The Problem of Christian Love and Friendship
If friendship is the point of human life, we seem to have a problem with Jesus’ rightly famous teaching that we should love our neighbor, indeed, that we should love even our enemy. It certainly seems that friendship and this commanded love (shall we call it “Christian love”?) stand at odds. Friendship is particular, but Christian love is universal. Friendship is reciprocal, but Christian love is unidirectional. Friendship is drawn to the good and thus discriminates, unlike the rain that falls on the just and the unjust alike. Jesus seems to teach against valuing friendship highly when he says, for instance, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:44–45). The word translated “love” here is agape, and agape is generally taken as self-giving performed selflessly. It is taken as altruism, a turning to the other without regard to who the other is. It is said to act without regard for any internal attraction to the beloved, in distinction from erotic love, eros, which builds upon such attraction. And it is said to lack the particularity that characterizes philia, which is friendship. So how can we reconcile friendship, the reestablishment of which we have argued is the point of Jesus’ entire mission, to this radical teaching on selfless love that Jesus says will make those who practice it the children of their heavenly Father?
Augustine’s Theology of Friendship1
It is not a new question.2 Aurelius Augustine (354–430), one of the West’s towering theologians, made love a central theme of theology; in Augustine’s hands, love explains God, history, and human beings. Love is the key for understanding the Trinity: the Father loves the Son, the Son receives and returns this love to the Father, and the Holy Ghost simply is that love. Furthermore, the contrast between two loves is the interpretive key to all human history: on the one hand, there is the city of God, which is grounded in love of God to the contempt of self; and on the other hand, the city of man, grounded in love of self to the contempt of God. Most personally, Augustine put love for God at the center of his theological anthropology. Each human person is fashioned to love God, a love that animates everything we do and that can be satisfied only by God himself.
Perhaps the most-read book ever, apart from the Bible, is the Confessions of Saint Augustine, which he wrote in the year AD 397 and in which he confesses love for God as he gives an account of his life up through his conversion and baptism (at Easter in AD 387, in his thirty-third year). The opening words of the Confessions give praise to God and are immediately accompanied by wonderment whether any human being can rightly praise God—for how can we know God without praising him? Yet how can we praise him rightly without knowing him? The first paragraph ends with the famous words that serve as the motif of Augustine’s life (and that of many others who will find him, in the Confessions, as a type of themselves): “Our heart is restless till it rest in thee” (inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te).
So do we see that love is central to Augustine’s theology. But equally was friendship central to his personality. Throughout those decades in which he wandered before his heart could rest in God, Augustine had several close friendships, and he never outgrew his desire to cultivate and enjoy friendship. After he became a Christian, he insisted on living in community with friends, and as a bishop in northern Africa, he drew other clergy around him to live a rather novel form of common life at the cathedral. He had some close friends “from youth to old age,” others who became friends later, with many of these friendships nurtured through his extraordinarily voluminous correspondence.3 Augustine valued and cultivated friendships all his life.
The patristics scholar Joseph Lienhard identifies Augustine as the first theologian to work out a theology of friendship. It appears in the Confessions and perdures to the end of his life. True friendship is not a relationship based on sympathy or some other common ground. Rather, it is a divine gift; it is one way we experience God’s grace. Friends are such because God’s Holy Spirit has made them so, giving them the particular bond of friendship. “True friendship . . . is not possible unless you [God] bond together those who cleave to one another by the love which ‘is poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us’” (IV.iv.7).4
On the basis of this view, Augustine judges his pre-Christian friendships in stringent and even severe terms, because those friendships lacked this divine foundation. In book IV of the Confessions, we read about one particular, very close, very dear friendship that he had in his late adolescence. As was not unusual at the time, neither Augustine nor his friend had been baptized, nor were they desirous of being so, for they also shared a disapproval of orthodox Christianity. Then his friend took ill, and it was thought he might die. While he was in a fever and largely unconscious, his parents had him baptized (which also was not uncommon). After the friend recovered, Augustine visited him and launched into a mockery of the baptism as a meaningless ceremony. But his friend cut short such talk and rebuked him strongly. Augustine held his tongue, thinking that he would later find his friend in a more pliant mood—and then suddenly his friend died.
