To C. S. Lewis, Friendship is an obvious love, even if it seems to be unnecessary. He says Friendship has fallen by the wayside in modern times. Lewis believes the foundation of Friendship is not the avoidance of loneliness. Rather, it is the recognition of shared truth.
In the Friendship chapter of The Four Loves, Lewis asserts, “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 considered, has no need of it.” This is not Lewis berating Friendship; rather, it is putting Friendship in its proper place. As he says later in the chapter,
The Ancients, Lewis notes, had a higher esteem for Friendship than we do today. We often call acquaintances our friends, thereby demoting Friendship, making it seem superficial and transitory—more like the familiarity of Affection, which was the subject of the earlier chapter. But that is not true Friendship. Out of the crowd of acquaintances in our lives, there will be some who stand out as true friends because we discover a common interest, fascination, and/or goal in life. As Lewis puts it,
The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our Friend. He need not agree with us about the answer. We picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead. 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. 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.
The small circle of true friends enjoy one another’s company in a way that transcends acquaintanceship. A highlight of the week for many years for Lewis and his friends was their meetings in Lewis’s rooms at Oxford. They called themselves the Inklings. Most readers of this post are probably already familiar with this group and the way they shared their interest in writing/literature. Many of Lewis’s books were introduced for critique in these meetings; the same applied to J.R.R. Tolkien as he labored through to the end of The Lord of the Rings. When Charles Williams, one of the Inklings during WWII, died suddenly in 1945, the fellowship of friends was diminished. Here’s how Lewis explains it:
Walking tours with friends was one of Lewis’s greatest enjoyments. Sharing their love of the outdoors, talking of things that interested them most, and then staying overnight at an inn to relax after a long day’s walk was nearly heavenly, in their estimation. “Those are the golden sessions,” Lewis writes. “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. And no one has any claim on or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago.”
This is genuine Friendship at its best, from Lewis’s perspective. Friendship such as this may be a rarity in our day. People certainly long for it. When it operates as Lewis describes it, life, as he says, has no better gift to give.
There is a way, though, that Friendship can go wrong. I’ll cover that in the next post.