My remarks this morning will focus more on the reasons for the
loss or
corruption of friendship than on what friendship is and how we might best cherish it. But I trust that my possibly gloomy diagnostic survey will be more than balanced by the wonderful topics in the other sessions today and tomorrow.
When I learned that the theme of this year’s symposium was “Friendship,” I was at first a bit perplexed about what I might have to say about the subject. It’s not one to which I’d devoted a lot of sustained reflection. But as I thought more about it, I realized that a few fundamental themes related to friendship have interested me for a long time. Given the work I do, I have thought a lot about the nature of conversation and about communication more generally. And surely
conversation and
communication are key components of friendship.
I often tell people that my undergraduate degree was in communications, with an emphasis in film theory and criticism. That’s not
quite true. Technically, the department I was in at the University of Maryland was designated the Department of Speech and Dramatic Art. I learned recently that in 1901, my department’s predecessor was born as the Department of Public Speaking. And for six short years before the First World War it was identified as the Department of Oratory. (I bet there is no such department anywhere today.)
When I graduated in 1974, my department was offering specialized degrees in rhetoric, in speech therapy, and in drama, as well as in broadcast and film studies. So while my diploma does not display the word “communications,” I was studying various
arts of communication, including the art of
listening—in my junior year, I took a three-credit course on the theories and practice of listening. I’ve come to appreciate the fact that public life today would be much better served if more attention was given to listening than to talking.
Today, that part of my alma mater is known simply as the Department of Communication—a singular, not a plural noun, which possibly suggests something larger than rhetoric and media studies. The idea of communication is, after all, a capacious one. It has a
theological register, as when theologians speak of the communicable attributes of God or of the Eucharist—Holy Communion—as the communication of Grace through the real presence of Christ. And, as I’ve suggested, communication is also a fundamental aspect of
friendship, especially but not exclusively through the gift of conversation, in which selves—not just ideas—are communicated.
Communication is also a central aspect of
community and hence a concern of
politics properly understood. When the ideas of “communication” and “politics” are juxtaposed, many people might assume that what is suggested are matters of public discourse, public relations, or even propaganda and “fake news.” But politics is not just a matter of the conduct or practice of governing; it concerns the formation and sustaining of the political
communities that governments serve and protect. Politics is
first about communities, about societies, and
then about government. Politics—like friendship—is sustained by
conversation about common concerns. It is because of that fact (among other things) that a strong relationship between friendship and politics was long recognized in the West. The modern exaltation of the state over society has caused us to identify politics exclusively as the science of governing—of securing, maintaining, and exercising power—and in the process, political thought has reduced the scope and significance of friendship.
That narrowing of the definition of politics can be challenged if we recover an appreciation for the connections between community and communication, two ideas that are connected in various New Testament passages. In I Corinthians, St. Paul uses Greek word
koinonia in two different senses. In chapter 10 verse 16, speaking of the bread and cup in the Eucharist,
koinonia has a verbal sense of “sharing” or “communion” or “participation.” In chapter 1, verse 9, St. Paul writes that his readers were called into the
koinonia of God’s Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Here,
koinonia has the concrete sense of “fellowship” or community. When that Greek word was translated into Latin in the Western Church it was rendered both
communicatio and
communitas. As Oliver O’Donovan has observed, “Those who are partners to communication (koinonia in the verbal sense) form a community (koinonia in the concrete sense).” A community is a sphere in which things are communicated—held in
common rather than in private, as ours rather than yours of mine.
We tend to think of communication as a process that involves ideas—the sort of process studied in a department of public speaking—but in its larger sense, we can speak of
any kind of good—material or spiritual—being communicated. So
communication is a dynamic force evident politics, friendship, and grace—and in ways that are more than lexical or conceptual.
• • •
In
The City of God, Augustine observed:
A people, we may say, is a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love. There can be as many different kinds of people as there are different things for them to love. Whatever those things may be, there is no absurdity in calling it a people if it is a gathered multitude, not of beasts but of rational creatures, united by agreeing to share what they love. The better the things, the better the people; the worse the things, the worse their agreement to share them.
