Long-live the reading-group! Death to examinations!!

From Heinrich von Kleist, ‘On the Gradual Production of Thoughts Whilst Speaking, in Heinrich von Kleist, Selected Writings, edited and translated by David Constantine, London: J.M. Dent (1997), 405-9.

If there is something you wish to know and by meditation you cannot find it, my advice to you, my ingenious old friend, is: speak about it with the first acquaintance you encounter. He does not need to be especially perspicacious, nor do I mean that you should ask his opinion, not at all. On the contrary, you should yourself tell him at once what it is you wish to know.
…

[Using his sister as an the example of this practice]

[It is not] by skilful questioning she brings me to the crux of the matter, though that might often be the way to do it, I daresay. But because I do have some dim conception at the outset, one distantly related to what I’m looking for, if I boldly make a start with that, my mind, even as my speech proceeds, under the necessity of finding an end for that beginning, will shape my first confused idea into complete clarity so that, to my amazement, understanding is arrived at as the sentence ends. I put in a few unarticulated sounds, dwell lengthily on the conjunctions, perhaps make use of apposition where it is not necessary, and have recourse to other tricks which will spin out my speech, all to gain time for the fabrication of my idea in the workshop of the mind. And in this process nothing helps me more that if my sister makes a move suggesting she wishes to interrupt; for such an attempt from outside to wrest speech from its grasp still further excites my already hard-worked mind and, like a general when circumstances press, its powers are raised to a further degree…

It is a strangely inspiring thing to have a human face before us as we speak; and often a look announcing that a half-expressed thought is already grasped gives us its other half’s expression. [Bold is mine]

…

That a certain excitement of the intelligence is necessary even to revivify ideas we have already had is amply demonstrated whenever open-minded and knowledgeable people are being examined and without any preamble are asked such questions as: What is the state? Or: What is property? Things of that kind. If these young people had been in company and for a while the subject of conversation had been the state or property they would by a process of comparison, discrimination and summary perhaps with ease have arrived at the definition. But being wholly deprived of any such preparation they are seen to falter and only an obtuse examiner will conclude from this that they do not know. For it is not we who know things but pre-eminently a certain condition of ours which knows.

 

Only very commonplace intellects, people who yesterday learned by heart what the state is and today have forgotten it again, will have their answers pat in an examination. Indeed, there may be no worse opportunity in the world for showing oneself to advantage than a public examination. Besides the fact that it offends and wounds our sense of decency and incites us to recalcitrance to have some learned horsedealer looking into how many things we know who then, depending on whether they are five or six, either buys us or dismisses us: it is so difficult to play upon a human mind and induce it to give forth its peculiar music, it so easily under clumsy hands goes out of tune, that even the most practised connoisseeur of human beings, even he, not being acquainted with the one whose labour he is assisting at, may make mistakes. And if such young people, even the most ignorant among them, do most often achieve good marks this is because the minds of the examiners, if the examination is public, are themselves too embarrassed to deliver a true judgement. For not only do they themselves feel the indecency of the whole procedure: we should be ashamed to ask a person to tip out the contents of his purse before us, let alone his soul: but their own intelligences come under dangerous appraisal and they may count themselves lucky if they manage to leave the examination without having revealed more shameful weaknesses than the young finalist himself has whom they have been examining.

[This train of thought begins here and it part of a series I've been working on since last year. You can find earlier articles by searching for the theme 'friends']

The different-ness of friends can be seen more subtly when we seek to locate the character of biblical-canonical friendships against a broader background of biblical relations. The drama of the Old Testament takes place among a set of characters who are bound together, not by an act of originative free association, but as a family. Israel was begotten, not made. Early in the story, as the plot thickens, so does the blood. Over time the family becomes greatly extended, internecine conflicts erupt, the extended family becomes the dispersed family. But always with the memory that Israel is a family: with all the pre-structured obligations and responsibilities invoked by kin. When the biblical authors need to characterise the relationship of biblical characters, whether to lament or berate, enjoin or celebrate, they find brothers. The usage flows on into the New Testament, the shared participation in the ‘family of Abraham’ becoming one of the key sources (along with the Fatherhood of God) for the Christian practice of referring to co-religionists as ‘brother’ or ‘sister’.

