S5E14 – TFL 4 – “Friendship” (Part II)

Andrew, David, and Matt continue discussing “Friendship”, examining its unnecessary and uninquisitive nature, as well as asking whether it can exist between the sexes.

S5E14: “Friendship” – Part II (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“In a perfect Friendship. . .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. Especially when the whole group is together, each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others. Those are the golden sessions; when four or five of us after a hard day’s walking have come to our inn; when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk. . .while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Chit-Chat

Andrew’s Updates

…

Matt’s Updates

• Been sick with COVID!

David’s Updates

• I have did want to say that, in the last episode we spoke about love can change over time and, appropriately enough, we had this iTunes review come in from Canada:

I listen to a lot of podcasts but I have to say that this is the best I’ve heard… I have recently been ordained as a permanent deacon, and I intend to be working him into my homilies!

…I particularly like having discovered the podcast a couple years in[,] so I can binge like mad! And it’s fun to hear David mention Marie for the first time and think, “You’re gonna marry her! And you don’t even know it!”

Thanks for the joy and enthusiasm you’ve brought into my day.

iTunes Review from Mrohana

Beverage and Toast

• Andrew
  • Guinness

• Matt
  • Tea

• David
  • Inchmurrin

Recap & Summary

Recap

So far in The Four Loves…

In Chapter 1, we were taught the key pieces of vocabulary with which Jack uses to analyse the different loves. We were also introduced to the central idea of the book, that a love becomes a demon when it becomes a god.

In Chapter 2, we examined love for sub-personal objects such as nature and country.

In Chapter 3, we were introduced to Affection (“storge” in Greek) which loves the familiar, but which goes bad if we become entitled, obnoxious, it’s allowed to become ravenous, or when we try to hang onto it by keeping others dependent upon us.

Then in last week’s episode, we began Chapter 4 and our discussion of Friendship (“philia” in Greek). We discovered that this love has fallen out of favour with the moderns, due to their lack of experience in friendship, as well as their attitudes towards the animal and biological. He distinguished Friendship from both Eros and companionship, and explained why friendship doesn’t really have survival value. Jack refuted the idea that Friendship is really just concealed sexuality. He explained how Friendship is the least jealous of the loves. And he ended that section with a thought experiment about what you would do if you were given the option of either retaining with your spouse either Philia or Eros – the difficulty of the decision demonstrating how important a love Philia truly is…

Summary

Is Friendship unnecessary? While some might argue that it benefits society, Jack shows that it is a double-edged sword, sometimes benefiting, sometimes hurting the community.

He distinguishes between friendship and allyship, saying that, while friends will be allies, this is not at the heart of friendship.

Jack then argues that friendship is uninquisitive, but that it is through the matrix of friendship that friends learn about each other.

He ends by exploring the possibility of friendship between the sexes. While he says that it can exist, he notes that when this is forced, the results can be disastrous…

S5E13 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Beneficial to Society?”

Jack begins the text for today by expanding on what he said earlier about the “unnecessary” character of friendship… He starts by saying that one could argue that friendship actually does have practical value to society. In support of this, he points to a list of movements and areas of study which began among a small knot of friends. The examples he gives are: religion, mathematics, Romanticism, science (that’s what he’s referring to when he talks about “the Royal Society”)… He adds many others to this list:

“… Communism, Tractarianism, Methodism, the movement against slavery, the Reformation, the Renaissance.”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Depending upon your point of view, some listeners are going to see the problem with this argument immediately, since they do not regard all of these movements to be unqualified goods. For example, as a Catholic, David and Matt are not fans of the Reformation. Jack recognises this, saying…

…nearly every reader would probably think some of these movements good for society and some bad.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Even Lewis’ comment about “the movement against slavery” immediately hints that maybe slavery began in the same way.

Jack wraps-up this section by saying that even if one thinks a particular movement born of friendship benefits society…

…it probably doesn’t add much to survival value. Rather, it adds “civilization value”. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

He says that sometimes survival value and civilisation value sometimes intersect, but not always. He concludes by emphasizing that if friendship benefits society, it’s only as a by-product.

Friendship is always about the object of the friendship – the “real thing itself”, the “real talk”

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

2. “Beneficial for the individual?”

So, if we can’t say that friendship is beneficial to society, can we at least say that it’s beneficial to the individual? Jack quotes a couple of proverbs to defend this idea, first from a 13th Century Icelandic Saga (“…bare is back without brother behind it”) and from the Hebrew Bible (“…there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother”).