A people constituted by common objects of love is, as Oliver O’Donovan puts it, “capable of common action, susceptible to common suffering, participating in a common identity.” Members of a people can speak as a “we,” not just an “I.” Members of a community may love
one another, but that is a
second step, a consequence of a shared love of
something other than the members themselves. As John Von Heyking notes, “Our love of common objects transforms into love of each other as our habits and predispositions intermingle to the point where we cannot conceive of those common objects of love independently of those we share them with.”
And so, communities understood this way are, in a sense, friendships writ large, since friendships too are grounded in common loves. C. S. Lewis famously distinguished lovers from friends by observing that “Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed ion some common interest. . . . Two friends delight to be joined by a third and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to be become a real friend.” Lewis quotes the blessed souls depicted by Dante as they exclaim “Here comes one who will augment our loves.” Friendship is thus an analogue of the Heavenly Community in which the multitude of the blessed “increases the fruition which each has of God.”
Friendship is an analogue of the Church. Ordered by Love, and gifted to one another by what Augustine calls a kind of divine lottery,
all true human communities are imperfect, incomplete but nonetheless real anticipations of the Church’s life in its fulfillment. One reason such a claim may sound implausible is that modern politics has undermined the centrality of sharing of common objects of love, by insisting that the point of government is to protect the rights of individuals within the society governed to love what they
want to love. And so in modern societies, all organs of community that attempt to nurture allegedly well-ordered loves for what
ought to be loved are squashed in the name of individual freedom. Modern states thus enforce what Pope Benedict called a dictatorship of relativism.
In an essay on Aristotle’s view of how friendship encourages the growth of moral excellence, philosopher Robert Sokolowski provides a helpful summary of how friendships form:
We first act with others in regard to more mundane, ordinary tasks: we work with someone in an office or factory, we play golf with someone, we attend classes together. Such friendships may be useful and pleasant and as such they are more under our control. Then, gradually, we realize that we and the other person can deal not only with such ‘superficial’ things, but that we begin to ‘face life together.’ We begin to cope with the deeper contingencies and situations that arise in life. We begin to deal with the kinds of things that our moral virtues (our courage, temperance, generosity, justice) are concerned with. We find that we can deliberate and choose with the other person in regard to the obligations, difficulties, and projects that define us as human beings and not just as employees or consumers. A ‘hand in glove’ cooperation becomes possible that can arise for us with only a few people in a lifetime. The kind of reciprocal trust, disclosure, and benevolence that constitutes a noble friendship gradually takes shape.
Aristotle argued that friends so bonded could assist each other to gain self-knowledge and thus to become intellectually and morally virtuous. Like Plato, Aristotle argued that this process of stimulating intellectual and moral virtues primarily takes the form of conversation, of speaking with one another, of communication. John Von Heyking writes that “This vision of friendship informs Aristotle’s understanding of politics. The aim of politics is living well in a polity governed by justice, which justice is practiced by citizens in prohairetic [or virtue-forming] friendship. Friendship and politics are mutually dependent.” Life in the larger community requires virtuous citizens, whose affections have been trained to love the Good within friendships. And the polity was committed for protecting space within the network of social institutions in which such friendships could thrive.
Let me insert somewhat parenthetically a recommendation of a wonderful book by Josef Pieper called
Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, which contains a short essay on the dangers of speech that is uttered for the sake of obtaining power rather than for orienting us properly to reality. The essay is an analysis of Plato’s critique of sophistry, and much of what Pieper discusses concerns protecting the health of conversation and thus has great relevance to the topic of friendship. I’ll mention more about this tomorrow, but for now share one short paragraph. Pieper writes:
[W]ord and language form the medium that sustains the common existence of the human spirit as such. The reality of the word in eminent ways makes existential interaction happen. And so, if the word becomes corrupted, human existence itself will not remain unaffected and untainted.