To characterise a relationship as filial is to immediately imply mutuality, that the relationship has a symmetry. Either party could rightly be called the subject of the predicate ‘is my brother/sister’.¹ The biblical-canonical tradition also has plenty to say about other non-mutual, asymmetric relations like master/slave, father/son, etc. But if we consider the biblical-canonical descriptions of friendship, we find that they don’t map easily onto this taxonomy of mutual/non-mutual relations. Biblical-canonical friendship is capable of being quasi-mutual. Clearly, two men (or women?) are envisaged as being able to mutually address each other as ‘friend’. But in the outstanding narrative descriptions of friendship there is a significant reticence to predicate the relation mutually. Abraham is God’s ‘friend’, but the usage is never reversed: God is never Abraham’s friend. We find the same thing with Jesus and his disciples: we do not hear the words, ‘I am your friend, if you do what I command.’ It’s very safe to assume that in both these cases, this subtle lack of mutuality is due to the maximal ontological difference between the parties. As a result, it would be risky to apply this lack of mutuality straightforwardly to human/human friendships. But if it is fair to characterise these relationships as ‘friendship’, and the biblical authors press us in this direction, then our concept of friendship must expand to include a level of difference, of inequality between the friends, that could even result in friendship being asymmetrical, i.e., not having precisely the same quality as it flows from one party to the other.²

Could it even involve obedience?

Footnotes
1. It’s probably easier to see what I mean if we contrast mutual with asymmetric relations.  A master/servant relation is asymmetric: the master and the servant do not share the same relation to each other. A master and servant cannot change places without changing their relationship. A ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ relationship is one in which the parties are equally/mutually ‘brother’ or ‘neighbour’ to each other. This point shouldn’t be confused with the fact that in both asymmetric and mutual relations the parties can be mutually constitutive of each other, i.e., one cannot be ‘master’ without a servant, nor ‘brother’ without a brother.

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2. We must be careful not to overstate our claim at this point. Not every friendship must be founded upon the kind of radical difference presupposed by the Creator/creature divide, but the biblical-canonical history pushes us to recognise that equality, which forms the root of the pathological narcissism Derrida detects in the Western canonical concept – cannot be made an essential quality of friendship.↑

Is equality between friends essential to the concept?

Consider Abraham the pilgrim, the one person in the whole length and breadth of biblical history who is known by the epithet ‘friend’. But whose friend?

But you, Israel, My servant, Jacob, whom I have chosen, descendant of Abraham, My friend (Isaiah 41:8 HCSB)

Are You not our God who drove out the inhabitants of this land before Your people Israel and who gave it forever to the descendants of Abraham Your friend? (2Chronicles 20:7 HCSB)

So the Scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness, and he was called God’s friend. (James 2:23 HCSB)

Is there any question of equality between these two? Any possibility that they might mutually reflect each others’ greatness back, as in a mirror?

What about Moses, staggering out into darkness after a late night session in the Tent of Meeting, radioactive with the divine presence, spoken to ‘just as a man speaks with his friends’? Did Moses rejoice to see his power imaged in God?

And we have already traced the history of David and Jonathan. Those two who, though both firmly planted in the common soil of humanity, come from such very different fields: the heir of a kingdom, and a youngest son, whose inheritance could be measured in lambs.

It is of course, the echoes of different-ness which reverberate through, and make significant, Jesus’ description of Lazarus as ‘our friend’; And even more so, his deliberate  words to his disciples: ‘you are my friends’.

All these surprising friends! In most of these stories, we get the impression that the narrator reaches for the word ‘friend’ with a shake of the head and bemused expression. The Bible is basically silent on the question of whether friends should be equals, but it speaks volumes of wonderment on the subject of how different they can be. Even if we were to grant that within this history, friendship was normally regarded as between two equals (however that might be measured), the outstanding friendships, the places where the narrator nudges you and says, ‘check this out’, are friendships between two or more who can scarcely be thought together, let alone who belong talking face to face.

Jesus conceives of a compatibility between friendship and obedience which challenges the mutuality and equality at the heart of our received conception. Wouldn’t you be unsettled in the face of two ‘friends’, one of whom demanded obedience from the other? My instinctive reaction would be to try and persuade these two that they’ve misunderstood something about how friendship flows.

Faced by this, we can react in a number of ways: first, we could conceivably claim that Jesus has radically departed from and distorted the true meaning of the word ‘friend’ – that obedience is genuinely incompatible with the essential freedom that must obtain between individuals in friendly relation. But this is an unfriendly reading of Jesus’ words, not an interpretation open to anyone who has been washed with his hands.

