trials of raising children.  So friendship didn't necessarily have to enter the picture. Still, I don't understand why you think most people today are not eager for friendship or open to it. The way you talk about it, I'm tempted to believe you see us moderns as closed to friendship.

 

CSL: "The pack or herd - the community- may even dislike and distrust it. Its leaders very often do. Headmasters and Head mistresses and heads of religious communities, colonels and ships captains, can feel uneasy when close and strong friendships  rise between little knots of their subjects."

M: But why? Why do moderns object to friendship whereas the Ancients valued it? Why do we set more of a store on Eros and affection, whereas the Ancients thought friendship was higher or more noble?

CSL: The "(so to call it) 'non-natural' quality in Friendship goes far to explain why it was exalted in ancient and medieval times and has come to be made light of in our own. The deepest and most permanent thought of those ages was ascetic and world-renouncing. Nature and emotion and the body were feared as dangers to our souls, or despised as degradations of our human status. Inevitably that sort of life was most prized which seemed most independent, or even defiant of mere nature.  Affection and Eros were too obviously connected with our nerves, too obviously shared with the brutes. You could feel these tugging at your guts and fluttering in your diaphragm. But in Friendship - in that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen- you got away from all that. This alone of all the loves, seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels."

M: That's a marvelous way to put friendship into words: "the luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen." It makes me think of the knights of the round table discussing the best way to defend Camelot, or writers discussing their craft, or even a few research scientists planning how to develop a cure for a life threatening disease. They can be cool and collected, or aroused and passionate, in their discussion, but no matter how hot and heavy the discussion becomes, the group keeps it rational and level-headed searching for the answer that will illuminate their way to a good course of action.

 You know, just saying that makes me realize that I do think we are too self-absorbed to have many real friendships today, and to sense you may be right after all, when you say the old timers were more capable of friendship than we are.  What happened after the age of friendship to produce the age of sentiment, if I can put it that way?

CSL: "Then came Romanticism and "tearful comedy" and the "return to nature' and the exaltation of sentiment; and in their train all that great wallow of emotion which, although often criticized, has lasted ever since. Finally the exaltation of instinct, the dark gods in the blood; whose hierophants may be incapable of male friendship. Under this new dispensation all that had once commanded this love now began to work against it..."

M: Excuse me. I hate to interrupt, but I have to grab my dictionary and look up that word hierophant. As a modern, I am not as literate as your generation was... Okay , got it. Please, go ahead. You were explaining how we humans began to prize feelings and instinctual drives over and above reason and intelligence, how that tendency took over our culture and today predominates in most places.

CSL: "....that outlook which values the collective above the individual necessarily disparages Friendship; it is a relation between men at their highest level of  individuality. It withdraws men from collective togetherness as surely as solitude could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws them by two's and three's. Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally hostile to it because it is selective and an affair of a few. To say 'These are my friends' implies 'Those are not'. For all these reasons, if a man believes as I do, that the old estimate of friendship is the correct one, he can hardly write a chapter on it except as a rehabilitation. "

M: So friends don't necessarily adopt the party-line or engage in the group-think that the current ideology may seek to blanket society with? Friendship calls us to stand apart and speak the truth to each other, even when such an activity may be unpopular?Am I understanding you correctly? Is that why men seems to have less friends than women? Because women open up and communicate what they are thinking and feeling, but men today hesitate to do that with each other? Do you think I'm right when I say men have less friends than women?

CSL: "This imposes on me at the outset a very tiresome bit of demolition. It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual."

 

M:  Do you think men in this era are afraid of friendship because they think it  has a trace of homosexuality in it?

CSL: "The dangerous word really is here important.To say that every friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false; the wise acres take refuge in the less palpable charge that it is really - unconsciously, cryptically, in some Pickwickian sense - homosexual. And this, though it cannot be proved, can never be refuted. The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behavior of two Friends does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: 'That', they say gravely, 'is just what we should expect.' The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes,- if it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence. Otherwise we are arguing like a man who should say 'If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.' "

M: I can't wait to see where you are headed with this line of thinking.  I"m looking forward to picking up your book tomorrow. 

The Four Loves,  C.S.Lewis, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanich  pp.87-91