Friends

Some reflections on friendship - from the book, FRIENDSHIP And the Body of Christ, by Peter Atkinson. — from a series of lectures given in the UK, in Chichester Cathedral.

How does one discern or evaluage appropriate friendship relationships between a man and a woman – what is good, grace and gift from God? While celebrating, honouring and being deeply in love with respective spouses, can a man and woman also have a friendship relationship that can grow deep and strong, as gift and enhancement of their lives in to Christ?

This is largely unexplored territory today, both in Church and society. In society because one just takes one to bed if one can get away with it, and one without restraint or morals usually can. In church, it’s considered dangerous and therefore potentially dangerous. 'Slippery slope' theology means one cannot explore even legitimate possibilities for (perhaps often-times false) fear of sinning against God and our neighbour (our own spouse and the spouse of the other).

While admitting this can be dangerous territory, sometimes perhaps not so much because of physical intimacy -- due to separation of many miles, but because of an emotional intimacy that could be pure fantasy and wrong. I’m trying to explore what is and what could be - and how to go about it, Christianly, sanely, with mutual respect, patience, acceptance and hope.

From the Preface

As modern adults we tend to class friendship as part of our ‘private’ lives, together with our leisure and our religion. Christians of earlier centuries lived in a different culture, in which the private and public spheres were less demarcated, and friendship was understood both to belong to the structure of society and to be a proper subject for spiritual reflection.

They knew that friendship was sanctified by the example of Christ, and that in his grace two people could discover a deep ‘spiritual friendship’ which was sometimes described in sacramental terms.

Such friendships might exist between men, between women, or between a man and a woman. It was sometimes expressed in passionate language and intimate behaviour, which our more private culture would find surprising.

From Chapter I – I Have Called You Friends

The lamps are lit in the upper room, but the air is fraught with foreboding. Jesus and his disciples are at their last supper together. he has worried them by taking the servant’s part and washing their feet, and confused them by saying that they cannot follow where he is going. his speech is riddling, as it often is. None of them doubts that the opposition is mustering somewhere near. Judas has just vanished into the night. it is in this tense atmosphere that Jesus turns to them and says — This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

. . .Upon these confused and frightened disciples, uncertain of their role and doubtful of what Jesus has in mind, he confers the privilege that Scripture ascribed only to Abraham and Moses: of being the friends of God.

St. John wrote in Greek; and the Greek word for friend is philos, with its accompanying abstract noun philia (friendship) and very phileo (to love as friend). St. John also uses another set of words, the verb agapao and the noun agape, which also means ‘love.’ In some contexts it may be possible to sense a difference between these two sets of words; C.S. Lewis drew a sharp distinction between them in his book The Four Loves. There he distinguished philia, the ordinary Greek word for friendship from agape, the gracious, disinterested love that God reveals to us in Christ, the love that St. Paul celebrates in 1 Cor. 13. In the Johannine writings, however, it is hard to distinguish them. There are passages where the words are clearly used interchangeably. St. John does not have a special word for the love or friendship of God; he presses into service the ordinary categories of human friendship.

St. John, as distinct from the other gospel writers, directs our attention to the way Jesus calls his disciples and forms them into a group of friends. He seems to close the shutters and draw the curtains and concentrate on the love shown within the group of disciples. "Love one another," Jesus says to them, "as I have loved you." The group of disciples is where the ‘love of God’ is put into practice; and it is the love of God celebrated within the close-knit circle of disciples that authenticates for the fourth evangelist the truth of Christianity.

The miracle of grace, as John tells it, is not so much the miracle of the Good Samaritan, who sacrificially tends the ancestral enemy, but the miracle of friendship within a group of people under pressure to break and run. St. Luke tells the story of the ‘wideness of God’s mercy’ that reaches harlot and Pharisee, thief and tax-collector. St. John, however, tells the complimentary story of the depth of God’s mercy that can forge such bonds of love and loyalty within the group that they are prepared even to lay down their lives for one another.

And so St. John dramatizes his Gospel as the story of a group of friends. He is interested, not only in how the disciples are related to Jesus, but how they relate to each other. In the Fourth Gospel the disciples converse with each other, which they don’t by and large, in the other Gospels.

