Can a Christian Be a Friend? God, Friendship and Love of Neighbor

Abstract

Christian thought and friendship have had a sometimes stormy relationship. In the first part of this essay, I shall draw on St Augustine, Kierkegaard and C. S. Lewis to outline some key reasons for suspicion of friendship within the Christian tradition. I shall briefly discuss Kierkegaard’s distinction between love of the neighbor and ‘preferential’ loves such as friendship, his worry that friendship is exclusionary and often a form of disguised self-love, and the related claim that the category of the neighbor is required in order to recognize genuine alterity. We shall see that Kierkegaard’s concern about friendship’s exclusionary nature is echoed in Lewis’s remarks about the ‘pride’ of friendship. Moreover, his worry about friendship as disguised self-love is itself an echo of some of Augustine’s comments in the Confessions. But while Kierkegaard is not the unequivocal enemy of friendship that he has often been portrayed as being (see, most famously, Adorno [1940]), neither is he as close a friend of it as he might have been. His insufficiently critical inheritance of the classical view of the friend as a ‘second self’ leads to a failure to see the true potential of friendship within the Christian life. In the second part of the essay, to illuminate this claim, I shall first discuss friendship’s inspiration for, and potential as a bridge towards, love of neighbor.

God is friendship.

Aelred of Rievaulx

[T]he praise of erotic love and friendship belongs to paganism … Christianity has misgivings about erotic love and friendship simply because preferential love … is actually another form of self-love.

Søren Kierkegaard