Secondly, we could accept Jesus’ words as a true statement about friendship, but only inasmuch as it relates to friendship with him. Just as he is always Lord as Servant, and Servant as Lord, he is also, utterly uniquely, Lord/Servant as friend. Just because he is who he is, unlike any other, he is a friend unlike any other. And so, his Lordly friendship, while unquestionably friendship, cannot be the model for thinking about the kind of friendliness which might flow between us. The concept is too far transformed through contact with his person. But then, claiming us as friends, would Jesus leave us to our own devices to figure out what this means? Is he that unfriendly?

There might be a third way. Recognising there’s more than a little truth to the point above, perhaps we can plot our way forward by recognising that, with reference to himself, Jesus does work a variation on our generic understanding of friendship, but not in a way that runs against the grain of the concept. By this I mean that, while Jesus’ is a unique instance of friendship, he is still working within the implications and latencies of the term. Actually, this doesn’t do justice to who Jesus really is. I’d like to go even farther: as the Creative Word, the person through whom the Father brought the world into existence with all its patterns, orders, particulars, and concepts; and as the Creative Word, the original speaker and framer of language, Jesus Christ is the transcendental foundation of friendship. ‘Transcendental’ is a term (given its philosophical meaning by Immanuel Kant) to describe the foundational conditions upon which our experience of something depends, but which are not themselves capable of being directly experienced. For the purposes of our discussion, to claim that Jesus Christ is the ‘transcendental foundation of friendship’ amounts to saying this: we can never be Jesus, or have his relation to the world or his people, but God’s action toward the world in Christ, creating, loving, sustaining, redeeming, is the basis and frame for all our experience, including the experience of friendship. So we can’t rule out Jesus’ words and actions as irrelevant for our discussion of friendship, we also can’t simply make them paradigmatic in a way that ignores his uniqueness. We need to employ an ‘analogical’ method and pay careful attention to the lines of similarity Jesus draws between friendship with him and friendship with each other. We need to let Jesus speak and teach us. And we must also be careful to pay attention to the fact that he speaks throughout the whole biblical canon. Our analogical method is disciplined (analogies have a tendency to become feral) by attending to Jesus’ own usage of the concept, both in his incarnate words and actions, and as the Spirit interprets these words and actions to us through the rest of the Bible.

Before we move on, just to reassure you that I’m not plucking this concept of analogy out of the air, look back at Jesus’ words again:

This is My command: Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. (John 15:12–14 HCSB)

Do you notice the form of verse 13 (the middle sentence)? It’s very ‘general’ sounding, like a proverb or aphorism. In fact, as a proverbial-type saying, it doesn’t sound entirely unlike a passage in Aristotle. In the Nicomachean Ethics we read, “To a noble man there applies the true saying that he does all things for the sake of his friends… and, if need be, he gives his life for them.” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1169a).

Jesus’ little proverb links together his action and attitude toward the disciples with their behaviour toward each other. The proverb crystallises the meaning of the ‘love’ command in verse 12 (‘love like the best kind of friend’). But in doing this, the proverb also extends the meaning of ‘friend-love’ by connecting it with Jesus’ own actions, saying in effect: No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends, as I am doing for you. This is precisely the dramatic rhetorical effect of moving from the general proverb to the emphatic “You are my friends”. These three little verses are an analogical hinge, allowing us to connect Jesus’ friendship toward us with that which flows between us.

Jesus has more to say in this passage, and we must also look out at the wider biblical picture, but in principle, the path forward seems sound. We still need to puzzle out the relation between obedience and mutuality, but we can at least be confident that Jesus teaches us friendship.

Image by Pixelmaniac

“You are My friends if you do what I command you.”

That sounds like a remarkably conditional form of friendship. The phrase is jarring, almost embarrassing, as though Jesus at this intimate moment reveals an ultimate egocentricity. Does he not actually understand friendship: that it cannot be commanded or conditioned like this?

Of course there a many different ways in which a condition can function. If we heard these words on the lips of a human political manipulator, they would sound like a threat. But when spoken by Jesus they are transformed by his story and his prior action. His command is that they love each other, as I have loved you, i.e., wrapped in a rough towel and not afraid to touch another’s toes; not afraid to travel into the jaws of danger for Lazarus; and as the disciples are beginning to dimly understand, soon to be seen naked against the grain of the Cross. The content of this command is certainly not incompatible with the love that friends bear.

