David T. Koyzis
Recently, as part of an online Global Scholars conference on “Friendship that Makes a World of Difference,” I was privileged to respond to a paper delivered by John von Heyking entitled “Christian Faith and Friendship in the Academy.” Von Heyking has written on friendship and has become something of an expert on the topic, especially in its relation to political life. Hearing his address inspired me to write something of my own on friendship.
As Facebook, in its inimitable wisdom, tells us, “Life is better with friends,” a truism that contains a rather large element of profundity. God has created human beings to enjoy communion with each other in a variety of contexts, beginning of course with family, a community normatively bound together by a very high form of love. Our first relationships are with our parents and siblings. While not all parents are equally adept at expressing their love for and to their children, the best of parents do so, setting a pattern for them that will take them into adulthood. If children learn that they can trust their parents, they will learn to trust others as well, providing a secure foundation for lasting friendships.
Face to Face
As they enter adult life, our children discover a rich variety of friendships open to them. We might break down these friendships into four basic categories, using two criteria for classifying them: (1) face-to-face and side-by-side, following C. S. Lewis, and (2) interpersonal and communal.
C. S. Lewis tells us, “Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”1 We all know about lovers, beginning with our first elementary school crushes. In the normal course of events, this intense love leads to marriage, at which point we cross the line from an interpersonal friendship to a communal friendship. Marital partners are committed not just to each other but to a central institution that is foundational for the larger social edifice with its complex network of relationships.
Marriage uniquely binds a man and a woman together in a publicly witnessed exchange of vows of lifelong fidelity and openness to new life. This is the most “face-to-face” of all communal friendships. The friendship of marital partners is similar to the ordinary interpersonal friendship, but while there is considerable overlap between the two forms, they are not identical.
Because so much of our popular music revolves around romantic or erotic love, we may tend to bring distorted expectations to the institution of marriage. A recent song from a hugely popular Korean television series2 contains this lyric:
I am lost without you
You are my everything
But no lover or spouse can be “everything” to me, and if I were to expect this of my wife, I would be unfair to her. She cannot be everything to me any more than I can be everything to her. However much they love each other, spouses need other friends who share their individual interests and commitments. I may be a Toronto Maple Leafs fan, however unlikely that would be in real life, and my wife may prefer the Ottawa Senators—the NHL team, not Parliament’s upper chamber!—but this is certainly no grounds for divorce. When watching a hockey game, she may prefer the company of fellow Senators fans to her husband’s. Moreover, she and I are both members of a variety of differentiated communities, including professional associations, bound by different forms of communal friendship.
Marriage’s distinctiveness has to do with the nature of the vows the couple take which elevate the institution to a status beyond an ordinary interpersonal friendship. The Book of Common Prayer (1662) contains the typical marriage vows found in many Christian marital liturgies:
I M take thee N to my wedded wife, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do part, according to God’s holy ordinance; and thereto I plight thee my troth.
The fact that everyone within the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Church of England repeated the same vows once underscored marriage’s institutional character. Could it be that the practice of couples writing their own vows effectively obscures this institutional character, facilitating marriage’s demotion to a mere voluntary association between two contracting individuals of either sex? But if marital friendship is normatively distinctive, and if marriage forms a necessary foundation for social flourishing, then contemporary efforts to redefine it are likely to have negative repercussions for the larger social fabric.
Now we move on to family, a unique community in which we are born to membership. We did not choose our parents or siblings; nor did they choose us. Not all families are close, of course. Estrangement between members can occur even in the best of families. In a large family one sibling may naturally gravitate to another more than the others on an interpersonal level. Yet even families filled with internal tensions can produce members tenaciously loyal to each other, especially when threatened by outsiders. Even in cultures characterized by low levels of interpersonal trust, extended family networks can be very thick indeed, threatening to stifle the independence of younger members coming of age.
