Friendship: Pursuit of Virtue or Pursuit of Numbers?

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle describes life without friends as hardly worth living; but his idea of friendship is vastly different than the modern fetish of “making friends and influencing people” in which he who has the most friends wins. For Aristotle, friends are equals and their relationship is based on an active love for each other. Unanimity of feeling and shared intellectual sympathies are key to this idea of friendship. A mere feeling of goodwill cannot constitute friendship for Aristotle as one can feel such goodwill for someone one has never met. For Aristotle, mutual participation in activities that develop virtue are the main interest of the best type of friends. The depth of companionship needed for this type of friendship precludes friendship with large amounts of people. While there is certainly nothing wrong with being friendly with everyone, being everyone’s friend in any meaningful way is truly impossible. And as Aristotle noted, to go through one’s life without true friendship is to miss out on life.

In his book The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis distinguishes between friendship and the love that Christians are commanded to have for others – this is the distinction between φιλέω and ἀγαπάω/αγάπη. Lewis’ understanding of φιλέω is very similar to Aristotle’s conception of friendship. This type of friendship and love has mutual feeling – it is a quasi-emotional form of love. Αγάπη, on the other hand, is not a word connected with feeling. It is a word which describes action – actions taken on behalf of the loved. As C.S. Lewis notes, this type of love used to be called charity. This is the type of love that we are commanded to show others in the Bible. Φιλέω, or friendship, is never used in a command in the Bible. Thus, while we are required to serve one another in demonstration of our love to God, we are nowhere commanded to be friends with everyone nor to have fuzzy feelings of affection for everyone.

In the book of Job, we see several friends who none of us would like to emulate. As Job sits on a dung heap covered in sores having lost everything, his three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar. In the beginning, they seem to be a sort of Aristotelian friends (albeit pre-Aristotle) and they just sit down in the dust and dung with Job and share his suffering. But then they open their mouths. They all begin long diatribes accusing Job of sin, blaming his suffering on that sin, and encouraging Job to repent. Job all along defends himself. After all the rest speak, a fourth younger man, Elihu, speaks and rebukes the three friends for their false superiority and misconceptions of God’s justice. He also points out the hubris in Job’s desire to make his case before God as if he has some moral superiority over God. God then shows up and rebukes the three friends and Job, but not Elihu.

As Christian friends, we have a tendency to be like Job’s friends. We are always rebuking each other for some perceived slight moral failure. These moral failures often result not from the person violating a Biblical command, but from violating our personal standards. We rebuke people in much the same way as Job’s friends critiquing his activities. We are rarely like Elihu, challenging our friend’s misconceptions of reality and other real problems. We never attempt to help people with the problems that will have an effect on their lives and jobs. Problems such as failing to practice normal etiquette, competent dressing ability, use of proper grammar in speech, etc. go unaddressed as we strain at the gnats of minor dress code violations and music choices. We owe our friends more.