The Four Loves: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Compared to Affection and Eros, friendship isn’t something modern people think about very much. It’s seldom celebrated in modern literature. Older examples include David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes, Roland and Oliver.

The ancients saw friendship as “the happiest and most fully human of all loves,” but the modern world minimizes friendship. Aristotle classified Philia as a virtue, and Cicero wrote a book about Amicitia. But today friendship is regarded as marginal, “something that fills up the chinks of one’s time.”

One reason friendship isn’t valued is that few people experience it. This is because there’s a sense in which friendship is the “least natural” of loves; it’s not instinctive or necessary. A person can go through life without it.

This “non-natural” quality goes a long way toward explaining why ancient and medieval people thought highly of friendship, and why our own age has little regard for it. Those past ages renounced the world. Friendship seemed to defy “mere nature,” especially compared to Affection and Eros. Friendship was more “rational” and seemed to elevate people above the world.

When Romanticism came along and Sentiment was revered, however, emotion and instinct ruled, and the same is true today. All these things worked against friendship; they made friendship seem like an unappealing substitute for the more robust forms of love (like Eros). Other factors include the modern view that human life is just an evolution from animal life, and that friendship has no “survival value.” Outlooks that value the collective community over the individual also tend to be suspicious of friendship’s exclusivity.

Because of all this, it’s become necessary in Lewis’s time to “rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual”—especially unconsciously homosexual. Such a claim can never be either proven or refuted. Lewis holds that people who make this claim have never had a true friend.

Though it’s possible to feel both Eros and Friendship for the same person, there are some strong distinctions between the two. For example, lovers are always talking about their love, while friends seldom discuss their friendship. Lovers are absorbed in each other, while friends are normally absorbed in a shared interest. And though Eros occurs between two people, two isn’t the best number for friendship.

The reason for this is as follows. Suppose there are three friends: A, B, and C. If friend A dies, then B doesn’t just lose A, but also A’s part in C. At the same time, C loses both A and A’s part in B. No single friend can throw light on every single facet of another. It’s not as though B has C “all to himself”; he actually has less of C now that A is dead. This makes friendship “the least jealous of loves”; this love isn’t lessened, but only strengthened, when a friend joins other friends.

This quality of friendship—that we possess a friend more as the number of people with whom we share the friend increases—gives friendship a special resemblance to Heaven, where the sheer number of souls increases each soul’s enjoyment of God.

For this reason, the “homosexual” theory seems implausible. In certain cultural contexts, such as warlike societies, it’s possible for Friendship to be combined with Eros in that manner. It’s true that historically, friendships used to be more physically demonstrative, but it’s today’s society that’s “out of step” in this regard.

Though friendship is something people and communities can survive without, there is a related “matrix of friendship” that communities do need. In ancient communities, men had to get together to plan things like hunts and battles. Afterward, they would discuss these things. Men in paleolithic society must have enjoyed such things greatly and bonded over their shared skills, dangers, and hardships. Certainly, women had such shared, separate society, too. But Lewis knows nothing of that, so he can’t speak of it.

This kind of “talking shop” and enjoyable cooperation is biologically valuable. Nowadays it takes place in barrooms, common rooms, and golf clubs—what might be called Companionship or even “Clubbableness.” It’s not the same thing as Friendship, but the “matrix” of friendship. Friendship emerges from companionship when companions discover common interests that they thought nobody else shared. Unless such “kindred spirits” find one another, things like art or religion are never born. But when people share their vision, they “stand together in an immense solitude”—though they would always be glad to reduce the solitude by welcoming more people in.

Today, companionship arises not so much from activities like hunting or fighting, but from shared religion, studies, or work. Often friendship arises from a question that companions agree to be important—but they don’t care if they arrive at different answers. Instead of gazing at each other, such friends look ahead on a shared journey. In this sense, having a friend means that you want something beyond friendship. If you seek a friend, affection may arise. But friendship can’t be sought for its own sake—it has to be about something.

When such friendship emerges between people of different sexes, it passes very easily into erotic love. But this only highlights the distinction between friendship and Eros. When friendship gradually turns into Eros, you will no longer want to share that beloved with anyone. But there is no jealousy about sharing the friendship aspect with other friends; in fact, it only enriches the erotic love.

Reflecting on the fact that nearly every movement has started out from Friendship, it’s easy to see that Friendship can both benefit and endanger a community. Friendship can bear fruit that the community can use, but as a “by-product.” Similarly, while it’s true that a friend can do many good and practical things to help a friend, these “good offices” are more like interruptions. A benefactor isn’t the same thing as a friend. Friends always want to get back to the things that really interest them—hence “don’t mention it” when a friend does a favor.