Devastation and grief overcame Augustine. His account of the experience must be reckoned to include some of the most beautifully poignant sentences ever penned about human loss.
Everything on which I set my gaze was death. My home town became a torture to me; my father’s house a strange world of unhappiness; all that I had shared with him [my friend] was without him transformed into a cruel torment. My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not there. I hated everything because they did not have him, nor could they now tell me “look, he is on the way,” as used to be the case when he was alive and absent from me. I had become to myself a vast problem. (IV.iv.9)
Augustine clearly wants us to learn something about friends and about God. Writing his Confessions as a bishop, he continues this remembrance through several additional, anguished paragraphs in which he describes and tries to understand the grief he felt at the time. At the end, he identifies the problem: he had loved his friend as if his friend would never die. But, he now says, that kind of love should be given only to God. He should have loved God first—although, being misinformed and foolish, he knew nothing about God. But if we love God first of all, we will be loving someone who never will die. And then we can love our friends “in God.” This is Augustine’s basic view of friendship and what he wants us to learn. We need first to love God and then to love our friends in God, who in fact gives our friends to us.
With these theological moves, Augustine secures a place for human friendship within Christianity. Where Aristotle or Cicero would place true friendship in the good of the friends and the good they desire, Augustine names that good as God himself and places true friendship “in God” and sees it, moreover, as a gift of God’s grace. And to the question of how friendship fits with Christian love, if friendship is a bond that God has established, we need not worry that it will contradict the selfless and universal love that God seems to have commanded in Christ.
Yet one might wonder about the character of this friendship. Augustine secures friendship within an overarching love he has for God—a unidirectional conception, not the reciprocity we think of as characterizing friendship. Indeed, to love a friend “in God” seems to bespeak its own unidirectionality, a love toward the friend, a love that promotes the good of the friend, and so forth, without being a reciprocal love that also receives from the friend.
However, as Carolinne White points out, Christ’s second love commandment (to love one’s neighbor as oneself) works against Augustine’s Neoplatonist tendency to direct all love to God alone. If the neighbor must be loved, then Augustine’s theology must have a place for love of people who are not God. The result is that one’s friend cannot be eclipsed in one’s love for God; one wants friends—neighbors, indeed any other human beings, even, as Augustine will remind us, one’s enemies—themselves to love God. In other words, one wants other people to be “as oneself”: people who love God supremely over all.5
Still, there is some weight to the charge of unidirectionality: How can we understand God’s love for us, indeed God’s friendship with us? Yes, he gives us grace, he gives us friends—but how is God himself a friend? For a theological understanding of friendship that pushes these thoughts even further, we turn to the second towering Western theologian.
Aquinas: Christian Love Is Friendship with God
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1224–74) makes a brilliant move when he declares that Christian love (caritas, the Latin equivalent of agape) simply is friendship (amicitia, the Latin equivalent of philia) with God.6 It is a breathtaking thought that somehow the universal love that we might call “Christian love” or “charity” is nothing else but friendship with God. That is to say, despite all the differences between friendship and Christian love, between philia and agape, at their highest they are just one thing.
If Aquinas makes this claim, we can expect that he will work through the difficulties we have seen. And indeed he does just that.7 To see how Christian love is the same thing as friendship with God, I will lay out Aquinas’ thinking on friendship in terms of the principal suspicions or objections to which it responds.
To the objection that Christian love is extended to all people but friendship involves mutuality, Aquinas says that when we love a friend, we love everything about that friend. Thus our love will want to expand to include the friends of our friend, even if those friends have no other connection to us. “When a man has friendship for a certain person, for his sake he loves all belonging to him, be they children, servants, or connected with him in any way. Indeed, so much do we love our friends, that for their sake we love all who belong to them, even if they hurt or hate us.”8 So when we love God, we also love those whom God loves. Each human being is, potentially, a friend of God. So whenever one human being, a friend of God, is loving God, that love is naturally extended to all the other friends of God—that is, to all other people insofar as they are also friends or potential friends of God. This is why we love our enemies: they too belong to God in that God’s love extends to his enemies also.