In response to this, unsurprisingly, Jack makes a distinction. In our last episode, he distinguished between a friend and a companion.  He now makes another distinction, saying that when we talk like this, although we use the word “friend”, we really mean “ally”…

Andrew has mentioned The Office on the podcast before, so I’d cite S1E4 where Dwight invites Jim to form an alliance. Dwight definitely doesn’t think of Jim as a friend, but he does think he can be useful to him as an ally.  On the other hand, Jim of course just thinks Dwight is an idiot!

So, Jack says friendship is not the same as allyship, but is this distinction fair? After all, aren’t friends also allies? Jack says that they are, that they…

…will lend or give when we are in need, nurse us in sickness, stand up for us among our enemies, do what he can for our widows and orphan.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

He notes that someone would prove to be a false friend if they didn’t do these things.

So, while friends should be allies when needed, Lewis contends that this isn’t the “real stuff” of friendship – he even describes these things as “interruptions” to the friendship. He says:

…Friendship is utterly free from Affection’s need to be needed. We are sorry that any gift or loan…. should have been necessary – and now, for heaven’s sake, let us forget all about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. The mark of perfect Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. It was a distraction, an anomaly. It was a horrible waste of the time, always too short, that we had together. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

3. “Uninquisitive?”

Jack continues to make claims at which some folks might baulk… He says:

Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Jack contends that when we become someone’s friend, it’s not because of that person’s marital status, occupation, class, income, race, or history…  Actually, he waxes rather lyrical here:

That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts… It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

I think that someone’s, say, occupation, can contribute to a friendship, but mostly if it relates to the subject which unites the friends. From my own experience, I think there is a difference between the sexes here, what Jack says about friendship here is more true for men, than for women. However, even for men, I’m not sure friendship is entirely uninquisitive. 

What Jack has said can very easily be misinterpreted, so he goes on to point out that, although friends are united in a common question or vision (standing side-by-side) it doesn’t mean that they are oblivious to each other. In fact, that common question or vision is the very medium, the very means by which love and knowledge are exchanged between friends.

Every step of the common journey tests his [friend’s] 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.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Jack even thinks that if we had focused on the man rather than what binds us in friendship, we wouldn’t have come to know the man so well!

You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring in his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

This made David think of monks or Nuns, even in a contemplative order with lots of silence, living a common life side-by-side, allows them to get to know each other much better than if they just sat down and talked to each other all day. He also shared about his ministry experience putting on the Daughters of the King events.

4. “Humbling”

In the next section he talks about how good friendship fosters humility – we’ll talk about its perversions next time, but I do want to take a few minutes to look at what Lewis says here. He begins by saying that perfect friendship fosters an Appreciative Love so great that each person in the circle of friends is secretly humbled:

Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

He describes those times when each person is bringing out the best in the others as the “golden sessions” and describes sitting around a fire in an Inn at the end of the day of walking. It’s clear that these are moments he treasures. 

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

It’s worth pointing out that Philia typically isn’t alone here. When describing the scene sitting around the fire at the Inn, he refers to years of Affection enfolding them.

5. “The Battle of the sexes”

Being unwilling to back away from controversial topics, Lewis now addresses the subject of friendship between the sexes, and this is what we’ll spend the rest of today’s episode examining… it’s the age-old question, asked in movies such as When Harry Met Sally – can men and women be friends?

Jack begins by reiterating what he said in Part I of this chapter on Friendship…

…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 [Philia]. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

The question then is, “Why is this?” 

Jack responds by saying that men and women have typically not had the “companionship of common activities”. The “matrix of friendship” which he spoke about before isn’t present in order for men and women to become friends. He says:

Where men are educated and women not, where one sex works and the other is idle, or where they do totally different work, they will usually have nothing to be Friends about.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

What about when raising children together?

It’s easy for some people to be offended by this chapter, but I would urge them to read what he says very closely and not to import offense unnecessarily. Jack points out that it has nothing intrinsic to either sex which causes this absence of friendship.  He goes on to say that in professions where men and women do work together men and women can be companions and therefore can be friends. 

