Posted on 06/16/2012 9:32:41 AM PDT by ReformationFan
June 13, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) - When close friends are presented in film or literature today, the conclusion is often: ‘Oh, they are gay.’ One of the tragedies of our culture, in its vigorous acceptance of the homosexual agenda, is the corrosion of a true understanding of friendship. What is ‘Friendship’? Have we lost our concept of it?
Today, Friendship is considered either mere casual companionship, or, if it is something deeper, a latent sexual urge. But traditionally, Friendship was neither of these things.
In The Four Loves, novelist and philosopher C. S. Lewis describes Friendship as a love in its own right, as great as Eros (romantic love), but entirely separate from it.
“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 declares.
Friendship is founded on the vital question: “Do you see the same truth?” It occurs when two people perceive the same thing, or pursue the same end, separate from others. “Friendship is unnecessary,” Lewis states, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself. … It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
Ancient tradition often portrays the earnest—but non-erotic—love between people of the same sex. Examples of deep friendships are found throughout literature, such as Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s The Iliad, David and Jonathan in the Bible, or, later, Rosalind and Celia in Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
“To the Ancients,” Lewis states, “Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue.”
It is clear that love between two people of the same sex can be profound and deep—this is established in literature and history. But, incongruously, these friendships are now taken as evidence of homosexuality.
In The Last Battle, Lewis says that mixing truth with a lie makes the lie much stronger. People point to the truth of friendship—and the very real love that’s found there—and say: ‘Here is proof of homosexuality!’
“To say that every Friendship is consciously and explicitly homosexual would be too obviously false;” Lewis states, explaining that ‘wiseacres’ then accuse deep friendship of being somehow subconsciously gay.
“The fact that no positive evidence of homosexuality can be discovered in the behaviour of two Friends,” Lewis continues, “does not disconcert the wiseacres at all: ‘That’, they say gravely, ‘is just what we should expect.’ The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden. Yes - if it exists at all. But we must first prove its existence.”
Looking for subconscious homosexuality in friendship, Lewis argues, is like looking for an invisible 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.’ A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved,” he says, “but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it.”
Of course, Friendship has, on rare occasions, been combined with a homosexual urge. But this is not its natural or normal outcome. “In deciding… where [homosexuality] crept in and where it did not,” Lewis states, “we must surely be guided by the evidence—when there is any—and not by an a priori theory.”
To presume that every love is, deep down, driven by a biological urge puts humanity on an animal level; we can think better of ourselves than to imagine that Friendship springs from mere sexual instinct. We are capable of deeper love than that
Yes we do.
And George Macdonalds.
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Very interesting aspect of what friendship and love should be. What caught my eye was the Lewis statement: mixing truth w/a lie makes the lie much stronger. The great deceiver is a master of telling us a lie just enough to make our truth worse.
Interesting. One principle of reparative therapy for homosexuals who want to change their ways is to enable them to forge a strong non-erotic same sex friendship. As Lewis insightfully observes, this is not a part of the homosexual life.
Love George MacDonald.
So of course I immediately hit Amazon and bought one copy each of Lilith and Phantastes for my 16-year-old son, the budding writer who is working on his first novel.
I love being a homeschooler.
...and Owen Barfields.
This reminds me of the entire way the culture has become so twisted, automatically and bizarrely reading sleaze into what was once everyday normalcy. I’ve shown old movies, old magazines, and all sorts of vintage material to folks nowadays, and they have an almost kneejerk reaction of reading some perverse sexual innuendo into absolutely everything. And I mean everything. Sometimes jokingly, sometimes not. Always a twisted subtext ready to be applied, to the most mundane and innocuous material.
It’s all rather warped. But it seems like modern culture has really cultivated this in recent years.
Love has been perverted by perverts.
Ask someone if they can truly love someone without having any sexual desire for them.
Then ask them if they love their grandparents and their dog.
Go search ‘photos, “gay interest”’ on ebay.com.
You will see everyday snapshots from decades past with a slur cast at anonymous people.
That’s another good example. I’ve gone through listings of old movie stills on ebay, and kept seeing sellers describe entirely innocent and innocuous photos of two men together as “gay interest.” As you say, the same has been done with ordinary family photos.
Absolutely sick. Could anyone envision one day that, after they and their friends and family were all deceased, and their photo albums and scrapbooks scattered to the winds, that decades in the future, some creep would be selling their normal, everday, innocent photos under the context of depraved homo-eroticism? Sick, sick, sick.
Pro-homosexual cultures make men see other men as sex objects. It destroys trust and creates an atmosphere of awkwardness—as all situations where people have no Virtue do.
Boys are especially attractive to homosexuals since it is the age they are fixated sexually in-—an immature age of lust without commitment —inability to form mature, long-lasting relationships. It is why they are promiscuous—it is immaturity and lack of self-mastery. It is really a very sick, immature lifestyle that puts selfish lust above all other things. True maturity takes selflessness. Homosexuals never have it unless they revile their own actions.
What a fabulous education you are giving your child!
C.S. Lewis was himself a great friend. If anyone’s writing on the subject of platonic friendships could be trusted it would be his. Lewis had a friend who died in WW I. For the rest of her life Lewis housed and patiently cared for that friend’s mother. It was a deal the friends had made with one another and Jack stuck it out loyally. He had strong friendships with every one of the Inklings and was able to relate to each individually as well as to each within the context of the group. He was a great friend to and of his older brother who survived him; they lived together for decades. His friendship with Joy Davidman began as a pen-pal relationship and only years later blossomed into marriage. We all should be so lucky as to have a friend of the sort that C.S. Lewis was, and we would all do well to seek to emulate him.
Thanks for this post.
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object present to your senses.” – C.S. Lewis
talking about C.S...
C.S. was Roman Catholic in his heart and at present, He
is now fully Roman Catholic.
Belief in the Holy Eucharist is the way to go. Believe, then all misunderstandings about the faith will fall away, the Real Presence is the pinnacle.
“I love being a homeschooler.”
I understand what you mean. We are in Central America and I’m mentoring several young men in appropriate technology skills. English is taught in school here. One young man said that he did not like to read. I mentioned the joy of good books and re-reading them over the years.
I had my Android phone with me (as data storage) and pulled up Kipling. The young man was not familiar with Kipling, but had seen parts of the Disney movie of The Jungle Book. First I gave a synopsis of “The Miracle Of Puram Bhagat” from the Second Jungle book then read the last few pages.
Then I started on the Mowgli stories from the First Jungle Book. My the time I finished reading the first chapter to him, he was hooked!
Get your hands on The Princess and Curdie by MacDonald. It's the sequel to The Princess and the Goblins by the same author, though I didn't enjoy Goblins half as much as I enjoyed Curdie. The latter is a work fairly ringing with warning (and, if one could dare say it, prophecy) relevant to our own age and current state of civilization, though I can't say whether MacDonald had any such conscious intentions of doing this (though he may well have done). Certain British authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (and this would include GK Chesterton) seemed to be at least vaguely aware that some sort of dreaded sea-change was taking place in western civilization, and that its Ruin was then well within sight on the horizon unless something were done.
That aside, it's a good fantasy-adventure story on its own,
The Bible speaks of “thy friend, which is as thine own soul” (Deuteronomy 13:6).
Now way this isn't intentional, and intended to destroy our fighting forces.
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