Then there is the objection that friendship, since it necessarily involves sharing because friends do things together and share each other’s lives, cannot be the same thing as love of God, since human beings cannot have anything like a common life with God. This objection is based on the radical difference between God as creator and human beings as creatures. To this, Aquinas answers that charity/love is God’s gift, something that comes to us by grace, and once it has been given, then there is indeed some sort of transformation so that human beings can have communion with—share with, communicate with, have a sort of common life with—God. To repeat that Aristotelian adage, “If it’s actual, it’s possible.” Weird and beyond our understanding as it is, Aquinas’ point is that God has actually given the grace that makes it possible for us to have mutuality with him in love, a mutuality that is properly called friendship. “Charity signifies not only the love of God but also a certain friendship with Him . . . a certain mutual return of love, together with mutual communion. . . . Now this fellowship of man with God, which consists in a certain familiar intercourse with Him, is begun here, in this life, by grace, but will be perfected in the future life, by glory” (ST I-II.65.5).
The previous objection also needs to be faced with regard to friendship with other people. If friendship involves sharing one another’s life, then it cannot be extended to a large number of people, since we are finite beings and cannot have a huge number of friends. But this seems to contradict Christian love, which is to be extended to all people. Aquinas answers that Christians truly will want to communicate with all God’s friends, but they are not required to do specific acts toward every person, because it is impossible to do so (ST II-II.25.8). Aquinas expands this point into concrete advice. There is a sort of friendship with oneself whereby one seeks preservation particularly of one’s spiritual goodness but also, in its proper place, of one’s body. There is also a proper preference given to love of one’s family. And there is a proper preference given to one’s fellow citizens. One also should love (and will want to love) those who are close to God, those who are more fully realized as God’s friends. How one sorts out these differing loves in concrete situations cannot be specified in advance; it requires that one practice and become skilled at making good practical decisions. The signally important point is to be disposed and ready to love all those whom God loves, to want to be friends with God and with all God’s friends.
In similar fashion, it could be objected that friendship is truly friendship only when it is based on the good. One cannot be a friend with those who are not good in themselves and who lack a desire for the good. Yet Christian love is supposed to be directed to all people and particularly is not to exclude sinners and one’s enemies. Aquinas answers that God has offered his friendship to sinners and to his enemies. Jesus was a friend of sinners (Matt. 11:19), and he asked that his own death not be held against those who accomplished it (Luke 23:34). The theological move here is to distinguish an offer from its actual reception. The offer of grace in Christ is universal; it is held out to all people (e.g., John 3:16). The reception of the offer of grace remains in the realm of human freedom, although, again, we cannot in the end understand how such an offer could actually be rejected—just as we cannot understand any particular sin.
As is often the case, here Aquinas is practical. It may not be required of us to show particular actions of love toward our enemies. For instance, they may be recalcitrant, or they might pose a threat to others, such that it would be harmful to them and others for us to do particular loving actions. Or it might be that in our weakness in this fallen world, we are unable to perform them. Nonetheless, Aquinas says, we do need to be ready to love them and to offer them friendship, in his words, “if the necessity were to occur” (presumably, if they were sincerely to repent!). Despite all this, Aquinas will not have us forget that in the perfection of Christian love, one does love one’s enemies in appropriate particular actions, done apart from any necessity (ST II–II.25.8).
So friendship with God is, first, the grace given when God loves a human being. This grace makes possible a love for and with God. This is rightly called friendship, since love involves mutuality, communication, and benevolence. Friendship with God necessarily extends from God to all God’s friends, which is to say, potentially, to all people. It also reveals a transformation of the notion of friendship in that, for a Christian person, friendship’s longing is now universal, like God’s. It extends not only to the virtuous but also to the wicked, not insofar as they are wicked, of course, but insofar as they are loved by God.
