1. Prayer adapted from “O Worship the King,” hymn by Robert Grant.
Introduction
1. A third and shorter work, the Magna Moralia, seems to follow the Eudemian but with “a number of misunderstandings of its doctrine”; Anthony Kenny supposes it to consist of student notes. See Aristotle, The Eudemian Ethics, trans. and intro. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), x–xii.
2. The direct Psalm quotation is from the Episcopal Church’s 1979 Book of Common Prayer (hereafter BCP). Verse numbers in this Psalter do not always correspond to canonical numbers. See Book of Common Prayer (New York: Church Publishing, 1979).
3. BCP, 333.
Chapter 1 The Limits of Marriage
1. “In the kingdom . . . when the love of God for mankind is fully revealed . . . there will be no God in the sense of what is set above or apart from man. God will simply be the life of mankind.” Herbert McCabe, “Freedom,” in God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 24. Add to this the following, from the same volume: “Jesus was the first human being, the first member of the human race in whom humanity came to fulfilment, the first human being for whom to live was simply to love. . . . The aim of human life is to live in friendship—a friendship amongst ourselves which in fact depends on a friendship, or covenant, that God has established between ourselves and him” (“Good Friday,” 93).
Chapter 2 The Confusions of Friendship
1. The irrepressible Malcolm Guite once told the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of Dallas that if we wanted to think about what poetry is, we should skip “middle management” and go straight to Shakespeare.
2. These parenthetical notations direct the reader to the page and line in the standard Greek text and can be found in the margins of most translations. A single reference at the end of a paragraph pertains to all the direct quotations within the paragraph. All translations of the Eudemian Ethics herein are from Kenny.
3. Of course, once a child becomes an adult, the two can become peers and then, quite possibly, friends in the primary sense. This would not be inconsistent with Aristotle’s thought, nor would a similar development into equality in a marriage (which Aristotle takes as fundamentally unequal) or in some other initially unequal pairing, however exceptional that development would be.
Chapter 3 Friendship as Success at Being Human
1. Herbert McCabe refers to the “creation question” as a question “asked by the Jews, at least from Second Isaiah onwards, the question which, once asked, could not be unasked.” Herbert McCabe, “The Involvement of God,” in God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 42.
2. See William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979).
3. Consider: If your age were infinite, how old were you five hundred years ago? Infinite again, because if you take five hundred away from infinity, you still have infinity. The paradoxical conclusion is that if you are actually infinitely old, you never were five years old, or fifty, or five hundred, or . . . Thus while we can imagine always becoming a year older, never dying, without end, we cannot jump from that to being actually infinite in age.
4. McCabe, “Creation,” in God Matters, 6.
5. I use masculine pronouns for God only out of humility before tradition. Our discomfort with them is a recognition of the breaking down of language when we speak of God. But the alternatives (feminine or neuter pronouns, or the avoidance of pronouns altogether) are no better, and they can mislead us into thinking we have rectified an error.
6. All quotations from the Lysis are from the 1910 translation of J. Wright as revised and published in Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Bollingen Series LXXI (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961 [corrected ed. 1963]). For Edith Hamilton’s introduction to the Lysis, see Collected Dialogues, 145. Parenthetical notations in the text are made conventionally to the standard Stephanus page and page subdivision, as found in the margins of most translations.
7. See Mark Vernon, The Philosophy of Friendship (Basingstoke, UK; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). In an appendix, Vernon deftly compares Aristotle and Plato, with an insightful reading of the Lysis.
8. When I speak of the Socratic method or of Socrates himself, I am not making any distinction between Socrates the man who taught Plato and Socrates the character in Plato’s dialogues. I am also running together Socrates’ teaching and Plato’s. In both cases, scholars explore fascinating, subtle differences, which are, however, beyond the scope of this book.
9. The word philosophers within brackets is in Hamilton and Cairns.
Chapter 4 Friendship and Beauty
1. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 6.
2. “How to Make Friends? Study Reveals Time It Takes,” University of Kansas, March 28, 2018, https://news.ku.edu/2018/03/06/study-reveals-number-hours-it-takes-make-friend.
3. Cicero, De Senectute, De Amicitia, De Divinationei, trans. William Armistead Falconer, Loeb Classical Library (1923; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1964), 104, 106. In what follows, parenthetical notations in the text refer to this edition.
