Our Cultural Landscape
It is a venerable strategy: when you are trying to grasp something that is not clear, you can begin by attending to how people use the word. Friend, we quickly see, is a word used in many different ways that suggest several different things. Here are some notes on our cultural landscape of friendship.
Contrary to what we might expect, many people employ the word friend to suggest distance rather than intimacy. One sees this at the time of a romantic breakup; the two parties might say to one another, “Let’s just be friends.” Thereby they reveal that they think of friendship as something vaguely cordial but lacking closeness, something that falls short of a real relationship.
Now turn to an aspect of the great cultural-shifting gift we have from Mr. Zuckerberg, whose Facebook has verbed the term friend, thereby debasing the friendship currency promiscuously. Of course, to “verb” a noun is part of the fun of English. It’s not the verbing of friend that’s culturally significant but the casualness of the process: “friending” someone amounts to no more than a click of a digital synapse. To say that you have, or to set out to acquire, thousands of friends wantonly cheapens the notion. This is acknowledged still, if guiltily, when one announces that one has a certain number of not “friends” but “Facebook friends.” Yet “friending” continues to gallop along.
Other cases, however, point in the opposite direction, with friend indicating neither someone put off at a distance nor a person breezily “friended” but someone who is close and special. Spoken of in this way, a friend is a person intimate to oneself. Many people will say their spouse is their best friend, or they wish he or she were. Two people who are sexually attracted to each other will try to see if they can be best friends for each other as a sort of test before they commit to marriage. Similarly, and increasingly, they may simply remain each other’s girlfriend or boyfriend—compound terms in which the friend is a spouse-like companion in a substitute-for-marriage relationship.
Behold our culture’s confusion! On the one hand, the epitome of friendship is identified with marriage, which, whether formalized or not, is widely taken to be the most meaningful human relationship. Yet on the other hand, friendships are the dregs of lesser relationships—“just friends” and “Facebook friends”—dregs left for everyone else. On all hands, friendship lacks a proper distinctiveness, and it seems to be anything or nothing at all.
Who Will Teach Us about Friendship?
If Christians have not given friendship the kind of thoughtful attention marriage has received, and if when we do start to think about friendship we realize there is a wide variety of opinion about it and indeed vast confusion even in the way we speak of friends and friendship, where should we turn for guidance? Many people would turn straight to the Bible and investigate what it has to say on the subject. And the Bible does contain deep wisdom concerning friendship. But the path of this book, as I indicate in the introduction, is to attend to some worldly and ancient wisdom before going further into the Scriptures. It just is the case that Aristotle’s thinking about friendship proved decisive for much Western thought that followed. In addition, there is a lacuna in Aristotle’s thought that is almost perfectly explained—and overcome—by the Scriptures. That is to say, the likes of Aristotle will both help us understand friendship and help us see better the distinctively Christian way of friendship.
So, dear reader, you will find this book going back and forth between old classical texts and the Scriptures, even as it goes back and forth between secular cultural artifacts and Christian thinking.
Let me lay my theological cards on the table. I take the Bible to be the Word of God written for us and speaking to us. We humans turn to the Bible with the intelligence we have, and that intelligence is human, which is to say that, while personal, it is not individual but cultural and social and communal. We humans never think alone but are ever (when we think) in some sort of dialogue or conversation with other humans, others who include both the living and the dead. Indeed, the Bible itself speaks in an implicit dialogue with all forms of human wisdom, wherever found; it critiques, illuminates that which is good, and can correct that which falls short.
With each of the ancient pagan writers this book considers, we will bear down on one key text. I could not pretend herein to give you a complete scholarly account of these writers or to go through the various schools of interpretation that have been popular at different times in history. Nor do I think you would find that interesting! What is interesting—I think, for any person, whoever we are—is to consider with care some things these ancients said that seem to be at once true and problematic. Their ideas about friendship still (thousands of years later) attract people who find them beautiful. Yet at the same time, they suggest questions that trouble.
I turn then, for the rest of this chapter, to Aristotle (384–322 BC), the Greek marine biologist (yes!) and philosopher whose thinking on friendship decisively shaped Western culture.