But how can friendship extend, even potentially, to all people without lessening its intimacy or intensity? Can we better see how Christian friendship relates to the views, and the wisdom, of the ancient thinkers?
Answers to these questions are at hand, thanks to a third theologian to whom we will now turn. He does not tower among the theologians of the West; he was merely a monk-administrator who lived about a hundred years before Aquinas. But he wrote a short book (comprising three short dialogues) on precisely this question. While Aquinas opens up how to think about friendship and love with respect to God, this monk spells out the resolution of the Christian quandary of love and friendship with other people.
Aelred of Rievaulx: Understanding Friendship Christianly
As friendship is an implicit theme running through the life of Augustine, it is an explicit theme running through the life of Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1110–67). Coming from a line of married priests in the north of England, Aelred was sent, around the age of fifteen, to serve in the court of Scotland’s king, forming there “close friendships” with the king’s heir and stepsons. His character seems to have been disposed at once to friendship and to a desire for holiness as a Christian. In time, he chose to leave the court, later reflecting that the pleasure of “the welcome attachment of friendship” did not persist in that environment but rather inevitably declined: “I contemplated the happiness we felt at the beginning of those friendships; I considered their progress; I foresaw their end.” That progress was growing fear of giving offense, and that end was recrimination.9 So in 1134, he joined the Cistercians in Rievaulx, where he had discovered a community of Christian love, and there he would work out how friendship and Christian love are related to each other. In 1143, he left Rievaulx to become the first abbot of a daughter house, but he returned after a few years to be abbot at Rievaulx itself. This proved strenuous work; his health was failing by 1157, when his duties were lightened; he continued there to his death.
Like Augustine’s, Aelred’s life involved considerable “administration” (as we would say), but unlike Augustine’s, his health was weakened and his life not as extended (about fifty-seven years to Augustine’s seventy-six). His written work is but a fraction of that of the African bishop, and even what he did write was sometimes less than enthusiastically received. Despite all these obstacles, he manages in his work Spiritual Friendship to show the way to solve the problem of friendship, not only theologically but also practically.
Spiritual Friendship is a short work in three books, one book for each dialogue. His interlocutor in the first book seems to have died before the conversation of book II takes place; one assumes the intervention of a number of years (either there was a delay in composition or Aelred sets it up thus as a literary device). Books II and III have two new interlocutors and take place on successive days. In each book, there is a sense that the conversation occurs in scarce time stolen away from work, conversation welcome in its own right, precious and yet limited. When the hour (if it was an hour) was up, the dialogue had to be ended.
Mark Williams, a Protestant scholar at Calvin University who has given us a fresh translation of Spiritual Friendship, reminds us, as we have seen in Aristotle and Cicero, that “in both antiquity and the middle ages, it was difficult to begin a friendship”: people of those times had a high view of friendship, and they expected much of their friends.10 In this, they were quite different from us moderns, who speak casually of taking up friends and did so even before the “face book” was a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes. When I went to seminary (which was after the invention of the light bulb but before “Facebook”), the deli owner just down the street was friendly with all of us seminarians and our families. He greeted each of us cordially as “friend”—but not by name. It seems harsh to say the truth that, friendly as he was, we were not in fact friends. We moderns don’t want to make sharp judgments of that sort; we fear appearing to be unfriendly. By contrast, the ancients and the people of Aelred’s time would have had no problem denying that a casual acquaintance was a friend.
This difficulty of forming friendships is an early topic of the first book, a dialogue between Aelred and his “dearest friend,” Ivo. In his first sentence, Aelred intimates that any existing friendship is a gift in Christ: “Here we are, you and I, and I hope that Christ makes a third with us.” Aelred, having sensed that Ivo is burdened, invites him to “reveal your heart and speak your mind” in this special, private time of “opportunity and leisure” (I.1).11 He also points out that their friendship is based on the good, that Ivo doesn’t get involved with empty talk but is “always engaged in some beneficial pursuit” for his “spiritual development,” and that their friendship has mutuality in which they each “learn and teach, give and receive” (I.4)—this despite their difference in age and status (as Ivo tries briefly to object). So far, so classical.