Think of the contrast between Toula’s and Ian’s respective families in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Even if Toula, Athena, and Nikos quarrel at family gatherings, they are still family, and that counts for everything as far as they are concerned. As Toula memorably put it: “My family is big and loud, but they’re my family. We fight and we laugh and, yes, we roast lamb on a spit in the front yard. And wherever I go, whatever I do, they will always be there.” Family bonds are among the most important bonds in any society, and they endure throughout our lives. Familial friendship may have a “side-by-side” quality to it, but it often approaches the “face-to-face” level, especially as parents are so invested in their children’s wellbeing and future.
Then we have the “deep” friendships that approach Lewis’s “face-to-face” orientation yet do not quite conform to his understanding of eros. Here the two people take delight not just in their common interests but in each other, bound by a strong mutual affection and care transcending the pub and the sporting arena.
These are the friends that come to each other’s aid when needed, who are willing to sacrifice a measure of their own happiness—or perhaps even more than that—to increase the well-being of the other. As Jesus himself said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Such friends easily profess their love for each other, encouraging each other in their respective pursuits and finding joy in the other’s victories and successes. In a normal lifetime, such friendships are likely to be few. In some respects, they approximate the relationships among family members and thus partake of what Lewis calls affection.
By their very nature we cannot enter many such friendships, something Aristotle recognized already 2,500 years ago.3 Childhood friendships enduring into adulthood seem more likely to attain this high level of commitment than those formed later in life. My 90-year-old mother was recently visited by a childhood friend whose family had brought her into the Christian faith when they were young. They have been friends since 1939—for eighty-two years! Or we might think of the lifelong friendship of the Reverends John Ames and Robert Boughton in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels.
In our society, we tend to neglect such “face-to-face” friendships, which are difficult to sustain over the long term, in part because of our rootlessness and mobility. Huge numbers of people live far from their respective birthplaces, often losing the friendships formed when they were young. Moreover, the larger society’s lopsided focus on sex tends, following Freud and his heirs, to ascribe a sublimated sexual interest to ordinary close friendships. Even Lewis recognized this factor more than sixty years ago, and it has arguably intensified since then. In this respect, our society’s general tendency to confuse categories and to blur boundaries conspires to increase the epidemic of loneliness in our society.
Side by Side
Now we come to side-by-side friendships, in which friends are bound together by a common interest. Two persons discover each other and find, to their delight, that they share much in common. They have similar interests and shared attitudes towards life. They enjoy relaxing in a pub over a couple of beers. They root for the same professional sporting team. Their children attend the same schools. They sit in adjacent pews at church. They read the same books.
These are the sort of friendships that revolve around common likes and dislikes and see the partners side by side most of the time. Affection and loyalty grow between them, but they are based on things outside themselves. They may be workplace colleagues or fellow members of another community, but their friendship extends beyond this. If one of the friends were to move to another job, the friendship would nevertheless endure.
Then, of course, we have the sorts of friends who are probably better described as mere acquaintances. These are what might be labelled Facebook-quality friends. These can number in the hundreds and possibly even the thousands. (But watch out for that 5,000-friend limit imposed by Zuckerberg and company!)
Since the publication in 2014 of the Brazilian edition of my Political Visions and Illusions,4 I have acquired a huge number of contacts in Brazil. A very few of these have become close friends, despite the distance separating us. But most of these I would have to describe as mere acquaintances, if even that.
Business and professional contacts would fall into this category, as would perhaps friends of friends we meet at social gatherings. The level of mutual commitment among such people would necessarily be low. That many of these are connected only through online forums makes such relationships thinner than in the past, even as their sheer number may be much greater.
Side-by-Side Communal Friendships
Side-by-side communal friendships are differentiated according to the setting in which they occur. Here friendship functions not so much to bind together individuals as to confer a certain solidarity on a specific community, such as family, school, business enterprise, or church congregation.
The type of friendship at issue is peculiar to the structure of the community, with its own ethos, culture, and fellow-feeling. The leaders of a small organization properly undertake to nurture in its members (labelled comrades in arms in the figure below) loyalty to its mission, horizontal bonds of camaraderie as they fulfil the mission, and enthusiasm for the clientele they serve.
