S5E16 – TFL 4 – “Friendship” (Part III)

Today we finish discussing “Friendship” by looking at how it can go wrong.

S5E16: “Friendship” – Part III (Download)

Show Notes

Introduction

Quote-of-the-week

“Friendship is. . .angelic. But man needs to be triply protected by humility if he is to eat the bread of angels without risk”

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

Chit-Chat

Andrew’s Updates

• Ordination
  • In the New York I took my canonical exams for ordination.
  • Took oral exams in Texas.
  • Should be becoming a Deacon on June 25th!
• Celebrated my five-year (“wood”) wedding anniversary.
• Finished article for the Perichoresis Journal on Lewis and autobiography
• Working on entry for new version of C.S. Lewis As Philosopher
• Went to Bushman’s!

Matt’s Updates

• Currently with Christian in Savannah for a baptism
• Doing a crazy amount of routine

David’s Updates

• I’m going to be a groomsman at a wedding around the time this episode is published, so I’ve shaved off my beard. Now, as all men know, you can’t just shave off all your facial hair in one go – you have to do “experiments” along the way, see how you look with sideburns, goatee etc. This time I decided to channel my inner Tom Selleck and rock a mustache which is why last week I posted on a picture of myself on Instagram with the tagline “‘Tache the Inexorable, the Irresistible and this is a joke which will only make sense for those who have already read this season’s Narnia book, The Horse and His Boy.
• Started reading The Silmarillion again in preparation for the new series on Prime which starts in September.
• Read Lewis’ essay, The Sermon and the Lunch, which ties very nicely into the Storge chapter of The Four Loves.

Beverage and Toast

We were recording early in the morning, so alcohol was off the menu…

• Andrew
  • Cafe Verona

• Matt
  • Ka’chava Shake

• David
  • Homemade Starbucks Coffee

We toasted Patreon supporter Deborah Bensted.

Recap & Summary

Recap

Last time on The Four Loves…

In Chapter 1, Jack discussed some key terms and asserted that love becomes demonic when it becomes disordered.

In Chapter 2, we looked at the love of nature and country.

In Chapter 3, we spoke about “storge”, Affection, the love of the familiar. We saw how it goes bad when it becomes ravenous, entitled, obnoxious, or domineering.

At the beginning of this month we began Chapter 4 which discusses Friendship (“Philia”). Jack told us that it’s maligned by the moderns and that he intends to rehabilitate it, restoring the understanding and appreciation found in the ancient world. He distinguishes Friendship from both companionship and allyship and comments that it’s the least jealous of the loves and generally uninquisitive. He explains that it doesn’t so much add to survival value, but value to survival. It may, as a side-product, possibly benefit or hurt society. Lastly, we have also seen how Philia interacts with Eros, and how Philia can be established between the sexes where there is already Companionship, but also how it can go awry where Companionship does not exist…

Summary

Given the eminently spiritual nature of friendship, Jack asks whether or not we have finally discovered “Love itself”. He offers these objections to this…

1. The term “spiritual” is not an unqualified good.

2. Those in authority often see Friendship as non-conformist and rebellious.

3. Those outside of a friendship group often regard that group as something prideful or elitist.

4. Finally, Lewis notes that the Bible rarely uses Philia to describe our relationship with God.

Jack concludes the chapter by speaking about Divine Providence and considers how we select our friends.

S5E16 Episode Summary

Discussion

1. “Love Itself?”

Jack begins this final section of the chapter on Friendship by reminding us that he is setting out to rehabilitate friendship and he hopes that he has now shown why our ancestors…

…regarded Friendship as something that raised us almost above humanity. 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.

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

Since this is the sort of love one can imagine between angels, Lewis then asks the same question he asked towards the end of the previous chapter about Affection…

Have we here found a natural love which is Love itself?

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

Jack says “Steady on!” Yes, friendship is “eminently spiritual” but he reminds us that the word “spiritual” is ambiguous:

There is spiritual evil as well as spiritual good.

