The Four Loves
AT OUR SECOND LUNCH with Lewis, we might ask him to tell us about the Inklings. Who were they? How did they operate? How much does Lewis’s own work owe to the group? After all, everyone who is familiar with C. S. Lewis wants to know more about the Inklings —the astonishingly creative group of writers and thinkers who met at Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s and helped shape some of the classics of twentieth-century literature.
Lewis, however, might suggest that we talk about something more fundamental —friendship. Lewis was no solitary genius, who lived and worked in isolation. He needed friends to support and encourage him. He needed friends who could inspire him —to enable him to become a better person and a better writer. Some of Lewis’s friends, such as Arthur Greeves, gave him emotional support; others, such as J. R. R. Tolkien, gave him intellectual encouragement. And Lewis’s conversion —first to belief in God, and then to Christianity —owed an incalculable amount to his close friends such as Owen Barfield and Tolkien.
That’s why Lewis would want us to talk about friendship first. Without his friends, Lewis would never have become a spiritual and literary giant. And he would have little hesitation in demanding that we take the questions of friendship with the greatest seriousness: What kind of friends do we have? How much time do we spend nurturing our friendships? What’s the nature of real friendship? These aren’t secondary questions as we might assume, but essential ones for living life well. Friends matter. They matter at school. They matter at work. They matter even more in old age. That’s why so many nod their heads at a neat epigram from Francis Bacon: “Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.”
We all need friends —people who care for us, who can share our moments of joy, and who will support us in times of need and difficulty. Old friends tend to be good and true friends. Friends encourage us when we are downhearted and demoralised, they motivate us to perform better, and they help us pick up the pieces when things go wrong.
We know that friends are important, but we live in a world that often trivialises the nature of friendship. Online social networks, with their collections of “friends,” have in many people’s lives overtaken the place of real friendship. Yet despite these networks touting increased connectivity, research has shown that the upshot is less satisfaction with life.[26] These “friendships” are leaving us worse off than before.
So what might Lewis have to say to us about real friendship? Why is it important? What are its purposes and its pleasures? What are its benefits —and its risks? And how should friendships function?
As a student of the classics at Oxford University in the early 1920s, Lewis would have been aware of the rich classical notion of friendship. Classical civilisation regarded friendship as one of the greatest privileges and responsibilities. Aristotle drew a distinction between genuine friendships and relationships that were based simply on need and pleasure. Such need- or pleasure-based friendships lasted only as long as they were useful or enjoyable —what we might call “fair-weather friends.” But real friendship, Aristotle argued, went much deeper. Friends care for each other. Aristotle suggested that someone would wish the best for his or her friend, not because it might be of personal benefit, but because it enriched the friend.
For Aristotle, friendship is about bringing out what is best in people. The best friends share a common vision of what is good and important, and help each other achieve goodness. Friends “enlarge and extend each other’s moral experience” by providing “a mirror in which the other may see himself.”[27] This kind of friendship rests on shared assumptions about the nature of goodness, and what might be involved in living the good life. It is not a casual matter, but something deep, enabling each other to become —and remain —good people.
But Lewis did more than just study what others had to say about friendship. He wrote about it at length in a book of his own, The Four Loves.
The Four Loves
The success of Lewis’s Broadcast Talks for the BBC during the Second World War (the basis for his book Mere Christianity) led to lots more invitations to record radio addresses. Lewis ignored these requests —except for one. In August 1958, Lewis recorded four hour-long talks on love for the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. Each of the talks was devoted to one of four “loves” —affection, friendship, eros (sexual love), and charity. Lewis’s book The Four Loves (1960) was based on these talks. It remains a provocative and helpful exploration of aspects of love —including friendship. The book distills Lewis’s accumulated wisdom over the years, perhaps most effectively in his discussion of the value and role of friends.
This late work is unusual in some respects. For a start, Lewis’s trademark use of stories and anecdotes is largely absent from this work. The few that he does use —such as the character of Mrs. Fidget —are memorable precisely because they stand out in a text from which they are otherwise conspicuously absent. Second, love is analyzed in a curiously detached, almost clinical manner. Yet by the time of writing this work, completed in June 1959, Lewis had married Joy Davidman. If Lewis experienced love as a searing and overwhelming human emotion, there is little sign of it in The Four Loves. The reader who was unaware that Lewis had recently married would not have guessed it from the disengaged account presented in the book. In marked contrast, A Grief Observed (1961) represents one of the finest accounts of the emotional firestorm unleashed by bereavement. Lewis could write with emotional power and depth when he wanted to, yet he did not choose to do so here.