The Ancient Surprise
On the matter of friendship, Aristotle makes a claim that we are unlikely to have expected (although it will turn out to be also the key Christian claim about friendship). Whether our contemporaries think of friendship as a great thing or a minor good thing, whether they esteem it highly or not, they locate friendship in the private realm, treating it as something that supplements, at best, the public business of life. Aristotle’s view could not be more different. For Aristotle considers friendship to be the point of human life. It is not a soothing refuge from the tasks and duties that otherwise occupy us. It is not a place of escape where we can attend to private things, a break away from the pressures of life, a time to recharge our batteries before we go out again into the real world. On the contrary, according to Aristotle’s teaching, friendship is, or should be, of our entire life the central concern.
This is manifest in his ethical teaching. Today there are famously interminable debates about ethics as a matter of making decisions. Should one aim to bring about the best outcome (“maximize human happiness”), or should one focus on inner motivation (“follow the moral law”)? These debates are between competing ethical theories about the proper grounds for coming to a decision. But making decisions, Aristotle says, is not what ethics is primarily about.
On several occasions I have taught ethics to college students, having them (as is my custom) read original texts as much as possible. So in the course of things, they get to Aristotle, and there they are surprised. Aristotle has little to say about particular choices, he does not talk about issues, he does not dwell on particular decisions—rather, he emphasizes character. He expounds the excellences (the virtues) that build up good character. And he wraps it all up with an extensive account of friendship. Ethics, to my students’ surprise, turns out to be about friendship; the aim of ethics is friendship—a discovery that, taken to heart, upends one’s late-modern collegiate worldview. Something the students might have taken as onerous and burdensome (ethics) turns out to be tied directly to something they desire (friendship). I call this the Aristotelian surprise: ethics aims at friendship, and friendship rightfully takes up a significant proportion of our thinking about ethics.
It was a general view. Ancient Greeks and Romans esteemed friendship as the most important thing in life. What were they talking about when they talked about friendship? How did they unravel friendship’s confusions (for they had them just as we do)?
Aristotle’s Classical View
Aristotle writes about ethics in two major works, the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics.1 The Nicomachean is more famous and more studied, but recently, British philosopher Anthony Kenny has urged a reconsideration of the Eudemian, seeing it as being closer in thought and style to most of the rest of Aristotle’s corpus. Since Aristotle’s works come to us through uncertain transmission, it is nigh impossible to settle the question of the relationship of these two texts. But since most writers (including yours truly in the past) have attended to the Nicomachean, I will here, for the sake of a certain freshness of exposition, set forth the views as nuanced in the Eudemian.
Aristotle opens with our question: “What is friendship and what are its characteristics?” He surveys various views people have, with questions that will not be unfamiliar to us. Does the word friendship point to one thing only, or are there many things that we just happen to call by the same name? What obligations do friends have to one another? And what is the connection of friendship to ethics? To this last question he spells out an answer: ethics is a matter of “what is noble and desirable in people’s characters,” and it involves acting justly, treating other people fairly. Friendship has at least this connection to ethics: we will want to act justly (ethically) with our friends and not harm them. This is the particular goodness of civic friendship; Aristotle notes that “promotion of friendship is regarded as the special task of political skill.” Yet all this is little more than repeating what people commonly said (1234b18, 22, 24)2—however rare it is today to claim that politicians should be about the promotion of friendship!
For us as for Aristotle, the truisms that pepper our speech reflect unexamined truth claims, what we can call common sense. The problem with common sense is that it easily contradicts itself. One hears, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but one also hears, “Out of sight, out of mind.” Well, which is it? Concerning a desire for friends, some say we are seeking another “I,” a person who is like me, who likes the things I like, and so forth. Others say we want an opposite in a friend. Do likes attract? Or do opposites attract? We say both (and so did Aristotle’s contemporaries).
Aristotle trusts commonsense wisdom to contain some portion of truth; indeed, there usually is a reason why a cliché has become a cliché. But when we discover apparent contradictions, we need to think more deeply. Often this involves making an appropriate distinction. For instance, take the matter of whether likes or opposites attract. It seems that in friendship I do want someone who is like me: there is a good deal of sharing in friendship, and without significant commonalities, that sharing would just be too difficult. Yet it also seems that a good friend must be unlike me in some respects; otherwise we would have no point in sharing with each other. The other would already have everything I might give, and vice versa. So we need both like and unlike: my friend must be like me but cannot simply be like me.
