C.S. Lewis on Friendship

I figured I might blog about some of the big ideas I've been wrestling with the past few years in college. It is impossible to record completely the many things I have learned. And the motivation might not be there while I am in D.C. or even back at school again. Who knows if anyone will read this anyways? But perhaps this is something worth doing for its own sake. Tonight, I'll start with what God has taught me regarding friendship.

Learning to take friendship seriously has been one of the most important journeys I have traveled during my time at college. Friendship was always something secondary to me, in that I viewed as necessary because of the benefits it might offer me. It seemed as if everyone had friends, which is why I also needed to have friends. No one wants to be friendless. There's a normalcy to friendship that humans seem to crave. Going to college introduced me to many wonderful friends. Every year I get what I believe is a clearer picture of what true friendship is. I thought I'd share some of my observations with the help of C.S. Lewis, whose chapter on Friendship in the Four Loves, remains one of the most influential writings in my life today.

Lewis distinguishes four primary loves, affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Of all these, he considers friendship the least necessary. After all, no one would exist without eros, nor would be properly cared for without affection. It is for this reason that friendship fails to receive any attention in the modern world, although Aristotle considered it a virtue, and Cicero wrote a book on it.

But as Lewis points out, few people value friendship because few experience it! There are many reasons for this, and Lewis meticulously explains why he believes few understand the true nature of friendship. He blames the suspicion that arouses when the collective sees the growth of individual friendships, an envious "democratic" sentiment that grows jealous when one may not be the friend of someone else, and the accusation that homosexuality may underlie deep friendships among the same gender. Lewis also clarifies the difference between companionship and friendship. For many people, those whom they would consider "friends" are simply "companions." Friendship is more than just sharing something in common. According to Lewis, it is a "shared vision" able to produce "an immense solitude." Friendship must be ABOUT something, friends must seek the same truth for it to be more than affection or companionship.

Lewis also suggests that friendship always desires to grow among others unlike eros, which needs to stay between two people, friendship always longs for new friends. The qualification to join, is the pursuit of a common interest, a transcendent truth that allows friends to look ahead at what they seek. Friends together seek something "more inward, less widely shared, and less easily defined." Continuing, Lewis beautifully writes, "we picture lovers face to face but friends side by side; their eyes look ahead."

Yet what are the rewards of true friendship according to Lewis? Lewis describes true friendship as "that luminous, tranquil, rational world of relationships freely chosen.... This alone of all the loves seemed to raise you to the level of gods or angels." It is this type of love that is "even as great a love as eros." It is not self-conscious for "eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities." This type of love is meant for its own sake. Writes Lewis

I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Lewis also warns against the dangers of friendship, specifically pride and the type of exclusivity that exist so that we may bask "in the moonshine of our collective self-approval." Rather the true purpose of friendship is found within God's sovereign plan so that we might know Him better.

Friendship is not a reward for or discrimination and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others. They are no greater than the beauties of a thousand other men; by friendship God opens our eyes to them. They are, like all beauties, derived from Him, and then, in a good friendship, increased by Him through the friendship itself, so that it is His instrument for creating as well as for revealing.

I have been so blessed by not only these insights from Lewis, but the pictures of friendship God has shown me over the past three years. I can only hope that as I strive to be a better friend to those whom God has called me to love and serve, that the love I have for my friends, will be a shadow like that which exists between the angels.

Thoughts on Junior Year

I believe learned more about life this past year than ever before. I still am unable to get over how fast the year went, but I am thankful it is finished. I will miss many friends, however, especially the seniors who were such an incredible part of my college community and are now moving on to other things. I am excited for this summer, the opportunity to go to Washington D.C. and spend some time with friends down there. I've compiled a list of sorts of some of the highlights of this past year along with a few quotations at the end which I think best summarize the important things I have learned.

*I took the best, most influential, and most difficult classes of my life this past year. Last fall I took Dr. Birzer's Sectionalism and Civil War remains my favorite history class at Hillsdale. I also took Dr. Westblade's Seminar on the Life of Jonathan Edwards which was not only a great spiritual blessing, but it provided me with a senior thesis topic on the Edwards's covenant theology. Both classes I took with Dr. Gamble this past year reintroduced me to St. Augustine's City of God and helped me understand the danger of the earthly borrowing from the transcendent in relation to America's religious identity.