So what does Lewis think is so important about friendship? Lewis sees friendship as something vital and transformative. Yet friendship is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Only very inadequate or ambitious people deliberately set out to secure friends, either as a means of boosting their own self-confidence or advancing their own ends. The wise set out to achieve something more important and noble, and find that their friends enable them to do this. “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends.”[28] As Lewis rightly observes, this means that friendship is not about moral improvement. It “makes good men better and bad men worse.” Yet where there is good, friendship enables it to be achieved and maintained.
Lewis makes it clear that a “friend” is more than just an acquaintance. “Many people when they speak of their ‘friends’ mean only their companions.”[29] Following Aristotle, Lewis insisted that friendship arose when two people realised 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).”[30] For Lewis, friendship extends to the exploration of the deepest questions of life.
Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth? —or at least, “Do you care about the same truth?” The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our friend. He need not agree with us about the answer.[31]
Lewis’s analysis helps us make sense of how his friends helped him to write books, and cope with life’s disappointments and challenges.
Lewis’s early letters and diaries suggest that he had a very small social circle, being seen as difficult or awkward by his fellow students. We don’t know why they called him “Heavy Lewis” as an undergraduate. The most likely explanation is that he was seen as “heavy going,” out of touch with mainstream student life at the time, especially the “hearties,” who excelled at sport and heavy drinking. Perhaps Lewis’s friends came to matter to him because they were so few in number.
When I was researching my recent biography of Lewis, I began to appreciate how important friends became to him. Lewis formed very strong attachments to a relatively small number of people. Without those friends, Lewis would have been a lesser person. Time and time again, Lewis’s friends provided him with support in seasons of difficulty and with inspiration for his books and writing.
Yet Lewis’s friendships were not always easy. Sometimes they went wrong —as in the case of the increasingly distant relationship between Lewis and Tolkien. They also went wrong at Magdalen College, Oxford, where by 1949, factions had developed within its governing body, several of which were hostile to Lewis. This increasingly uncomfortable atmosphere at Magdalen College was a significant contributing factor to Lewis’s decision to move to Cambridge several years later.
So imagine that we are having lunch with Lewis. The topic of friendship is on the agenda. Perhaps the most obvious starting point is to ask Lewis to tell us about some of the important people in his life, and the difference that they made to him.
Lewis’s Core Friendships
Lewis’s first real friendship was with his elder brother, Warren (“Warnie”). After the family moved to their new home (“Little Lea”), Warnie and Lewis became close friends. At that time, the threat of disease led many middle-class families in their part of Belfast to keep children indoors. The children had little option other than to read books or play games together. Lewis and Warnie read widely, and created imaginary literary worlds. Later, the two brothers brought their stories about “Animal-Land” and “India” together in a composite world, “Boxen.”
In the summer of 1907, Flora Lewis took her two sons to France. In those days, few Irish people travelled abroad. While their father stayed at home to work in his law office in Belfast, the rest of the Lewis family traveled to France and stayed in a small family hotel on the Normandy coastline. Yet only a year later, Flora Lewis died, slowly and painfully, of cancer in the fall of 1908, before Lewis’s tenth birthday. His world fell to pieces around him. Warnie was Lewis’s only companion for the next few years, while they studied at boarding schools in England, far away from their family in Ireland.
A new friendship began to emerge in April 1914, when Lewis was home during school vacation. Arthur Greeves, the son of a prosperous Belfast linen manufacturer, lived close to Little Lea. Greeves was in poor health, and was confined to bed for much of the time. To Lewis’s surprise, he was invited to visit Greeves. Lewis went somewhat reluctantly.