What then about the rather different things that we refer to as friendship? The Greek word for friendship, philia, is used for “love” in a wide range of cases. So one might say one loves a particular glass of wine, and one loves one’s cat, and one loves one’s city, and one loves one’s spouse, and one loves one’s wine merchant, and one loves one’s household musician, and one loves a noble and wise person. All of these could be called friendships; the word friendship is scattered abroad liberally. But that doesn’t mean we ought to assume that something is there, something that’s the same in my friendship with my beloved wine as in my friendship with my daughter or son as in my friendship (should I be so fortunate as to obtain it) with you.
Where there is verbal confusion, Aristotle wants us to seek out the primary instance. Of all the different ways we speak of the love that is friendship, which one can claim primacy over the others? Here is a first step. We are moved to love or desire something because it is good or looks good to us. However, experience has taught us that what is good might not also be pleasant. We desire pleasant things because they appear good: the sugary confection seems good to the taste even if it is not good for us in itself. Telling gossip may be pleasant even though it is unjust and thus not good. Nonetheless, for a good person, the good and the pleasant will be the same. She will not enjoy gossip, and she will enjoy sugary confections in appropriate moderation.
Now a follow-up step. Among goods, some are good in the abstract while others are good for a particular person. (“In the abstract” means roughly “in general” or “abstracting from particular circumstances.”) Health is good in the abstract (it is always good), as is a balanced diet that maintains health. Medicine may be good for a particular person at a particular time, but medicine is not good in the abstract—which just means that a healthy person does not need medicine.
Medicine that is good for a particular person may not seem good to that person and may in fact be unpleasant. In particular cases in life, it is not only true that what seems pleasant may not be good for us but also true that what is good for us may be unpleasant. Nonetheless, abstracting from particular circumstances, for a good person, the pleasant and the good are always the same. Someone who has a good character enjoys exercising her virtues while hardly thinking about it as she does so.
A third distinction (after that of the good and the pleasant, and the particular and the abstract) is between what is useful and what is good in itself. When something is useful for me, it is obviously good for me. But something could well be good in itself without having any practical value for me.
Aristotle’s final distinction brings this discussion home to friendship. “Just as in the case of inanimate objects [wine, medicine, etc.] we can choose and love something for each of these reasons [it’s good or pleasant or useful], so, too, in the case of human beings: we love one man for his character and virtue, another because he is serviceable and useful, and a third because he is pleasant and gives us pleasure” (1236a10–15). When that love is received and returned, and when both parties are aware of this, then they have become friends.
Thus Aristotle comes to his famous conclusion that there are three kinds of friendship. Friendship is a love for another person (a love that is received and returned) for the sake of, respectively, the pleasant, the useful, and the good in itself. But immediately he is careful to add that there need be no single thing that all these friendships have in common. They aren’t like oaks, elms, and cedars, three species of the single genus “tree.” No, only the friendship whose basis is the good in itself is truly friendship—friendship in the primary sense. Although we might call relationships based on utility or pleasure “friendships,” there is no necessity to do so. You may call the coworker who often helps you a friend, but it need not be a real friendship. The same is true of the person whose company pleases you. Relationships that are useful or pleasant are often called friendships, but they might not be friendships in the primary sense.
But what does it mean to say that real friendship is based on the good?
The Pleasantest Thing for Human Beings
In the midst of making these distinctions, Aristotle states categorically, “For a human being the pleasantest thing is another human being” (1237a28). This strikes me as arrestingly true; as soon as I heard it, I knew I wouldn’t forget it. Beyond the pleasure of a glass of wine, beyond the pleasure of reading a book (even a book on friendship!), maybe even beyond the contemplation of eternal truths, the pleasure we can take in being with another human being is the greatest of pleasures. All good things are better when shared with someone, and that “someone” is pleasanter than any of them.
This is true—and perhaps it is strictly true only—when that “someone” is a friend in the primary sense. Such friends, Aristotle says, will be purely good people, complete—at least in the sense that they will not need each other to be useful to them. Nonetheless, there will be pleasure in their relationship, the pleasure that good people take in sharing the goodness of each other. To quote Aristotle again, “For a human being the pleasantest thing is another human being.”