4. The reader’s mind naturally returns to the definition of friendship given by Laelius at the outset in chaps. iv and vi.
5. Here Laelius seems to contradict what he said earlier in chaps. xii–xiii, but the context makes it clear that he is considering not a friend who is moving away from virtue but one who is moving toward virtue but not yet there. In my view, this is just about everyone. One might also consider that in the earlier chapters Laelius was particularly thinking of treason, which here remains something one would not do for a friend, as being a signal instance of “utter disgrace.”
Chapter 5 The Weirdness of Divine Love
1. This translation is from Walter M. Abbott, ed., The Documents of Vatican II (New York: America Press, 1966), 220, emphasis added. The Latin original is given in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 2:1081: “Reapse noonisi in mysterio Verbi incarnati mysterium hominis vere clarescit. Adam enim, primus homo, erat figura futuri, scilicet Christi domini. Christus, novissimus Adam, in ipsa revelatione mysterii Patris euisque amoris, hominem ipsi homini plene manifestat eique altissimam eius vocationem patefacit.”
2. In the Tanner volume, “hominem ipsi homini plene manifestat” is translated as “fully discloses humankind to itself” (2:1081). But “humankind” is a collective that falls short of presenting the entirety of homo as an individual homo. The desire for inclusive language is commendable, but it can create new problems of its own. Paul and Gaudium et spes are concerned to hold before us not “humankind” but two powerful individual men, Adam and Christ, in each of whom every human being is found.
3. The Revised Standard Version (RSV) lacks the definite article; it has “sin which clings so closely,” which is more clearly a claim to be about all sin and not just a certain type of sin. By contrast, the King James (Authorized) Version avoids the image of sin as stuck onto us, making it instead something that comes against us: “the sin which doth so easily beset us.” For the prayer, see, e.g., BCP, 331.
4. Abbott, Documents of Vatican II, 220–21. “Ipse enim, Filius Dei, incarnatione sua cum omni homine quodammodo se univit.”
5. See Victor Lee Austin, “John Paul II’s Ironic Legacy in Political Theology,” Pro Ecclesia 16 (2007): 165–94.
6. In all languages, the meanings of words overlap; in Hebrew, various words are translated variously as lover, husband, wife, friend, intimate, fellow citizen, acquaintance, neighbor, companion, associate, another, fellow, even brother and sister, and one word might itself be translated in a number of these ways. A helpful overview with significant detail is given in the introduction to Saul M. Olyan, Friendship in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven: Yale, 2017). The discussion above is not intended to be, nor is the author capable of making, a definitive lexical or textual account. The point is, rather, about the emergence of speech about love and to take note of who is spoken of as the lover and who the beloved.
Chapter 6 Biblical Friendships
1. So Saul M. Olyan: “Although the [Hebrew] word rēʿa with the meaning ‘friend’ and other terms for ‘friend’ are not used of Jonathan and/or David in the Jonathan-David narratives, the relationship of David and Jonathan is almost universally described as a friendship.” Saul M. Olyan, Friendship in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 69.
2. See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, rev. ed. (New York: Basic, 2011).
3. While it seems likely to be the case that these two, differing introductions of David indicate redaction from two different sources, it is also the case that the text as we have it can be made sense of—as I hope to be doing in this chapter. See Robert Alter, The David Story (New York: Norton, 1999), x: “Much of the richness and complexity of the story is lost by those who imagine this book as a stringing together of virtually independent sources.”
4. “This grandly resonant lament . . . is also another public utterance of David’s that beautifully serves his political purposes, celebrating his dead rival as it mourns his loss and thus testifying that David could never have desired Saul’s death.” Alter, David Story, note on 2 Sam. 1:17.
5. From the text as we have it, Alter infers that David’s “various attachments to women are motivated by pragmatic rather than emotional concerns” or, in the case of Bathsheba, by lust. Alter, David Story, note on 2 Sam. 1:26.
6. “Jonathan several times proclaimed his love for David. It is only in Jonathan’s death, and at the distance of apostrophe, that David calls him ‘my brother’ and says that Jonathan was dear to him” (Alter, David Story, note on 2 Sam. 1:26). Alter goes on to note that the text “tells us little about David’s sexual orientation” and that the bond between warriors, in a warrior culture, “could easily be stronger than the bond between men and women.” To my mind, the claim that the Bible points to a homoerotic friendship between David and Jonathan founders on the point that the Bible does not point to it as a friendship.
