The Four Loves

Lewis maintains that “[v]ery few modern people think Friendship a love at all” (57). Whereas “[t]o 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” (57). Lewis essentially poses the question: why is friendship today treated as a trivial matter when it was so important to Aristotle?

Lewis states that it is because so few experience Friendship. It is possible to go through life without experiencing Friendship because Friendship is “the least natural of loves.” (58). It does not have biological or genetic necessity. There is nothing erotic in it: “The species, biologically considered, has no need of it” (58). Therefore, there is nothing innate that drives a person to seek it out.

But it is this “non-natural” (58) quality that caused the ancient and medieval scholars to exalt Friendship. That it must be actively sought out—and that people do so—can be taken as proof of its value.

Friendship began to wane with Romanticism, Sentimentality, and the rise of primitivism. For those who believe that humans are mere advanced animals, Friendship is seen as superfluous because it does not have a precedent in the animal kingdom. It is not an adaptive trait and Friendship can quickly run afoul of collectivist thinking. Any organizations that value group importance over individual responsibility disparage friendship.

Lewis takes considerable time debunking the notion that all friendship is homosexual, an idea that was popular at the time of his writing:“Those who cannot conceive friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend” (61). He follows this thought: “Lovers are always talking to each other about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship” (61). He relates that when he had questioned the “wiseacres” (60) who insist on the homosexuality of Friendship, they can never provide any evidence, which they take as proof that the knowledge is being hidden. But in that case, it cannot be refuted, either.

For Lewis, there is no such thing as having too many friends. Friends illuminate qualities in each other. When one friend leaves a group, the remaining members are less illuminated because they cannot be seen through the lens of that friend’s reactions. “True Friendship is the least jealous of loves” (61), he says, because it encourages more members in the circle of Friendship, which would not be the case with Affection or Eros.

Friendship is different than mere Companionship: “Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)” (67). Emerson views the question “Do you love me?” when it comes to Friendship to mean “Do you see the same truth?”(66). Lewis believes that “[t]his 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” (66). Without the element of truth, simply having a Friend is meaningless companionship.

Companionship relies only on the sharing of an activity or a physical space. Friendship is the same, but with an added inward focus. Friends are capable of being alone, together, but still benefiting from the presence of the other person.

Lewis also believes that people can have friends of the opposite sex, but this can quickly turn into romantic love. When people of opposite sexes see the same truth, their Friendship can pass quickly into Eros, unless they physically repulse each other.

Despite his statement that Friendship is not an adaptive trait, Lewis admits that Friendship has value to a Community, and that communities tend to form along adaptive traits that work as group survival strategies: “Every civilized religion began in a small group of friends [...] Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles.” (68). However, when Friendship proves to be useful, the usefulness is a by-product of the Friends, not the goal. It is a sort of happy accident.

It is amusing to Lewis that people can become Friends without knowing anything about each other:“Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living” (70). This is because those details have nothing to do with Lewis’s question: “Do you see the same truth?” (66) and because “[i]n a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself” (70). But over time, the knowledge that one accumulates about one’s friend can enrich the relationship and deepen the love. Friendship becomes something that makes each Friend vulnerable:“Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship, naked personalities” (71). The more one reveals of oneself, the more one can be wounded, a theme which Lewis will revisit at great length later in the book.

Lewis then turns his attention to the potential danger of Friendships, giving special attention to authoritarian societies or dictator-like social structures. Anyone in authority may have the inclination to distrust Friendship, and the more repressive the regime, the most suspect Friendship can become. Authorities distrust Friendship because Friendships find their own truths and resist collective thought: “Every real Friendship is a sort of secession, even a rebellion” (80). Friendship can lead to an indifference to outside opinion, which does not serve an authoritarian system. When two people are discussing some version of their own truth, they may find that they no longer agree with a state-mandated version of truth, and authoritarian leaders do not make friends with their citizens.

Just as Affection can produce jealousy, Lewis argues that Friendship can produce envy. Two friends share a bond. Anyone on the outside can view the duo—or the group, if the Friendship is larger—as a clique. The presence of a clique says, in Lewis’s view, that the outsiders do not belong with the friends and may never belong.

Lewis’s final criticism of Friendship is rooted in its problematic nature when discussing man’s relationship to God. Essentially, can God be said to be man’s friend, ordoes a man who professes to be friends with God commit blasphemy? To Lewis, “God is love” (1), and Friendship is a love. In fact, “Friendship is already, in actual fact, too spiritual to be a good symbol of Spiritual things” (87). By this, Lewis returns to the fact that Friendship is based on recognition of shared truth. Because God created man, man lives his life in the image of God.Therefore, man must live in order to return to God, and God and man partake in shared truth in every moment. In this way, they can share the love that Lewis defines as Friendship. The shared truth is so inextricable that this is what Lewis refers to when he says that Friendship is “too spiritual” (87) to be a good symbol of spiritual things. It is not a symbol at all.