Atkinson talks about Judas the friend who betrayed Jesus . . . He talks further about the ‘beloved disciple’ who was close to Jesus breast. Even in the twelve there were three – Peter, James and John – who were ‘closer’ to Jesus as friends of his, and likely St. John who comes down to us as ‘the disciples that Jesus loved.’

He talks about Mary Magdalene out of whom Jesus had cast 7 evil spirits . . . She also appears among the disciples gathered near the cross, and later in the privileged role of the first disciples to see the risen Lord. We can tell from the way that St. John tells his story that Mary had some deep and particular personal devotion to Jesus; she alone takes the trouble and the risk to linger near his grave. And when she meets him and mistakes him for the gardener and then realizes who he is, she longs to embrace him. The Lord’s reply is ‘Do not touch me (cling to me).’ He goes on – ‘for I have not yet ascended to my Father.’ That echoes his words at the last supper: "If I do not go away, the Holy Spirit will not come to you." The Lord must withdraw his bodily presence in order that his spiritual presence may be with them. So Jesus is not recoiling from Mary; he is gently explaingin that she cannot cling to his bodily presence any more. . . .
She too is among those whom he has called to be his friends.

Friendship in classical literature was a rare, noble and refined quality. Yet John not only establishes friendship as a central theological issue and makes it a principle metaphor for expressing the relationship of redeemed humanity with God; he depicts this ‘noble’ gift of friendship as being conferred upon a circle of Galilean fishermen and tax-collectors. And this both sanctifies ‘ordinary’ human friendship and transforms it. If the ‘ordinary’ friendship of two people can serve as abn image of the relationship of God and humankind, then that ‘ordinary’ friendship is a very extraordinary things indeed, and that ‘ordinary’ friendship has potentialities that those two ‘ordinary’ people may not have dreamt of. Even in its ‘ordinary’ state, there is something godlike about it.

Neither race, nor sexuality, nor the conventions of human society, says St. John, determine the way we live out our friendship with God and, in him, with one another. And therein like a gift, an opportunity and a challenge.

From Chapter 4 – St. Augustine to St. Aelred: a developing tradition

St. Anselm introduced a new and different tone. His ‘letters of friendship’ are extravagant in the extreme and are, as we would say, romantic. Writing to a pupil he says: "If I were to describe the passion of our mutual love, I fear I should seem to those who do not know the truth to exaggerate. But you know how great is the affection we have experienced – eye to eye, kiss for kiss, embrace for embrace. I experience it all the more now when you, in whom I have had so much pleasure, are irretrievably separated from me."

Such letters suggest a world of emotional intensity nearer to that of 12th century romantic love than to traditional monastic friendship. But if these sound to us like love letters, we must bear in mind that Anselm addressed many of his friends in just such extravagant terms.

Anselm not only provided the language of friendship with a new tone; he gave it a new theological purpose. The notion of a friend as another ‘self,’ an alter ego, one apart from whom one might die, is part of the classical rhetoric of friendship.

The joint soul created by a fusion of common profession (interests, calling, passions, etc.) Is not just a poetic image; it is a spiritual entity in the scale of being. The fusion of souls in friendship makes possible the perfect substitution of one for another, which on a cosmic scale dominated Anselm’s doctrine of the Atonement (where Jesus’ vicarious and substitutionary death on our behalf is seen as efficacious and satisfactory in meeting God’s righteous demands as revealed in His Law.)

When Anselm writes of friendship, he is speaking the language of heaven.

From Chapter 5 – Sworn Friendships

Drawing upon the earlier Christian ideas of sponsorship and friendships that ‘stood up’ for new converts and the idea of ‘godparents . . . ‘ Atkinson writes — What every Christian received at the font was, in fact, a new set of friendships, spiritually constituted. It is clear that the spiritual kinship established at the font was one of a range of recognized and formal relationships available to the medieval Christian, which historians now sometimes classify as ‘ritual friendships.’ The easy intimacy of the relationship is shown by the way the word ‘godsip’ (spiritual relative) became ‘gossip.’ It was part of the cement of medieval society.

So there is a tradition of publicly acknowledged and formally committed relationship in medieval society. Two men, for example (without being homosexuals) could swear lifelong friendship or ‘brotherhood’ to each other. They might become formally ‘god-brothers’ and they could be referred to as ‘wedded’ (ie. pledged). Such relationships were sanctioned by the church where such friendships could be formalized or sanctified before God and the community.