Around that time, Lewis had developed a love for Norse mythology. On being shown into Greeves’s bedroom, Lewis noticed that Greeves had been reading a book on that subject. He suddenly became interested. “Do you like that?” he asked, pointing at the book. Greeves was delighted.[32] Their shared interest in what Lewis called “Northernness” became the initial basis of their long-standing friendship, which lasted until Lewis’s death in 1963. They exchanged letters regularly. Especially in the 1910s and 1920s, Greeves became Lewis’s confidant —someone he could talk to about the things that really mattered to him or were troubling him.
Yet there were serious differences between the two. For a start, Lewis was a somewhat aggressive atheist, and Greeves was a committed Christian. It soon became clear that their disagreement on this matter was so serious that they gave up talking about it. When Lewis moved to Oxford in 1917, he developed a mild interest in sadomasochism, which clearly shocked Greeves. Yet Lewis needed someone who would listen to him on these matters —who would stay friends with him, even though he disagreed with Lewis’s new interests. In the end, this turned out to be a phase that Lewis needed to work through. Further tensions arose in the relationship in the late 1910s when Greeves told Lewis that he was beginning to realise he was a homosexual. Lewis made it clear that he did not see this as interfering with their relationship, which continued unaffected.
Greeves became a sounding board for Lewis —someone whose judgement he trusted, and whose advice he sought. In 1917, Greeves was the only person Lewis told about his increasingly complicated relationship with Mrs. Moore, the mother of his close friend Paddy, who had been killed in the First World War. When Lewis began to embrace Christianity in 1931, he wrote two letters to Greeves telling him about both this development and the reasons underlying it. The second letter, written weeks after the event, sets out Lewis’s thinking in considerable detail, and is of critical importance in understanding Lewis’s decisive move from believing in God to believing in Christianity.
Yet Greeves was no academic, and could not cope with the questions Lewis was beginning to explore about the purpose and place of literature, and how Christianity was to be expressed and explored. As their correspondence makes clear, Lewis found Greeves invaluable in helping him think about more personal matters. Yet Lewis also needed friends who shared his academic interests, and could help him reflect on the deeper questions raised by his studies.
As might be expected, Lewis formed new friendships with other students during his time as an undergraduate at Oxford University. The most important of Lewis’s student friends was Owen Barfield, an undergraduate at Wadham College, Oxford, whom Lewis met in 1919. Barfield was unquestionably Lewis’s intellectual equal, and possibly his superior. In 1920, Barfield was awarded first-class honors in English Language and Literature.
Their disagreement in the initial phase of their lifelong friendship was so severe that Lewis came to refer to this as their “Great War.” Yet Lewis relished this engagement, seeing Barfield as “the best and wisest of my unofficial teachers” at Oxford. Barfield played a decisive role in undermining Lewis’s atheism, emphasising the incoherence of reductionist ways of thinking. Lewis trusted him, and respected his intellectual judgement. When Barfield raised questions about Lewis’s atheism, Lewis knew that he had no other choice than to take them seriously. Barfield’s persistent questioning eventually forced Lewis to the conclusion that his atheism was incoherent.
After leaving Oxford, Barfield went on to establish a successful legal practice in London from 1934 to 1959. His clients, needless to say, included Lewis, who asked his old friend to administer his estate after his death. Lewis knew whom he could trust.
Lewis’s Friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien
When Lewis became an Oxford don in 1925, his circle of friends began to expand beyond his childhood and student friends. The most important of Lewis’s new friends was J. R. R. Tolkien, a philologist who was Oxford University’s Professor of Anglo-Saxon. Like Lewis, Tolkien had been an officer in the British army during the First World War, and had returned to the academic life after his demobilisation. Tolkien was fascinated by the languages and lore of northern Europe, and founded a study group he named the “Kolbítar,” aimed at fostering an appreciation of Old Norse and its associated literature. (Tolkien borrowed this name from an Icelandic word meaning “coal-biters,” which was a derisive term for Norsemen who refused to join in the hunt or fight battles.) Lewis found this “little Icelandic club” a massive stimulus to his imagination, throwing him back into “a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music.”[33]
The friendship between Tolkien and Lewis proved to be of critical importance for twentieth-century English literature. It is no exaggeration to say that this friendship gave birth to both Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. It all began when Tolkien asked Lewis if he would look over a piece of writing Tolkien had just completed, and let him know what he thought of it. What Tolkien wanted Lewis to read was a long narrative poem titled The Lay of Leithian. It was a precursor to the great work that we now know as The Lord of the Rings.