Friendship—henceforth I will say simply “friend” or “friendship” when meaning this primary sense—is an activity as much as it is a state. As an activity, it “is the mutual, pleasurable choice that two people make of each other’s company,” and since it is founded on virtue, that choice “is nothing other than the reciprocal choice of the things that are good and pleasant in the abstract, and it is the state that finds expression in such a choice” (1237a31–34). I take Aristotle to mean that when I choose a friend who is good, I make the choice not for any usefulness we might have for each other. Together we will choose things good and pleasant in themselves and not for any particular good they may provide for us.
What do friends do? They treat “the loved one as beloved.” A friend loves his friend just as a friend. If I love a friend because he is a musician, I am loving him for the music he plays, perhaps for me. If I love him because he is a doctor, that too is a movement away from the good “in the abstract” to some particular good—in this instance, healing. Aristotle draws us to that deep place of loving the loved one, just so, as beloved simply because he is my friend. Similarly, the pleasure that is derived in friendship is properly the pleasure “from the friend himself in himself; for he is loved for himself and not for being someone else” (1237b1–4).
A true friendship is stable, enduring through time and events, good and bad. This stability demands the friends’ mutual trust, and it takes time to build trust. A would-be friend should be tried and tested; initially indeed one has only would-be friends. (This is one reason that bad people can’t have real friends: they cannot trust one another.) Thus Aristotle would come down against Facebook and also against contemporary sentimentality that thinks everyone could just be friends. There is much more to befriending than “friending.” It simply is not possible to have a large number of friends; “it is difficult to make a trial of many people: you would have to go and live with each of them.” Friendship is more than shopping: “Choosing a friend should not be like choosing a cloak” (1237b35–37).
Yet still, one would think that the number of virtuous people who could make good friends is a rather large number. But we are finite beings. One cannot know, prior to taking the time, whether trust can be built with a would-be friend, which means, it seems, that one is unable to know in advance who is a truly virtuous person. Furthermore, given that there are many virtuous people in the world while I am finite, I might be able to build trust with and treat as beloved only a few.
Whenever a true friendship is established, there will be a stability that undergirds happiness. A true friend does not disappear in hard times. On the contrary, in misfortune “it becomes clear that the property of friends is common.” As soon as the beloved falls into need, the friend will treat her own goods (and, we could add, her time, and whatever else might be hers) as belonging not just to herself but to her friend as well. Which is to say, even when life is unstable, a true friendship maintains its stability (1238a17).
So in the end, must friends be equals? Aristotle notes many friendships that exist between unequals, and while they sometimes seem to be based on utility and pleasure, they also can be based on the good. Friendships can arise between benefactor and beneficiary, ruler and ruled, parent and child, and so forth. (One regrets to note, however unsurprising it is, that Aristotle considers the husband-wife friendship to be one of these unequal friendships; see 1238b24.) Still, the inequality built into these friendships keeps them from being friendships in the primary sense, even if they are based on the good, for the inequality of the parties makes their reciprocity unequal. The love of parent and child, for instance, resembles true friendship since it is based on the good (and not on the pleasure a parent gets from having a child, or the usefulness a child gets from having a parent, and so forth). But it would be wrong for a parent, holding nothing back, to share her whole mind with her child. Such openness, which indeed is proper to friendship, demands an equality between the friends that is absent between parent and child; thus “it is only equal partners that are friends” (1239a4).3
Now we have a complete and, many have found, attractive picture from Aristotle of what a friendship truly is: a reciprocal love between two virtuous people who are fundamentally equal that is based in their human goodness and not in their usefulness to each other or in their pleasantness to each other. Such a friendship, deeply satisfying, is uncommon but not necessarily unique; one person can have a (small) number of friends. And such a friendship will be stable over time and provide true happiness, true human fulfillment.
Yet this picture has its problems. It seems tragic that friendship must be so rare an occurrence and limited to so few. A Christian could wonder, in addition, about the absence of a dynamic of repentance and how that might change our understanding of what is humanly good. Such questions Aristotle does not raise. But he does raise, in the Eudemian Ethics, two significant questions with implications for theology. He asks first if, according to this picture, a man can be friends with himself. This odd question arises if we think of a good human being as someone who is self-sufficient. And it leads to an even odder question: Why does God have no friends?—an observation with a troubling consequence. If God has no friends, and if humans are supposed to aspire to being godlike, then there is something fundamentally askew with Aristotle’s whole picture.
