The Six Loves, Part 3: Philia, the Love Under Suspicion

Ask someone why they love their spouse and they will usually stammer or have a hard time explaining much in detail. Ask the same person why they love a friend and the answer comes at once. They read the same books, or they laugh at the same jokes, or enjoy the same games.

Lewis called this love Friendship, and the Greek word for it is philia. Lewis has a line about its beginnings in his talks that makes me laugh. Lewis pictures the first men coming back from the hunt and talking the hunt over, away from the women and children, and then Lewis writes, "As some wag has said, palaeolithic man may or may not have had a club on his shoulder but he certainly had a club of the other sort."

Lewis also opened his chapter on friendship with a complaint. Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet "have innumerable counterparts in modern literature: David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amile, have not." Lewis could not remember a poem since Tennyson's In Memoriam that celebrated friendship, and most people now hear Tennyson's line from that poem as a line about romance.

Romantic love or parental love is talked about all the time in movies. There are also songs galore about romantic love, and occasionally, a song from a loving father about his daughter may make it onto modern playlists. But Philia is not often represented, and in modern media, it's not uncommon or remotely rare for every friendship that could be Philia to be shoehorned into a romantic relationship.

The first time I read through The Four Loves and listened to Lewis describe Philia, I realized immediately what he meant. As a child, my friends and I used to play games where we would pretend together to slay something. We had a common cause, imaginary or not. Where had I seen that before?

The closest we come to seeing Philia in a way we can accept it in movies is in war and action films. Sports movies can occasionally reach those levels, but for my money, life and death battles build Philia in believable ways.

I've had more fun than I have any right to with franchises like Lethal Weapon or Bad Boys. I also have distinct memories of Predator, where Schwarzenegger and Weathers meet up at the beginning. I'll spare you the line where they greet each other, but if you know, you know: there was more unity in that single flash of a scene than anything I can think of in the last twenty or more years.

In action movies, the friendship is not usually the focus; it's the task or the problem. In all fairness, it would probably not bring profit to make a movie like that. Men don't generally go to see movies about friendship. They go to the movies with their friends to enjoy entertainment they both enjoy together, which is a very Philia thing. Lewis wrote, "Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship."

When the culture finally wanted a word for a close friendship between two men, it built the word out of "romance" and called it a "bromance," because of course it would.

Brotherly Love

The noun philia appears only once in the New Testament, and the noun appears as a warning. James 4:4 says that friendship with the world is hostility toward God. Even in a warning the word means what Lewis says friendship means, because a friend of the world is someone who wants what the world wants.

As a Christian, you ought to desire what Christ wants, and enjoy Philia with Him.

The more common word is philos, friend. Proverbs 18:24 says, "A man with companions comes to be shattered, but there is a friend who clings more closely than a brother."

Lewis wrote most of his chapter on that same difference between a companion and a friend.

Lewis' Description

Lewis calls the fellowship among men who hunt or fight together Companionship, "or Clubbableness." Men have always had to hunt and fight together, and men have always liked talking about the hunt and the fight afterwards. Lewis does not look down on Companionship: "We do not disparage silver by distinguishing it from gold."

Friendship starts when two of the companions discover they share something the rest of the club does not. Lewis gives the moment a line of dialogue that makes sense to everyone who has ever experienced it: "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

Lewis writes, "Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest." He then borrows a question from Emerson, Do you see the same truth?, and says a friend is the person who at least cares about the same truth, even if the two of them argue about the answer. "Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice."

Lewis also writes, "Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship." Lewis does not mean the remark as an insult, but as a fact. "Friendship is unnecessary," he writes, "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 says that each of his friends had something in him that only another friend could bring out, which also brings out its own distinct type of mourning.

Writing about the death of his great friend Charles Williams in 1945, Lewis said, "Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him 'to myself' now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves."

Ronald here is Tolkien. Tolkien did not hear about Lewis' marriage until after the deed was done. Many have written that Tolkien and Lewis shared Philia, but I think if Lewis and Tolkien shared Philia, it did not last.

A culture, I believe, can lose this form of love without noticing. It is not necessary, after all. But that culture can also unintentionally confuse it, or even intentionally or maliciously misrepresent it.

The Suspicion

Lewis wrote in 1960, "It has actually become necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual." The people who held the theory treated the lack of evidence as evidence, and Lewis answered those people with a cat: "If there were an invisible cat in that chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it."

Lewis was blunter a few lines later. "Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend."

Lewis also found the theory funny, and Lewis asked his readers to picture "Hrothgar embracing Beowulf, Johnson embracing Boswell (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple) and all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up." And no doubt a movie made today would make it say exactly what the world today desires.

In 1960 Lewis could call the people who believed that theory "wiseacres."

The theory has since become the first guess. Type "Was Abraham Lincoln" into Google and the first word Google offers to finish the question is "gay." Type "Was Richard I" and "gay" is one of the first two choices. Type "Were David and Jonathan" and Google offers "lovers" and "gay" before Google offers "friends."

