If your delight is in souls, love them in God, because they too are frail and stand firm only when they cling to him.” … This is why we mourn their death, which shrouds us in sorrow and turns joy into bitterness, so that a heart is drenched in tears and life becomes a living death because a friend is lost.”Īugustine says, “If the things of this world delight you, praise God for them but turn your love away from them and give it to their Maker, so that in the things that please you you may not displease him. This sounds like a paragraph about “those golden sessions” of friendship that Lewis describes in “The Four Loves.” In fact, Augustine expressed this view after the loss of his unnamed friend. These are sparks that kindle a blaze to melt our hearts and fuse them inseparably into one.”
Such signs of friendship spring from the hearts of friends who love and know they are loved in return, signs to be read in smiles, words, glances and a thousand gracious gestures. We teach and learn from each other, sadly missing any who are absent and gladly welcoming them when they come home. If we disagree with each other occasionally, it is without malice, as a person might disagree with himself, and the rare occasions of dispute lend spice to season our much more frequent accord. “Friendship has joys that captivate my heart-the charms of talking and laughing together and kindly giving way to each other’s wishes, reading elegantly written books together, sharing jokes and delighting to honor one another. “My greatest comfort and relief is in the consolation of friends,” Augustine wrote. What does Augustine really say about friendship? His major error is misrepresenting Augustine by saying he taught we must not give our heart to anything but God, for human beings pass away. Nebridius (mentioned briefly in Confessions IV, 3) was with Augustine much later in life after his conversion (Confessions IX, 3). The death of an unnamed friend, not Nebridius, caused Augustine grief. Lewis made a minor error in his reference to Nebridius. With trembling, I offer a correction to Lewis because of the supreme value of what they both teach about friendship love. Lewis could have relied upon Augustine as a great ally to strengthen his essay on friendship love.
But recent study led me to investigate the validity of Lewis’s depiction of Augustine’s “hangover.” I now conclude he was wrong about Augustine’s view of friendship. Since I first read “The Four Loves” in the 1970s, I’ve accepted and quoted what Lewis said about Augustine. I’m similarly reluctant to question Lewis, a favorite author. Augustine’s view with reluctance, saying, “I do so with trembling, for it met me in pages of a great saint and a great thinker to whom my own glad debts are incalculable.” Augustine, ‘and our heart has no rest till it comes to Thee.’” Lewis rejected St. Later in the same chapter in “The Four Loves,” he quotes with appreciation: “‘Thou hast made us for thyself,’ said St. II.27).”Įverywhere else, Lewis refers to Augustine as a respected authority. Paul who shows no sign that he would not have suffered like a man, and no feeling that he ought not so to have suffered, if Epaphroditus had died (Phil. Paul has a higher authority with us than St. We follow One who wept over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, and, loving all, yet had one disciple whom, in a special sense, he ‘loved.’ St. It is closer to Stoic ‘apathy’ or neo-Platonic mysticism than to charity.
“This passage in the Confessions is less a part of St Augustine’s Christendom than a hangover from the high-minded Pagan philosophies in which he grew up. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions IV, 4.),” Lewis wrote.
“In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Why then did Lewis shoot down Augustine’s view of friendship in “The Four Loves?” Lewis, gave themselves without reservations to their friends.
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