7. See Robert D. Sacks, The Book of Job (Santa Fe, NM: Kafir Yaroq Books, 2016), 250.
8. Sacks translates Job 42:5–6 as follows: “I had heard of you as ears can hear; but now my eyes have seen you. Wherefore I have both contempt and compassion for dust and ashes.” Sacks, Book of Job, 95.
9. Note that here is a case where the text explicitly says “sisters” as well as “brothers.” Even though often in the Scriptures “brethren” is to be taken inclusively, it is important to note the places where the author thought it required explicitly to add “sisters.”
10. The sole partial parallel is the daughters of Zelophehad, who inherit after their father’s death only because they have no brothers and who are forbidden to marry outside their tribe; Num. 27 and 34. Job’s daughters inherit alongside their brothers with no restrictions.
11. The broad lines of this interpretation I owe to Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, vol. 2 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970).
12. As argues Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988).
13. “As it seems to me, the most important thing that Jesus said (and he does not only say it in John’s Gospel but shows it and implies it in a thousand ways) is something about himself: that the Father loves him.” Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Chapman, 1987; repr., London: Continuum, 2005), 18.
Chapter 7 Christian Friendship and Christian Love
1. This section and the next draw upon and revise elements of the chapter on friendship in Victor Lee Austin, Christian Ethics: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2012).
2. For a valuable and detailed study, see E. D. H. (Liz) Carmichael, Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love (London: T&T Clark, 2004).
3. See, for pertinent examples, Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 185.
4. See Joseph Lienhard, “Friendship, Friends,” in Augustine through the Ages: An Encyclopedia, ed. Allan D. Fitzgerald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 372–73. Parenthetical notations in the text refer to Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
5. White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century, chap. 11.
6. As he does, e.g., in Summa Theologiae [hereafter ST] II-II.23.1. The move is not wholly without patristic antecedent; see Daniel Schwartz, Aquinas on Friendship (Oxford: Clarendon, 2007), 5.
7. The following arguments are indebted to Carmichael, Friendship, 105–26.
8. ST II-II.23.1, reply to obj. 2, translation from Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, 2 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, rev. Daniel J. Sullivan, Great Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1950).
9. Mark F. Williams, trans., “Introduction,” Aelred of Rievaulx’s “Spiritual Friendship” (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2002), 10–11.
10. Williams, “Introduction,” Aelred of Rievaulx’s “Spiritual Friendship,” 17.
11. Parenthetical citations are to book and paragraph as noted in Williams’ translation; these divisions are from a text established by Anselm Hoste and published in 1971. It is from the Hoste text that Williams has (mostly) translated, and all quotations here are from Williams.
12. Oliver O’Donovan, Entering into Rest, vol. 3 of Ethics as Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 141.
13. Williams, Aelred of Rievaulx’s “Spiritual Friendship,” 109n30.
14. For this reading, like that of Job earlier, I have been instructed by Robert D. Sacks, a remarkable and self-effacing tutor emeritus of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. See his Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990). Sacks marshals these additional citations: Gen. 24:50; 31:24, 29; Deut. 1:39; 30:15; 2 Sam. 14:17. “In all these cases the knowledge of good and bad seems to be knowledge appropriate to political life. It has to do with many things. Sometimes, as in the case of Laban, it implies simple power; at other times it concerns free choice as opposed to prejudices inherited from others. This was the choice which Israel could make only after it had been separated from the Egyptians for forty years.” Sacks’ reference here is to the change between Deut. 1:39 and 30:15. “Finally, it is the knowledge appropriate to a king” (Sacks, Commentary on the Book of Genesis, 29–30). See also Robert D. Sacks, The Lion and the Ass: Reading Genesis after Babylon (Santa Fe, NM: Kafir Yaroq Books, 2019), for a well-printed and revised version of this text.
15. Sacks, Commentary on the Book of Genesis, 93–114.
16. Williams, Aelred of Rievaulx’s “Spiritual Friendship,” 108–10, various notes.
17. The adjective is “summa,” which O’Donovan translates as “supreme.” O’Donovan, Entering into Rest, 142.
Chapter 8 Unapologetic Celibacy
1. Augustine, “On the Good of Marriage,” 1.1 and 3.3, in Elizabeth Clark, ed., St. Augustine on Marriage and Sexuality (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1996), 43, 45.
