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Friendship, The Forgotten Love

Friendship, The Forgotten Love

The Greeks famously recognized four forms of love: Storge, Eros, Agape, and Phileo.

Storge, or Affection, is the quietest form of love.  We see it in the quiet moments between old couples, parents and children snuggling, fondness for your dog, dear evening hours of illumination when you suddenly realize how very much you care for a dear companion or co-worker and how great a hole you would have in your life without the music of their voice, or their little jokes.

In Christian circles, Agape or Unconditional Love gets a lot of press for the simple reason that God is Agape, according to Scripture.

Not hasIs.  God is, in his very nature, pure self-donating love, the font of all other loves and indeed all other being in the universe.  The Christian life is about nothing other than becoming participants in that love, so it is natural that Christians would spend a lot of time thinking about it.

In secular thought, the 800-pound gorilla among the four loves is Eros.  The world rings with the songs and hymns of praise and laments over the glories and tragedies of Eros.  Eros is what we commonly call “Romantic Love”.  It includes, but is by no means limited to, sexual expression.  A person can be deeply in love with the Beloved and yet, for the sake of the Beloved, martyr himself for the good of the Beloved by letting that person marry another.  

But this is not, of course, what Eros seeks, merely what it will do if driven by necessity to self-sacrifice for the Beloved. If it has its druthers, Eros seeks union with the Beloved above all else.  It longs both to give itself solely to the Beloved and for exclusive possession of the Beloved in a unique relationship.  So a million wedding invitations have engraved on them, “My Beloved is mine and I am his.”  The world has sung the praises of Eros since the dawn of time and will continue to do so till the moon falls.

Because of our gigantic preoccupation with Eros and its consort, sex, we often tend to overlook or misinterpret the last of the four loves, Phileo or Friendship. Indeed, in our age, Eros has metastasized into the realm of Friendship in ways that do violence to it by insisting either that “Men and women cannot be friends” or by insisting that every same-sex Friendship is “really” sublimated homoeroticism.

I submit that robbing the world of Friendship in this way is deeply impoverishing and has led to the forgetting of Friendship as a real and unique form of human love. I submit further that human beings require the dimension of Friendship in their lives.  They require this relationship of love that is not about one another directly but is mediated to them through a mutual love of something else.

For that is what Friendship is: love that is mediated through a common love of something else.  Eros looks the Beloved in the face and desires the Beloved.  Friendship is born when two people stand side by side looking at something else in admiration and then turn and say, “You too?  I thought I was the only one!”  Because of this, Friendship is not limited, as Eros is, to a dyad of Lover and Beloved.  It welcomes into its circle of warmth a broad and diverse group of people, all of whom are bonded by their common love of something else.

What that something else may be can be virtually anything.  Circles of friends can form around anything from quilting to watching sports to chess clubs to shared experience of trauma in war to philosophy to gaming to hiking to books to the rest of the infinitude of human pursuits.  The commonality is that the love they share is about something else.  Groups of friends can be large and small, but though Friendship can be a pair of BFFs, Friendship tends to be richer and happier when it involves more than two people.

Friendship was so highly prized among the ancients that it was hailed by some as superior to Eros, precisely because it does not depend so much on the appetites of the body, which (non-Epicurean) philosophies tended to view with suspicion as prone to dragging the spirit down to earth.  These days we tend to view the ancient wariness of the body and its appetites (especially sexual appetites) as repressed.  But we still speak, even today, of our desire for relationships “without a lot of drama”.  It is this freedom from drama that the ancients appreciated about Friendship, because Friendship, unlike Eros, tends to lack the issues of jealousy that come with the exclusive demands of Eros.  Friends can be comfortable in the own skins around each other in ways that, while certainly not impossible with Eros, are often more difficult.  More than this, Friendship, because it can welcome a wide circle of people with a diversity of gifts, can be collaborative in rich and striking ways.

Accordingly, one of the remarkable aspects of Friendship is that it bears a curious analogous resemblance to Eros in this: it is fruitful.  Not (obviously) sexually fruitful as Eros is, but fruitful in many other ways.

Consider the Inklings, one of the great circles of friends of the 20th century.  As with all friendships, they were about something else, in this case, the shared love of language, myth, literature, and their sundry and diverse approaches to the Christian tradition.  One of the marks of Friendship is its appreciation for the real differences among friends.  Although there was much agreement among the different Inklings, there was also great diversity.  C.S. Lewis was, famously, a convert to Christianity and an Anglican.  J.R.R. Tolkien was a lifelong Catholic.  Charles Williams was Anglican with a taste for the esoteric Tolkien disliked.  Other members of the group who came and went disliked Tolkien’s work and would famously protest, “Oh no, not more [expletive] elves!”  Tolkien himself disliked Lewis’ Narnia books as too allegorical for his tastes.  Their meetings, held in the local pub in Oxford were raucous affairs in which no-holds-barred criticism was offered, arguments were cherished and savoured, and some of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century were midwifed to birth.  Without the encouragement of his friend Lewis, Tolkien might never have finished The Lord of the Rings.  Without the inspiration of Tolkien, the model of his hero Ransom, Lewis might never has written his Space Trilogy.

The world owes much to the fruitfulness of Friendship.  It was a group of friends who constituted the early Jesuits, for instance.  Their common vision created one of the most powerful evangelistic forces of the 16th century. 

Friendship among medieval scholars and their passion for exploring the workings of God’s creation is what founded the great universities of the High Middle Ages.

Two friends named John Lennon and Paul McCartney who loved rock and roll, the blues, and pop music started playing together in the late 1950s out of their shared love for this music and generated a musical legacy that still shows no signs of losing its potency.

It was the 17th Century Protestant movement that was literally known as the Society of Friends that pioneered the Abolitionist movement that would eventually result in the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments.  Unlike many Christians who opposed slavery in word but did nothing in deed, the Quakers actually freed their slaves, many of them going bankrupt in the process.

Friendship in Christ was likewise the bond that connected Sts. Francis and Clare, as well as Sts. Francis and Dominic.  To this day, their friendship is commemorated in Dominican parishes by putting statues of Francis and Dominic in the sanctuary.

Scripture often uses different forms of love to portray the love of God.  The prophets, for instance, use the image of Eros to speak repeatedly of God as a lover and even husband of Israel.  They even portray God as a heartbroken and spurned husband pleading with his wife to return.  Jesus the Bridegroom performs his first miracle at a wedding as the primal sign of his relationship with his Bride, the Church.  And Paul speaks of the relationship of husband and wife in sacramental terms (Ephesians 5:21-33). 

Yet while Scripture certainly affirms Eros as a vehicle for the divine love of Agape to enter the world, it is notable that when Jesus began the mission of the Church, he sent into the world a group of friends, people with nothing in common--except their love for him.  For what, after all, do Simon the Zealot and Matthew the Tax Collector, Peter the Fisherman and Thomas the Doubter have in common? Nothing but Christ.  

Christian worship reflects this. So, for instance, in the Mass, Catholics are called to face the altar where Christ is present.  We stand side-by-side and adore the Father along with the Son who is our Brother and Friend.  Midway through the liturgy, we turn and extend a greeting of peace with each other in the Spirit, united as friends by our common love of Jesus.  Then, when it is over, the words of the liturgy say, “Go, you are sent!” in Latin and we turn, again side-by-side, to face the world just as the apostles were likewise sent out—as friends.

That is to be the pattern of our lives in Christ and the way in which we bring Christ to the world as the first Christians did.  Recovery of the love that is Friendship may just be a vital key to recovery of the Church’s witness to the world.


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