“The Four Loves” - 4 - Friendship

Friendship is the least biological love

• least conventional love
• not in literature
• few value it because few experience it
• “least natural of the loves”
  • least biologically reactive

Without Eros, none of us would be begotten Without Affection, none of us would be reared But [we have no need of Friendship].

Leaders may also dislike friendships at ground level.

The progression of historical dispensations and their outlook on Friendship, from survival to romanticism.

Friendship celebrates individuality. It is selective an an affair of the few.

To say “These are my friends” implies that “These are not”.

Friendship is multiple (unlike Eros)

Friendship looks like Eros to some, but lack of evidence is treated as evidence.

True Friendship is the least jealous of loves.

Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke.

But they can co-exist; Friendship is a real love, even as great. If we fall in Eros with our Friend, and then must only choose either, would they not be comparable?

Communities need Companionship (the matrix of friendship)

As some wag has said, paleaolithic man may or may not have a club on his shoulder, but he certainly had a club of the other sort.

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.”

Friendship has this exclusive solitude over a shared passion

Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not. They would be glad to reduce it. The first two would be glad to find the third

…as Emerson said, Do you love me? means […] “Do you care about the same truth?” 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.

But unlike Companionship, Friends are:

• more inward
• more exclusive
• less definable
• more immaterial
• but the world does not take account of it

This is why [people] who “want friends” can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. […] “I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend” […] There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about. […] Those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.

Friendship has crazy impact on civilisation

Movements started out as yap sessions; both beneficial or dangerous.

Survival value may or may not come out, if so, usually as accidental by-product.

The little knots of fFriends who turn their backs on the “World” are those who really transform it.

Friendship is uninquisitive of obligations and affairs (vs. Allies)

Is Friendship useful/necessary for survival? They produce authority.

A Friend may prove himself to be an Ally when necessary; but offices are not the stuff of Friendship, they’re like interruptions.

Would be relevant, since true Friends are always Allies; but irrelevant, because friends-with-benefits remains accidental, alien, embarrassing. It is free from Affection’s “need to be needed”.

We are sorry that any gift or loan or night-watching should have been necessary—and now, for heaven’s sake, let us forget about it and go back to the things we really want to do or talk of together. Even gratitude is no enrichment to this love. […] “Don’t mention it” [really, don’t make it weird] […] The mark of a 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. Perhaps we had only a couple of hours in which to talk and, God bless us, twenty minutes of it has had to be devoted to affairs.

For of course we don’t want to know our Friend’s affairs at all. Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive.

You become a man’s friend without knowing whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. What have all these “unconcerning things, matters of fact” to do with the real question, Do you see the same truth?

In a circle of true Friends, each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares two-pence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history.

Of course you will [eventually learn them]. But casually. They [slow-drip as analogies, anecdotes], but never as their own sake.

We meet like sovereign princes […] abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts.

This Friendship love ignores our physical bodies, but also all our family, job, past, connections, our character and roles.

It is an affair of the disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

Friendship is arbitrary and irresponsible. I don’t need to be anyone’s friend, no one has a duty to be mine.

[Friendship] has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Friendship provides the medium for us to love and know the person

All that said, Friendship requires us to know the whole person.

Knowing the other person well is required to understand and thrive in our common objectives and experiences. Must be robust and well-informed.

If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is “about”, we would not have come to know or love him as 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 besides, read, argue, pray] with him.

Friendship is individually humble

Sometimes we wonder what we did to deserve such betters.

Especially when friendship brings out the best/wisest/funniest in all the others.

…no one has any claims or any responsibility for another, but all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. [Natural life] has no better gift to give—[who deserves this]?

It seems that nature would exclude certain groups from having the required common topics (e.g. men & women). But when common topics are shared, it can overcome even nature (men & women working in same field).

Friendship into Eros, don’t mistake “turning into” for “mistaken for”.

Friendship is quenched by the mingling of self-inserters

Men and Women having different different passions, can incite trouble in marriage. It is poor for one spouse to fake and enter the Friendship circle.

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—as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there.

The war against Friendship as a threat to Eros, or more to Affection, to break up your spouse’s Friendships.

She does not realise that the husband whom she succeeds in isolating from his own kind will not be very well worth having; she has emasculated him. She will grow to be ashamed of him herself. [His life exists in places without her.] New friendships will break out, but this time they will be in secret. Lucky for her [if no other secrets].

All these, of course, are silly women. The sensible women [could qualify themselves for the passion] and [if not], never try to enter it or to destroy it. […] They [go to their own circles]. They don’t want us, for this sort of purpose, any more than we want them. […] [We laugh at each other]. That is just as it should be.

It is healthy to have a lively sense of absurdity for mismatched passions.

Friendship’s spirituality

very spiritual. free from:

• animalistic instinct
• jealousy
• qualifications
• need to be needed

But define “spiritual”:

1. good, desirable
2. just the opposite of corporeal, instinctive, animal.

There is spiritual evil and spiritual good.

The worst sins of men are spiritual.

Spiritual Friendship is not necessarily spiritual good (holy, inerrant).

Three considerations:

1. Authorities distrust friendships (whether warranted, or not)
2. Society generally gives envious, derogatory names to Friends
3. Friendship is rarely the scriptural image of love

Friendships (indifference) threaten humility

Shared passions for torture, cannibalism, human sacrifices.

What we had been half-ashamed of, we now freely acknowledged.

“The perilous harm of shared hatred or grievance.”

Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half-ashamed to avow them, and half-doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour—in ten minutes—these same views and standards become more indisputable.

The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders…

For we all wish to be judged by [Friends “after our own heart”]. Only they know really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs i the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread.

A circle of criminals can survive by becoming deaf, discounting the “chatter of outsiders”.

Authorities distrust Friendship because they threaten a rebellion

• excludes authorities
• a group’s “public opinion” fortifies its members against public opinion of the community

Men who have real Friends are less easy to manage or “get at”; harder for good Authorities to correct or for bad Authorities to corrupt.

Strong valid(?) bonds of indifference.

There is no offence in this. As I know that I should be an Outsider to a circle of [golfers, motorists, etc.], so I claim the equal right of regarding them as Outsiders to mine.

Examples of Roman-era Jewish Priests and Froissart’s Knights.

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

Even if a group has no power to exercise and oppress, it can create an echo chamber and opinion vacuum.

The faults of the circle (no circle is without them) become incurable.

…based on some kind of superiority—even if it were only a superior knowledge about stamps.

A Friend group can be individually humble, but can be collectively prideful. (see #Friendship is individually humble).

Lewis’ anecdotes of intellectual superiority

• Olympian: Two clergymen laughed at his genuine question
• Titanic: One young student rejected his discussion and quietly walked out
• A man referencing some nickname. Nobody dared question, but actually nobody knew
• There’s a kind of, reminding that you are not in the exclusive circle

Friendship circles must remain humble (compared to Outsiders).

Affection and Eros come without our full choice. But Friendship touts that we’ve chosen our peers. Forget the dozens of factors. But Christians believe there’s a Master of Ceremonies at work, not our own discrimination and taste. And there’s a purpose to beauty.