But what difference does Christ make to friendship? Ivo, whose friendship with Aelred has been quickly established as classical, seeks to understand friendship as a Christian. What is Christian friendship—which is what Aelred means by “spiritual friendship”? Where does it come from? What is it for? Is it for everyone? And can it continue through a life unbroken?
Aelred commends Cicero, who has written well on friendship, but Ivo is suspicious. Cicero, he points out, does not know “the honey-sweet name of Christ,” which has claimed Ivo’s affections (I.7). Ivo wants “our most common assumptions about friendship” to be “proved by the authority of scripture” (I.8). Aelred agrees to take up the task.
He takes the Ciceronian definition of friendship and gives it a Christian interpretation. “Friendship,” Cicero says in his classic definition (which we also saw earlier), “is agreement on both human and divine affairs, combined with good will and mutual esteem” (I.11). Aelred takes “good will” as “the mental emotion of friendship,” and “mutual esteem” as “the expression of friendship in deeds” (I.15). Friendship itself Aelred interprets (conventionally, as does Cicero) from its root in amor (love): amicus (friend) comes from love, and amicitia (friendship) likewise follows. Love, he goes on, is “an affection of the rational mind” that “seeks something for itself with desire and strives to enjoy” it, and to enjoy it internally as well, and to preserve it (I.19). A friend is “the guardian of love,” or better, “my friend must be the guardian of our mutual love, or even of my very soul.” This points to the good, indeed the ultimate good, that is the point of friendship. To do this, the friend must be able to keep secrets and also appropriately correct flaws in the friend or endure them. “When I rejoice, he will rejoice; when I grieve, he will grieve with me; he will consider as his own everything that his friend experiences” (I.20). Again, very classical: friends have all things in common. Yet we whiff the scriptural aroma (“Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” [Rom. 12:15]).
The philosophers, Aelred says, agree with this, as does the wisdom literature of the Bible. He quotes Proverbs 17:17, “He who is a friend loves for all time” (I.21), which “makes it quite clear that friendship is eternal, provided it is true friendship.” Aelred takes this verse from Proverbs to mean that if a friendship ends, it was never really a friendship. (The whole verse, “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity,” suggests that while siblings are particularly important in times of adversity, a friend will love us in all the various times of our life.) Even if one “is nailed to the cross, ‘he who is a friend loves for all time’” (I.23)—which is rather more than a whiff of Scripture. Aelred (if I may put it so) nails pagan friendship, with its desire to endure without end, to the friendship accomplished on the cross for all time.
Is the Number of Friends Small?
But Ivo, still not satisfied, brings forth the pessimistic view common to the ancients and his contemporaries. If friendship is so hard, it necessarily will be rare. And if friendship is rare, he is unlikely to find what he wants; he despairs of achieving friendship himself. Aelred tells him—it is a gentle rebuke, the sort of correction that a friend offers a friend—that even if friendship were rare, he must not despair of achieving it. No Christian should lack hope of attaining any virtue; indeed, our Lord said, “Seek, and ye shall find” (Matt. 7:7). Then he gives reason.
The ancients, not knowing Christ, did not know that he is the one who dispenses virtues. (Aelred quotes Ps. 24:10, but instead of “The Lord of hosts,” he reads, “The Lord of virtues himself is the King of glory” [I.27, emphasis added]). And that means, says Aelred, that he will not speak “of merely three or four pairs of friends, as the pagans do, but I set before you a thousand pairs of friends, who by faith in the Lord were ready to die one for another—in short, to do as a matter of course what the pagans said or imagined a great miracle in the case of Pylades and Orestes” (I.28). We noted earlier Cicero’s reference to a then-recent play in which Orestes was to be put to death, and Pylades and Orestes each stepped forward, saying, “I am Orestes,” because they were such close friends that each wanted to die instead of the other. Well, Aelred says, Jesus Christ, the Lord of all the virtues, gives friendship to many. There have been thousands of Christian martyrs willing to die, who have in fact died, for their friends—indeed, not just thousands but a countless host. Jesus, he says, speaking through the Psalms, “foretold these martyrs; he spoke, ‘and they were multiplied beyond number’” (I.30; cf. Ps. 40:5). Jesus has multiplied friends beyond all counting, for of course, although Jesus’ friends are willing to die for each other, only some have martyrdom thrust upon them. Which is to say that the vast number of martyrs testifies to the even vaster extent of the spread—the massive explosion—of friendship within Christianity. Aelred clinches his argument with John 15:13: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Clearly, for Aelred, Jesus’ declaration is the key to the interpretation of all human friendship, and particularly the key to the magnificent and, to an ancient mindset, incredible multiplication of friendship among the followers of Jesus.
