Lost Art of Friendship
"Greater love has no one than this..."
“Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.” I was eighteen when I first read that line from Nicomachean Ethics. These were the days before phones, so I wrote the quote down in my notebook and sent a letter via snail mail to my best friend back in Texas. In the age of social media (what a funny phrase, by the way, that has become common parlance), we define “friend” as someone who follows our posts in the digital space. But this means that some of my “friends” are people that I have never met. Some of my friends are my mom’s Bible study group. Some of my friends are my neighbors. The assortment of what constitutes “friend” through the internet is varied. Perhaps this misuse of the word “friend” is contributing to the “loneliness epidemic.”
“Alone, all alone
Nobody but nobody
Can make it out here alone,”
sings Maya Angelou in her poem “Alone.” Is it even possible to live life by yourself? Solitary confinement is an extreme form of punishment used as discipline for prisoners. In 1949 the Geneva Convention prohibited solitary confinement for prisoners of war because it is too inhumane; being alone causes severe psychological problems—depression, anxiety, psychosis. The Jewish Torah speaks of the first earthling: “It is not good for the human to be alone” (Gen. 2:18, my translation). Human beings seem made for friendship.
In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle categorizes friendship into three categories: usefulness, pleasure, and virtue. The first kind of friendship is like networking: “those who love each other for their utility do not love each other for themselves but in value of some good which they get from each other.” When you’re in school, these are the friendships that put you into a certain set—the cool kids, the athletes, the nerds, etc. After graduation, these friendships are the work relationships—what can you do for me? to whom can you connect me? Or, if you are not focused on employment, other uses for relationships—connection to a future preschool for my kid, share your vacation home with me, etc. But once a person’s usefulness ends, the friendship dissolves.
The temporality of such relationships is a shared feature with those friendships pursued for pleasure. Aristotle explains, “these friendships are only incidental; for it is not as being the man he is that the loved person is loved, but as providing some good or pleasure. Such friendships, then, are easily dissolved, if the parties do not remain like themselves; for if the one party is no longer pleasant or useful, the other ceases to love him.” In friendships based on pleasure, you become friends with the fun person, the person who gets your jokes, the person who likes the same video game, or enjoys running as much as you do. But what happens when that person suffers from depression or grief? What if that person’s sense of humor changes with age or lifestage or maturity? What if that friend stops playing video games or loses his or her ability to run? Are we still friends with people who are no longer pleasant to be around?
For Aristotle the third kind of friendship is labeled “perfect.” He writes:
“Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing.”
These friendships are based on virtue, and they contribute to eudaimonia, meaning literally “the virtuous state,” otherwise translated as HAPPINESS. Friendship helps us develop the character we desire because we cannot be good alone. Nor can we be happy all by ourselves. Aristotle would say that un-virtuous people cannot be happy, and they can only participate in the shallow forms of friendship listed above.
We need friends to be happy, but that friendship requires that we not use one another for happiness. It sounds like a catch-22. C.S. Lewis writes of friendship in The Four Loves: “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” However, its very unnecessariness is what makes friendship paradoxically more needed. If you want friends, be a friend (Proverbs 18:24).
What I’m Reading
After struggling to find a contemporary novel that wasn’t full of vulgarity, I went back to the 1960s and read Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. I read it in two nights; it’s only 120 pages. The book records the life of the “mad” wife Bertha from Jane Eyre, her life before and after marrying Mr. Rochester. I’m not always for tales of behind the scenes (movies like why Batman’s Joker is evil, for instance), but I do love these kinds of conversations between texts. If you enjoyed Gregory Maguire’s Wicked from the perspective of the Wicked Witch, you’ll get a high brow version of considering the shadow side of a literary story.
I’ve also been reading so much that pertains to my current book that I’m writing. I’m nearly finished with the first draft of the manuscript, which is the most enjoyable part of the process. For my chapter on Agnes Maude Royden, I’m actually going back in time to talk with Margery Kempe—both of them were female preachers when such behavior was not embraced by the church, though they are six hundred years apart. Also, re-read Rowan Williams’s Looking East in Winter as I meditate on my final chapter on Maria Skobtsova.
Updates
The final week of June will be a whirlwind between Pepperdine’s first Great Books Summer Program and speaking for the Logos Retreat for teachers.
Then my husband and I will attend the new faculty retreat in Vevey Switzerland at the Chateau d’Hauteville where I taught last summer. I’ll be speaking in July at Grace College’s inaugural writers conference.