Our culture is so confused about the nature of this kind of friendship, it hasn't noticed it has eliminated an entire category of possibility.

Test Cases

Homer and the author of Samuel each describe a friendship and what the friends shared.

The argument over Achilles and Patroclus dates back to ancient Greece. Homer never calls Achilles and Patroclus lovers. In the Iliad, Patroclus is the companion Achilles honored above all his other companions, and when Patroclus is killed, Achilles goes back into a war Achilles had quit, knowing the war will kill Achilles too.

The Greeks themselves were arguing about the pair a few centuries after Homer. Aeschylus put Achilles and Patroclus on the stage as lovers, and Xenophon has Socrates answer that Homer shows Achilles avenging a comrade. Google's first suggestion for "Were Achilles and Patroclus" is "lovers," and a popular modern novel tells the whole story as a romance.

So in the world of the ancient Greeks there was a cultural component to that kind of relationship. But, that same cultural component doesn't transpose as easily to the world of Jews and Christians.

Jonathan was the king's son and the heir to the throne, and David was the man God had chosen to take the throne. 1 Samuel 18 says, "Jonathan's soul was bound to David's soul, and Jonathan loved him as himself."

Later, when David was hiding from Saul in the wilderness, Jonathan went out to find David "and encouraged him in God." Then Jonathan told David, "You will reign over Israel, and I will be second to you," and the two of them made a covenant before the LORD.

David and Jonathan both believed the LORD's promise, and Jonathan accepted that the promise gave his crown to David.

When the two men parted, they kissed one another and wept, and when Jonathan died David sang, "your love for me was more wonderful than the love of women." David had wives, and David knew the love of women well enough to make the comparison. Lewis' answer to the modern reading of those verses was short: "Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality."

Especially in the case of Homer, we find debate without consensus even in its own time. But, that the Greeks argued about it says even they understood the erotic was not explicit. This tells us something: the Greeks knew men could have deep friendships with each other without romance being involved.

The Lord of the Rings

Many would be tempted to talk about Frodo and Sam here.

I teach The Lord of the Rings to my eighth graders every year, so I have gone through the book more than most people ever will, by several magnitudes. And I get a little annoyed at pastoral references to Sam and Frodo, because I believe ministers stress the bonds of friendship there too much.

I don't want to undersell Sam's contributions. Tolkien himself, in a 1951 letter, called Sam the chief hero of the book. But I believe sympathetic Christians (to say nothing of Hollywood directors) often oversell the Frodo and Sam relationship, because Sam sees his friendship as that of a servant to Frodo.

Sam says "Mr. Frodo" and "master" to the last page. Tolkien wrote, in a line quoted in Humphrey Carpenter's biography, that Sam was "a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognised as so far superior to myself." A batman was the soldier assigned to look after an officer.

Peter Jackson's film even adds a quarrel on the stairs of Cirith Ungol, where Frodo sends Sam home, and Tolkien never wrote that scene, further demonstrating, I believe, that he misunderstood. Sam goes to Mordor to serve Frodo.

When the Quest is over, Frodo tells Sam in "The Grey Havens," "You cannot be always torn in two." Sam's life is in the Shire, with Rosie and the children and seven terms as Mayor. Sam serves Frodo loyally, and the years Sam and Frodo spent together at Bag End gave the two of them the affection of Storge.

I admire Sam's service, but I don't want to mistake it, because Sam doesn't seem to think he and Frodo are equals.

That doesn't mean there is not Philia to be found in The Lord of the Rings.

I think the better example of Philia comes in the form of Gimli and Legolas. This may surprise some who only watched the movie, or closed the book when Sam arrives home. But the story of Legolas and Gimli goes further in the appendices.

Gimli and Legolas begin as hereditary enemies. In The Hobbit, Gimli's father sat in the dungeon of Legolas' father, and the old quarrel flares up again at the Council of Elrond. Neither one needs anything from the other.

Somewhere in the forests of Lórien, Gimli and Legolas start walking together, and the rest of the Company wonders at the change ("The Mirror of Galadriel"). Later, Gimli and Legolas strike a bargain ("The Road to Isengard"): if both live, Legolas will go with Gimli to see the Glittering Caves, and Gimli will go with Legolas into Fangorn. Each one promises to go and see the place the other loves.

Gimli and Legolas keep the bargain after the war ("Many Partings"). They travelled together long after they didn't have to.

Appendix A says Legolas finally took Gimli with him over the Sea "because of their great friendship, greater than any that has been between Elf and Dwarf." The Tale of Years in Appendix B ends with Legolas building a grey ship in Ithilien and sailing down Anduin, and with Legolas, it is said, went Gimli the Dwarf.

And thankfully, we haven't lost all our humanity yet to this mania for male lust. Google's first suggestion for "Were Frodo and Sam" is "gay," but conversely Google's first suggestion for "Were Legolas and Gimli" is "best friends."

Men and Friendship

A culture that can picture only one kind of closeness has lost a whole kind of love, and that culture, I believe, can no longer understand its own past.