How Friendship and Christian Love Are the Same and Yet Different
Aelred ultimately interprets friendship as, in God’s design, the same as Christian love. In God’s design, agape is philia, caritas is amicitia. But until the consequences of the fall are overcome, friendship and Christian love will have a certain separation. On the one hand, there is the universal love that we owe to all people, even our enemies. On the other hand, friendship is reserved for a few with whom we have a reciprocal sharing of love that is based on the good. Aelred therefore gives a genealogical account, a narrative, within which we can place the classical (Ciceronian/Aristotelian) teaching about friendship and affirm it, while through the narrative we can overcome what the moral theologian Oliver O’Donovan has rightly identified as the “sense of tragedy” that “hangs over the classical discourse of friendship.”12
Here is Aelred’s account of how this separation came about. First, we see that everything is created by God and shows God’s purpose for “all his creatures to be joined together in peace, and for community to exist between them.” With a sensitivity that we could well identify as “ecological,” Aelred says that there is nothing in creation that is left alone by itself. Rather, God has linked everything “together in a certain community out of diversity” (I.53). His argument runs from stones to trees and plants and even to angels. Angels, one might think, would pose a problem for him, since, as is traditional, he holds that there is only one angel per angelic species. Take something that is not angelic—may I pick on cats again? The reason we have many cats, the reason why we have many individuals of any given species, is because of physical matter; matter is what differentiates individuals within a species. Angels, however, being pure spirits, have no matter, and thus they are singular: one angel, one species. Yet Aelred sees God’s desire for creaturely fellowship even here: “Even among the angels divine wisdom saw to it that not just one, but many were created, among whom community was welcome and the sweetest love created a unity of will and affection.” The unity of the angels is given prior to the recognition of difference in rank (the hierarchy of angelic species) so that the angelic hierarchy “would be no occasion for envy—but the joy of friendship. . . . And so sheer numbers banished solitude, and mutual participation in joy increased the happiness of the many” (I.56).
But for humans, we are a single species—descended from, according to the biblical narrative, a single pair of parents. It is thus essential for the man and the woman of Genesis 2 to be equal with each other if they are to be friends. Hence, Aelred rejoices in both the creation of the woman and the manner of her creation: “Woman was created expressly as an incentive for happiness and friendship, from the very substance of the man himself. And so it is beautiful that the second created being was taken from the side of the first, so that nature might teach that all are equals, as it were ‘collateral.’ In human affairs there is to be neither superior nor inferior; this is the appropriate mark of friendship” (I.57). As Williams notes, Aelred makes a Latin pun here: the woman comes from the latus, the side, of the man, and thus they are collateral, brought together in a side-by-side equality.13
The Fall from Friendship
Let us turn from Aelred for a moment to consider his claim of aboriginal human equality, for there is wisdom buried in Genesis 2 and 3, wisdom waiting for a careful reader but easy to pass by.
