Friendship rerooted in faith rather than virtue: development or a change of subject?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: plausible — on its best form (a two-tier reading that adds supernatural friendship above natural friendship rather than abolishing it) the Christian rerooting is a coherent development of the classical ideal, not an equivocation; the “changes the subject” charge lands only against the maximal form that denies true friendship to the virtuous unbeliever outright · advanced by Ambrose of Milan (and, at its medieval term, Aelred of Rievaulx)

The claim

— Ambrose of Milan, On the Duties of the Clergy III.22.132, link.¹ The classical philosophers grounded true friendship in virtue and reserved it for the good, who love the friend for his own sake. Ambrose keeps that frame but reroots the bond in faith: the fellowship of the virtuous becomes a fellowship of the faithful, with God himself a party to it. Aelred of Rievaulx carries the same move to its term — “God is friendship” — making Christ the medium in whom friends are joined.² The interpretation to weigh: is this a legitimate deepening of the classical ideal (specifying which good the friends are united in), or a substitution that quietly narrows friendship to co-religionists and forfeits what Aristotle and Cicero prized — the friend loved for his own sake, and the friendship possible with the virtuous pagan?

Who advances it

The rerooting is the through-line of the whole Christian tradition of amicitia. Ambrose (c. 389) makes the first conscious move, rewriting Cicero’s Laelius for a clergy and adding faith as the true bond; Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1160) completes it, rewriting Cicero again with Christ at the centre. Modern scholarship reads the arc as continuous development rather than rupture: Carolinne White’s Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century frames its Ambrose chapter as the very question — “Ciceronian or Christian friendship?” — and argues that the best of classical friendship was “transformed and found a secure purpose in Christianity.”³ The countercase — that the reroot changes the subject — is not advanced by a rival school so much as it is the standing philosophical objection any such transfer invites, and is folded in below as the defeater it is.

The evidence for

The strong form of the development reading rests on four observations, and it is strong.

The “divine” is already in the classical definition. Cicero defines friendship as “a complete accord on all subjects human and divine, joined with mutual goodwill and affection,” and insists both that “friendship can only exist between good men” and that nature gives it “as the handmaid of virtue, not as a partner in guilt.”⁴ Right relation to the divine is thus not smuggled in by the Christians; it is one of the terms on which the friends must already agree. To specify that this accord includes the true God is to fill in a blank Cicero left, not to open a new one.

Aristotle’s ground transfers cleanly if God is the highest good. For Aristotle perfect friendship holds between “men who are good, and alike in virtue,” who love each other “qua good” and for the friend’s own sake, each finding in the other “another self.”⁵ If God is the source and measure of the good, then friends united in the love of God are united in precisely the thing Aristotle prized — only named at its root. The structure is preserved entire: like still loves like (Ambrose keeps “there can be no friendship between diverse characters”); the friend is still a second self; candour, the ban on wrongdoing for a friend’s sake, and the ranking above every external good all survive the transfer intact. Only the ground is deepened, from virtue-in-general to the God in whom virtue is grounded.

Aelred answers the “loved for his own sake” worry from inside. Aelred does not make the friend a mere occasion for reaching God. Spiritual friendship is desired “for its own natural worth… so that its fruit and reward is nothing but itself”; the friend is loved, and in loving him one rises — without leaving him behind — to the love of Christ, until one dares say with John, “he that abides in friendship, abides in God, and God in him.” To will a friend’s union with God is to will his deepest good, which is loving him for his own sake in the fullest sense, not instrumentalizing him.

The tradition builds a second tier without razing the first. Aquinas makes the point explicit: charity (caritas) is itself “a certain friendship of man for God” — a supernatural friendship founded on the shared life God communicates — and this leaves the ordinary natural friendship of the virtuous standing as a real, if lower, good.⁶ On this reading the Christian reroot adds a supernatural storey above the classical one; it does not knock the classical one down. That is development in the strict sense: the same idea unfolded, not replaced.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. As a filling-in of Cicero’s own “human and divine” accord, and as a supernatural tier laid over natural friendship, the reroot is coherent and preserves the whole classical apparatus. The two commonest objections are answerable. The instrumentalization worry — that loving a friend “in God” reduces him to a means for loving God, i.e. a utility-friendship in disguise, exactly what Aristotle excluded — is met by Aelred’s insistence that the friend is loved for his own worth and that willing his union with God is willing his own good. The love-of-enemy tension — that universal charity should dissolve the fierce particular bond — is met by John Cassian’s distinction: universal agape is owed to all, even enemies, while preferential affection (diathesis) is rightly “shown to but a few,” as Jesus loved the beloved disciple.⁷ Charity does not abolish friendship; it orders it.

What is overstated. Ambrose’s sharpest sentence — “he cannot be a friend to a man who has been unfaithful to God” — in its flat form overshoots the development it serves. Read as denying that any true friendship is possible with a virtuous unbeliever, it does not merely deepen the classical ideal but contradicts it at the point Aristotle and Cicero cared about most: that any two good people, as such, can be perfect friends. The classical world knew genuinely good men without the true God; a reading that forfeits friendship with them altogether has changed the criterion, not specified it — and the church’s own honouring of pagan virtue, and Augustine’s real pre-conversion friendships, tell against it. The tradition itself moderates the line: Aquinas holds that natural friendship with unbelievers remains possible, only not the highest supernatural friendship of charity. The maximal Ambrosian form is best taken as rhetorical emphasis on the primacy of faith — the point being that faith outranks friendship — not as a considered denial that the virtuous pagan can be loved as a friend at all. Where it is pressed as the latter, it is a proponent’s overreach, and is flagged as such on Ambrose’s page.

Assessment

Plausible. On its best available form — the two-tier reading, where a supernatural friendship with and in God is added above the natural friendship of the virtuous rather than substituted for it — the Christian rerooting is a coherent development of the classical ideal and not a change of subject: Cicero’s own definition already made the divine one of the things friends must share, Aristotle’s “love the friend qua good” transfers cleanly once God is named the good, and the whole classical apparatus (the second self, candour, the ban on wrongdoing, the loving-for-his-own-sake) is carried over intact. What keeps it short of sound is a genuine residue the friendly framing tends to paper over: the strongest single formula the proponents reach for — Ambrose’s “he cannot be a friend to a man unfaithful to God” — in its flat sense forfeits the friendship-with-the-virtuous-pagan that the classical ideal counted its glory, and the question whether the reroot deepens or narrows is decided only by opting for the two-tier reading over the maximal one. It is a development on the reading the tradition itself settles into; it is a substitution only on the reading the tradition itself abandons.

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