Friendship: The Heart of being Human

Book Review (Victor Lee Austin)

"Friendship" is the motto of my primary (elementary) school. No aspirational Latin, just the idea of friendship for 5-12 year olds. I’m not sure that had any impact, but it’s a topic I return to frequently. What is the nature of friendship, how do friendships work, how should they, what makes a good friend and what makes me a good friend? I think my interest in this topic is partly because I have not seen much quality reflection on these questions in theological literature; partly, because I would not say I have enjoyed that many or such good friends in my life - I struggle with friendships that have faded with time, I have looked with envy at the friendships others have enjoyed, and often I have wondered if the deficiencies I have felt in the friendships of my life is ultimately a reflection of me - am I the common thread, the cause?

This book tackles the question of friendship in a way almost perfectly suited to my tastes - it combines a look at classical philosophy (Cicero, Plato, Aristotle), with theological, pastoral, and personal wisdom and reflection.

Let's combine that with Austin's provocative thesis. Austin introduces the book by reflecting on his own marriage - married soon after college, his wife was diagnosed with cancer after 15 years, and lived another 15 or so. And so our author finds himself faced with the reality of being a widower; this sets the stage for the initial reflection and thesis - that the church has spent so much time thinking and arguing about marriage, and yet marriage is an institution bound by death. Friendship, however, is not.

heaven is people living together as friends—friends with each other, friends with God.

The characteristic activity of a human being is to live in friendship with others. p10

Let me take us sideways with a comment from Oliver O'Donovan : “humanity in the presence of God will know a community in which the fidelity of love which marriage makes possible will be extended beyond the limits of marriage.” (O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 70.)

Marriage is a unique kind of relationship because of its unique fidelity, and in this life is bounded by two features - it is a union of two people only, and it ends in death. Friendship is a general relationship that is between two people but not two people only, and it is not bounded by death.

So let's talk a long walk with this book, because it's surprising and engaging and thought-provoking, and it will take a few turns that are worth the ride.

Beginning with Antiquity

Starting with the Ancients, Austin picks on Aristotle first:

according to Aristotle’s teaching, friendship is, or should be, of our entire life the central concern. p 16

Why? Because ethics is about character and the kinds of people we are, and we love our friends either for what is pleasant, what is useful, or what is good in itself. It is this last category that makes for truest friendship, and to quote Aristotle again, "“For a human being the pleasantest thing is another human being.” p20. True and good friends delight in the other as in themselves, because they delight in what is Good.

For Aristotle, too, friendships must (if they are to live up to the name) be enduring, through hardships; and they must be between equals. This is an important point to which we shall return.

summing up: a reciprocal love between two virtuous people who are fundamentally equal that is based in their human goodness and not in their usefulness to each other or in their pleasantness to each other. p22

And yet, for Aristotle, God is self-sufficient and has no friends. Here our philosopher has made a wrong turn, and it is one we must plumb. If God is distant from the universe, can he be friends with it? Austin suggests that the problem is more acute for Christians - the Creator / Creation divide is a vast gulf, and what sense would it be to speak of friendship with a being outside the universe of being?

This turns into a reflection on our second philosopher, Plato. Plato's dialogue Lysis is short, and apparently a failure. At the end Socrates and his interlocutors have totally failed to figure out what friendship is. But Austin's reading is that it is in fact in the activity itself that friendship is made possible. Friendship is a thing we do, and (part of it) is seeking the truth and seeking the good of the other.

The premise of Lysis is Socrates engaging Lysis and Menexenus, two adolescent boys, one of whom (Lysis) is besotted with Hippothales. This leads Plato/Socrates into a discussion of beauty. But it's fitting for us to pause for a moment and recognsie that for all the wisdom that Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero can give us on friendship, all of them write as elite free males who envisage friendship as only possible with others who are the same. And Plato writes of friendship and love in the context of ancient Greek pederasty, which is itself a complex topic. Those caveats should not escape our reflections.

To return to Lysis though, the encounter with Beauty evokes the desire to replicate Beauty in new beautiful things. That replication, Austin's reading of Plato suggests, is best done in an asexual friendship. This is one more thought we'll need to return to later.

Cicero's De Amicitia holds forth, inter alia, that friendship, at least in its best and truest forms, is "rare and exalted"; it is a limited good, built upon our human nature, arising from a love that finds and rejoices in the virtue of the other. And only friendship grounded in virtue is a friendship that can hope to endure unto death.

That accounts for the first third or so of the book. Austin then turns to theology, and there are all sorts of interesting moves he makes. He begins with some foundational things. Firstly, that

Jesus Christ, fully manifests the human to the human. p50

and so, in falling short of full humanity:

Sin is not something we add to ourselves and need to get rid of...Rather, sin actually is a defect, a falling short on our part of living up to our nature, a failure to be human in the full sense. We sinners, who live among sinners, never have seen in the flesh a totally real human being. The astonishing claim is that Jesus is the one, true, complete human being. p50

I think that this is not entirely true. Rather, I would say that there is indeed one sense in which sin is a 'thing' that is "added" to us; but the insight here is still good, sin is also, and perhaps more so, a failing, a defect, a lack. And to understand humanity qua humanity, we must look at Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, Jesus unites to himself our humanity, and so if we are going looking to understand humanity, and friendship, then in actual fact we are going to find it in Jesus.

Secondly, Austin turns us towards love, and God's love in particular. One thing he points out that you probably haven't thought about, is that love "is not something the Bible gets to quickly or easily". It's not until Gen 22 that you get the mention of love, and it's Abraham's love of Isaac. And the loves of Isaac and Jacob which follow are recipes for disaster. But "Nowhere in Genesis is love connected with God." (p52) "Only when we get to Deuteronomy do we find it said, finally, that God can and has loved people." p52

And then Austin asks the question - why this reticence to speak about God's love? Why is it only when we get to the giving of the law, that it speaks of human love for God? For Austin:

only in a context where God speaks to people is it possible for people to love God. The Scriptures seem to demonstrate that God must first speak to us before we can love him. p54

And this speaking, this conversation, is part and parcel of what makes love possible, makes friendship possible. Again provocatively, Austin writes, "You cannot love something that is fundamentally unequal to you." p54. At first glance, that doesn't seem right. Can I not love a child? An animal? A tree? Such loves are benevolent charity from the powerful to the weak, and they cannot overcome the inequality endemic to the relationship. For Nietzsche, God can only and ever always be in a master-slave relationship to us, and so he rejects God. The Scriptures make a grander claim - that God can be not only creator, but he does something profoundly strange and marvellous - he "He also somehow makes it possible for us to love him, and that is because he has loved us all along." p55

Read part 2 here.