First, we should note the rather strong claim that the “good and evil” of the forbidden tree can indicate knowledge of a political character, and in particular, the wisdom that a ruler needs to have. Following the principle of allowing the Bible to interpret itself, we will find the same Hebrew words used in Solomon’s prayer asking God for what he needs to be a good king: “an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad” (1 Kings 3:9). The knowledge of “good and bad” (elsewhere translated as the knowledge of “good and evil”) is here explicitly linked with the discernments, the judgments, that a ruler must make. It is the knowledge that a king needs to have.14
This insight can then illuminate the overall trajectory of Genesis 2. The human enters the scene as a lowly creature whose job is to bring the seeds that are in the earth to fruition (v. 5). But it seems he is discovered to have more dignity than that, and so a garden is made for him (v. 8). Then, just as God is about to bring to awareness that it is not good for him to be alone, God tells him not to eat of the tree of political knowledge (vv. 17–18). God does not want him to know about ruling. To be innocent of knowledge of ruling seems to be necessary for God to create an equal for him, a fitting “help-meet”: God does not want there to be rule or governance (with its resulting inequalities) between the human and his companion. Only with this prohibition in place does God make the animals. Presumably, one of them might have been found to be the human’s equal companion, but in the event, none of them was fitting (vv. 19–20). Finally, God causes “a deep sleep to fall upon” the human, and from his side the woman is taken (vv. 21–22), in the implicit equality of friendship that Aelred celebrates.
It follows that their subsequent eating from the forbidden tree is the eruption of the world of politics into their existence. This is a world of superiors and inferiors, a world of command and obedience. This world of power dynamics is what underlies God’s pronouncements of the consequences of their acquisition of this sort of knowledge. There is “enmity” between one creature, at least, and the humans (Gen. 3:15). There is “sorrow” in childbearing (we will suggest this includes a self-awareness of mortality); there is “desire” for the husband, who “shall rule” over his wife (v. 16). And to complete the circle, the man, expelled from the garden, is returned to his initial humble place as one whose job is to bring seeds to fruition, now with his own “sorrow” at the time of eating—“in sorrow shalt thou eat of [the ground] all the days of thy life” (v. 17). Communion at table has become a time of sorrow rather than one of fellowship, of happiness—of friendship.
Enmity of one with another, rule of one over another, sorrow rather than friendship—these details of our primal narrative are clearly congruent with Aelred’s understanding of an aboriginal divine purpose to make creation an arena of universal friendship and fellowship. The divine purpose was for this fellowship to flourish in the very high form of friendship in the human species. The fall is precisely deviation from this purpose, and its consequence the loss of universal human friendship. Aboriginal human nature, according to Aelred, gave people “the emotional desire for friendship and affection,” which was increased by the experience of its “sweetness” (I.58). But the fall brought corruption and division. As a result, “those who were good began to distinguish between affection and friendship.” They saw that affection should be given to all people, even “those who are enemies and perverse,” but the “fellowship of wills [and] counsel,” which is of the essence of friendship, had to be reserved for the good (I.59).
And with regard to politics, Aelred, despite giving it scant attention, does claim that human law became necessary after the fall to regulate friendship and put it in order. The law is needed, he says, to distinguish carnal and worldly (so-called) friendships from “true friendship.” The necessity of the law, it seems, pertains to the law’s educative function: by whatever regulatory method (and Aelred is entirely unspecific on this), the law would save people who were looking for true friendship from being “caught unawares” in one of the false forms; the law would point out that despite their similarities, carnal and worldly “friendships” are not authentic friendship (I.61).
The Bible, of course, has much more to say about politics than that its origin is in the failure of friendship. Robert Sacks finds, for instance, a suggestion that the sacrificial system, which is established as an important part of the government of Israel, aims at the restoration of human communion.15 A Christian might find further positive appreciation of political authority in Jesus, ascended and reigning from God’s right hand. But Aelred, who left the court of an earthly king in order to enter a monastery, surely has a right understanding of the fundamentals: we were made for universal friendship, and that has been lost.
Real Friendship Is Spiritual Friendship
Yet although universal friendship has been lost, we have not lost altogether the innate human longing to have friends. So we have the lesser relationships, the false forms and simulacra that trade off the real thing. Aelred denominates as “carnal” friendship a bond between people who are in agreement about vices. And “worldly” friendship is what he calls a relationship from which each hopes to profit. These have “the mere name” of friendship; each such relationship “looks like friendship,” but only spiritual friendship is truly so. In a spiritual friendship, people are bound together by having similar good character, goals, and habits (I.36–38). These distinctions correlate well with Aristotle’s differentiation of friendships as based on the pleasant, the useful, and the good.