As we read earlier in the chapter, some people think that friendship between the sexes is really just disguised Eros. Lewis rejected this when it applied to same-sex friendships and he equally rejects it when it’s between opposite genders. However, he does concede that Friendship is often mistaken by one of the parties for Eros with “painful and embarrassing results” … but he also says that… 

…what begins as Friendship in both may become also Eros. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

However, as we saw in the last episode, the very fact that Friendship can become Eros shows that the two are not the same.

Lewis was writing in a society after two World Wars and the Suffragette movement, both of which had been increasingly putting men and women into common orbits… although not with complete uniformity.. He therefore says that…

The necessary common ground, the matrix, exists between the sexes in some groups but not in others. He says this typically doesn’t happen in the suburbs. He says it often happens in academia, missionary work, writing, and the arts.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

He repeats that working together and being similarly educated is important. He says that where men have had advanced education…

The women are to them as children to adults.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

…and before people get angry, he also says that among the wealthy where the men earn large sums of money, the women have leisure to develop an intellectual life and…

In such places the men appear among the women as barbarians among civilised people.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Lewis had quite a few important female friends. Sister Penelope, Ruth Pitter, Janet Spens (who taught some of his students), Dorothy Sayers (the only non-Inkling invited to contribute to the Charles Williams essays, the woman whom he debated alongside, and for whom he offered a Eulogy at her funeral)…and of course, Joy Davidman.

6. “Pushing across frontiers”

As we come toward the end of the chapter, the controversy continues as Lewis describes the problems which arise when the matrix of friendship isn’t present, but there are attempts to force a friendship regardless…

…men and women in this situation, haunted by rumours and glimpses of happier groups where no such chasm between the sexes exists, and 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.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Being a man, Jack’s examples inevitably focus on the male experience… He gives the example of the “cultivated woman” who is always dragging her husband to concerts, “encouraging” him in “civilized pursuits” or inviting similarly refined people to dinner. In a hilarious bit of cynicism, Lewis says this doesn’t do too much damage:

The middle-aged male has great powers of passive resistance and…of indulgence

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

I think we have an image of such a women in the Controlling Wife, found within the pages of The Great Divorce. Although Jack speaks about the “great powers of passive resistance” of the middle-aged man, I think we must remember the misery inflicted on that husband.

Jack thinks it’s much more problematic when the situation is around the other way when…

…it is the men who are civilised and the women not, and…simply refuse to recognise the fact.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

As a result, male-only events are not allowed – they must always be co-ed. This naturally causes a problem when you have women who subsist on a diet of trashy magazines, trying to develop Philia with cultured and educated men. Note – it’s not the difference in gender which is the real problem here, but the disparity in education. But what results? He says…

If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation which means nothing to her. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Alternatively, if the men are well bred, they’ll try and bring her into the conversation, but Jack rather cynically says…

…the efforts soon fail and, for manners’ sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes, and jokes. 

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

…and this seems to be what Jack really objects to:

Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Jack seems to think that this is one of the reasons that Friendship is both rare and disparaged.

While Lewis thinks that the intrusions he’s described are often unconscious, and he reserves significant venom for those who would do this on purpose… such as the Controlling Wife in The Great Divorce, who makes sure she scares off her husband’s friends. He later says that such a wife will come to regret it. Lewis thinks that the interloper would be better off…

…talking real women’s talk to other women and perhaps doing so with great charm, sense and even wit…

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

In a sentence which is often overlooked, Jack says:

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, nor mistress of the same methods. (We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.)

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Chapter 4)

Lest we think he is disparaging all women, Lewis ends this section by reminding us that it’s perfectly fine for men and women to not be friends if the Matrix of Friendship is not present – it’s just unfortunate that he belabors the point of interfering women.

Jack doesn’t think that there’s much hope of the more educated bringing the uneducated up to their level. While I don’t think it’s easy, and perhaps not always possible, I’m not as pessimistic. 

Many people ask the question “Can men and women be friends?” Lewis says “Yes, they can”, but seems to think the better question is “Can people who do not share similar interests or education be friends?” To this, at least to me, he seems to say “No”. However, it must be pointed out that there can still be great Storge Affection, as well as Eros love.

I wanted to close by pointing everyone to a twenty minute video put together by Dr. Love himself, Dr. Jason Lepojärvi, called Misreading C.S. Lewis on Friendship: The Charges of Sexism, Secrecy, and Snobbery. It’s a really good video to watch alongside reading this chapter…and I’m sure we’ll talk about it when we have him on the show later in the season!

Wrap-Up

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