It's not just that the culture can only picture one kind of love. It's that men naturally distance themselves from friendships that can be misinterpreted. They suffer as a result. It used to be that a man who preferred the company of only women was suspect. Now the suspicion goes the other way.

In 1990, more than half of American men said they had at least six close friends. By 2021 about one man in four could say so, and the number of men with no close friends at all had grown fivefold.

Men did not stop wanting friends between 1990 and 2021. The survey does not say why the friends went away, and I am sure there are several reasons. I think the suspicion is one of the reasons, given the cultural swing anyone with two human eyes can see has happened. I suspect some men let friendships lapse because those men worry about appearances, and others show affection for a friend only inside a joke.

Lewis wrote in 1960 that "it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation. We, not they, are out of step."

The Marks of Friendship

I think Lewis' descriptions work well. We may not recognize Philia as we used to as a society, but we should, because the marks are still there. It's not as if those marks have been erased, even if they were made socially awkward.

There are friendships that we sometimes have where we haven't seen the person for months or years, and the moment we reconnect, we fall right back into the routine as if no time has passed at all. We may talk about the past, but we do it for enjoyment's sake more than for the sake of catching up. We can catch up with each other, but if we didn't, that wouldn't be held against us.

Lewis describes the same marks. "Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive," Lewis says, and a man becomes your friend before you know whether that man is married or how that man earns a living. The facts of a friend's life come out later, "bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake."

Lewis says friends have no obligation to one another. "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."

I believe Philia carries the mark of the supernatural more readily than perhaps even Eros, precisely because it has no biological purpose.

But, I also do not want to oversell it as common. I believe most friendships are really Storge, which depends on proximity and upkeep. I would call a friendship that resumes immediately after five years of silence, with no apology owed, Philia.

Corruption

That same touch of the supernatural also means Philia is prone to go wrong in terrible ways, and its pitfalls haven't changed too much from Lewis' time. Society may have changed, but the way Philia is corrupted seems to be built into the human spirit.

Lewis says friends have to disregard some outside opinion, because other people do not share the friends' interest. The friends can then begin to disregard all outside opinion.

A literary set that began by ignoring the plain man's ideas about literature "may come to discount equally his idea that they should pay their bills, cut their nails and behave civilly." The friends who felt lucky to be in each other's company begin to feel that the company is better than everyone outside it.

Lewis' name for that circle is a coterie, "a self-appointed aristocracy." Lewis also says friendship "makes good men better and bad men worse."

But for the reasons I gave above about Philia being constantly and intentionally misrepresented, it seems as though Philia can be assaulted from inside and outside in ways the other loves haven't been.

There have always been overly affectionate and overbearing Mrs. Fidgets to ruin Storge. And the image of Aphrodite, of Venus, as beauty and carnal pleasure breaking marriages and promises is as old as time.

Without Eros, none of us come about, so it serves an obvious purpose. Without Storge, none of us gets far. But I don't know if any of them have suffered as much as Philia has. Because it is not necessary in the strict sense, Philia suffers against the constant enemy of its liberty, which is culture: you are allowed to be friends, but the moment your friendship is too hard to understand it must be ridiculed and maimed.

And, the other side is true as well. If you disregard the outside for the exclusive care of the friendship, you risk thinking worse and worse about the world. That part may be forgivable, for the immediate world outside the doors of our homes does seem less safe. But if you think better and better about friendships to the exclusion of the world, you risk the deadliest of the seven sins: pride.

"To hell with the world and what it thinks. It's you and me," sounds powerful, but if you really ever meant it, you would need prayer. After all, a xenophobia to everyone not in your tribe is not what Christians are commanded. We are to love our neighbor, and pray for those who persecute us.

Lewis expected an attack from outside, though he expected a different attack. He wrote that every circle of real friends is "a pocket of potential resistance," and that men who have real friends are "less easy to manage or 'get at.'"

Lewis worried that the people in charge would produce "a world where all are Companions and none are Friends," by force or by propaganda about togetherness. I think ridicule has discouraged close friendships instead.

The Beginning of Friendship

Friendship cannot be sought directly.

Lewis writes, "That is why those pathetic people who simply 'want friends' can never make any. The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends." He adds, "Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers."

A lonely person can spend time doing something they care about alongside other people. Work and church both supply what Lewis calls Companionship. Most institutions produce companions and rarely friends, and friendship may develop when two of the companions discover a shared interest.

Christ described friendship the same way. In John 15 He tells the disciples, "I no longer call you slaves, because a slave does not know what his master does; but I have called you friends, because I made known to you everything I heard from my Father." By Christ's own account, the slave becomes a friend when the master tells the slave what the master knows.

Lewis also quotes John 15:16. Christ told the disciples, "You did not choose me, but I chose you," and Lewis says Christ can tell every group of Christian friends, "You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another."

The next post takes up Eros, the love Lewis called being in love. And I believe Eros and Lewis have a complicated relationship.

Blessings.