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

Angels are spiritual, but so are demons! Also, as we read in Mere Christianity back in Season 1, the worst sins aren’t animal, but they’re spiritual!

2. “Objections to Philia”

In assessing whether in Philia that we have found “Love itself”, Jack tells us that, in addition to remembering that something which is “spiritual” is not necessarily good, that we should consider three other reasons which folks are suspicious of Philia…

Firstly, the suspicions from Authorities. As we’ve said before, authorities often distrust close friendships among members of their community, and it may be justified.

Secondly, not only are authorities suspicious of friendship groups, Jack says the majority of people outside of a group of friends typically use derogatory language to refer to that group, calling it a “coterie… gang… or mutual admiration society…” This may be just a result of envy…but maybe not.

Lastly, he notes that the image of Friendship is rarely used in Scripture to describe the relationship between God and man, typically preferring to use the more instinctive loves of Storge (God as Father, Mother Hen, Kinsmen redeemer) and Eros (Bridegroom). These were the instances of Friendship:

• “The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus)
• “[Abraham] was called the friend of God” (James)
• “[Jesus is a] friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Luke)
• “I [Jesus] have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John)

3. “Emboldening Friendship”

In the next section, Jack begins to consider the first of those issues, the suspicions of those in Authority about Philia…

He points out that, while friendship is usually born in the moment when two people discover a common taste or vision, that this shared point-of-view need not be a nice one. It can give rise to…

…torture, cannibalism, or human sacrifice.

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

Lewis notes that whether it’s a shared delight or a shared hatred, one feels emboldened when one discovers those who share it. So, on the positive side, the Early Christians…

…cared exclusively for the love of “the brethren” and stopped their ears to the opinion of the Pagan society all round them

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

…but on the flip side, it is equally true for…

…a circle of criminals, cranks, or perverts survives in just the same way; by becoming deaf to the opinion of the outer world, by discounting it as the chatter of outsiders who “don’t understand”, of the “conventional”, “the bourgeois”, the “Establishment”, of prigs, prudes and humbugs.

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

His point here is that Friendship is ambivalent – it can either be a school of virtue or vice. 

It makes good men better and bad men worse.

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

Given this, it’s easy to see why Authority is suspicious of Friendship:

Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion. It may be a rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap or of faddists against accepted good sense; of real artists against popular ugliness or of charlatans against civilised taste; of good men against the badness of society or of bad men against its goodness. Whichever it is, it will be unwelcome to Top People. 

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

4. “The Congenital Liability”

According to Lewis, the continental liability of Philia is that friend groups are somewhat deaf to the outside world. He illustrates this with an innocuous example of a group of stamp-collectors:

…the circle rightly and inevitably ignores the views of the millions who think it a silly occupation and of the thousands who have merely dabbled in it.

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

This is a feature of friendship. So what’s the problem? 

The partial deafness which is noble and necessary encourages the wholesale deafness which is arrogant and inhuman.

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

When the group cuts themselves off from outside criticism, they become incurable. The superiority of the group in their particular niche becomes an overriding superiority over all outsiders.

It will, in effect, have turned itself into something very like a class. A coterie is a self-appointed aristocracy.

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

5. “Corporate Pride”

So we looked at the first issue, the distrust of authorities… Now we’re going to look at the second issue, how outsiders regard these friend groups…

Last episode, we said that a good Friendship makes the members of that friendship feel humble. Unfortunately it can also degrade from individual humility to corporate pride…

The snob wishes to attach himself to some group because it is already regarded as an élite; friends are in danger of coming to regard themselves as an élite because they are already attached. 

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

He then talks about three different types of pride – Olympian, Titanic and Vulgar…

First of all, referring to the Greek Gods of Olympus, is the the Olympian Pride. Jack tells the story of when he was at a conference with two clergymen spouting some heretical nonsense. Jack asked them a question and their reply was to glance at one another and laugh. He said:

[The sneering] expressed very much what Americans would express by saying “Isn’t he cute?”… You can hardly imagine how inoffensively it was done, nor how clearly it conveyed the impression that they were fully aware of living habitually on a higher plane than the rest of us… grown-ups among children… Here was a sense of superiority so secure that it could afford to be tolerant, urbane, unemphatic.