*This spring I took Dr. Birzer's American Order and Disorder which focused on the problems of modernity, the error of humanism divorced from Christianity, and the power of the imagination as a means to understanding myth and the revealed Logos in history. From Russell Kirk to Eric Voegelin, I understand the reasons why modernity can never fulfill what it promises. Also, the lectures on T.S. Eliot forever changed my life and the way I view the world. I also took the "capstone" Hillsdale class, Artes Liberales. The class is taught by two professors, Dr. Whalen a professor of English and our associate provost, and Dr. Kalthoff our outgoing Dean of Faculty and current Chair of the History Department. For three hours on Wednesday afternoons, we talked about the importance of a liberal education, why and how one could pursue it, and the insufficiencies of modern day education, of vocational training, specialization, and practical knowledge. Liberal education is a lifestyle, a way to live with a well-ordered soul. This class tied in many of the big ideas that I had long been wrestling with, and synthesized great thinkers of the western tradition from Plato, to Aristotle, to Cicero, to Augustine, to Aquinas, to Melanchton, through many of the founders of the American Republic.

*I grew closer to many of my professors. I enjoyed many lunches and dinners with Dr. Gamble, Dr. Westblade, and Dr. Birzer. What a blessing to be at a school where the professors care about the spiritual and intellectual lives of their students!

*It was a blessing to see the growth of Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the community that Rev. Henes and his family worked to build among the students.

*I had an awesome year as an RA and was blessed with some of the most wonderful guys on campus. I also developed very close friendships, and strengthened many existing ones. I look forward to returning as the student house director of my dorm in the fall.

*Revived interest in the American Studies major at Hillsdale. I was elected president of the American Studies Honorary, Delta Pi Nu, and look forward to the coming year to recruiting new members and promoting stimulating intellectual discussion around campus.

*Building a campfire in the middle of winter, and reading G.K. Chesterton's "The Ballad of the White Horse" by the light of the fire.

*The many great nights of reading the Bible, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and other great authors out loud in the dorm.

*Delicious taco nights at the Ramp with four amazing girls, Hannah, Elyse, Bethany, and Jami, three of whom graduated this past weekend.

*Many many many fun times. Dances, concerts, Michigan Football game, Detroit Tigers game, chilling at the Donnybrook (off-campus house with a number of good friends), fall break in Chicago, Spring Break in NYC, etc. It was the most stressful academic year, but there was also time for plenty of fun!

Here are some great quotations that changed my life and only begin to summarize this past year:

At the back of every discussion of the good society lies this question, What is the object of human life? The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is
competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love. He knows that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt. He has learnt that Love is the source of all being, and that Hell itself is ordained by Love. He understands that Death, when we have finished the part that was assigned to us, is the reward of Love. And he apprehends the truth that the greatest happiness ever granted to a man is the privilege of being happy in the hour of his death.
---Russell Kirk

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
--- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" from the Four Quartets

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
--- T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.

Knowledge is most truly free when it is philosophical knowledge...
--- John Henry Newman, Idea of a University, Discourse V.

Leisure, then as a condition of the soul-... is the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative beholding, and immersion- in the real.
--- Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture

A new way of looking at things...

You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
Psalm 16:11

"You made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace till they rest in you."
"You are my God, my Life, my holy Delight..."
"Confessions" St. Augustine

"That God in seeking his glory, therein seeks the good of his creatures: because the emanation of his glory (which he seeks and delights in, as he delights in himself and his own eternal glory) implies the communicated excellency and happiness of his creature. And that in communicating his fullness for them, he does it for himself: because their good, which he seeks, is so much in union and communion with himself. God is their good. Their excellency and happiness is nothing but the emanation and expression of God's glory: God in seeking their glory and happiness, seeks himself: and in seeking himself, i.e. himself diffused and expressed (which he delights in, as he delights in his own beauty and fullness), he seeks their glory and happiness."
"The End Which God Created the World"- Jonathan Edwards

"God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake... We were made not primarily that we may love God (although we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well-pleased.'"
"The Problem of Pain"- C.S. Lewis

Worthy are you, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and by your will they existed and were created.
Revelation 4:11

"Ought to's"

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, in his article "Natural Law" written for the Harvard Law Review November, 1918 writes:

"We all, whether we know it or not, are fighting to make the kind of a world that we all should like-- but that we have learned to recognize that others will fight and die to make a different world..."

"The jurists who believe in natural law seem to be to be in that naive state of mind that accepts what has been familiar and accepted by them and their neighbors as something that must be accepted by all men everywhere."

"... The question remains as to the Ought of natural law."

Holmes suggested throughout the piece that there are no "oughts" in the world we live in. By laying the foundation for legal pragmatism, Holmes desires a world without certainty and truth. Perhaps these ideas are the consequences of progressivism in American culture and politics. But I think the issue is more fundamental than progressivism, for the idea that man is purposeless in a dark world of chance Holmes calls the "Can't Helps."

