Peter’s Blog for April
C. S. Lewis – A Biography of Friendship
C. S. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898. He went to school in England and spent his final years studying privately with William Kirkpatrick, his father’s old tutor and former headmaster. As a boy Lewis fell in love with Scandinavian myths and sagas and was wonder-struck by the songs and legends of the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic Sagas. In his last years at school he developed a love of Greek literature and mythology and sharpened the clarity and coherence of his thinking as well as his ability to present his thoughts imaginatively and persuasively.
Later, he immersed himself in Irish Mythology and literature and developed a particular fondness for W. B. Yeats whose use of Ireland’s Celtic heritage in his poetry he was attracted to. In a letter to a friend, Lewis wrote, “I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart, whom I am sure you would delight in, . He writes plays and poems of rare spirit and beauty about our old Irish mythology”. Lewis was surprised to find his English peers indifferent to Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement, Lewis wrote: “I am often surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met: perhaps his appeal is purely Irish – if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish.”
In 1916, Lewis was awarded a scholarship at University College Oxford but before he could take advantage of it he was conscripted and fought in the First World War. After the war he returned to Oxford, earned his degrees, and was elected a fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College. As a scholar, he specialised in medieval and Renaissance literature.
Story as a preferred medium
Lewis’ interest in stories as a way of expressing how he understood and evaluated the world in which he lived remained central for him throughout his life. Even though in many of the books he wrote he used a more conceptual approach to expressing himself he is best remembered for his efforts to express his vision of Christianity in stories like The Chronicles of Narnia. He shared this belief in story as his preferred medium of communicating particularly with his friend Tolkien and in this way they were a much needed support to each other in an academic world which prided itself on its devotion to disengaged reason. Lewis would have loved the way Yeats expressed his choice to be “a foolish passionate man”.
GOD guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone;
From all that makes a wise old man
That can be praised of all;
O what am I that I should not seem
For the song’s sake a fool?
I pray – for word is out
And prayer comes round again –
That I may seem, though I die old,
A foolish, passionate man.
W.B. Yeats
A life based on relationships
What interests me most about Lewis is that his life was built around his relationships and especially around a very distinctive idea of friendship. At a critical time in my life I read his book Four Loves and found it had a profound influence on how I learned to navigate what I now think of as the three ages of love and relationship we pass through as we develop in life.
Jane Moore
The age of affection
Lewis’ experience of affection came mainly from his mother as he had a troubled relationship with his father. However she died when he was a boy and for a time he was bereft of affection until he was a student at Oxford and lodged with an Irish woman called Jane Moore. She had a son Paddy who did his military training with Lewis during which time the two became close friends. They agreed that if one of them survived the war he would look after the family of the one who did not. When Paddy was killed in the war Lewis looked after Jane and her daughter for the rest of their lives. In 1951 when Jane was suffering from dementia and was being cared for in a home Lewis used to visit her every day. In December 1917 Lewis wrote in a letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves that Jane and he were “the two people who matter most to me in the world”.
The age of passionate love
After the death of his mother and of Jane Moore, Lewis met the third woman who had a profound influence on his life. She was Joy Gresham, an American writer of Jewish background, a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity. After corresponding for two years Joy came to England in 1952. Lewis at first regarded her as an agreeable intellectual companion and personal friend, and it was at least overtly on this level that he agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract with her so that she could continue to live in the UK. Of this Lewis’s brother Warren wrote: “For Jack (The family name for Lewis) the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun”. However, after she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer their relationship developed to the point that they sought a Christian marriage. Two films, called Shadowlands, one made by the BBC and another by David Attenborough focus on this relationship that was the most profound experience of love in Lewis’ life. We see what it meant to him in A Grief Observed a book that describes how the loss of her love impacted on him. I wonder was it his experience of his love for her that prompted him to write.
It is probably impossible to love any human being “too much”. We may love him too much in proportion to our love of God but it is the smallness of our love for God not the greatness of our love for others, that constitutes the inordinacy.
The age of friendship
It is very significant that Colin Duriez calls his book, C. S. Lewis A biography of friendship. It is this capacity for friendship and the way he understood, valued and lived it out that I find most striking in an age that did not understand or value it highly. From the time he met Arthur Greeves as a boy he had this capacity to share his world with others in what is a very distinctive kind of friendship. In his book, Four Loves he describes it in these words:
“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 ). The typical expression of opening friendship would be something like, Ah What? You too? I thought I was the only one. … It is when two such persons discover, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.”
Lewis sees friendship as creating a space apart from affection or from that in which lovers dwell.
“Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not. … Friends will still be doing something together, but something more inward, less widely shared, less easily defined; still hunters but of some immaterial quarry; still collaborating, but in some work the world does not, or not yet, take account of; still travelling companions, but on a different kind of journey, Hence we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side, their eyes look ahead.”
Gazing out at a shared vision
A restricted notion of friendship
Lewis’ notion of friendship is about a shared interest and is exclusively about that. A friend’s personal life is excluded as friendship is “without claim or responsibility for one another”. In this way it departs from Biblical and classical ideas of friendship in which there are mutual responsibilities. Another distinctive quality of Lewis’ idea of friendship is that, unlike the love of affection and passionate love, it is unnecessary or not essential for survival. In spite of these restrictions in Lewis’ notion of friendship he states that, “Life – natural life – has no better gift to give” He has done much to reestablish friendship as “the crown of life and the school of virtue”.
Many people when they speak of their “friends” mean only their companions. But it is not Friendship in the sense I give to the word. By saying this I do not at all intend to disparage the merely clubbable relation. We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold. … Very few modern people think Friendship even a love at all. … To 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.
“Life has no better gift to give”
It is very obvious that Lewis lived out his belief that “life has no better gift to give” than friendship. He always made a priority of making space to be with friends, for example, for the weekly meetings with a group of literry friends known as the Inklings. At these meetings they shared the interests or the vision that brought them together in their practice of reading to each other what they were working on and then discussing their reactions. This was the art of conversation essential to the ongoing cultivation of friendship. The various groups of friends he belonged to often met in pubs, for meals or went walking together and they seemed to have a great time together sharing the joy that is central to friendship. It was within this context of friendship that with the help of people like Tolkien he made the most important journey of his life from atheism to theism and on to become one of the great Christians of our times.
The bigger picture of friendship Lewis initiated
Over the years I have come to see life and especially my life as a Christian in terms of friendship. My idea of friendship, however, as distinct from that of C.S. Lewis, has its roots in affection and passionate love. I feel our parents lay the foundation of love in our lives through their gift of affection or in the way they accept, appreciate, care for us in a very personal way. When we fall in love, we learn to give another person a gift of this affection and it takes all the intensity of passionate love to bring about this sysmic shift from centring on ourselves to centring on another. Part of the intensity of passionate love is focused on making it last and on deepening it so that we become capable of the level of mutual sharing of ourselves that friendship calls for.
The Ecstasy of John
Imagining the Christian life as passionate love
How passionate love became, from the 2nd to the18th century, a way of understanding what it means to be a Christian has always fascinated me. This way of seeing ourselves found expression for centuries in the passionate love depicted for us in the Song of Songs. While in this age of disengaged reason we may wonder why the Song is included in the Bible, during the first millennium it was seen as the interpretive key to understanding the whole Bible story. Was this because it expresses in such a creative way the threefold passion of the Trinity to reveal themselves to us? There is first of all their passion for self-revelation, then the passionate nature of the love they desire to reveal to us and finally the passionate return of love they seek from us. I think that this is what is said to us by the Great Commandment when it invites us to be loved and to love with our whole body and soul, heart and mind. This for Jesus is where life in all its fulness is to be found. Lk 10:25-28.
Imaging the Christian life as friendship
Why Christians changed from seeing themselves in the context of the passionate love depicted for us in the Song to seeing themselves in the context of friendship is largely due to Thomas Aquinas. For him friendship became central to his vision of being a Christian and he based his idea of friendship on the words of Jesus: “I have called you friends because I have revealed to you everything I have heard from the Father”. What is shared is not just Lewis’ common interest but “everything” the Trinity have and are which is essentially their love. This led Aquinas to make the extraordinary statement that, “Friendship is love”. This view of friendship as the sum and climax of love is what the four gospels move towards; they reveal a vision of Jesus as one who goes around making friends and drawing all into his own relationship with his Father. Aquinas’ vision of friendship did not survive long beyond his own lifetime. This, as a wonderful teacher I once had suggested, was probably because,it was too overwhelming a way of seeing our lives as Christians; it was too good to be true. What a loss we have suffered!
Most of what I have written about the role of affection, passionate love and friendship as a key to understanding what it means to be a Christian is in my final book called, A World Alight With Splendour. There is a full description of what is in this book under My Books in the menu of this website.
It is because I owe so much to of my understanding of affection, passionate love and friendship and how they are so mutually dependent and enriching to C.S. Lewis that I wanted to write about him it this blog.
Prayer for friends
We give thanks for our friends.
Our dear friends.
We anger each other;
We fail each other.
We share this sad earth,
this tender life, this precious time.
Such richness. Such wildness.
Together we are blown about.
Together we are dragged along.
All this delight.
All this suffering.
All this forgiving life.
We hold it together.
Michael Leunig