The Four Loves: 2. Friendship

Now it starts to get complicated.

I started with charity because charity is the purest form of love, and that means that it is the simplest. It is the sort of love that is purely intellectual. It aims purely at the good of another person without any "good feeling" going with it - or, if you like, without any feeling of fondness or sexuality coming back, as it were, as a "reward". The purely charitable man is motivated purely by a sense of duty towards his fellow creatures and towards his Creator. As St Paul puts it, he is completely selfless.

The other possibility, of course, is that such a pure, dutiful, selfless man doesn't really exist. That's not to say that there aren't charitable people out there. (I like to imagine that there are.) But their motives are not purely charitable. When they act to help their fellow human beings, in reality they have all sorts of emotions "mixed in" with their charitable motives. A man who collects for babies in the Third World will most likely have feelings of compassion, and quite possibly affection, for those whose plight he wishes to relieve. I have been told that most people who are involved in charitable work will have take an interest in the cause (whether it be cancer of cystic fibrosis or homelessness or famine relief or whatever) because they have a sister or brother or child or aunt or parent who has been affected by the issue that they are interested in. Or, indeed, because of a friend!

Lewis is his usual acute self when he points out that the Ancients (that is to say our ancestors, or at least our intellectual forebears) prized friendship far more highly than we do today. In fact nowadays it sounds quite incongruous to talk about friends "loving" each other. Yes, I dare say that once a year, or once in a lifetime, stout-hearted, salt-of-the-earth American men, after a long night of comradeliness in a bar or tavern, might slap each other's shoulders and say "Gee, I love you guys." (C'mon! I've seen Cheers. I know these things go on.) But Englishmen certainly don't behave like that. In fact it would positively turn our stomachs to say anything of the sort.

In the good old days, the symbol of all four types of love, from time in memorial, was always the kiss. Husbands and wives kissed (incuding in bed!). Parents kissed their children and vice versa. Friends of the same sex kissed on meeting and parting, as they did in England in the Middle Ages, as they still do in some European countries, and as is still the normal custom in the Arab world. Indeed "liturgical" kisses, including when venerating holy objects and relics, was a wholly unremarkable part of mainstream religion. Nowadays, of course, the kiss is almost totally sexual: kisses have vanished from most modern religions (just as religion itself is vanishing from public life in this country, just as it did long ago in America and France), a man who kisses another man will get old-fashioned looks in the street (and quite possibly some unwelcome attention from other men), boys resent being kissed even by their own mothers, and a man who kisses a boy can expect a knock on the door from the local constabulary.

What friendship and the other two loves do still have though, I think, is emotion. The seat of the emotions is the heart. And the heart has always been, at least in the Christian world, the principal symbol of what we call love. In Christianity even the love of God is represented by a heart, and this is because it is the essential tenet of Christianity that God became Man and created for Himself a human heart with which to love the human race. It is the heart that is the source and summit of the "good feelings" that one has when one is with one's friends. (Arenaline, dopanine, serotonin? Don't ask me to be exact, but I'd have thought that all these and more have their parts to play, pumping around the body and into the brain, during a great night out with your mates.) Similarly, the heart is also there to power the deeper, more visceral feelings that one has towards one's children, not to mention the sexual feelings one has towards one's spouse, fiancée, "bit on the side", or whatever takes your fancy.

Well, all this really goes for "love" in general. Friendship, specifically, is the simple feeling of enjoying being with people one likes. Man is a social animal, and so to a certain extent it is natural for him to enjoy being with other people. To those who would agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that 'Hell is other people' I can only say 'Just try a couple of weeks of loneliness and you'll soon change your mind!' Friendship is often called brotherly love, because it is the sort of love that ought to exist between brothers. (Don't come to close to me and my brothers, but never mind.) It also exists between sisters, though for certain genetic and evolutionary reasons it is more evident between men. (Genetically women are more heterogenous than men, and as such they are less gregarious: boys tend to have groups of friends or gangs, girls tend to have "best friends" or "girlfriends" - and of course if a boy has a boyfriend then he's a whoopsie - and so on.)

There are a couple of important points that are worth making about friendship or brotherly love as a masculine phenomenon. The first regards its military role, and it is this. I have been told by those who have experienced it (and I have read it as well) that in the Army, in a war, when one engages with the Enemy, one immediately forgets politics and religion, one forgets wives and sweethearts. One even forgets one's country. One even forgets oneself. When the Enemy attacks, a man fights back not to defend anything else, or even himself, but to defend the man next to him; and he will perform the most phenomenal acts of bravery purely for the sake of his comrades in arms. He might not die for his country, or even his wife and family. But an officer will die for his men, and a man will die for his mates. And greater love hath no man.

The other point, which follows from the military aspect of "brotherhood", is that friendship has provided the key theme of the greatest works of art our species has ever produced. The oldest story in the world is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. (See the pic at the beginning of this post.) The first and greatest work of actual literature in the western canon, twenty-seven centuries old and still a damn good read, is a work that we nowadays call The Iliad but which the ancients would have thought of as the Menin or The Rage of Achilles. Contrary to modern popular belief, that poem is not really about the Siege of Troy (or 'Ilium'), but about the emotional life of its greatest hero, who is Achilles. It is about how Achilles, driven by lust and pride, leaves the Trojan War, deserting the Achaeans (or 'Greeks', as they're nowadays known), and about how the death of his best friend Patroclus convinces him to return to the field of battle. (And no, I don't have much time for the fairly distasteful fifth-century Athenian re-interpretations of the poem, with which we are still very much lumbered to this day - see here, for example - that make out that Patroclus was really Achilles' boyfriend/"young friend" and that the whole thing is really about sublimated homosexuality. There's certainly no evidence for that sort of interpretation in Homer.)

If you want to understand the true meaning of friendship then you could do worse than to start with Homer, go on to Beowulf, and then just work your way on through all the great epics of our culture. (And have a look at the Holy Bible as well, why not! It's all good stuff.) But you'd do better simply to have friends. Friends are those who are your social, intellectual and physical equals, whose company you enjoy, whether physically or intellectually (through truly the two cannot be separated), but purely for it's own sake - and whom you can trust. There is nothing more (nor less) to it than that.

The most important point that has to be made about friendship, however, is that true friendship, (or true "brotherly" love) is complex. It is not purely physical but has to have an element of the first sort of love (that is to say charity, or intellectual love) "inside" it, so to speak. Charity, in fact, is the sine qua non not just of friendship but of all the other sorts of love as well. As St. Paul puts it, even acts such as giving up one's life for others or giving money to the poor are morally worthless unless they are done out of charity. In reality, I like to think that they are, even though of a necessity it is a charity that is normally "mixed in" with the other emotions.

In fact charity forms the basis of friendship just as friendship forms the basis of the other two loves. And how this works we shall I hope see in due course.