HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Christian Theology of Friendship

Christianity did not invent the philosophy of friendship — it inherited one. Long before the gospel, the classical world had thought friendship (philia, amicitia) through to a fine point: for Aristotle it was a species of virtue, or could not exist without it, and its highest form belonged only to the good, who love the friend for his own sake and become, in the old phrase, “a single soul in two bodies”; for Cicero, writing his Laelius de Amicitia as Rome's republic died, true friendship could exist only among the good and was the one thing whose usefulness no one doubted and whose loss no wealth could repair. This is the material the church received. The belief that develops on this page is not friendship as such but the Christianization of that inheritance — what happens to the pagan ideal of the two virtuous souls when a third term is introduced: Christ, and through him God, as a party to the friendship rather than its mere occasion.

The transformation runs along several seams. The gospel makes friendship a name for the highest love — “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13) — and, astonishingly, a name for the relation God offers the creature: “I have called you friends” (John 15:15); Abraham is “the friend of God” (James 2:23). Where the classical ideal reserved perfect friendship for the few good men and made it fragile before betrayal, the Christian reworking has to reckon with the command to love the enemy, the universality of charity, and the danger that a fierce particular attachment competes with the love owed to all and to God. So the fathers both prize friendship and watch it warily; the monastic writers ask whether a monk who has renounced the world may keep a friend; and the question is handed to the modern age — most memorably by C. S. Lewis — as one of the four loves, the one the modern world, unlike the ancient, has half forgotten how to esteem.

The timeline below traces that arc across time, earliest first: from the classical bookends the church was reading (Aristotle, Cicero), through the patristic Christianizers of amicitia (the Cappadocian friendship of Basil and Gregory of Nazianzus, the tradition's great lived exemplar; Ambrose, who rewrote Cicero's De Officiis; Augustine, who buried a friend and grieved that he had loved a mortal as if he would not die; John Cassian, who asked what makes a friendship last), to the great medieval synthesis of Aelred of Rievaulx — “God is friendship” — and on to the modern re-examination. It is a development, not a timeless essay: watch the classical ideal enter the church and come out changed.

The biblical foundation

Before the fathers could Christianize amicitia they had a Scripture to read, and it gave them more than a stray proverb: a paradigm friendship told at length, a Lord who renames his followers “friends,” a patriarch styled “the friend of God,” a body of wisdom on choosing and keeping friends, and one hard warning that not every friendship is safe to have. This is the layer every witness below builds on.

David and Jonathan — the covenant of two souls

The Old Testament’s set-piece of friendship is the bond of David and Jonathan. At their first meeting “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,” and the two “made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.”¹ That covenant is renewed as Saul turns murderous — Jonathan risks his father’s spear to warn David and later seeks him out to “strengthen his hand in God” — and it closes in David’s lament over the fallen Jonathan: “very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”² The fathers took this as Scripture’s own lesson in friendship rather than a mere tale. John Chrysostom opens a discourse, “I will now cite you from the Scriptures a wonderful instance of friendship,” and reads the whole arc — Jonathan feeling no envy though the kingdom was passing to David, sparing not his father for his friend’s sake, and David repaying the kindness to Jonathan’s children — as the pattern “I would wish all to entertain both towards the living and the dead.”³ Ambrose, reworking Cicero for the church, likewise holds David up as one who “truly loved his friends, so he thought that he was loved as much in return,” and prizes the friendship “which maintains virtue” above wealth, honour, or power.⁴

“I have called you friends” — Christ and the disciples

The decisive New Testament turn is Jesus’ word in the upper room. He first makes friendship the name of the highest love — “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”⁵ — and then, astonishingly, offers that name to the creature: “Henceforth I call you not servants… but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.”⁶ The fathers seized on both halves. Ambrose reads the verse as the charter of Christian friendship itself: “God himself made us friends instead of servants… He gave us a pattern of friendship to follow,” the mark of which is that “a friend, if he is a true one, hides nothing,” as the Lord “poured forth the mysteries of his Father.”⁷ Augustine dwells on the condescension — “Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you… What great condescension!”⁸ — and Chrysostom on the promotion: the disciples are raised from service to friendship.⁹

“The friend of God” — Abraham

Friendship is even predicated of the relation between God and a man. Abraham is called “the seed of Abraham my friend” and, in the New Testament, “he was called the Friend of God.”¹⁰ This title, already old, is one of the earliest things Christian writing does with the theme: Clement of Rome, writing to Corinth in the first century, notes that “Abraham, styled ‘the friend,’ was found faithful, inasmuch as he rendered obedience to the words of God,” grounding the friendship in obedient faith.¹¹ Cyril of Jerusalem presses the same point — Abraham “was not called a friend of God until he believed”¹² — so that friendship with God, not merely between men, enters the tradition from the start.