Our problem then, seems to revolve around the intrusion of this notion of ‘commanding’ upon our concept of friendship. We must quickly despatch the idea, however, that the disciples become Jesus’ friends through obedience to his command. The context makes perfectly clear that this conditionality relates to a friendship already initiated and named by him. Rank, calculated disobedience to Jesus is unquestionably incompatible with claiming his friendship, but just because obedience is a necessary condition doesn’t mean it’s sufficient. It seems more likely that we should regard this as an ‘evidential’ condition, a way for us to verify someone’s claim to friendship with Jesus, rather than a ‘generative’ condition: one that makes the claim true.

And this is so because Jesus is always Lord of his friends, even while washing their feet, or laying down his life. Perhaps to our increasing embarrassment, he goes on in verse 16 to say, “You did not choose Me, but I chose you.” Friendship with Jesus does not come through the satisfaction of a condition, but only through his own initiation: his ‘electing’.

Image by LivingOS

As Peter gazed upon the scalp of the Christ, the head bowed over his road-grimed feet, and  felt the carpenter’s fingers carve the dirt from his toes, the rasping of the towel, he partook of the body and blood of the Lord. John’s account of Jesus’ final night with his disciples is striking for the way he substitutes the synoptic account of Jesus’ breaking and sharing of the bread and cup, with this poignant washing.  “If I don’t wash you, you have no part with Me.” (John 13:8 HCSB)

The one who kneels here, the outstretched arm of Yahweh, the incarnate omnipotence, is the figure of the Lord as Servant. And what he was, in eternal glory with his Father, he will be again, even as he hangs between heaven and hell: the Servant as Lord. But perhaps most mysterious of all, between here and there, he will be friend.

“I have spoken these things to you so that My joy may be in you and your joy may be complete. This is My command: Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you slaves anymore, because a slave doesn’t know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have heard from My Father. You did not choose Me, but I chose you. I appointed you that you should go out and produce fruit and that your fruit should remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in My name, He will give you. This is what I command you: Love one another. (John 15:11–17 HCSB)

This paragraph fascinates and disturbs me. Even without any familiarity with the other Gospels, or the wider narrative of John, we get the immediate sense that when Jesus addresses his disciples as ‘friends’, something happens, it is a phrase pregnant with meaning. He draws attention to this innovation himself: “You, I call friends”.¹

Are the disciples shocked by this, staring at him with open mouths? Are they flattered, unsettled?

If we cast our net more widely through the Gospels, the novelty of Jesus’ language becomes increasingly apparent. Only on one other occasion does he address a group of people as his ‘friends’ (Luke 12:4). In this case, Jesus is addressing a crowd of many thousands and the usage is primarily rhetorical, there is nothing of the personal intimacy we find in this drawn out farewell. Certainly, there are many other occasions where Jesus is charged with being a ‘friend of sinners’ by his enemies. The intended moral obloquy in the phrase becomes a rich source of irony for the Gospel writers, but it is not a phrase we find on the lips of Jesus himself. Nope, it’s really only here, that we find Jesus with ‘friends’.

¹ The English translations uniformly struggle to deal with the Greek tense-forms in this passage. When Jesus says, ‘I have called you friends’ (v.15), the ‘I have called’ translates a single perfect tense-form verb. Older grammarians argued that this indicated a past state of affairs with ongoing consequences (hence the translation), but recent verbal aspect theory questions this solution. The Greek phrase is ὑμᾶς δὲ εἴρηκα φίλους. The fronting of the pronoun ὑμᾶς is emphatic, ‘You (and not others), I call friends’. It parallels the emphatic ‘You are my friends’ in verse 14.  The perfect tense-form verb is probably also intending to highlight this dramatic moment as it unfolds around them, rather than referring to a past state of affairs. The use of the perfect verb is doubly striking in that the passage continues on with a series of aorists: I made known to you, I chose you, I appointed you. These verbs form the narrative explanation for why Jesus has just now referred to them as friends and will continue to do so.