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

Next up, referring to the Titans who were defeated by Zeus, is the Titanic Pride… To illustrate this he tells the story of a time he was speaking to a university society and was met with someone whose attitude was “restive, militant and embittered”. 

Finally, we talks about Vulgar Pride. While the two previous stories involved those of a high intellectual level, it need not always be so, and Jack gives examples of the way in which those who are established in a school or military unit speak in front of newcomers:

Such people talk very intimately and esoterically in order to be overheard. Everyone who is not in the circle must be shown that he is not in it.

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

He gives another example of someone he knew who would also say things like “As Richard Button once said to me …” and nobody ever dared to ask him who that was! The purpose here is to exclude others.

Whether Olympian, Titanic or vulgar, the pride of Friendship is hard to detect because it’s hard to distinguish from Philia because, as he says, …

Friendship must exclude… the spirit of exclusiveness is an easy step; and thence to the degrading pleasure of exclusiveness…

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

…and at this point is really ceases to be a friendship:

The common vision which first brought us together may fade quite away. We shall be a coterie that exists for the sake of being a coterie; a little self-elected (and therefore absurd) aristocracy, basking in the moonshine of our collective self-approval.

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

Jack says that, of course, not every group of friends came into existence for the sake of being superior to outsiders, but it does seem to be a real danger. He writes more on this subject in his essay, The Inner Ring.

6. “Scriptural Precedent”

Jack now offers a suggestion as to why Scripture rarely uses Friendship as an image of the highest love. 

It is already, in actual fact, too spiritual to be a good symbol of Spiritual things… God can safely represent Himself to us as Father and Husband because only a lunatic would think that He is physically our sire or that His marriage with the Church is other than mystical. But if Friendship were used for this purpose we might mistake the symbol for the thing symbolised… We might be further encouraged to mistake that nearness (by resemblance) to the heavenly life which Friendship certainly displays for a nearness of approach.

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

He also says…

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.

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

7. “Saving Friendship”

As we near the end of the chapter, Lewis offers an assessment of how we “save” Friendship from going bad…

Friendship, then, like the other natural loves, is unable to save itself. In reality, because it is spiritual and therefore faces a subtler enemy, it must, even more whole-heartedly than they, invoke the divine protection if it hopes to remain sweet.

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

It shouldn’t become a “mutual admiration society”, but it must be a society full of mutual admiration, since without Appreciative love it can’t possibly be friendship. He offers a solution by alluding to The Pilgrim’s Progress.

8. “Choosing our friends”

Jack ends the chapter on Friendship by talking about who becomes a friend. Affection is all about proximity, and the songs about Eros are always telling us that it’s destiny. He says that we could be under the impression that we in a friendship group have chosen one another by our own brilliance but…

In reality, a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another, posting to different regiments, the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting – any of these chances might have kept us apart.

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

So it would all seem to be just a matter of dumb luck, but, for the Christian, “chance” isn’t really a thing. Referencing the end of John’s Gospel, he says:

A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you”, can truly say to every group of Christian friends “You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another”.

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

Therefore, we shouldn’t even really boast in our selection of friends:

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. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by Friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good Friendship, increased by Him through the Friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing. At this feast it is He who has spread the board and it is He who has chosen the guests. It is He, we may dare to hope, who sometimes does, and always should, preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

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

But he ends with warning us against excessive solemnity… and that is a subject to which we’ll return in the next chapter as we look at Eros!

Wrap-Up

• Please follow us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
• We would be grateful if new listeners would rate and review us on their preferred podcast platform.
• If you would like to be part of our video tribute to William O’Flaherty, please go to PintsWithJack.com/misquote.