For example, William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe who were ‘sworn brothers’ (not natural brothers) who in 1391 were on active service in Constantinople. Clanvowe died, and a few days later, overcome by grief Neville followed him. The monks of Westminster Abbey in their chronicle placidly (ie. without raised eyebrows) recorded their deaths, observing that the death of the one caused the other (‘for whom his love was no less than for himself.’).
Atkinson gives numerous examples of such friendships . . .stating that both the Catholic Church of the West and the Orthodox Churches of East had liturgical forms for the ‘making of brothers.’
Again (without homosexuality being the issue) there is evidence of women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘plighting their troth’ to each other, exchanging rings and sealing their friendship with a joint reception of holy communion.

He points out too that – while not being sexual, homosexual or otherwise, kissing, embracing or the writing of letters of ardent and passionate love between two men did not convey the meanings in the 11th century that they might for us. The kiss, for example, was an important ceremony in both religious and secular life, and an act of the utmost significance. King Henry II refused the kiss of peace to Thomas a Becket, which meant their quarrel must continue to its catastrophic end (e.g. Murder in the Cathedral). Lines were drawn in different places than where our society would draw them today.

Atkinson concludes: If we approach the study of sworn friendships in the past by comparing and contrasting them with marriage today, then we shall misread them. Friendship and marriage — and spiritual kinships such as those of godparent and godchild – all belonged to a very rich Christian society in which people could enter into a variety of recognized relationships with one another. "Friendships" was a virtue widely recognized and deeply rooted in that society, celebrated by Christian and classical authors alike. It was sufficiently distinct to hold its own against relationships derived from sex and birth. The assumption that ‘friendship’ either means sex, or else must be demoted (as we do today in church and society) to ‘just friends’ or ‘just friendship’ is a very modern (and singularly blinkered) point of view.

From Chapter 6 — Men and Women

Beloved, I can write to you only very hurriedly; yet I had to try to write you something, however brief, in the hope of giving you if I can a little joy. You are so deeply engraven on my heart that the more I realize how truly you love me from the depths of my soul, the more incapable I am of forgetting you and the more constantly you are in my thoughts; for love moves me deeply and makes my love for you burn more strongly.

These lines occur in a letter written by the second Master of the Order of Preachers and successor of St. Dominic, Jordan of Saxony, in the spring of 1228, to Diana d’Andalo. Contemporaries remembered Diana as beautiful, charming and intelligent; she became one of the first Dominican sisters, and the lifelong friend of Jordan.

His letters to her, written between 1222 and 1236, of which 50 have survived, show that the language of ardent affection, which we have already encountered in St. Anselm, both persisted and readily transferred itself to the friendship of a man and a woman.
Of course, their shared vocation to chastity was never in doubt. Nonetheless, the intimate tone of Jordan’s letters is remarkable, and evidently caused no embarrassment to the brothers of the order who carefully assembled them after his death.

Aristotle spoke of marriage as a kind of friendship. St. Thomas Aquinas builds on this and puts marriage into Aristotle’s categories of friendship: the useful, the pleasurable and the virtuous.
His doctrine that friendship is a more fundamental category than marriage opens the way to a positive evaluation of the friendship between men and women. For if friendship is the fundamental category, then non-marital friendships between men and women are not in some way failed or half-hearted approximations to marriage; they are relationships that stand in their own right and have their own integrity.

St. Francis de Sales wrote of ‘virtuous friendships.’ He had a famous friendship with an aristocratic widow, who took a vow of chastity and placed herself under his direction. Together they founded the Visitandines, a contemplative order for women.

He wrote that ‘virtuous friendships’ can be enjoyed with family, relatives, benefactors, neighbours and there is not need to renounce any of them (ie in becoming a monk or a nun); but there is room for more selective friendships too. Are these a problem? "Many will say perhaps that we ought not to have any kind of particular affection and friendship, inasmuch as it occupies the heart, distracts the spirit, and produces jealous." While he conceded that there may be a danger in particular friendships in the context of a monastery, such considerations do not apply to those who are ‘in the world;’ "for by means of this they encourage one another, they help one another, they stir up one another to good works." ‘Sacred friendship’ then has a freedom and candour about it, language which is simple and frank; "it has only simple and modest eyes, free and frank caresses;" – "it has its eyes wide open and does not hide itself."

