Is God Friendship?
How far does friendship go? Through the entire universe does it run, according to the beautiful claim of Aelred at the end of the first book of his Spiritual Friendship. God’s wish—the perspective is so vast it is worth quoting again—is that “all his creatures . . . be joined together in peace, and for community to exist between them.” Aelred claims that “even among insensible things” like the earth or rivers or stones “a certain love of community, as it were, shines forth”; they have a “community” (societas) in that none of them exists alone; beings—things—that lack senses nonetheless enjoy some sort of analogue to friendship. Thus more so nonhuman sentient beings, although lacking human rationality, “in this one respect” still “imitate the human spirit, in that they . . . follow each other, they play with each other, in their movements and noises they express and give evidence of their mutual affection.” Indeed, he continues, “so avidly and happily [do they] enjoy their common community, that they appear to care for nothing more than those things we associate with friendship.” And friendship extends further, beyond the material creation to the spiritual, where “divine wisdom saw to it that not just one [angel], but many were created, among whom community was welcome and the sweetest love created a unity of will and affection.” Thus friendship characterizes the universe even in the spiritual realm, where “sheer numbers banished solitude, and mutual participation in joy increased the happiness of the many” (I.53–57).
We noted earlier (in chap. 7) Aelred’s teaching that human beings in their original nature were made for friendship with each other. The fall, however, fractured this primordial universal bond, as “avarice and envy corrupted the splendor of friendship and affection” and brought the ills of “disputes, rivalries, hatred, and suspicion.” The result was the need to distinguish between affection and friendship, to show universal affection or grace (or we might say Christian love) even to enemies, while friendship adapted itself to a more constrained circumference. Nonetheless—to repeat in order not to lose sight of the conclusion—the desire that friendship extend to embrace more and more people has never left the Christian heart (I.58–59).
Friendship, in these different concrete ways, marks the entire creation, from mere matter to pure spirit and including (still—despite the fall) human beings. This sweeping conclusion is itself astonishing, but does it capture the whole truth? Or does friendship extend even further? Is friendship something we might attribute properly to God himself, in his own, uncreated, eternal being?
This question is posed by Aelred’s interlocutor, Ivo, with emotional and indeed existential urgency. “But what does all this mean?” he asks. “Shall I say of friendship what Jesus’ friend, the apostle John said of grace [caritas], that ‘God is friendship’?” (I.69). The line from 1 John 4:16 is eminently famous: “God is love.” Ivo wants to know if we should say also, “God is friendship.”
Aelred replies that to do so would be “unusual” and that the sentence lacks “scriptural authority.” Nonetheless, he reckons that it must be true, for everything that comes out of grace or love (caritas) can be called friendship. His example is 1 John 4:16 itself, where the complete sentence reads, “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.” Aelred says, replacing love/grace (caritas) with friendship (amicitia), that a person who dwells in friendship truly enjoys with God a mutual indwelling (I.70). It makes sense to say that a person who abides in friendship is abiding in God and God is abiding in him. So, yes, we may say that God is friendship.
Are the Persons of the Trinity Friends?
Good and proper catechetical teaching puts forth that “God is love” is literally true thanks to God being himself the Trinity. That is to say, “God is love” asserts more than that God is loving; it asserts more than that he loves the things in the world and indeed more than that he loves even thee and me. “God is love” means that God is constituted by love, that his very being is love. So we can say that the Father loves the Son (he bestows himself upon the Son); the Son receives that love and returns it to the Father through a perfect counter-bestowal; and the love that flows between them in this pattern of bestowal and counter-bestowal is the Holy Spirit.
In speaking that way, we are putting in rather simple terms the teaching of great theologians, who were themselves trying to hold together everything that the Scriptures declare concerning God’s being. For our purposes, I will home in on one paragraph of just one of the classical works—namely, Augustine’s On the Trinity.1 In book VI, Augustine first sets out the unity and equality of the Father and the Son and then turns, in chapter 5 of that book, to the Holy Spirit. His first claim is that the Holy Spirit has the same unity of substance and the same equality as the Father and the Son. There are different suggestions, all drawing from the scriptural witness, concerning how we might understand the Spirit. He might be the unity of the Father and the Son, or their holiness, or their love; or he might be one of these most fundamentally and then consequentially the other two (for instance, he might fundamentally be the holiness of the Father and the Son, and therefore the love that they have, and therefore their unity). But however we take him, it is clear that the Holy Spirit is neither the Father nor the Son. This is because he is the one through whom the other two are joined; it is through the Spirit that the Father begets (and loves) the Son, and through the same Spirit that the Son loves the Father, who begets him.
At this point, Augustine quotes Saint Paul’s line “to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3). This line culminates the apostle’s admonition to the church in Ephesus to “walk” in a manner “worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called,” for the sake of keeping “the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (4:1–3). The reality behind this admonition, Augustine says, is in the being of the Trinity. The persons of the Trinity are not equal by the gift of someone higher than themselves; it is their own gift to each other that makes them equal, and all that they have to give is their own essence, which is one and the same in each.
