Sunday, October 21, 2007

Christianity's Influence On Friendship

Last year, I wrote a post about the moral standards of the earliest Christians. Christianity's positive effect on society in contexts such as charity and infanticide is often noted, but a less discussed contribution is Christianity's influence on friendship.

In her book Christian Friendship In The Fourth Century (New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Carolinne White comments:


As far as the early development of a positive Christian attitude to friendship goes, it has also been suggested that the best elements in Classical friendship were in fact transformed and absorbed into Christianity...

But it must not be forgotten that, if any positive evaluation of friendship was to develop within early Christian thought, it had to be firmly based on Scripture....

It is true that there are several places in the Gospels where Jesus appears to condemn friendship, as at Luke 14:12 and Matt. 5:46 where it seems that friendships based on mutual benefit and exclusiveness are rejected, for are not Christians to imitate their God who loves freely and without partiality? Jesus breaks through the exclusivity of family and friends, contradicting forcibly the ancient values.

Furthermore, Christian emphasis on the eschatological element in its theology and the belief that the end of the world was at hand deprived friendship of much of its importance by undermining the value accorded to the traditionally accepted benefits of this life and radically altering the perspective on life. And yet Jesus' disciples are referred to as friends as well as brothers, possibly indicating that they have a share in the eternal life brought by Christ, and Lazarus is said by Jesus to be 'our friend' for whom he shows his love by weeping at his death (John 11:35-6). And did not Jesus regard John as his favourite disciple whom he loved more than the others? In fact, the passage in which Jesus speaks of the disciples as his friends, in the fifteenth chapter of John, is crucial for our understanding of the love which is the essence of the life of God's people and which, it is clear, is as much a love between men as between man and God; that Jesus should here refer to his disciples as friends is significant. His words here could provide some model for a view of friendship which is created by Christ and which involves both love for our fellow men and an intimate relationship with Christ himself, a friendship in which the participants strive to attain that love with which Christ sacrificed his life for his friends....

Another important element in Christian love, which appeared in the writings of certain writers, was the eschatological perspective lacking in the Classical [pre-Christian Gentile] view. Not only is all love closely related to God, it is also related to the future fulfilment of God's kingdom where the love will be perfected and man will attain knowledge of God - this characteristic was to be of central importance in Augustine's development of a Christian ideal of friendship....

Thus the best in Classical friendship was transformed and found a secure purpose in Christianity, which offered many favourable conditions for the development of friendship. Not only could the Christians' common faith and devotion to God provide a similar basis for friendship as shared interests and a devotion to virtue or truth had done for the men of antiquity, but also, for example, the belief that all men are equal in the sight of God meant that Christian friends could feel free in some sense from the problems which were traditionally regarded as arising if the friends were unequal, socially or morally. The emphasis placed on unity in Christ among all Christians encouraged men to come together in a high degree of spiritual intimacy resembling, even surpassing, the intimacy held to be the prerogative of perfect friendships in antiquity. Furthermore, the fact that friendships were believed to spring from the love of Christ meant that they were, at least in theory, divinely endowed with a stability and permanence which would have made the pagans of antiquity envious....

The focus of the virtuous man [in the view of the Christian bishop Gregory Nazianzen] must be God: this is on the whole a view which is foreign to the Classical idea of the relation between virtue and friendship....

He [Ambrose of Milan] explains that grace can produce just as strong a force for love as nature and indeed we ought to love more strongly those who we believe will be with us forever than those who are with us only in this life. Natural sons fail to live up to their parents' expectations but spiritual sons are chosen with a view to loving; the former are loved out of necessity while the latter are loved as a result of an act of judgement which creates a far stronger bond....Here again we are reminded of the fundamental contrast between the pagan and Christian outlook, with the Christian emphasis on the future life and on grace opposed to the pagan attachment to natural, family ties....

[quoting Paulinus of Nola] "For the friendship not built on Christ is not founded on a rock. So from time to time it is troubled by a slight breeze and is loosened; it bears a short-lived bloom produced by some transient attraction but then it quickly withers away like grass and like the flower of the field quickly falls. But the Lord's love abides for ever. It binds us to each other both for life and death because the love of Christ is as strong as death."

Related to this belief is the startling idea that Christian friendships, in such circumstances, are perfect from the start and do not need time to mature and conversely, that those Christians who have devoted themselves to a life of imitation of Christ are close friends whether they have yet come into contact or not....

In adding a creative element to his view of friendship, Augustine makes it a more dynamic relationship than in the traditional picture. This element is of course paralleled by the creative force of God's love for man for we love him because he first loved us despite our sins. Although we may love someone because he is virtuous, as in the Ciceronian view of friendship, we may also love him in order that he might become just, i.e. in order that the love of God may be kindled in his heart and he may respond to our love with mutual feelings. In this way men may attain that love which is the true fulfilment of Christ's commandment whereby they love one another because they all belong to God, so that they may be brothers to His only Son, as Augustine writes in his commentary on the Gospel of John. 'They love one another with the same love with which He loved them when he intended to lead them to that final place where all their needs and desires would be satisfied and where God would be all in all.' (pp. 46, 48-49, 55-57, 73, 123, 153-154, 207-208)

1 comment:

  1. "Christ sacrificed his life for his friends...."

    No greater love Than this.
    Jesus came to die for His friends, because they were lost and ungodly in their sin.
    Abraham was His friend, the disciples became His friends, and now we who trust Christ, and have been born again, are His friends, and He loved us, and died for our sins.

    "There's not a Friend like the lowly Jesus,
    No not One,
    No not One."

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