2. Robert D. Sacks, Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), 27.
3. Mark F. Williams, trans., Aelred of Rievaulx’s “Spiritual Friendship” (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2002).
4. Aquinas, rather delightfully, thought that it would be fitting for the resurrected body to be thirty-two or thirty-three years old, which we may think of as the age of Jesus at his death and also roughly the optimal age of the body as we know it: maturity achieved, decline not yet begun. “Those who have not yet come to this [age] have not achieved a perfect state, and older people already have lost it. Therefore to children and to youth [age] is added, but to old folks it is restored.” The Sermon-Conferences of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Apostles’ Creed, trans. Nicholas Ayo (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 147, 149 (in Aquinas’ commentary on the resurrection of the flesh).
5. Jonathan Santlofer, The Widower’s Notebook (New York: Penguin, 2018), 168.
6. There are a growing number of books by Christians trying to think through singleness. I will mention three. (1) Christine A. Colón and Bonnie E. Field, single academic women who had expected that at some point they would be married, focus on the question of celibacy and especially on recovering a positive view of it, particularly in evangelical Christian churches. Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today’s Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2009). (2) Jana Marguerite Bennett, a theological ethicist, works through questions of how single Christians could understand desire, perfection, friendship, mission, and more by turning to wisdom from, among others, Paul, Augustine, Wesley, and Aelred. She wants to avoid overemphasizing celibacy and is refreshingly positive about Augustine and Aelred. Singleness and the Church: A New Theology of the Single Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). (3) Christina S. Hitchcock, a professor of theology, finds positive content in the lives of single Christians. Their lives testify to both the church and the world about the church (its priority over all other communities), the resurrection (whose reality is the source of Christian identity), and “the proper place for our hope and trust”—namely, the authority of God. Her short and readable book is organized around three figures of that witness: Macrina, Perpetua, and Lottie Moon. The Significance of Singleness: A Theological Vision for the Future of the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).
7. BCP, 423. The 1662 BCP, still the official Book of the Church of England, puts it similarly: “Holy Matrimony . . . is an honorable estate, instituted of God in the time of man’s innocency . . . which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee.” The reference to “the time of man’s innocency” is absent from the first (1789) U.S. BCP; it appears in the next BCP (1892) but drops out in the 1928 BCP (which has a simple claim that marriage “is an honourable estate, instituted of God”—no mention of innocency or creation and thus silent about whether it might be postlapsarian). In this matter, and also in its articulation of God’s intended goods of marriage, the 1979 Book (the current U.S. BCP) recovers an older and more robust teaching. The texts may conveniently be found in Paul V. Marshall, Prayer Book Parallels, vol. 1 (New York: Church Hymnal Corporation, 1989), 440–41.
8. This line is not only oft-quoted but also oft-quoted out of context, as toward the end of the film Call Me by Your Name when the father uses it to comfort his teenage son at the end of a summer’s romance with a man in his twenties. A summer’s romance is not a once-in-three-centuries friendship (as Montaigne took his to be)! This quotation (which I have emended) and those that follow are from Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1991), in which the essay, traditionally titled “On Friendship” but here unfortunately rendered by the translator as “On Affectionate Relationships,” is on pages 205–19.
9. Oliver O’Donovan, Entering into Rest, vol. 3 of Ethics as Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 142.
10. Carol Harrison, “Marriage and Monasticism in St. Augustine: The Bond of Friendship,” Studia Patristica 33 (1996): 94–99; here, 95. I am grateful to Jeremy Bergstrom for this reference.
11. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
12. Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
13. “Christian [sexual] austerity represented a radical freedom from the demands of the world” (Harper, From Shame to Sin, 213). For more on this, see esp. 82–99 and chap. 4.
14. Harrison, “Marriage and Monasticism in St. Augustine,” 97. I am grateful to both Jeremy Bergstrom and Stephen Hildebrand, who, at different times, helped me understand the broader point of this section.
15. “Patebunt etiam cogitations nostrae invicem nobis” (Augustine, City of God XXII.29). I am grateful to Eric Gregory for this reference and its translation.
Chapter 9 Is There Friendship in the Trinity?
1. All quotations in this section are from Augustine, On the Trinity 6.5.7, as translated in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers first series, vol. 3, found online at https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf103.html (among other places).