Men and women may, of course, deceive themselves that their friendships are innocent when they are not. St. Francis is clear about the need for self-discipline and self-knowledge. When he talks about friendships that have turned ‘carnal’ it is clear that he means friendship between the sexes; but he does not for that reason reject them. They could have remained innocent and sacred. He points out that particular friendships - and friendships between the sexes – are rooted in the life and example of the Lord.

We could not deny that our Lord loved with a gentler and more special friendship, St John, Lazarus, Martha, Magdalen, for the Scripture bears witness to it . . .St. Augustine bears witness that St. Ambrose had a unique love for St. Monica, because of the rare virtues which he saw in her; and that she had a mutual affections for him . . .

Puritanism was less hospital to the idea that friendship might exist both between the sexes and outside of marriage. At once more positive about sex, mor pragmatic about marriage (and divorce), and more suspicious of celibacy, the Puritans sought to make of marriage the only proper context for male-female friendship. The 17th century Anglicans, on the other hand, read
St. Francis de Sales and accepted his views . . .

De Sales’ work was known to Jeremy Taylor whose own ‘Discourses on the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship’ dealt specifically with friendships between the sexes and was addressed to his lifelong friend, the poet Katharine Phillips.

John Evelyn (1620 - 1706) a diarist, though not as famous as his contemporary Pepys, was throughout his life a Royalist and a devout Anglican, a man of wide interests, and one who played a part in the foundation of the Royal Society. In the troubled years of the Civil Wars, at the Paris home of a friend, he met and married the friend’s daughter, Mary, who bore him children and outlived his long life by three years. In 1669, he met the young Margaret Blagge, a member of the Queen Mother’s household. Witty and attractive, Margaret could hold her own at court; and she combined this with a very serious Anglican piety. In 1675 she married a fellow courtier, Sidney Godophin, and died in childbirth in 1678.

From 1665 until her death, she and John Evelyn were friends. The intellectual climate of the time was hospitable to Platonist ideas, and ‘friendship’ naturally figured as a matter of discussion and practical experience in the circles in which Evelyn moved. His love for Margaret, while both were married to another, was ardent. They even agreed together to a formal pact of friendship - something that was not seen at the time as jeopardizing their respective marriages in any way.

They conversed together regularly, each serving at times as the other’s spiritual director. Evelyn wrote a ‘Life of Margaret’ after her death (he must have been devastated). It was published and became a best-seller.

One writer commenting on it, say: Passionate friendships between men and women who were unconnected by marriage or kinship, centred in shared religious practice, were and are a feature of many sects and periods of Christianity. . . . There is no need for us to be unduly knowing or condescending about these. Dr. Sales wrote quite frankly of ‘the similarity that exists between our spiritual emotions and our physical emotions.’ The aspect of sublimated sexuality was well understood, and indeed values, by the participants, who never discounted the unruly and subversive nature of sexual passion. We may now take it for granted that passionate sexual love demands physical expression, whatever the consequences if it should arise outside accepted social norms or in competition with other claims, but we may need reminding that this has not always been seen as the only or the best solution. It is clear enough . . . that at one level Evelyn was ‘in love’ with Margaret Blagge and knew that he was. The crucial issue was how he dealt with it.’

Margaret was a spirited person who made her own decisions and was far from being under Evelyn’s control, despite all his plans for her spiritual welfare. The two other main characters in the drama, the respective other spouses, remain partly but not wholly in the background; we have less opportunity to see at close hand what the ‘holy friendship’ of their respective spouses meant to them.

That the friendship was not a sexual and physical relationship in disguise seems clear enough; but the point at which a friendship begins to trespass emotionally on the fidelity of marriage is harder to determine. (danger point)

Conclusion

Perhaps the clear distinction between agape, philia and eros, so familiar to readers of C.S. Lewis’ The Four Loves cannot be maintained so sharply. St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, classified married love a sort of friendship, and certainly the language of friendship is present in the rites of marriage. But if the Puritans tried to confine friendship between men and women within the bounds of marriage, Christian experience told otherwise.

Men made friends with men, and women with women, and women with men. The friendships of men and women did not have to be in marriage and the more catholic part of the Christian tradition encouraged a high and sacramental view of such relationships.

We conclude then that in the Christian tradition there is a degree of overlapping ground between married love and the love of friends.