It is clear Tolkien needed a “critical friend” at this point, a mentor who would encourage and criticise, affirm and improve his writing. Tolkien had had such “critical friends” in the past. Yet these friendships had faded, and Tolkien needed someone he could trust to help him move ahead with his writing. And what Tolkien needed he found in Lewis.
The two men encouraged each other to write. Since they each had a high estimation of the other’s judgements, they read their writings to each other. In the early 1930s, Tolkien read parts of The Hobbit to Lewis; Lewis read parts of The Pilgrim’s Regress to Tolkien.
While Lewis helped Tolkien in many ways, his most important achievement lay in persuading Tolkien to finish what he was writing. Tolkien was a perfectionist, always wanting to revise documents again and again, and somehow never finishing them. Lewis gave Tolkien the encouragement he needed to complete his masterpiece. As Tolkien later recalled, Lewis was for many years the only audience for The Lord of the Rings. “But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”[34]
Tolkien’s influence on Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia was more indirect. In September 1931, Lewis invited Tolkien and another friend to join him for dinner at Magdalen College. In the course of a long walk through the college’s gardens afterwards, Tolkien helped Lewis appreciate the deep appeal of Christianity. As a result of talking to Tolkien, Lewis realized that Christianity was a “true myth” —that is to say, a true way of expressing reality in narrative form. The Chronicles of Narnia arose some twenty years later from this basic insight, and are now widely regarded as one of the finest retellings of the Christian story.
But Tolkien did not like the Chronicles of Narnia. He regarded them as being hastily written. They mingled different kinds of myths. (What was Father Christmas doing in Narnia?) Most worrying for Tolkien, Lewis seemed to have “borrowed” ideas from his own early drafts of The Lord of the Rings. By the time the final book in the Chronicles of Narnia was published in 1956, Lewis’s relationship with Tolkien was in trouble.
What had gone wrong? Lewis’s friendship with Tolkien was at its strongest throughout the 1930s —an immensely creative period for both men. Yet it began to falter in the early 1940s as Lewis developed a friendship with the novelist Charles Williams, who had recently settled in Oxford. Tolkien felt he had been displaced in Lewis’s affections and resented Lewis’s growing intimacy with Williams. Tolkien’s suspicions in the early 1950s that Lewis had plagiarised material from The Lord of the Rings made things worse. Finally, Lewis’s clandestine civil marriage to Joy Davidman caused Tolkien considerable distress, partly because he did not approve of civil marriages, but mainly because Lewis never told him about it. It became clear to him that Lewis no longer regarded him as a close friend.
During this period of increasing alienation, however, both men retained their respect and admiration for each other. Tolkien was instrumental in persuading Lewis to accept the newly established Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University in 1954. And recently discovered documents show that Lewis proposed Tolkien for the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature, citing The Lord of the Rings as a justification for this honor.
It is clear that the rupture in Lewis and Tolkien’s friendship was due primarily to Tolkien. To an outsider, Tolkien may seem to have been somewhat oversensitive, overreacting to developments which were not malicious or sinister. Yet perhaps this reminds us that friendships cannot be taken for granted. They require investment and maintenance if they are to flourish.
The Inklings
What is probably the most important friendship of Lewis’s life was communal, rather than individual —the remarkable group we remember today as the Inklings.
Lewis’s social life entered a new phase in 1930. His brother, Warnie, who had been on active military service, announced his decision to retire from the British army. At that time, Warnie had been posted to Shanghai in China —one of many overseas postings which prevented the two brothers from spending time together. At Lewis’s suggestion, Warnie moved to Oxford and moved in with Lewis and Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen. A new house was purchased —The Kilns —which could be extended to give everyone enough living room. Lewis was delighted. He and Warnie would be together again. Their friendship could resume after a long interruption.