The well-being of communities no less than the vitality of friendships depends on healthy, honest, non-manipulative language. Unfortunately, the rhetorical landscape we live in today does little to instruct us in the use of language that nurtures perception of the truth about things, including the truth about ourselves. And so our relationships are less likely to be the schools of virtue they could be.
Robert Sokolowski nicely summarizes Aristotle’s insight concerning how friendships can become schools of virtue, an insight that is developed later by Augustine and Aquinas.
Perfect friendship, friendship of the highest kind, requires that each of the friends wishes and performs the good of the other friend. He wills the good of his friend; that is, he takes the good of the friend as his own good. When I act with and for a friend, I act in such a way that what is good for the friend, as such, is wished for and done as my own good. His good, as good for him, has become my good, and he acts in the same manner toward me. The good each of us seeks is not just our own individual good but the good in common and the good for the other. If my friend and I are accomplishing something as friends, I am not just trying to do something that benefits me; I am trying to do something that benefits him as well, and I do it precisely as benefiting him. Its being good for him has become good for me. I have enlarged my sense of what is good for me. I wish not only things that benefit me individually, but also things that benefit others (my friends), and I wish those things precisely as benefiting them. This expansion of my desire for the good, this ‘intersubjectivizing’ of the good by me, means that I have become more virtuous, more human, more perfect as an agent.
Of course, Aristotle assumed that the Good was an objective reality. What is good for my friend isn’t merely a subjective preference of his or mine or ours, just as, rightly understood, the common good for a community does not consist in maximizing the capacity for each individual to pursue his or her own idiosyncratic understanding of “what’s good for me.” For Aristotle, what is good for my friend is a
particularized expression of the transcendent Good.
When Christian thinkers took up the idea of friendship and the relationship of these schools of virtue to the life of political communities, they enlarged the scope and consequences of such shared life in light of the eschatological promise of the Church, the City of God. As Oliver O’Donovan notes, “Christian moral reason differed from antique moral reason in understanding community not as the
context for practical satisfaction, but as the essential
content of it. It achieved its overcoming of the polis, in other words, not by elevating the individual subject over the community, but by accepting community in a commanding position among the moral purposes of agency, a change made possible by the re-foundation of community in Christ.” In other words, the life of the Church was not simply the
setting for moral growth, it was recognized as the
goal of moral growth. Becoming perfected together—united by one Lord in one faith and one hope as the Bride of Christ together—this is the Good toward which all other goods aim. Friendship and politics are thus both elevated and diminished: diminished because they are mere hints of the greatest good that is to come, elevated because—as was true for John the Baptist — even to be a herald of something so glorious is an awesomely high calling. And so Aquinas could say “[A]mong all worldly things there is nothing which seems worthy to be preferred to friendship.”
But if Aquinas could say it, why can’t we?
Early in the chapter on Friendship in
The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis observes that, in modern society, Friendship has come to be regarded “as something quite marginal; not a main course in life’s banquet; a diversion; something that fills up the chinks of one’s time.” The other two of the first three loves Lewis discusses—Affection and Eros—still get a lot of recognition and attention. But, he claimed, “very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value [to Affection or Eros] or even a love at all. I cannot remember that any poem since [Tennyson’s]
In Memoriam, or any novel, has celebrated it. Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, have innumerable counterparts in modern literature: David and Jonathan, Pylades and Orestes, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amile, have not. To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and family a man needs a few ‘friends.’ But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as ‘friendships,’ show clearly there talking about what they are talking about has very little to do with that
Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that
Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book.”
Lewis then goes on to speculate about why Friendship has been demoted or trivialized. His first suggestion is that few people experience real friendship, so few people value it. Furthermore, we can live without friendship: “Without Eros none of us would have been begotten and without Affection none of us would have been reared; but we can live and breed without Friendship.”
Lewis observed that most modern people assume that the most significant aspects of human life are those which (as Lewis phrases it) can produce certificates of an animal origin and of survival value. Friendship cannot be so certified, and so is regarded as not fundamental to human being. Friendship is thus not seen to be as
natural as Eros or Affection.