In The Problem of Pain Lewis seems to identify this thinking as an element in all developed religion. It is the second of four strands their identify within Christianity:

"All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by he words 'I ought' or 'I ought not.' These experiences resemble awe in one respect, namely that they cannot be logically deduced from the environment and physical experiences of the man who undergoes them."

Thus Holmes seems to be rebelling against one of the most fundamental assumptions of mankind. This is nothing new under the sun for man will always resist the truths of his Creator. Holmes may be among the first to introduce progressive ideas into our justice system. But these ideas are not new and certainly not original to Holmes.

Meditations on the "Meditations"

Failure to observe what is in the mind of another has seldom made a man unhappy; but those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy.

Men exist for the sake of one another; teach them or bear with them.

Enter into every man's ruling faculty; and also let every other man enter into yours.

Let no act be done without a purpose.

In one way an arrow moves, in another way the mind. Yet the mind, both when it cautiously examines the ground and when it is engaged in its inquiry, is nonetheless moving straight ahead and toward its goal.

Reading the "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius has been really refreshing. I love it how he understands the nature of man within a community. Thus man should be teachable and should learn from others seeking a higher purpose, which is the same goal of knowing truth.

Unity of the Bible

"But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman..."

-------

"For to us a child is born, to us a Son is given..."

The first passage is from Galatians (4:4) and the second is from Isaiah (9:6).

Amazing how the Bible should be read as a whole for its story is told as a whole.

Merry Christmas...

The Inner Ring

The only certain rule is that the insiders and outsiders call it by different names. From inside it may be designated, in simple cases, by mere enumeration: it may be called "You and Tony and me." When it is very secure and comparatively stable in membership it calls itself "we." When it has to be suddenly expanded to meet a particular emergency it calls itself "All the sensible people at this place." From outside, if you have despaired of getting into it, you call it "That gang" or "They" or "So-and-so and his set" or "the Caucus" or "the Inner Ring." If you are a candidate for admission you probably don't call it anything. To discuss it with the other outsiders would make you feel outside yourself. And to mention it in talking to the man who is inside, and who may help you if this present conversation goes well, would be madness...

...But you have met the phenomenon of an Inner Ring. You discovered one in your house at school before the end of the first term. And when you had climbed up to somewhere near it by the end of your second year, perhaps you discovered that within the Ring there was a Ring yet more inner, which in its turn was the fringe of the great school Ring to which the house Rings were only satellites. It is even possible that the School Ring was almost in touch with a Masters' Ring. You were beginning, in fact, to pierce through the skins of the onion. And here, too, at your university-shall I be wrong in assuming that at this very moment, invisible to me, there are several rings-independent systems or concentric rings-present in this room? And I can assure you that in whatever hospital, inn of court, diocese, school, business, or college you arrive after going down, you will find the Rings-what Tolstoy calls the second or unwritten systems...

...I must now make a distinction. I am not going to say that the existence of Inner Rings is an evil. It is certainly unavoidable. There must be confidential discussions: and it is not only not a bad thing, it is (in itself) a good thing, that personal friendship should grow up between those who work together. And it is perhaps impossible that the official hierarchy of any organization should quite coincide with its actual workings. If the wisest and most energetic people invariably held the highest posts, it might coincide; since they often do not, there must be people in high positions who are really deadweights and people in lower positions who are more important than their rank and seniority would lead you to suppose. In that way the second, unwritten system is bound to grow up. It is necessary; and perhaps it is not a necessary evil. But the desire which draws us into Inner Rings is another matter. A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous...

...My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it-this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment, and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing-the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an "inner ringer." I don't say you'll be a successful one; that's as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in-one way or the other you will be that kind of man. I have already made it fairly clear that I think it better for you not to be that kind of man...

...As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain...

...And you will always find them hard to enter, for a reason you very well know. You yourself once you are in, want to make it hard for the next entrant, just as those who are already in made it hard for you. Naturally. In any wholesome group of people which holds together for a good purpose, the exclusions are in a sense accidental. Three or four people who are together for the sake of some piece of work exclude others because there is work only for so many or because the others can't in fact do it. Your little musical group limits its numbers because the rooms they meet in are only so big. But your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There'd be no fun if there were no outsiders. The invisible line would have no meaning unless most people were on the wrong side of it. Exclusion is no accident: it is the essence...

...The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it...

...We are told in Scripture that those who ask get. That is true, in senses I can't now explore. But in another sense there is much truth in the schoolboy's principle "them as asks shan't have." To a young person, just entering on adult life, the world seems full of Insides," full of delightful intimacies and confidentialities, and he desires to enter them. But if he follows that desire he will reach no "inside" that is worth reaching. The true road lies in quite another direction. It is like the house in Alice Through the Looking Glass...

C.S Lewis- "The Inner Ring"