2. “Augustine, in describing the relation between the three persons of the Trinity, considers amicitia [friendship] to be the most appropriate word to express this relation.” Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 54.
Chapter 10 Examples of Friendship
1. In the supplementary material on the DVD, Bill Murray says, rather haltingly, that there is a standard romantic story line that we are familiar with, and at a certain point it goes one way or the other. But both ways, he says, are “incorrect for me”; they are “almost not true.” This is because at the point where people decide to consummate an affair, they typically belittle their other lives as a way of justifying to themselves and to the other person the choice they are making. Murray says he’s “very proud” of this scene; “it’s one of the nicest scenes I’ve ever made.” From “A Conversation with Bill Murray and Sofia Coppola,” Lost in Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola (Los Angeles: Universal Studios, 2003), DVD.
2. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (New York: Scholastic, 2003), 843–44.
3. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in Mississippi Writings, The Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 834–35.
4. Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 841.
5. Here I extend language used by Oliver O’Donovan to unpack friendliness. “In being friendly . . . we say, in effect, ‘I am not your friend, nor you mine, nor in this life are we ever likely to become friends; yet in God’s eternity, and even in this life if it should so transpire, a friendship between us will be no bad thing.’” Oliver O’Donovan, Entering into Rest, vol. 3 of Ethics as Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 145.
6. O’Donovan, Entering into Rest, 136–39.
7. Francisco de Vitoria, “On the American Indians” (De Indis), in Vitoria: Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 231–92.
8. See C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (New York: Macmillan, 1944). Oliver O’Donovan has praise for the “serious philosophical intent” of the first volume of the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet: “If we imagine a species wholly different from us biologically . . . and possessing more or less comparable powers of reason, with which we could communicate fully and at will by speech . . . we should simply conclude that the ‘kind’ laying claim upon us was constituted not by one biological species alone but by an intercommunicating ensemble of two or more species.” Which is to say, our “neighbor” in that case would not have to be human. Oliver O’Donovan, Finding and Seeking, vol. 2 of Ethics as Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 64.
9. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (New York: Knopf, 2005).
10. The title of the novel, You Shall Know Them, evokes the saying of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matt. 7:16). Vercors is identified by name, and his Resistance writing is characterized on the dust jacket as quoted above: Vercors, You Shall Know Them, trans. Rita Barisse (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953).
11. Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (New York: Fawcett Columbine/Ballantine, 1996); see also the sequel, Children of God (New York: Fawcett/Random House, 1998). I was introduced to The Sparrow by the wife of one of my oldest friends, and a few years later, when I praised it, a seminary student gave me the sequel. Friendship is something that comes to us in layers upon layers.
12. Ernest Cline, Ready Player One (New York: Crown Publishers, 2011). I was introduced to this book by the son of a priest—another instance of the human desire to deepen and expand friendship.
1. Robert W. Jenson, Song of Songs (Louisville: John Knox Press, 2005).
2. One may read the opening chapters of Job as a sort of reverse mirror of the opening chapters of Genesis, with the difference that Job, unlike Adam, does not fall. So the blessing of Genesis 1 (be fruitful and multiply) is fulfilled in Job’s large family and estate. Job has dominion over his animals; his children feast as people who do not experience the world as one of work and toil; there is even a hint of Sabbath observance in the timing of Job’s intercessions in 1:5. His world collapses in an order suggested by Genesis 1–2: first the animals die, then the children. Satan asks if he can afflict Job’s bone and flesh (Job 2:5); Adam recognized Eve as bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. At 2:9, Job’s wife appears, and she tempts Job to curse God. Michael Legaspi says that the significance of all this lies in Job being an exemplar of wisdom: he fears the Lord; he eschews evil; he is blameless and upright. Most of all, he speaks wisely. When he learns of the deaths of his animals, servants, and children, he speaks of nakedness: “Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither” (1:21). Legaspi connects this introduction of “nakedness” also with Genesis. Job, who obviously will not return to his mother’s womb naked, is referring to the earth and thus echoing (embracing for himself) the words of the Lord spoken to Adam, who “knew” he was naked (vulnerable, mortal): “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19). Legaspi’s book is extraordinarily rich throughout. For the contents of this note, see Michael C. Legaspi, Wisdom in Classical and Biblical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 87–91.
3. See, for an accessible example, Robert W. Jenson, A Theology in Outline: Can These Bones Live?, ed. Adam Eitel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chap. 4.
Postscript