The
collectivist tendency in modern societies is also, according to Lewis, a factor in the emoting of the significance of Friendship, since in Friendship true individuality (but not individualism) is valued. And finally, he writes, “Some forms of democratic sentiment are naturally hostile to it because it is selective and an affair of the few.” Friendship seems elitist or exclusive in an age of egalitarian inclusiveness.
Lewis then claims that Friendship is treated with such dismissive or suspicious prejudice in modern culture that many people assume “that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual,” a form of Eros not recognized. Modern people can’t imagine an intense and intimate love between two men or between two women that doesn’t reveal or conceal a fundamentally sexual attraction. And he spends several pages deconstructing that claim.
When I re-read this book recently, I was surprised that although Lewis commented on the modern trivialization of friendship, he did not mention what I think is the most remarkable aspect of that trivialization: the near-complete ignoring of friendship in modern political theory. Although he mentions Aristotle and Cicero as champions of the virtue of friendship, he neglects to mention that in both instances—and in Antiquity generally—friendship was regarded as a
public more than a
private matter.
In a recent anthology on friendship and politics, John Von Heyking says that “Throughout the greater part of the history of political philosophy, friendship has occupied a central place in the conversation. If we draw on conventional historical distinctions, friendship perennially figured as the sine qua non of discussions among ancient and medieval political thinkers regarding good political order and the good human life.”
Horst Hutter, in his 1978 book
Politics as Friendship, demonstrates that “Western political speculation finds its origin in a system of thought in which the idea of friendship is the major principle in terms of which political theory and practice are described, explained, and analyzed.” And writing on the place of friendship in the political theology of the Reformers, Thomas Heilke—until recently a professor of political science at the University of Kansas—exclaims that in the ancient world, long before Aristotle formalized a theory of friendship, it was universally portrayed as a vital part of civic life, and therefore a central concern when reflecting on the dynamics of human life together. He concludes that “there is no instance in any treatment of [the] story of friendship in a purely private matter. None. In all cases, from the myth of Gilgamesh to the epics of Homer, through the poems of Theognis [6th Century B.C.], to the tragedies of Sophocles and all points between, friendship always has public, political connotations and implications.”
Hans-Georg Gadamer once quipped that Aristotle deals with justice in a single book, but friendship fills
two books in his
Ethics, while friendship receives no more than a single page’s discussion in Kant.
Lewis was right to see a general neglect of Friendship in modern thinking. Reading the Friendship chapter in The
Four Loves certainly conveys how this neglect has unfortunate consequences for personal life. But the consequences of this neglect within modern
politics is not, I think, adequately recognized. One of the principal factors in the decline of importance given to friendship acknowledged by Lewis is that modern political and social theory banished friendship to private precincts where it would have no public significance. The modern understanding of what a society is and what the aims of political authority are—indeed, what human persons are imagined to be—no longer require the capacities that are nurtured by friendship.
In the best premodern thought about politics, there was no wall of separation between public and private, between material and spiritual, between politics and morality. The virtues and vices of persons were not assumed to be “their own business” and of no public consequence. Political communities were bodies, and the health of the body was tied to the health of its members.
Modern politics claims to separate public from private, envisioning government as a neutral, amoral machine that impersonally directs shared life in a way that maximizes the freedom of individuals to live however they want to. Government serves to protect us
from one another, since persons are assumed to be essentially self-interested and in competition with one another.
But while public life is supposed to be insulated from the concerns of private life, the barrier between them seems to provide one-way blockage; the understanding of human nature and freedom that is presupposed in public life doesn’t remain restricted in the public sphere, and has come to inform the imaginations of many in their private lives. Liberalism doesn’t just marginalize friendship, claiming indifference to its virtues and resource. Liberalism reconfigures friendship, indeed it redefines (formally or informally) the logic of
all relationships, remaking them in its own image. The Supreme Court’s recent redefinition of marriage was the most dramatic instance of such a totalizing project.