Aristotle’s Theological Questions
It is of course impossible for someone to be her own friend: by definition, friendship is the love of another human being on account of that person’s goodness. Nonetheless, Aristotle discerns analogies between self-love and friendship. Think of your soul as having parts. (Aristotle even has names for the parts: the vegetative soul includes such things as breathing and digestion; the appetitive soul includes such things as self-control, justice, and liberality; and the rational soul includes our intellective powers.) If the soul’s parts fit together harmoniously (so that you do what you want to do, and you don’t do what you don’t want to do, contra Saint Paul’s description of his own experience in Rom. 7:15), then your soul as a whole is living in something like friendship with itself. As a friend wills for his beloved the things that are good, not for his own sake but for the sake of the beloved, so in a good person, each part of the soul wants the good for the other parts and, most of all, wants the good for the whole person.
This is only an analogy, but it has its uses. It points to why wicked people are unable to be real friends with anyone. A bad person is someone whose soul lacks proper unity, which is to say, integrity; a bad person’s inner constitution is unruly or disharmonious. People like that, lacking the good, cannot enter into (and certainly would lack the character strengths to persevere in) friendships in the proper sense.
But if a good person is someone whose soul is rightly ordered, is not such a person then self-sufficient? Why then would a good person need a friend?
It is because, as Aristotle sees it, humans live in groups but do so distinctively. He famously defines the human being as a political animal, one who dwells with others of its kind in governed societies (“cities”—poleis, from which we get “political”; see his Politics 1253a). As social beings who treat with others, a mark of a good character is justice, the acquired excellence of treating others rightly. Using an expansive understanding of friendship, Aristotle says, “All justice is about relations towards a friend.” That is to say, with regard to every person with whom we have dealings, there can be something like friendship, a “civic friendship.” Then he goes further and says that even family relationships are friendship. In sum, friendship is the special way that humans are social, or “gregarious.”
For justice concerns individuals who are partners, and a friend is a partner either in one’s family or in one’s way of life. For human beings are not just political animals [i.e., living in governed communities], but also domestic animals [living in domiciles, i.e., households]; they are not like other animals who copulate in season with any chance female or male. No, humans are not solitary animals, but gregarious in a special way, forming partnerships with their natural kinsfolk. Accordingly, even if there were no such thing as the state, there would be partnership and justice of a sort. A household is a kind of friendship.
So we are political and domestic animals, “not solitary . . . but gregarious in a special way” (1242a20–28).
But a problem still lurks here. For regardless of the political arrangement (monarchy, aristocracy, republic, etc.), all civic friendship, both political and domestic, necessarily will be less than primary friendship. For civic friendship is a friendship based on utility; it comes from our need of others to accomplish living. Civic friendship is based on our lack of self-sufficiency.
Is then friendship a crutch, preventing us from developing true human greatness, keeping us from becoming as godlike as possible? Such questions force Aristotle to his final topic.
God, he says, “lacks nothing,” and therefore “he will not need a friend,” and furthermore, “since he does not need one, he will not have one.” And from this, Aristotle admits the devastating human corollary: “Consequently, the happiest human being will have very little need of a friend, except to the extent that self-sufficiency is not possible.” This means that a very good person will have very few friends, and the better the person, the fewer the friends. “He will not be eager to make friends, and will disdain not only friends for utility but also friends for company” (1244b8–14).
But that conclusion is unacceptable. It is contradicted by the obvious pleasure we have in our friends, a pleasure that is concomitant to their goodness quite apart from their usefulness to us. How did the argument reach such an erroneous conclusion? Where was our reasoning misled? Aristotle says it happened in “the comparison” (1244b23)—namely, of human beings to God. God, Aristotle holds, is not like us. God has no awareness of the world; he thinks only upon himself, and he is the first cause of all the movement in the world just by his being. Aristotle teaches that the universe is eternal and uncreated—it was just always there. God causes all the movement in it (this includes life and thought) not by doing anything, and certainly not by any attention from himself toward the world, but rather by the world’s attraction to the transcendent beauty and goodness and simplicity of God, the unmoved mover, who is, simply and entirely, thought thinking itself.
