The companion virtue: Friendship

In the decade before his death of AIDS, Allan Bloom found a kindred spirit in novelist Saul Bellow. Bellow, a Nobel laureate in literature, taught classes with Bloom at Chicago late in the last century. In popular culture, he is known as the storied Jewish author of The Adventures of Augie March. At Chicago, he was a beloved teacher and sensitive colleague. Bloom, a political philosopher and student of Leo Strauss, was the author of the groundbreaking book, The Closing of the American Mind, and a seminal interpretation of Plato’s Republic. Both men had a marked impact on history. Both were Jewish. Both were atheists (or agnostics). And both were plagued by the same questions: Jerusalem or Athens? The City of God, or the City of Man?

Forging their friendship with a strange mix of shared cultural heritage, intellectual curiosity, and mere proximity, these men, late in life, became such close friends that on Bloom’s death, Bellow wrote a fictional account of Bloom’s last days. More than a treatise on the intellectual currents of fanned by Bloom at the close of the American century, it is the gentle tome of a friend remembering a friend. The book, Ravelstein, is deeply personal and disarmingly philosophic; and by combining the two, it illuminates the nature of Bellow’s and Bloom’s friendship: two men, bound by time and circumstance, both wondering after the same questions. It is a picture of friends sitting at the edge of an abyss, afraid, mesmerized, and intrigued – comforted at least partially by the fact that they sit and stare together.

Have you ever had a friend like that? Most of us, even those with lower aspirations than Bloom and Bellow, have. As a high school student, you had a group of two or three people who shared your love of basketball or sci-fi, philosophy or fantasy, and who would stick with you through thick or thin. You had a college roommate who always knew when to tape a crucial football game, and a best friend – a companion – who was always there with the right words when time was tight and tempers were short. In my time at Berry College, I grew to know several people for whom I developed what the Greeks refer to as phileo love, and with whom I experienced the deepest of shared passions. To this day they stay with me, if not in person, in heart.

But as often as we experience this depth of love, this intimacy, early in life, we seem to neglect it as we age. Sure, we remember eros. We fight to find agape. We even understand the protective, parental nature of storge love. But friendship, phileo love, is taken for granted. It is neglected or relegated to second class status in a world of whirlwind romance and international causes. It is forgotten, and as the cares of life close in on our ability to wonder, to dream, and to wander, many of us leave deep friendships behind.

Why do we demote the importance of this friendship love? After all, to the Greeks it was everything. Sometimes tinged with eros, phileo love bound groups of men and women with shared visions, ignited wars, and launched philosophic traditions that revolutionized the West. What would the academy have been without Plato’s love of Socrates, or Aristotle’s love of Plato? What would the Illiad be without the passionate companionship of Patroclus and Achilles? Friendship was the foundation of literature, philosophy, mathematics, and democracy in the Greek world, and its importance, for two thousand years, was transmitted to the successors of the Greeks in the modern world.

Friendship was a primary mover of various movements throughout the modern era. Poetry was revolutionaized by the friendships that ignited transcendentalism in New England and the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The very concept of political freedom was turned on its head by a rebel group of “founding brothers” running headstrong towards the enlightenment in a radical “new world”. And fantasy and apologetics were forever changed by the fireside chats of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. It could well be said (and has been said in Lewis’ The Four Loves) that friendship, more than eros or storge love, has inspired some of the world’s strongest movements and finest moments; but it receives little airtime in modern culture. Movies neglect it. Pop-songs dumb it down to thuggish loyalty or candy-coated girl-talk cliché. Regular people, you and me, forget our friends. We remember marriage. We remember parenthood. We sometimes remember God; and we sometimes remember to develop a sense of friendship love in coordination with the agape, eros, and storge loves in our life (and surely, this is a positive thing). But we forget to tie ourselves to those people who merely share our passions. We forget the necessity of friendship love as a sufficient phenomenon when the other loves in our life grow important. If there are four loves, we act as if juggling the fourth alone is more trouble than its worth, and let our pure friendships, our phileo love, slip away unnoticed and untended.

But aren’t we lucky to have such fellow travelers in a mysterious and uncertain world? Not those willing to love us romantically. Not those who only care for us and protect us. Not those with the unconditional love of saints. But those rare people who are willing to refocus us on shared goals when we fall by the roadside or allow ourselves to be lead astray. Those people who are not jealous of our love, simply appreciative of it. Those people who see it enhanced when we share it, and feel it cool when we tuck it away.

Everyday this love, friendship, surrounds us, waiting for us to notice. Let us never forget that love takes various forms, and to neglect a study of friendship, of the bond of shared passions and quiet loyalty, is to neglect the part of our souls that longs not to stare into the eyes of another, but to sit at the edge of the abyss together and stare forward into the mystery, confident, for we are not alone.

Comments

[chris coleman]

Hey John, just in case you would like another useless fact, track number 7 on Sufjan Stevens CD "The Avalanche" is about Saul Bellow. Pretty interesting, I think, and a good song too!

[John]

I think I'd like to have dinner with Sufjan sometime.

[Beth]

You are beautiful.

Thanks, John. The reference to Bellow reminded me of Henderson The Rain King, and the excitement over that book that my oldest friend and I shared more than 25 years ago. This post is a great reminder to reach out to him.

[Andre]

That was a beautiful appreciation of Bellow and Bloom. I am not as familiar with Bloom, but Bellow's works have consistently touched me. He was a great man.