On this side of the fall, Christians have, in effect, a double calling. They are to love all people, to have caritas for all, the word for Christian love that of old would have been translated “charity” but Williams takes variously as “good will” and “grace.”16 One wants to manifest grace to one’s neighbor, to have goodwill toward all people. And yet one cannot share one’s heart and mind but with a few people—and they need to be people who can reciprocate that sharing. Such a spiritual commonality, a communion involving character, goals, and habits, is emotionally packed in a way that caritas is not, precisely because it is shared. We remember Aristotle saying that to share with a friend is the pleasantest thing human beings can enjoy. Aelred would agree: spiritual friendship is enjoyable. And it is not a cause for guilt, as if one were wrongly holding back from offering friendship to others.
The reason for calling true friendship “spiritual” is made clearer in books II and III, which are set, as we noted above, some time after the first book and involve two new interlocutors, Walter and Gratian. Friendship, Aelred tells them, “is a path to the love and knowledge of God.” Its “special token” is the feeling of pleasure, security, sweetness, and delight that friends share in all things. Thus “from the perfection of Christian love, we are able to esteem those who are otherwise burdensome or unpleasant to us; we take account of their interests honestly, not disingenuously, not deceitfully, but truly and without being compelled to do so. However, we do not admit them to the privacy of our friendship” (II.18–19).
Friendship is always love, but love in this fallen world is not always friendship, and therein lies the need for care in the selection of one’s friends. Spiritual friendship needs a “solid foundation,” and that is nothing other than “the love of God” (III.5). This time when Aelred repeats Cicero’s definition (which in the first book he quoted to Ivo), he adds, as O’Donovan has noted,17 an adjective: friendship is “the highest agreement on both human and divine affairs, combined with good will and mutual esteem” (III.8, emphasis added). Here Aelred subtly reveals his answer to the question, What is the good which is the point of true friendship? It is “the highest agreement,” combined with affection and love, on all things. And that highest agreement has its solid foundation in the caritas of God, his gift of grace, the love that is God’s own being that he gives to us.
Aelred helps us grasp the specificity of spiritual friendship. It includes love (dilectio), “a show of favor that proceeds from benevolence.” It also involves affection (affectio), that “certain inner pleasure [that] comes from friendship.” Moreover, friendship provides an environment of security (securitas, reassurance) within which one may reveal “all one’s secrets and purposes without fear or suspicion.” And finally, it has delight (jucunditas) at the experience of minds meeting each other in “an agreement that is pleasant and benevolent—concerning all matters, whether happy or sad, which have a bearing on the friendship, everything that we teach or learn” (III.51). Showing love for each other, with its particular pleasure, a safe place to share all of one’s heart, with the delight that comes from agreement on the highest things—this is what spiritual friendship looks like.
And it remains supremely satisfying for human beings. We humans long for “that great and wondrous happiness” that we have when “God himself is at work and pouring forth such great friendship and love between himself and his creation,” which leads to each loving the other as he loves himself. “And through this friendship each one rejoices in the happiness of another as much as in his own; and so the happiness of individuals is the happiness of all, and the universality of the happiness of all becomes the happiness of individuals.” When this comes to be, “there is no concealment of thoughts, no dissimulation of affection.” Such “true and eternal friendship . . . takes shape here, in this world, and is perfected in the next; here it is the property of the few who are good; there, where all are good, it is the property of all” (III.79–80).
Aelred has more teaching than what I summarize here: how to choose friends, whether friendship should ever be broken off, and what to do when one’s friend falls short. Some of these practical matters (along with others) will concern us later on. But for now, here in the middle of this book, it is fitting for us to pause to give thanks for Aelred’s exposition of friendship as the consummation of Christian life and hope’s promise.