Once Warnie settled in Oxford, he became involved in Lewis’s literary life. He worked in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, typing up the Lewis family history. Warnie had a love of French history, and began to research some projects that eventually led to a well-received series of books, such as The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV (1953). Lewis and Tolkien were already meeting regularly in Lewis’s rooms by this stage to discuss their various projects. It seemed entirely natural that Warnie should join them. And gradually, still others —such as Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and Nevill Coghill —joined as well. As Tolkien later remarked, it was an “undetermined and unelected circle of friends.”[35] They had two shared interests: Christianity and literature. Lewis referred to the group as the Inklings, and that name has stuck.
The group —all of whom were men —got into the habit of meeting twice a week. On Tuesday mornings, they gathered in The Eagle and Child public house in Oxford’s St. Giles —a broad, tree-lined street, heading north from the center of town —to exchange news and gossip. The second meeting was business rather than social. On Thursday evenings, they met in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College to discuss works in preparation —mainly by Lewis himself, Tolkien, and Charles Williams —such as early drafts of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
It is important not to overstate the importance of the group. Charles Williams, for example, had already written some of his finest works before moving to Oxford and joining the Inklings. Tolkien was both stubbornly independent and sensitive, and found it difficult to accept criticism. Lewis never submitted the text of any of his Narnia novels to the group. Yet each of these authors submitted work for discussion, and each was of the view that these works benefited considerably from discussion. Among the works discussed by the Inklings, we may note Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, and Charles Williams’s All Hallows Eve.
The Inklings are now widely acclaimed as one of the greatest literary clubs of the twentieth century. Without naming either the group or its members in The Four Loves, Lewis reflected on the importance of a “circle of friends” such as the Inklings as the nucleus of a “rebellion of serious thinkers against accepted clap-trap.”[36] To challenge the status quo demands fellowship and commitment. Furthermore, Lewis emphasised the privilege of being part of such a group. “In a good Friendship, every member often feels humility towards the rest. He sees that they are splendid, and counts himself lucky to be among them.”[37]
So why did the group work so well? And what can we learn from its success? Let’s tease out the elements that made the Inklings so successful.
First, they were primarily a group of friends. They knew and respected one another. In one sense, the Inklings can be seen as a gathering of friends of Lewis (especially) and Tolkien. Yet this misses the point that the Inklings generated a network of friendships. Members knew they were respected and could say what they really thought. Newcomers were carefully vetted, and outsiders were discouraged from attending. At times, Lewis would have to restore order when things got out of hand. Hugo Dyson, for example, found Tolkien’s stories of orcs and elves tedious, and wanted everyone to know that. Yet overall, the group worked well.
Second, the Inklings were a community —a group of like-minded people with similar interests and concerns, and above all a love of literature. In a sense, they were amateurs —people who loved literature for its own sake rather than for professional advancement, and who saw the promotion of good literature as a worthy end in itself. John Wain, one of the members of the group, later emphasised how the Inklings saw themselves as a countercultural community, trying to reclaim a noble approach to literature which had fallen out of fashion, by “redirecting the whole current of contemporary art and life.”[38]
Yet perhaps it is the third aspect of the Inklings that helps us grasp the reason for their success. They were critical friends —that is to say, they trusted one another and their judgements, and had earned the right to comment on one another’s works. At times, there were tensions between those who wrote, and those who merely commented. Yet the underlying intention was clear. Criticism was about offering external perspectives, allowing an author to appreciate how his readers might understand him, rather than how he understood himself. Criticism was not seen as a cheap way of scoring points, of boosting one’s own self-esteem, or of making fun of a colleague. At its heart, the enterprise of criticism was about taking something that was good and making it even better.
This is an important point. In everyday use, criticism means saying negative things about something. As the Inklings understood it, however, the word meant judging something, identifying both its strengths and its weaknesses. In everyday use, the word is purely negative; as Lewis and his colleagues understood it, the word mingled positive and negative elements, reflecting that any work under discussion would have qualities that needed to be affirmed and flaws that needed further attention. Some, such as Tolkien, found criticism difficult to accept. Yet what we know of these meetings indicates that the group saw itself as a catalyst for improvement —and for offering encouragement.
That brings us neatly to the final point. The Inklings offered a supportive and encouraging environment, which helped its members strengthen and complete their works. This was especially important for Tolkien, who was clearly discouraged by anxieties about how his work would be received by his critics, and kept revising texts to the point that many believed they would never be published. The diaries and letters of individual Inklings help us appreciate the level of support they gave to each other at their Thursday gatherings.
