HistoricalChristian.Faith

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

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: sound — the mainstream Christian reading, well grounded and unrefuted: the incarnate love of God kept particular friends and named friendship the highest love, and the tradition (Cassian, Augustine, Aelred, Aquinas) orders rather than abolishes the preferential bond — charity does not dissolve friendship but heals, elevates, and directs it; the one caveat is not to purchase the harmony by dissolving the real tension the rival reading identifies · advanced by Aelred of Rievaulx, Thomas Aquinas, John Cassian, and modern defenders (Gilbert Meilaender, C. S. Lewis)

Related arguments: friendship and Christian charity — see also agape in tension with, or against, philia

The claim

Accordingly, since there is a communication between man and God, inasmuch as He communicates His happiness to us, some kind of friendship must needs be based on this same communication… The love which is based on this communication, is charity: wherefore it is evident that charity is the friendship of man for God.

— Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II q.23 a.1.¹ Against the reading that sets agape over against philia, the mainstream of the tradition holds that charity does not abolish preferential friendship but takes it up and perfects it. Charity is itself a friendship — the supernatural friendship of man for God, founded on the beatitude God shares — and grace, on the settled maxim, does not destroy nature but perfects it, so the ordinary friendship of the virtuous is not razed but raised. The interpretation to weigh: is this reconciliation coherent, or does it soften the radical universality of the love-command into a comfortable endorsement of our favourites?

Who advances it

The reconciliation is the through-line of the whole Christian tradition of amicitia. John Cassian (c. 426) distinguishes the universal charity owed to all, even enemies, from the preferential affection rightly shown to a few; Augustine (c. 397) reorders friendship around God as the party to it who cannot be lost — “he alone loses none dear to him to whom all are dear in Him” — so that friends are to be loved, and loved the more, in God; Aelred of Rievaulx (c. 1160) makes Christ friendship’s beginning, middle, and end (“begin in Christ, continue with Christ, and be perfected by Christ”); Aquinas (c. 1270) supplies the metaphysics — charity as friendship with God, grace perfecting nature. In the modern age C. S. Lewis hands friendship back to Christ (“I have chosen you for one another”), and Gilbert Meilaender’s Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics is a book-length argument that philia “deserves an honored place within Christian ethics” — that agape “cannot therefore be entirely alien to the needs and possibilities of our human nature.”² (The adjacent question — whether rerooting friendship’s ground from virtue to faith is a development or a change of subject — is weighed separately.)

The evidence for

The incarnate love of God displays friendship. The strongest single datum is Christ himself. The Gospel that most exalts divine love draws Jesus with named, preferential attachments: “now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus”; he wept at the tomb, drawing the crowd’s “Behold how he loved him!”; and one disciple is “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”³ If the perfect instance of agape keeps particular friends, then particular friendship cannot be what agape is set against — the incarnation itself is the standing counter-example to the opposition thesis.

The gospel crowns friendship as the highest love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” and the same discourse offers that very name to the creature: “henceforth I call you not servants… but I have called you friends.”⁴ A love Scripture names as the summit, and predicates of God’s own relation to us, is not a rival to charity to be outgrown but a form charity itself can take.

Grace perfects nature; it does not raze it. Aquinas’ identification of charity with friendship (“charity is the friendship of man for God”) is the hinge: charity is not the negation of the friendship-form but its highest realization, a friendship founded on the divine beatitude God communicates. On the theological maxim that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, the ordinary natural friendship of the virtuous stands as a real, lower good, taken up and elevated — not abolished — by the supernatural friendship of charity.¹

Ordered love answers the universality worry. The fear that universal charity should dissolve the particular bond is met not by opposition but by order. Cassian: universal agape is owed to all, even enemies, while preferential affection (diathesis) is rightly “shown to but a few,” as Jacob loved Joseph and Jesus the beloved disciple. Augustine: let the friend be loved in God, and so drawn, with as many souls as one can, toward the one Good who cannot be lost.⁵ Charity does not flatten the loves to a uniform benevolence; it orders them (the ordo amoris), so that the friend loved for his own worth is, in the same act, willed toward his deepest good.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The case is strong to the point of near-consensus. The incarnate exemplar keeps particular friends; the gospel crowns friendship; charity is itself the friendship-form at its summit; and the ordering of the loves accounts for the primacy of neighbor-love without setting it at war with the special bond. This is the reading the tradition, from Cassian to Aquinas to Lewis, actually settles into, and it is not seriously refuted.

The caveat — do not dissolve the tension. The one honest limit is that the harmony must not be bought too cheaply. Meilaender’s warning is exactly against a facile synthesis that loses both loves: philia’s preference, reciprocity, and mutability are in genuine tension with agape’s universality, gratuity, and covenant fidelity, and a reconciliation that simply declares them identical has stopped attending to either. So the sound form keeps the tension as a permanent feature of the Christian life to be ordered, not a problem to be conjured away — which is precisely the truth the opposition reading overstates into a war. Kierkegaard’s genuine point survives inside this reading: neighbor-love must found and purify friendship, or the preferential bond decays into shared self-regard. The harmony absorbs that caution as its ordering principle; it does not need to deny it.

(A separate overreach belongs to the ground question, not this one: Ambrose’s flat “he cannot be a friend to a man who has been unfaithful to God” forfeits friendship with the virtuous unbeliever, and is weighed — and moderated — on the faith-not-virtue page.)

Assessment

Sound. That charity takes friendship up and perfects it, rather than abolishing it, is the mainstream Christian reading and is well grounded and unrefuted: the incarnate love of God kept particular friends, the gospel names friendship the highest love and offers it to the creature, charity is itself the friendship of man for God, and an ordering of the loves secures the primacy of neighbor-love without opposition. What keeps it honest — and what the assessment insists on — is that the reconciliation not be used to dissolve the real, permanent tension between the preferential and the universal that the rival reading correctly registers before overstating it into a war. Charity orders friendship; it neither abolishes it nor pretends the ordering costs nothing.

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