The wisdom of friendship — and its warning

Around these exemplars the wisdom books supply the working maxims the fathers quote constantly: “A friend loveth at all times”; there is “a friend that sticketh closer than a brother”; “faithful are the wounds of a friend”; “iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”¹³ Ecclesiastes gives the case against solitude — “Two are better than one… for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth” — which Jerome and later the monastic writers turn into an argument that a person needs a companion.¹⁴ Sirach adds the warmest ancient praise of the thing: “A faithful friend is a strong defence… A faithful friend is the medicine of life,” while warning at length to test a friend before trusting him.¹⁵ The “faithful wounds” line in particular becomes a fathers’ commonplace for honest rebuke: Ambrose — “rebukes are good, and often better than a silent friendship” — and Augustine, who prefers “love mingled with severity” to “deceit with indulgence.”¹⁶

Yet the same Scriptures set a hard limit. James warns that “the friendship of the world is enmity with God: whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” — a text Bede reads as branding “adulterers those who… turn from the love of heavenly wisdom to the embrace of worldly friendship.”¹⁷ So the biblical layer hands the fathers not only a warrant to prize friendship but the very tension the timeline below works out: friendship is among the highest goods, and a friendship wrongly placed is among the gravest dangers.

Timeline

The witnesses are listed earliest first — the classical philosophers the church inherited, then the fathers and monastics who baptized the ideal, then the moderns who re-examined it. This spine is being built out; the figures named in the introduction are added here in chronological order as each is researched.

Aristotle (c. 340 BC)

Christian reflection on friendship begins from a book it did not write. In the eighth and ninth books of his Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle set down the analysis the West would use for two thousand years: that “without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods,” and that friendship comes in three kinds — for utility, for pleasure, and, highest of all, the “perfect friendship” of “men who are good, and alike in virtue,” who “wish well alike to each other qua good.”¹⁸ Only this third kind is friendship in the full sense, for only the good love the friend for his own sake rather than for use or delight; and in it each finds in the other “another self” (heteros autos), so that a man stands to his friend as he stands to himself.¹⁹

Cicero (c. 44 BC)

What Aristotle argued in Greek, Cicero recast in Latin — and it was Cicero’s Laelius de Amicitia, written in 44 BC as the republic collapsed around him, that the Latin fathers actually read. He defines friendship as “a complete accord on all subjects human and divine, joined with mutual goodwill and affection,” insists that “friendship can only exist between good men,” and ranks it above every external good: “with the exception of wisdom… nothing better than this has been given to man,” for you might “take the sun out of the sky” as soon as friendship from life.²⁰ The true friend is “as it were a second self” (alter idem), and — the limit the fathers would seize on — friendship is given “as the handmaid of virtue, not as a partner in guilt,” so that no wrong is excused for a friend’s sake. It is this Christianizable Cicero, more than Aristotle directly, whom Ambrose and Aelred rework.²¹

Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 381)

Beside the treatises stands a portrait. Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–390), in the funeral oration he preached over his friend Basil the Great (Oration 43, c. 381), left the tradition’s most celebrated description of a real Christian friendship — the lived exemplar the theorists analyze. Meeting as students at Athens, the two led a single life bent on virtue: they knew only two roads, “the one leading to our sacred buildings… the other to secular instructors,” leaving the “feasts, theatres, meetings, banquets” to others; they competed only in yielding first place to each other, “envy we knew not,” and so “seemed to have one soul, inhabiting two bodies.”²² It is the classical ideal — Aristotle’s “another self,” the “single soul in two bodies” of the old proverb — but re-founded on a third term the pagan version lacked: a common name, “to be and to be called Christians,” and a shared end, “our rising to God, through the help of, and with each other,” so that the friends are whetstones sharpening “our weapons of virtue.” The historical bond was not a pure idyll — Basil’s forcing of the wretched see of Sasima on Gregory (c. 372) strained it for years — but the oration fixes the picture the later tradition would keep of what a Christian friendship, a shared ascent to God, looks like.²³