So what can we learn from these reflections on the Inklings? One of the most obvious points is the importance of support and encouragement in doing something that matters. For Lewis and Tolkien, writing was of central importance to their lives. Lewis always found that others could help him write —by encouraging him to write, by assessing what he had written, and by helping him to sort out the structure of works he hoped to write. Although Lewis was the author of all his works, most of them were seasoned and finely honed through interaction with other people whose views he trusted.
The success of the Inklings also helps us to see criticism in a positive light. There are, unfortunately, people who boost their own sense of importance by criticising others as a matter of principle. Yet within this community, criticism was a mark of respect and commitment. It marked commitment on the part of the Inklings both to the member whose work was being discussed and to the work under consideration. The objective was simple: to take a promising text and make it still better. In a paradoxical sense, criticism offered was thus seen as an affirmation that this text was worth attention.
Lewis’s analysis of the “circle of friends” at times echoes the imagery of a church or religious community, bonded together by a shared commitment to truth and to communicating and commending this effectively. Lewis makes clear the limits of an individual; the “circle of friends” compensates for an individual’s weaknesses and enhances his or her strengths. These comments are particularly important in light of Lewis’s frequent admission that he found himself wearied by his apologetic ministry, which left him feeling emptied and isolated —a matter to which we shall return in a later lunch. The “circle of friends” was an important antidote to this sense of isolation and loneliness.
Yet in contrast to this “circle of friends” image, Lewis also warns us that friendship can go badly wrong. It’s not just that relationships break down. It’s that we can idolise friendship, or abuse it. In 1944, Lewis gave a lecture at King’s College London on “The Inner Ring.”[39] What did Lewis mean by this phrase Inner Ring? Basically, Lewis was talking about an “in-group,” a select few self-important individuals who saw themselves as defining what was good and right. For people within the “Inner Ring,” saying, “He’s not one of us” means “He doesn’t belong” or “He’s not the right kind of person.”
Friendship in the “Inner Ring” is used as a means of gaining admittance to the circles of power. Friendship itself is not what really matters —it is an instrument which opens doors and secures influence. It makes us feel that we matter and are important. Lewis illustrates this from a commonplace at Oxford University —being asked to be an examiner (one of Oxford’s dullest academic responsibilities):
It is a terrible bore, of course, when old Fatty Smithson draws you aside and whispers, “Look here, we’ve got to get you in on this examination somehow” or “Charles and I saw at once that you’ve got to be on this committee.” A terrible bore . . . ah, but how much more terrible if you were left out! It is tiring and unhealthy to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don’t matter, that is much worse.[40]
Lewis rightly points out that this desire to be part of the “Inner Ring” is not really about friendship at all. It is about our own insecurity and yearning to matter. It is about using “friends” as tools to gain what we want. We value someone, not because of who they are, but because of what they can do for us. We want them to boost our self-esteem and self-importance and get us privileged access to things we might otherwise not be able to get at all. In fact, our longing to be part of an “Inner Ring” debases friendship. Real friendship is about shared affection, respect, and interests. As Lewis concluded, there is “no ‘inside’ that is worth reaching.” What really matters is friendship, pure and simple.
So what might we conclude? Perhaps the most important point to take away from our lunch with Lewis is that friendship is of vital importance because friendship is transformational —both for ourselves and for our friends. This is key because any form of ministry or service or endeavor worth pursuing requires support and fellowship. It cannot be undertaken in isolation. Friendship is essential to fit us for the task. That’s why the questions of friendship should be ones we ask ourselves on a regular basis: How are my friends influencing me? What task lies ahead of me that demands a community of support? How can I support my friends? Am I spending enough time and energy cultivating real friendships? And is friendship an end or a means —something good in itself or a good to be consumed? It is no wonder that so many successful churches encourage small groups to meet and discuss things that concern them. Lewis himself gave and received this kind of support. We must expect to do the same.
We’ve now had two lunches with Lewis, and we haven’t thoroughly explored his most famous creation —Narnia. It’s time to change that. In our next two imagined lunches with Lewis, we’ll explore how he used the story of Narnia to open up a deeper vision of reality.