So, yes, we are indeed attracted to God—that attraction is the root cause of everything we do—yet we are attracted, Aristotle must say, precisely as human beings. Human life is an activity that consists in “perception and knowledge, and consequently sharing life is sharing perception and sharing knowledge.” We share life with one another; God shares life with no one. God knows nothing but himself; he never thinks of anything else (according to Aristotle). We obviously think about many things and desire to know many things. But we are like God to this extent: for us humans, “self-perception and self-knowledge is the most desirable of all things”; indeed, for human beings, “living must be regarded as a kind of knowing” (1244b25–29).
Aristotle’s argument here is a condensed form of his epistemology (his theory of knowledge)—no easy subject! Yet it is not hard to get a sense of it. If you are my friend, then you somehow enter into me, and I into you. I will know you, and you will know me, and my own self-perception and self-knowledge will include your perception and knowledge of me, and vice versa. This is the highest form of what happens in all human knowing, for knowing always involves taking what we know into ourselves in some way. In a revealing aside, Aristotle observes that this is how “sexual love resembles friendship, for the lover wants to share the life of the loved one, though not as ideally he ought, but in a sensuous way” (1245a24–26).
He writes in beautiful words, “We all find it pleasanter to share with our friends to the best of our ability the good things that fall to the lot of each of us: in the one case bodily pleasure, in another artistic contemplation, in a third philosophy. We need to be near to our friends—there is a proverb ‘friends afar a burden are’—so in this shared activity we must stay close together.” And a bit later he says, “It is evident” that friends “should live together, and that this is the dearest wish of everybody, and especially of the person who is happiest and best.” Thus, he concludes, the analogy with God breaks down. The premise was “because God is not of such a nature as to need friends, the same must be true of one who resembles God.” Yet this would also mean that “a virtuous man does not think of anything,” because God thinks only of himself, “being, as he is, too grand to think of anything else.” But manifestly, a virtuous man does think of things that are outside himself, and he needs friends. “The reason is that for us well-being involves something other than ourselves, whereas he [God] is his own well-being” (1245a20–24, b10–11, 15–19, emphasis added).
But note this. If, contrary to Aristotle’s assumption, God were the creator of the world, if God gave any of his attention to the world, if God wanted to communicate with the world in any way—if any or all of these were true, then we would not have to conclude that the analogy with God is faulty. That is to say, if Aristotle’s understanding of God had been different than it was, then the way might have been open to conclude both that Aristotle is right in his fundamental lineation of friendship and that friendship is not just a human thing but a divine thing.
Can God have friends? And can we be in their number? That quest is the heart of this book. I want to know what friendship is and to enjoy friendships in this primary sense: to be good, to have good friends, and to have friendships grounded in the good. At the same time, I would like to be friends with God. If these are things we want (if indeed you want them with me), are they possible? How might they be?
Theology and Friendship
Let’s review where we are. At the end of his teaching about friendship, Aristotle makes it clear that what we think about God can change what we think about friendship. His prime mover (as he calls God) is vastly different from the God of the Scriptures. The prime mover has no relationship to the world. He is not the creator of the world; the world has eternally just been there. Yet without doing anything, the prime mover causes all the motion (all the life) in the world because all movement of any sort comes ultimately from the world’s desire for God.
Friendship, involving activity, is, like every activity, caused by this desire, and ultimately this desire is to be as much like God as we can be. Our desire for friendship is a form of our general desire for God; God has no friends; thus we desire, in friendship, a state of being that has no friendship.
But such a conclusion runs against Aristotle’s analysis of what it is to be an excellent human being. We are political and domestic animals, social beings who thrive in cities and households. Our pleasure—our excellence—is found, more than anywhere else, in our friendships.
Here resides an oddity in his thought. On the one hand, when he looks at human beings, Aristotle sees the formation of friendships as the epitome of human flourishing. On the other hand, when he looks to the prime mover, he sees there no place for friendship. Despite this, all the life in the world (all its movement) comes from the world’s attraction to God.
For Christian theology (and in this there is no fundamental difference from Jewish theology), we will see there is no such oddity. But first—before we dig into that mind-blowing possibility, unimaginable to Aristotle, that God could have friends—let us consider more closely the difference between Aristotle’s God and the creator God revealed in the Scriptures.