The Holy Spirit, that is to say, is common to both the Father and the Son; it cannot be that one would have him and the other not. The three are “God, one, alone, great, wise, holy, blessed.” Then Augustine mentions friendship. “But that communion itself”—the communion enjoyed by the persons of the Trinity, which is identical with the persons of the Trinity—“is consubstantial and co-eternal; and if it may fitly be called friendship, let it be so called.” Augustine goes on at once to say he prefers to call it “love,” doubtless because that is the biblical word (1 John 4:16, as we saw just above).2 Then to wrap up the doctrine, he states that the Holy Spirit, being love (as are the Father and the Son), is along with them also substance, great, good, holy. Whatever else we might say God is, we will say that equally of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
There are not more than three, Augustine says, because these words substance, great, good, and so forth do not speak of something that God takes on. The Father never has an existence “prior” to the Son, so he is eternally love, and so forth.
What the reader should notice is that since God is love, we may say God is friendship. It then would not be a sufficient regard for friendship to elevate it only to the status of a great cosmic principle, applicable to all things material and spiritual and especially to human beings at their highest. No, friendship is also a name—one might think possibly the best name of all—for the mystery at the heart of God’s being. When Jesus reveals at the Last Supper that the point of his incarnation is to make human friendship possible (thereby interpreting his death on the cross as the highest form of love, the giving of his life for his friends), that friendship is given its location. The mansion where human friendship dwells is the being of God, to whom, Augustine emphasizes, we may (and must) cleave by grace. “We ourselves are one”—in unity with each other, in friendship—“by [God’s] gift, and one spirit with Him, because our soul cleaves to Him so as to follow Him.” The love that God gives us (which is to say, the friendship that God gives) is with him and with one another.
The analogical leaps here are breathtaking, although given the reality of the Spirit, perhaps we should say “breath-giving”! Augustine has it all in place so that, in a sense, Aelred and then Aquinas only had to move forward one tiny step to declare that love or grace, caritas, just is friendship, amicitia.
Is There a Difference between Being God’s Friend and Being His Child?
If God is friendship in his very being, then the persons of the Trinity are friends with each other, and so it would be proper to say the Father and the Son are friends. And if the disciples of Jesus are friends with one another and with Jesus, then it seems they must be friends also with the Father, on the principle that the friend of my friend is someone I also want to be friends with. It is a general theological truth that with regard to all matters outside God’s being, what is true of one of the divine persons is true of each of them. If you are Jesus’ friend, then you are also a friend of the Holy Spirit and a friend of the Father.
But sometimes we must distinguish the persons of the Trinity. Consider this line of thought: Since Jesus is God, whatever is true of Jesus is true of God. If Jesus drinks a cup of water, it is true to say “God drinks a cup of water.” But it would not be true to say “The Father drinks a cup of water.” Why? Because the Father has not taken on himself a human nature as the Son has. It is by reason of his human nature, and not his divine nature, that Jesus can drink water. The Father, having no human nature, cannot drink water—or anything else.
That is to say, the things Jesus does by virtue of his humanity, although they are things that God does (since Jesus is truly God), are not things that we can say the Father or the Spirit does. So it seems we need to ask our question in a new way. Does Jesus make himself our friend by virtue of his human nature or his divine nature? For if it is only by virtue of his humanity that Jesus makes himself our friend, then we would not be able to say that we share in the friendship that is the heart of the Trinity.
Now the friendship that Jesus offers is the fulfillment of the created goodness of humanity. When God stated it was not good for the original human to be alone, God was stating that human flourishing is found in friendship. Jesus makes that possible by being a complete, sinless human being. There is no separation in him between himself and God, and nothing dividing him off from other people, and nothing creating internal divisions within himself. He is “at-one,” and his offer of atonement (“at-one-ment”) is an offer of friendship.
Thus it seems to me that it is by virtue both of his divinity and of his humanity that Jesus makes himself our friend. By his humanity, he was able to die for his friends and thereby offer the love than which there is no greater. But the substance of his friendship with his disciples included his sharing with them everything he received from the Father—in other words, his sharing of that which he had by virtue of his divinity.
It is worth noting that the conclusion is different, in terms of the words we use, when we turn to familial language of sisters and brothers, daughters and sons. When we think of ourselves as Jesus’ brothers and sisters, we at the same time think of ourselves as children of the Father. But note that we use different language depending on which person of the Trinity we are considering: for the Son, a sibling, but for the Father, a child. Yet the end point is the same—namely, finding our lives in the midst of God’s being. We are lifted by God’s action (his grace, his love) to a level that is equal to God so that he can love us and we can love him. At that place of equality, we are friends of God and children of God and siblings of God—all those different words for the same reality. Saint Paul writes of this reality when he speaks of the mystery of prayer in his Epistle to the Romans: “We know not what we should pray for . . . but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered” (8:26). Prayer is our being placed within the being of God: the Spirit, within us, prays through Jesus to the Father. That is to say, prayer is the life of divine communication and our being placed, quite beyond our capacity to comprehend it, in the midst of that communication. It is our being lifted up to the level of friend of God.
One final point is necessary. If we are children of God, we are not so in any childish or inferior way. The point of grace is that we are no longer mere creatures, mere subordinates or servants or slaves. We are also no longer children in the sense of being immature (we are no longer under guardians, as Lysis and Menexenus were). We remain creatures, yes; we remain God’s servants, one might even say his slaves, but Jesus no longer calls us servants! We remain creatures, yet we know the intimacy that comes from the Son sharing his mind with us. Our obedience is free. We have the dignity of being a friend of our truest friend.