As John Von Heyking observes, “not only have the bonds of friendship been eviscerated, the bonds between individuals generally have taken on a completely different hue. We commonly characterize the individual’s relationship with others in terms of the contract. In fact, the liberal principle that society is grounded in a contract reaches into other areas of life to the point that we regard all our relationships in similar terms. We come to our private relationships, our loves and friendships, with the same desire to get a good bargain as we do when we purchase a car or computer. We network, we schmooze, and we realize the ‘autonomous self,’ the ideal to which much of contemporary liberalism seeks.”
It may be that the increasingly pornographic character of contemporary life—the sense of desperation for erotic connection and fulfillment which demands the government’s help in eliminating barriers to such projects—is a response to the lonely dissatisfaction felt by ever more fully autonomous selves.
Theologian David L. Schindler introduced his recent collection of essays,
Ordering Love, with the assertion that “modern culture marginalizes love. The logical tendency of modernity, in its dominant liberal form, is to look on love as at best a matter of piety or good will, and not as the very stuff that makes our lives and the things of the world real, the basic order of our lives and of all things.” The fracturing mentioned in the title of this seminar is not simply a byproduct of sociological changes ushered in by political and technological developments. Fragmentation and division are an effect of the Fall, but they are reinforced and in a sense celebrated by a view of the world that marginalizes love and hence trivializes friendship.
The loss of concern for friendship in thinking about politics—about the ordering of public life—is an important diagnostic symptom of the sources of the social and political confusion that is increasingly evident not only in the U.S. but in the modern West in general. Oliver O’Donovan has commented that the crisis of modern politics—which is producing numerous angry backlash movements—is often described as an expression of anger on the part of people who feel excluded. But in fact, it is an expression of a deeper discontent, of a sense that modern politics has come to be perceived as completely morally unintelligible. Citizens perceive at some level that political institutions in their fundamental configuration are not doing justice to their humanity. But most citizens lack an adequate well-articulated description of their humanity to recognize the true, systemic failure of modern politics. Because we are trained to think in individualistic terms, we lack a vocabulary to express how politics has become corrupted by a loss of vision for the good of communities.
In his 1996 book,
The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the Roots of Political Theology, O’Donovan said that “Christians believe that community is good for individuals; but they do not believe society exists solely to serve individuals’ private purposes. Social existence could never be accounted for as an instrument for private purposes, since private purposes have no intelligibility apart from social existence.” I think O’Donovan here is implying that something is
intelligible if it can be described, explained, or defended within some context. But according to modern political thought, societies are constructed from detached pre-social individuals. “Shorn of all prior contexts, natural or social, which could make him intelligible, [the individual assumed by liberalism] makes his appearance as a naked will, a pure originator.” A
pure originator: not a person striving to live in accord with a given order of good, but one who asserts arbitrarily what the good is for him.
O’Donovan goes on to observe that “Once society is thought of as an agreement [that is, a social contract] between competing wills, the cloud of competition never lifts from it.” Moreover, “Because the normal content of political communication . . . has come to be the conflict of competing wills, speech has lost its orientation to deliberation on the common good and has come to serve the assertion of competing interests.”
I’m reminded here of a quip in Alasdair MacIntyre’s
After Virtue. MacIntyre points out that modern political communities have eliminated the possibility of being “a shared understanding both of the good for man and of the good of that community [in which] individuals identify their primary interests with reference to those goods.” As a result, “[M]odern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.”
Modern liberalism tells us that we are beings whose nature and dignity are honored—beings who will be
happy—when we are entirely free from any constrictions in the pursuit of our desires. We will be happy when we get to define what happiness is on our own terms. If we assume this, if in our bones we believe this to be true, and we find that we are not happy, then we assume that we just aren’t free enough. And government is given the task to expand further our freedom.
But what if happiness depends on submitting to an understanding of happiness that we do
not invent? What if we can only be free when we honor an understanding of freedom rooted in certain truths about our nature, an understanding shared by and received from our community? What if our true freedom is not a freedom
from others, but a freedom fulfilled
through others in self-giving, reciprocal relationships?