Unlike Eros, friendship is “uninquisitive.” Ordinary facts about a person are less interesting than the question “Do you see the same truth?” You’ll get to know all the facts in the end, of course, but they emerge little by little over time; our past and connections are incidental to friendship in a way. In this way, Friendship is “arbitrary.” Nobody has a duty to be anyone else’s friend. Friendship isn’t necessary to survival, but it gives value to survival.

Though friends are absorbed in a shared quest, that doesn’t mean they’re oblivious to each other. Appreciative Love develops over time as a friend “rings true” again and again, causing our trust, respect, and admiration for a friend to deepen. These things only develop over time and will be missed altogether if they’re sought at the outset. Rather, they emerge as friends study, discuss, or pray together.

Based on what Lewis has said so far, he thinks that at most periods of history, friendships will tend to be between members of the same sex. This is because companionship in shared activities has generally been single-sex throughout history. But in fields where men and women work side by side, friendship can emerge—though it’s sometimes painfully mistaken for Eros. Today’s society is at a certain disadvantage. In some groups, there’s a basis for companionship between the sexes, and in others there isn’t. Trouble can emerge in parts of society when there is a chasm between the experiences or educational levels of the sexes. For example, an educated wife might constantly try to bring her husband “up to her level,” instead of accepting how things are.

When this happens, a kind of hollow egalitarianism emerges, where the sexes will be present together but will never fully engage with each other’s worlds. Then those worlds cease to be themselves, because they get diluted by the attempt to accommodate the other sex. People are happier when they’re among others who are interested in the same things and discuss them using the same methods.

This accounts for why friendship isn’t valued today. There’s no space for exclusively male or female friendship. Sometimes, there’s even an intentional war against friendship—a hatred and jealousy of friendship as the enemy of Eros or Affection. Lewis sees this especially when wives try to break up their husband’s friendships until he’s isolated and not really worth being with, because there’s nothing to his life beyond what she can see. Sensible people will find it healthier, where cross-sex companionship isn’t possible, to preserve single-sex friendships that allow them to appreciate the other sex more.

The preceding discussion of friendship has found it to be “spiritual,” not in the sense of being disembodied or holy, but in three other significant ways. The first is that authorities tend to mistrust friendships among their subjects. The second is the jealousy of the majority toward groups of tight-knit friends. The third thing to notice is that the Bible rarely uses Friendship to represent love between God and humanity; it usually turns instead to Affection (God the Father and his children) or Eros (Christ and the Church).

First is the question of authority. Sometimes the common vision shared between friends isn’t necessarily positive. Why not, for instance, sacrifice humans? There’s a certain delight in finding someone who shares your own sinful proclivities, hatreds, or grievances. When you’re in an unsympathetic crowd, it’s easy to feel timid and doubtful about your views. But when you’re among friends, in no time at all your views will begin to appear “indisputable.” In this respect, every friendship can be viewed as a sort of rebellion. No matter what its focus, a friendship can be a threat to the people at the top of society; it is a “pocket of resistance.” True friends are harder to correct (by good authorities) or corrupt (by bad ones).

Though the ancients were right to see that friendship can be a school of virtue, it can also be a school of vice. That is, friendship is “ambivalent.” Like other natural loves, friendship is susceptible to particular weaknesses. For instance, a circle of friends can ignore the views of those outside their group, which can lead to total indifference to outsiders. In other words, the attitude of “not giving a damn” can develop into a coldness toward voices that should be heard. This also leads to a group’s faults becoming entrenched, and even scorning outsiders—the group effectively becoming a little aristocracy of its own. It’s easy to see this about other groups but harder to see it among one’s own.

While this sense of superiority can be expressed in very inoffensive ways, it can also become bitter and incapable of seeing outsiders as specimens of various groups rather than humans. They go out of their way to communicate to others that they’re not part of the circle. In such a case, the friendship becomes “about” nothing more than excluding others. Of course, friendship must exclude to some degree. But it’s a short step from exclusion to the pride of exclusiveness. When a group of friends starts spending its energy on securing itself and keeping others out, it falls from friendship back into mere companionship.

So, Friendship’s natural danger is Pride. Perhaps this is why scripture doesn’t use friendship as a metaphor very often; it’s already quite spiritual. It’s easy to see that calling God “Father” is a symbol. But in friendship’s case, it could be easy to mistake the symbol for what’s being signified. This would encourage us to mistake God-likeness for nearness of approach. This is why friendship especially needs divine protection—it is a narrow path. If there’s no Appreciative love, it’s not friendship; and yet, appreciative love runs the risk of turning into a “mutual admiration society.”

People tend to believe they’ve chosen their friendships, but a Christian doesn’t believe in chances. Friendships aren’t rewards for our good taste, but God’s instrument to reveal the God-given beauties in each person to all the others. Those beauties are accordingly increased. Since God has chosen the guests, it’s dangerous to “reckon without our host.”