Like Water upon Sand

“During those years, when I first began to teach in Thagaste, my native town, I had found a very dear friend” (IV.4). So begins one of the loveliest but most dangerously seductive passages in Augustine’s famous spiritual autobiography, Confessions. Lovely, because it contains such a powerful description of the pleasures and power of friendship; dangerous, because it is expressed so well, and we so easily recognize in it what we ourselves have felt so strongly in our own friendships, that we might overlook the warning the entire passage is meant to convey.

Throughout these chapters Augustine touches on the theme of mutual interest, which C. S. Lewis finds so essential an element, and indeed the foundation, of true friendship in The Four Loves. Lewis says that friendship “arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one’” (65). Most of us remember this sort of thing happening and the ecstasy of discovering someone who shares what we thought were our private joys.

For Lewis himself, for example, this bonding (with Arthur Greeves, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and others) came about over a shared love of certain myths, poetry, atmospheres, and music, where for someone else it might be bicycle repair, astronomy, or French philosophy. And because friendship orients itself around mutual interests, continues Lewis, “we picture lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes look ahead” (66), and not at each other, as lovers’ do. And therefore, “Friendship, unlike Eros, is uninquisitive. You become a man’s friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living. What have all these ‘unconcerning things, matters of fact’ to do with the real question, Do you see the same truth?” (70). And so “you will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring at his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him” (71). For Lewis, friendship, unlike eros, is not about “us two”, but about some thing outside.

And this is exactly what we see in Augustine’s friendship: “we were both the same age, both together in the heyday of youth, and both absorbed in the same interests…there was sweetness in our friendship, mellowed by the interests we shared” (IV.4).

But later he depicts the small group of friends he so loved as so closely conjoined by the original mutual interests that the friendship itself becomes an object of attention and a thing to nurture—they are beginning to look at each other and not just straight ahead, side by side—although the original interests are certainly still in focus. “There were other charms to captivate my heart. We could talk and laugh together and exchange small acts of kindness. We could join in the pleasure that books can give. We could be grave or gay together. If we sometimes disagreed, it was without spite, as a man might differ with himself, and the rare occasions of dispute were the very spice to season our usual accord. Each of us had something to learn from the others and something to teach in return” (IV.8). So far, so Lewisian.

But then, “if any were away, we missed them with regret and gladly welcomed them when they came home. Such things as these are heartfelt tokens of affection between friends. They are signs to be read on the face and in the eyes, spoken by the tongue and displayed in countless acts of kindness. They can kindle a blaze to melt our hearts and weld them into one.” This begins to sound more like Achilleus and Patroklos, David and Jonathan, Orestes and Pylades, than Lewis and Barfield. This is not at all to disparage such a change in the friendship—in fact, it’s almost certainly a change that most friendships of the first type (sharing mutual interests) will turn into over time—but to point out a direction which will lead (not inevitably, but frequently enough) to the danger mentioned earlier.

Everyone who has loved a friend as the most important thing there is is simply an idolater, and idols become instruments of our soul’s destruction rather than blessing.

Wes Callihan

In the Introduction to The Four Loves, Lewis quotes the Swiss philosopher de Rougemont: “love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god” (6)—and Augustine’s friendship passage illustrates this; in fact, it is precisely the point Augustine is making in it. When his dear friend died, he “lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them…What madness, to love a man as something more than human!…the grief I felt for the loss of my friend had struck so easily into my inmost heart simply because I had poured out my soul upon him, like water upon sand, loving a man who was mortal as though he were never to die” (IV.6, 7, 8). Augustine, like everyone who has loved a friend as the most important thing there is, was simply an idolater, and idols are demons—that is, they become instruments of our soul’s destruction rather than blessing.

Augustine’s descriptions of friendship delight us, and ought to; the descriptions of the sadness he felt after losing his friend are equally moving. Without his dear friend, his soul was a burden; “neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry” (IV.7). We all recognize these descriptions—we’ve all lost friends, to death or distance or disillusionment, and we’ve suffered this sort of pain, because our friends are more than simply someone to share an interest with; as Augustine says, “…I was his second self. How well the poet put it when he called his friend the half of his soul” (IV.6). And so to lose a friend is to lose part of one’s own self. And friendship benefits the soul as a “school of virtue”, encouraging it to live according to its true nature, as Aristotle in his Ethics, and Cicero in his On Friendship, both point out beautifully.

But because Augustine loved his dear friend as “something more than human”, “as though he were never to die,” seeking in his friendships the satisfaction for his soul that, as he finally learned later, only God can be, he was devastated when he lost him. If his friendship had remained only about a mutual interest, then since that interest would have remained after the loss of the friend, the loss would be bearable. But the friendship was about more than the interest—it was about the friend, as it naturally would begin to be eventually, and so the loss of the friend is so much the greater. But if the friendship is everything, then the loss becomes truly unbearable.

Only later did Augustine understand how “blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you… they alone will never lose those who are dear to them, for they love them in one who is never lost, in God…” (IV.9). As Augustine says at the end of the wonderful first paragraph of the Confessions, “you made us for yourself”—not for anything else, no matter how good it is—“and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”

Works Cited

Augustine, Confessions (Tr. R. S. Pine-Coffin). New York: Penguin, 1961.

Lewis, C. S., The Four Loves. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991.