Friendship has disappeared from political theories because those theories presuppose an individualistic conception of freedom. As John Von Heyking notes, “whereas liberalism and its offspring liberal democracy promise the individual liberty, the cost of this liberty is often isolation. Loneliness, or as Joshua Mitchell refers to it, ‘brooding withdrawal,’ therefore becomes one of the central experiences people have as liberal democratic citizens. This phenomenon is often recognized and painfully experienced by immigrants and visitors from outside North America and Europe, especially Muslims.”
In his more recent book,
Finding and Seeking, Oliver O’Donovan points out that “If talk of freedom is to have substance, it must imagine how it can be exercised in a sustainable social order. . . . Freedom requires goals; it needs to fulfill itself in and through fulfilling them. . . . There must be a further horizon to freedom, something which freedom to pursue these goals is itself freedom ‘for.’ That further horizon is social. . . . Individual freedom shrinks if it lacks the capacity to imagine itself part of a wider common agency. It must look for the kingdom of God.”
In referencing the Kingdom of God here, O’Donovan introduces a perspective that is present in all of his work in theological ethics: We can’t think Christianly about ethics, about the moral life, without thinking eschatologically. What makes Christian ethics
Christian is the fact of the Resurrection, the fact that the moral order of Creation has been confirmed, restored, and set on a path of fulfillment by Christ’s being raised from the dead. We ought not speak about anything—including friendship or politics—without acknowledging how the fact of the Resurrection has put history on a path of glorious fulfillment. We know something about the ends of history and the ends of human life that the pre-Christian Ancients could not know. We know that the true meaning of Freedom, the true meaning of our humanity and of human communities, is revealed in the announcement of the coming of God’s rule, a rule that is actualized in the community of friends we call the Church. The purposes of God
for history and
in the history between the comings is communal, it is a new social reality ordered by love. As O’Donovan writes in his most recent book,
Entering into Rest, “Community alone can tell us of the universal order yet to arrive.”
We human beings are not best understood as bearers of rights, sovereign choosers whose freedom requires an expansion of choices. We are rather grateful recipients whose freedom is ordered and actuated by love, is be known in relationship, in imitation of the love exchanged within the Trinity.
In
The Desire of the Nations O’Donovan wrote that “Freedom . . . is not conceived primarily as an assertion of individuality, whether positively, in terms of individual creativity and impulse, or negatively, in terms of ‘rights’, which is to say immunities from harm. It is a social reality, a new disposition of society around its supreme Lord which sets it loose from its traditional lords.”
In conclusion, I will confess that my interest in Christian political theology is relatively new, and was energized significantly as we lived through the surreal election year of 2016. I began asking myself: “Is what we’re living through a sign of the
failure of our political structures, or is it the logical outcome of a system with critical design flaws? I have come to believe that a more hopeful future requires the radical revision of some basic beliefs about public life: about the relationship between state and society, about the purposes of government, and about how the ordering of temporal affairs accounts for the full reality of what we are as human persons. These and other relevant questions are finally theological questions, even if they aren’t always acknowledged as such.
A number of thinkers more experienced and wiser than I have suggested that we have a very hard time imagining radically different paradigms for political life. I think that what we need to jumpstart our imaginations is a renewed understanding of and—more importantly—the practice of friendship. As John Milbank has noted, “the main reality of all human association, including political association is . . . to do with friendship, as both Plato and Aristotle taught; it is to do with benevolent generosity as they taught in common with Confucius in the Far East. It is to do with a reciprocal sharing of all that is good. Only secondarily is it about organising the distribution of material goods and about designing laws which are always somewhat arbitrary, yet should reflect as far as possible non-arbitrary justice.”
If Western societies are to recover the possibility of ordering public life around a common understanding of the good, of being real communities anticipating the Heavenly Community, I think it can only happen as friendships are formed and flourish, bearing witness to the priority and ultimacy of love in human life. I hope that this Symposium serves to encourage and energize such friendships.
*Originally presented by Ken Myers, founder and producer of Mars Hill Audio, in 2018 at the 8th annual Eighth Day Symposium at St. George Orthodox Christian Cathedral in Wichita, KS.