Ambrose of Milan (c. 389)

The first great Christianizer of the classical ideal is Ambrose, and he does it in the open. His De Officiis Ministrorum (“On the Duties of the Clergy,” c. 389) is a deliberate rewriting of Cicero’s De Officiis — same title, same three-book plan — and just as Cicero had ended with the honourable, Ambrose ends his last book with a treatment of friendship (amicitia) that reworks the Laelius for a clergy. He keeps the whole classical frame: friendship “which maintains virtue is to be preferred… to wealth, or honours, or power” yet never to virtue itself; the friend is a “second self”; candour and rebuke are owed (“rebukes are good, and often better than a silent friendship”); and nothing dishonourable may be done for a friend’s sake.²⁴ But he adds the third term the pagan ideal lacked. Faith outranks friendship — “he cannot be a friend to a man who has been unfaithful to God” — so the fellowship of the virtuous becomes a fellowship of the faithful; the very pattern of friendship is now Christ, who “makes us friends instead of servants” and, hiding nothing, “poured forth the mysteries of His Father” (John 15:15); and Cicero’s Roman exemplars give way to Jonathan, the Three in the furnace, Job’s pardoned friends, and Judas the traitor.²⁵ This is pagan amicitia consciously baptized — the seam the whole timeline turns on.

Augustine of Hippo (c. 397)

Where Ambrose defined the third term, Augustine makes it existential. Book IV of his Confessions (c. 397–400) tells not a theory but a bereavement: the death of an unnamed boyhood friend, and a grief so total that “I wondered still more that I, who was to him a second self, could live when he was dead… my soul and his soul were but one soul in two bodies.” The classical praise-words are all there — the “second self,” the “one soul in two bodies” — but Augustine turns them into a diagnosis: the grief had cut so deep because “I had poured out my soul upon the dust, in loving one who must die as if he were never to die.”²⁶ From this he draws the central correction of Cicero’s autonomous virtue-friendship: love is not condemned, but a love that rests in the perishable creature as its final good is an idolatry that death exposes. Only friendship in God is secure — “Blessed be he who loveth Thee, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thy sake. For he alone loses none dear to him to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost.” Friends are still to be loved, and loved the more, for to love a friend “in God” is to “draw unto Him along with thee as many souls as thou canst.” His own letters enact it — a friendship with Paulinus of Nola founded, before the two had ever met, on their common Lord (“I had come to know you as my brother and friend… so eminent as a Christian”).²⁷ This is the hinge of the whole arc: Cicero’s friendship of two virtuous souls reordered around God as the party to it who cannot be lost.

John Cassian (c. 426)

Where Ambrose Christianized Cicero’s theory, John Cassian (c. 360–435) writes the Christianized practice. His whole Conference 16 — the First Conference of Abbot Joseph, titled On Friendship — is the great early-monastic treatise on the subject, and it presses the question the philosophers never had to: not what friendship is, but why it fails, and what makes one last. Cassian sorts the bonds that unite men — recommendation, bargain, shared pursuit, and blood — and finds them all “common both to the good and bad,” dissolved by time or distance; only one is indissoluble, the love owed “not… to the reason of some bargain, or the necessities of nature, but simply to similarity of virtue,” which “even death itself cannot part.”²⁸ But he has watched friendships begun “out of their burning love for Christ” go cold when carried by only one party’s patience, and so concludes that the “full and perfect grace of friendship can only last among those who are perfect and of equal goodness” — and lays down a monastic rule to reach it: six foundations crowned by the demand that a friend “never… be angry for any reason good or bad” and never “prefer his own opinions to those of his neighbour.”²⁹ Against the later monastic suspicion of the exclusive friend, Cassian also defends an ordered, preferential love: universal charity (agape) is owed to all, even enemies, but affection (diathesis) is rightly “shown to but a few,” as Jacob loved Joseph and Jesus the beloved disciple — a love that “while it loves all in general, singles out for itself some… with a special affection.”³⁰

Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1160)

The arc reaches its Christian summit in the Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaulx (1110–1167), whose De Spirituali Amicitia (Spiritual Friendship) is the medieval classic on the subject — a three-book dialogue that is a deliberate, self-conscious rewriting of Cicero’s Laelius with Christ installed as friendship’s beginning, middle, and end. Aelred keeps the whole classical apparatus — the prologue’s recollection of a boy’s love of Cicero, the very definition (“friendship is agreement in things human and divine, with good will and charity”), the three-book plan — but tests it against Scripture and reroots it in Christ: friendship must “begin in Christ, continue with Christ, and be perfected by Christ,” and the dialogue opens on its most famous words, “You and I are here, and I hope that Christ is between us as a third.”³¹ He dares even the audacious formula — voiced by his interlocutor Ivo — “God is friendship,” a rewriting of 1 John 4:16 that Aelred grants only with care (the equation itself is “novel… and lacks the authority of the Scriptures,” but he “surely do[es] not hesitate” to grant the rest of the verse: whoever remains in friendship remains in God). And against the monastic suspicion of the exclusive or “particular” friend he defends an ordered love — charity owed to all, even enemies, but friendship reserved for the few whom one may trust with the whole heart — making spiritual friendship not a rival to charity but a genuine path toward the love and knowledge of God.³²

C. S. Lewis (1960)

The arc reaches its modern terminus in a self-conscious heir. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), in the “Friendship” chapter of The Four Loves (1960), names his forebears outright — “that Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues [and] that Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book” — and takes up their high estimate against a modern world that, he argues, “ignores” friendship: “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves… The modern world, in comparison, ignores it… few value it because few experience it.”³³ His restatement turns on four claims. Friendship is “the least natural of loves… the least instinctive, organic, biological… and necessary” — and therefore the freest and (like God’s own creating) the most gratuitous: “it has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” It is born not face to face like eros but side by side over a shared vision — “Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest”; the real question is Emerson’s “Do you see the same truth?” And because it faces outward it is “the least jealous of loves,” a love in which “to divide is not to take away.”³⁴ But Lewis claims to correct the ancients on a danger they missed: friendship “can be a school of virtue; but also… a school of vice,” for the circle’s shared indifference to outside opinion can harden into a proud coterie — “a pocket of potential resistance.” He ends, as Aelred had, by handing friendship back to Christ: “You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.”³⁵

Arguments

Off-timeline sub-claims about friendship — proof-texts and theses weighed on their own merits — are added here as they are researched.

Related arguments — the Christianization of classical friendship

The master question of the whole timeline: when the fathers baptize the classical ideal of amicitia, does the pagan thesis — that true friendship rests on shared virtue and is possible only among the good — survive the transformation, or is it superseded? The overarching question and its sharpest single seam (the shift of ground from virtue to faith) are weighed separately below.

Does classical virtue-friendship survive the Christian transformation, or is it superseded? — sound

On its best case the transformed-yet-continuous reading holds: the fathers rewrote the classical treatises rather than repudiating them (Ambrose reworks Cicero’s De Officiis; Aelred keeps the Laelius’s very definition), carried the whole apparatus over intact (the second self, candour, the ban on wrongdoing, like-loves-like), deepened its ground, and ordered its exclusivity inside a wider charity rather than abolishing it. The strong-discontinuity / supersession thesis is weak (weighed in the charity group below). Sound — with the caveat that “survives intact” must be read as “survives transformed”: the third term (God/grace as a party to the bond) and the breaking-open of the “only among the good” limit by enemy-love are genuine novelties, so this is continuity through transformation, not preservation unchanged.

Grounding friendship in faith rather than virtue: a development of the classical ideal, or a change of subject? — plausible

The one seam where transformation presses hardest. The classical ideal grounds true friendship in virtue and reserves it for the good; the Christianizers — Ambrose first (“he cannot be a friend to a man who has been unfaithful to God”), Aelred at the term (“God is friendship”) — reroot the bond in faith. On its best, two-tier form — a supernatural friendship with God laid over the natural friendship of the virtuous rather than replacing it — this is a coherent deepening, and the whole classical apparatus survives. The “changes the subject” charge lands only against the maximal form that forfeits friendship with the virtuous unbeliever outright — which the tradition (Aquinas) itself moderates. Hence plausible, not sound.