From my own experience I well understand the bonds of affection that grow between instructors and students in a university, beginning, of course, with a shared educational mission and continuing in some cases with genuine interpersonal friendships lasting beyond graduation. In other words, communal solidarity can develop into and influence the sorts of interpersonal friendships that Lewis discusses at such length. Communal friendships conform for the most part to Lewis’s “side-by-side” relationships, where absorption in a common interest ties members together.
One of the more powerful examples of this sort of friendship is the church congregation. For those of us who are cradle Christians, we are born into a church community. At our baptism or dedication, our parents and sponsors vow to raise us to love God and neighbour, communing us regularly with Jesus’ body and blood and teaching us the Bible’s story of salvation and to live a life of repentance, forgiveness, and gratitude for our salvation. The type of friendship we find in a local congregation is conditioned by our common faith in Jesus Christ.
The typical parish includes a variety of people of all ages, occupations, social classes, interests, and commitments. Members root for different sport teams. They educate their children in different schools. They vote for different political parties. But they are united in the most important thing of all: allegiance to the kingdom of God as expressed in the Gospels. To be sure, church congregations, like every other community, are made up of sinners. Congregations, and even entire denominations, split over various issues—some of a basic confessional character and others of a more superficial nature. Interpersonal friendships may grow out of this communal friendship, but not necessarily. It is still possible to worship with people with whom you may not associate on the weekdays. But what binds you together is still a form of friendship oriented to the worship of God.
Then there is that civic friendship that Aristotle extolled in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. While the ancient Athenian polis was not a differentiated political community in the modern sense, much of what he writes has relevance to what we would call patriotism, or loyalty to country. But even patriotism may be too broad or too narrow for the sort of friendship I have in mind here. After all, patriotism encompasses allegiance to homeland taken in the territorial sense, which may or may not coincide with political community.
We might better call a modern version of civic friendship allegiance to the state, or, less aridly, solidarity among citizens. This solidarity I would define as a collective commitment to seeing public justice done within the context of a particular body politic with its own constitution, laws, and traditions. It encompasses a mutual love of fellow citizens for each other and a commitment to a public common good.
Finally, we arrive at friendship in the academy. The primary way in which friendship manifests itself in the academy is in the fulfilment of mutual obligations towards one another within the specific educational context.
During my thirty years of teaching, I came to recognize that, in the classroom, instructors and students each bear an authoritative office. These offices are not symmetrical or egalitarian. The instructor, and not the student, sets the terms of the course within the larger framework determined by academic administrators. The instructor is responsible for showing up for class, lecturing and discussing the subject matter as appropriate, and marking written and oral assignments fairly and expeditiously. The student is responsible to attend class, pay attention to the lectures, discuss when appropriate, and complete assignments in a timely manner. The fulfilment of these mutual responsibilities is the primary way in which this academic friendship is manifested.
Members of the academic community are bound together by the organizational mission of the university, which serves to unite them in a common purpose. This can produce a high level of mutual solidarity. However, where vision drift sets in and where the work environment becomes toxic, solidarity will erode, and academic friendship will diminish accordingly.
Communal friendship within the academy easily leads to interpersonal friendships, much as Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkein, and the Inklings maintained their friendship over the course of decades. I have personally found that my best and longest-standing friendships were cultivated during my undergraduate and graduate education and during my years of teaching when I came to treasure colleagues and students alike whom I am blessed still to count as friends.
May God grant that we all cultivate the sorts of friendships that make for healthy community and enrich our personal lives as well.
David T. Koyzis is a Global Scholar with Global Scholars Canada. He holds the PhD in Government and International Studies from the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Political Visions and Illusions (IVP Academic, 2019) and We Answer to Another: Authority, Office, and the Image of God (Pickwick, 2014).
Image: Jef Leempoels, Friendship
- C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1960), https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lewiscs-fourloves/lewiscs-fourloves-00-h.html.[
] - Descendants of the Sun, 2016.[]
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX, 1171a.[]
- David T. Koyzis, Visões e Ilusões Políticas: Uma análise & crítica cristã das ideologias contemporâneas (São Paulo: Vida Nova, 2014, 2021).[]