This piece was originally published in Inland Catholic Magazine.
In Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis discusses making his first real friend. He describes the scene of entering the boy’s room and discovering that they like the same books. According to Lewis, that sense of “What? Do you like that too?” is where friendship begins. A group of people sitting side-by-side looking at the same object, engaging in it, laughing about it, arguing over it. This, Lewis tells us, is friendship–a thing sorely lacking in our day.
As a boy, Lewis describes himself as relatively friendless, other than his brother Warnie and the boy who shared a love for Norse mythology, Arthur Greeves. But there can be no denying that friendship marked the rest of his life. It was friendship that helped bring Lewis to faith. It was friendship that led to the creation of most of Lewis’s fiction. It was friendship that caused Lewis to encourage a certain Oxford professor to publish his children’s novel and its sequel, The Lord of the Rings. But what is friendship? How are we to understand it? Lewis proves helpful in finding an answer.
In his book, The Four Loves, Lewis argues that friendship is one of the loves we have lost because we have forgotten to see it as a love. Friendship should not be confused with affection or even caritas. It may, and most likely will, include these loves at some level, but they are not inherent to it. A friend, as Lewis sees it, is someone who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with you as you both look at some third object. Lovers look at each other (and often do so intensely that another person results from that looking), but friends look together at something else. But this does not mean that friendships are safe. They are not. Friendship is terrifyingly dangerous. To enter into it means entering into a possibility of change.
But this does not mean that friendships are safe. They are not. Friendship is terrifyingly dangerous. To enter into it means entering into a possibility of change.
And this brings us to the very heart of friendship itself: laughter and arguments. True friends will spend much of their time engaged in these two most human activities. Laughter indicates a sense of being on the same page. It doesn’t matter if the laughter is at one’s expense or that of some incongruous sequence of events, the two are able to look at this third thing and enjoy it together. This could be beer or chess or minifigures, so long as it leads to good and not evil.
This can be hard to see if the second half of friendship is missing: argument. Lewis describes one kind of friend as the person who has read all the same books as you, but has come to all the wrong conclusions about them. For Lewis, this was his real-world friend, Owen Barfield. For G.K. Chesterton, it was the atheist playwright George Bernard Shaw. True friendship can see disagreement about a topic so long as all friends are in agreement that the topic is worth their time. This virtue is sorely lacking today. Too often, if we discover a disagreement about something as important as religion or politics (the two subjects one is never to mention in “polite society”), friendship, or even its possibility, ends. To argue here does not mean to shout one another down until someone submits, leaves, or gets violent. Rather, it means being able to have logical and rational –albeit spirited–discussions. Before his conversion, Lewis lived this with his friend Owen Barfield. The two would argue about the importance of myth. Lewis, who loved myth, saw it as nothing more than lies. He believed that mankind had progressed beyond needing these kinds of stories (despite being enamored with them himself). His friendship with Barfield cured him of his “chronological snobbery,” whereby he assumed that the newer was always better than the older.
For Lewis, this sense of being friends with those with whom he disagreed ultimately led to his own conversion. This brings us to his most famous friendship. Lewis and Tolkien met when Lewis began working at Magdalen College. Tolkien embodied the two main prejudices Lewis had been primed with from early on. As a Northern Irishman, Lewis had a natural in-born prejudice against Roman Catholics. As a member of the English Literature faculty, he had been warned against the English Language faculty. Tolkien was both. Nevertheless, Lewis becomes friends with Tolkien. Their mutual love of Northern myths, ensured they would become fast and deep friends.
One night, Tolkien and Lewis went on a walk with fellow friend (and later Inkling) Hugo Dyson. The subject? Myth and Truth. Lewis had come to view the things he loved most, poetry and myth, as things most unreal. Tolkien and Dyson helped open Lewis up to the possibility that myths are not lies but truths dressed up in the best way for us to understand them.
Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship would only blossom more after Lewis’s conversion. Without this friendship, we would not have Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. We also wouldn’t have Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. And yet, this was no mutual admiration society. Tolkien would share the poems and prose which would eventually become the Silmarillion and Lewis would tear down lines he thought unworthy of Tolkien’s true skill. The tearing down, the argument, was not to leave Tolkien in the dust, but to raise him back up. And this give and take of literature would lead to the creation of the Inklings, a group of writers and thinkers who turned out some of the most important works of the 20th century. They did keep this friendship to themselves, but shared it, adding to their number many, many others who all had the same love of writing and culture that the Inklings were concerned with.
In the end, friendship, true and proper friendship, is not something jealously guarded. It is not “exclusive”. It is a love that is made bigger the more people are joined to it, so long as they are in agreement that the thing we are looking at together is worth their time. A vegan has no place in a meat smokers club. An alcoholic should not join wine tasters. But lovers of literature should read books together and discuss them. Chess players should seek each other out and play chess. Amateur softball leagues can and should exist. But even more so, our relationship with Christ, who calls us friends, should not be some jealously guarded secret. It is a friendship where new friends enhance our joy.
Lewis argues in The Four Loves that friendship is not necessary on the biological level. It is not a thing that is needed merely to keep us alive. But, it is, he says, a thing that makes life worth living, like poetry or pastry-making or games. To merely exist, we do not need any of those things. But if we want to do more, then we need friends.