Related arguments — the nature of the David–Jonathan bond

Scripture’s set-piece of friendship (1 Samuel 18–20; 2 Samuel 1:26) has been read two ways, and the two readings are weighed separately below. The unbroken pre-modern tradition, and the mainstream of modern scholarship, take it as the paradigm covenant friendship; a genuinely-advocated modern reading takes the narrative as depicting an erotic or romantic bond.

Was the David–Jonathan bond a covenant friendship? — sound

The narrative’s “love” is the treaty-allegiance vocabulary of the Deuteronomistic History (Hiram “loved David”; “all Israel and Judah loved David”); the two formally “cut a covenant” under oath, binding their seed; Jonathan’s gift of robe and armor is dynastic investiture, matched by his explicit cession of the throne; and “passing the love of women” ranks kinds of love, not a sexual claim. The plain sense, and the only reading the text received for two millennia — sound, with the one caveat that a defensive reading should not flatten a warmly affectionate bond into a bloodless legal pact.

Was the David–Jonathan bond a homoerotic relationship? — weak

A post-1970s reading (Horner, Ackerman, Jennings) finds an eroticized register in the knit souls, the disrobing, the parting kiss, Saul’s rebuke, and “passing the love of women.” The hooks are real, but each has a covenant/political sense that fits ancient usage better; the text depicts no sexual acts and draws both men as married; the categories are anachronistic (Nissinen: homosocial, not homoerotic); and even the careful form (Ackerman’s narrative-rhetoric thesis) describes a rhetorical coloring in the service of dynastic politics, not a romance. No pre-modern interpreter read it erotically — weak.

Related arguments — friendship and Christian charity

The gospel that crowns friendship — “greater love hath no man” (John 15:13) — also commands a universal, enemy-reaching love owed to everyone as such (Luke 6:32–35). Are these two loves at war, or does the one perfect the other? The question is genuinely disputed, and the two rival readings are weighed separately below.

Is preferential friendship taken up and perfected by charity, not abolished? — sound

The mainstream reading: charity does not abolish the preferential bond but orders and elevates it. The incarnate love of God kept particular friends (Lazarus, the beloved disciple); the gospel names friendship the highest love and offers it to the creature; charity is itself “the friendship of man for God” (Aquinas), and grace perfects nature rather than razing it; and Cassian’s ordered love — universal agape to all, preferential diathesis to a few — secures the primacy of neighbor-love without opposition. Sound, with the one caveat that the harmony must not be bought by dissolving the genuine tension the rival reading registers.

Does Christian charity (agape) stand in tension with — even against — preferential friendship (philia)? — weak

The sharp form (Kierkegaard’s Works of Love; Nygren’s Agape and Eros) reads universal neighbor-love as standing over against friendship, which is at bottom a refined self-love (I love in the friend “the other I”). The tension it names is real and permanent; the opposition it advocates is not: the incarnate exemplar of agape displays philia, the gospel crowns friendship, Nygren’s two-motif antithesis forces the evidence, and an ordering of the loves does all the work without the war — as even Kierkegaard concedes when he refuses to give up the beloved. Weak.

Are exclusive “particular friendships” a danger to communal charity, to be discouraged in community life? — contested

The strong ascetic thesis — that an exclusive friendship (amicitia particularis) endangers the common life by breeding faction, jealousy, and privatized affection — is patristically grounded: Basil forbids “particular friendships” by name and has the offender “chastened as an injurer of the commonweal,” and the later ascetic tradition (Cassian’s cenobitic discipline, Climacus, à Kempis, Rodriguez) follows him. Yet the same monastic tradition’s greatest voices — Cassian’s ordered diathesis and Aelred’s “Christ the third” — and the gospel exemplar himself order the exclusive bond rather than forbidding it. So the danger is real (sound as a caution) but the prohibition-as-such over-corrects: genuinely disputed within monasticism itself — contested. (The same tension at the level of theology is weighed in the friendship-and-charity group above.)

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