HistoricalChristian.Faith

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

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the tension the thesis names is genuine and permanent, but the opposition it advocates (that agape stands against friendship, which is at bottom a refined self-love to be dethroned) does not hold on its best case: the incarnate exemplar of agape kept particular friends, the gospel names friendship the highest love, and an ordering of the loves accounts for the primacy of neighbor-love without any antithesis · advanced by Søren Kierkegaard (Works of Love) and, at its sharpest, Anders Nygren (Agape and Eros)

Related arguments: friendship and Christian charity — see also friendship taken up and perfected by charity

The claim

Passionate preferential love is another form of self-love… self-denial’s love, in contrast, loves the neighbor… the beloved… he loves as himself is not the neighbor; the beloved is the other I… the neighbor is the first you.

— Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (1847), II.B.¹ The Christian love-command sets neighbor-love as a duty owed to everyone as such, even the enemy: “if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them.”² On the reading weighed here, friendship and erotic love — chosen for the beloved’s qualities, returned in kind, confined to the few — are “preferential love,” and preferential love is at bottom self-love (I love in the friend “another self”). Commanded, universal agape therefore stands in tension with, and must relativize or even stand against, the fierce particular bond the classical world prized. Anders Nygren pressed the antithesis to its limit: agape and eros are two irreconcilable “fundamental motifs” — agape descending, unmotivated, indifferent to the worth of its object; eros (with philia in its train) ascending, acquisitive, drawn by worth — so that “when the Eros motif invades Christianity, it endeavours to drive out and supplant the Agape motif.”³ The interpretation to weigh: is preferential friendship in genuine opposition to Christian charity?

Who advances it

The sharpest modern form is Kierkegaard’s Works of Love (1847), whose whole architecture is a series of contrasts — love of the lovable against love of the unlovely, preferential love against the “royal law,” mutual egotism against triangular love — and Nygren’s Agape and Eros (1930s), which reads the history of the idea as the long, regrettable contamination of a pure descending agape by an ascending, self-seeking eros. Importantly, the tension is not the private property of these two: it is registered even by friendship’s warmest modern defender — Gilbert Meilaender frames his entire Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics around the “persistent tensions between philia and agape” (the preferential against the universal, the reciprocal against the love of the enemy, the mutable against the covenant-faithful).⁴ So the shared ground is that a tension exists; the distinctive thesis of this page — the one that makes it a rival rather than a restatement — is the stronger claim that the tension is an opposition, agape set over against philia.

The evidence for

The love-command is universal, and reaches the enemy. Neighbor-love is commanded, and its reach is precisely those who do not return it: “Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you… and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.”² This is a love indifferent to reciprocity and to the worth of its object — the very features that define it against friendship, which is answered love among the deserving.

The self-love diagnosis has real bite. Preferential love does choose its object for qualities we favour and does expect return; Kierkegaard’s claim that it can therefore be a refined self-love — loving in the friend “the other I” — names a genuine danger the classical eulogists of friendship (Aristotle’s “another self,” Cicero’s “second self”) never fully faced. A friendship can curdle into a closed circle of mutual admiration; C. S. Lewis, no enemy of friendship, conceded it can be “a school of vice” and “a pocket of potential resistance” to every claim from outside.

The two loves point in opposite directions. Agape, on Nygren’s analysis, descends from God and creates value in what it loves; eros and philia ascend, drawn upward by a value already seen. Friendship is mutable (friendships fade); agape is the covenant fidelity of God. Line the contrasts up and they do look less like two species of one genus than two motions in opposite senses.

Adversarial assessment

What holds. The tension is real and permanent, and the thesis is right to insist on it. The two loves are structurally different — universal and commanded against particular and spontaneous — and a preferential bond genuinely can decay into shared self-regard. Kierkegaard’s demand that neighbor-love found and purify friendship, rather than friendship being left to rest on its own charm, is a real contribution, and the “self-love” diagnosis is a permanent caution. None of this is in dispute; it is exactly what the rival reading carries, positively, as the ordering of the loves.⁵

What fails: the opposition. The distinctive claim — that agape stands against friendship, which is a disguised self-love to be superseded — does not survive its own best case, on four counts.

The incarnate exemplar of agape kept particular friends. The Gospel that most exalts divine love also draws Jesus with named, preferential attachments: “now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus”; he wept at the tomb, so that the bystanders said, “Behold how he loved him!”; and there reclined at the last supper “one of his disciples… whom Jesus loved.”⁶ If agape stood against philia, its one perfect instance would not display philia — yet it conspicuously does. The antithesis is refuted by the very life it claims to describe.

Scripture 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 name to the creature: “henceforth I call you not servants… but I have called you friends.”⁷ A love the gospel names as the summit, and predicates of God’s own relation to us, cannot be the thing agape must drive out.

Nygren’s antithesis is overdrawn on its own terms. To make agape “have nothing to do with human love at all” severs it from a New Testament that commands love of the neighbor — the near one, the one at hand — and honours particular bonds throughout; the sharp two-motif scheme has been widely judged to force the evidence and to read the whole patristic synthesis as decline. The opposition is a construction imposed on the sources, not drawn from them.

An ordering of the loves does all the work without the antithesis. Everything true in the thesis — that neighbor-love comes first, is owed to all, and must keep friendship from becoming idolatry — is secured by ordering the loves rather than opposing them: John Cassian’s universal agape owed to all, even enemies, alongside a preferential affection (diathesis) rightly “shown to but a few,” and Augustine’s rule to love the friend in God.⁵ Charity orders friendship; it need not abolish it.

Even the proponent pulls back. Kierkegaard himself refuses the oppositional form his rhetoric invites: “you are not to cease loving the beloved because of this — far from it… if in order to love the neighbor you would have to begin by giving up loving those for whom you have preference, the word ‘neighbor’ would be the greatest deception ever contrived.”⁸ His own text resolves the tension by grounding preferential love in neighbor-love, not by setting the two at war — which is to say, by the ordering the rival reading advocates. The sharpest oppositional statement is Nygren’s, and it is the weakest.

Assessment

Weak. The thesis is right that a tension exists and that preferential love needs neighbor-love as its foundation and its judge; that much is genuine, and it is carried — as a positive principle rather than an antithesis — by the reading that charity takes friendship up and perfects it. But the claim that makes this a rival reading, and not merely a caution — that agape stands against friendship, which is a self-love to be dethroned — does not hold on its best available case. The incarnate love of God kept particular friends; the gospel names friendship the highest love and offers it to the creature; Nygren’s two-motif opposition forces the evidence; and an ordering of the loves accounts for the primacy of neighbor-love with no opposition at all. Even Kierkegaard, pressed, grounds the beloved in the neighbor rather than sacrificing one to the other. The tension is real; the war is not.

Sources