Image by Chiceaux

When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw Him, she fell at His feet and told Him, “Lord, if You had been here, my brother would not have died!”
When Jesus saw her crying, and the Jews who had come with her crying, He was angry in His spirit and deeply moved.
“Where have you put him?” He asked. “Lord,” they told Him, “come and see.”
Jesus wept.
So the Jews said, “See how He loved him!”
(John 11:32–37 HCSB)

We find ourselves beside another grave. Lazarus’. “See how he loved him!” Come closer…

Sometimes we are too overtaken by the heady experience of witnessing Lazarus’ resurrection that we miss the unmistakable connection between this story and Jesus’ final destination. The one who will shortly say, “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” begins laying down his life right here. (John connects the two episodes verbally: Jesus speaks of “Lazarus the friend of ours” (Lit.), the only reference to friendship with Jesus other than in John 15:11ff). Jesus’ makes the trip to Lazarus’ grave over the protests of his disciples. It is a trip into the heartland of enemy territory where the Jewish leaders are waiting to capture and kill him. Thomas’ words capture the disciple’s outlook: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” (John 11:16, NIV).

When Jesus first heard the news he had promised a good outcome for Lazarus, “This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it.” (John 11:4 NIV) If you’ve been paying attention to Jesus’ talk of glorification throughout John’s Gospel, you’ll know, however, that ‘glorification’ is his way of talking about ‘crucifixion’.

The Son of David weeps, and speaks. Lazarus walks.

On the basis of this miracle the chief priests and Pharisees convene the Sanhedrin and take the final decision to have Jesus killed (John 11:45-54). In coming to the grave of his friend, and leading him up out of it, Jesus signed his death warrant.

With Lazarus we begin to smell the hint of a promise that friendship might return from death. That it might be more than the endlessly anti-climatic experience of David and Jonathan. But as soon as we begin to hope, the friend begins to depart. Jesus announces himself as a friend, in the very movement that he goes to the Cross. Is friendship finished or unfinished by this departure?

Image: The Raising of Lazarus. Statue by Sir Jacob Epstein in New College Chapel, Oxford. Photo by Lawrence OP

“As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.” (1Samuel 18:1–4 ESV)

Where did this story come from?

David and Jonathan have never met, as far as we can tell. David is returning from his victory over Goliath. He is the boy-hero of Israel anointed by God as the future King of the nation. He mets the young prince, the one whose throne he will usurp. And Jonathan loves him. It is not the fact that their souls are knit together which should hold our attention, it is the fact that this unity is produced between two who are so different, such natural enemies.
The story unfolds but the friendship is fraught with the weight of David’s destiny. In 1 Samuel 20, when Saul turns against David, Jonathan keeps his covenant by warning David of the danger. He lets fly an arrow, and a cry, whose trajectory speeds David into exile. But before David leaves there is time to renew their covenant, and weep.

“…though David wept more.” (1Samuel 20:41 HCSB)

The friends meet again in chapter 23. David is hiding from Saul in the Wilderness of Ziph.

“Then Saul’s son Jonathan came to David in Horesh and encouraged him in his faith in God, saying, “Don’t be afraid, for my father Saul will never lay a hand on you. You yourself will be king over Israel, and I’ll be your second-in-command. Even my father Saul knows it is true.” Then the two of them made a covenant in the LORD’s presence. Afterward, David remained in Horesh, while Jonathan went home.” (1Samuel 23:15–18 HCSB)

A third covenant. And a plan: “I’ll be your second-in-command.” The friends do not weep as they part this time. But they will not see each other again. Jonathan dies by his Father’s side in battle. His father’s victim by a Philistine arrow. David wept more.

How the mighty have fallen in the thick of battle!
Jonathan lies slain on your heights.
I grieve for you, Jonathan, my brother.
You were such a friend to me.
Your love for me was more wonderful than the love of women.
How the mighty have fallen and the weapons of war have perished!
(2Samuel 1:25–27 HCSB)

The story of David and Jonathan is the heroic friendship of the Old Testament. There is some suggestion that the story was retailed after the fact to help secure David’s lineage against any possible revolt and return by the Israelites to the House of Saul. Maybe it’s just a story prone to misappropriation: from Victorian Romantics to contemporary Gay christians. What sort of friendship is this?

It appears to have everything that Derrida fears: a sworn oath, one soul in bodies twain, the friend in the figure of the brother, even the exclusion of women! But this story has something else that Derrida, and many others, fail to notice: the presence of a third.

It was there in the very beginning, in the unseen hand that bound life to life. And they were genuinely bound together: Jonathan saving David’s life from Saul; David’s anointing irredeemably altering Jonathan’s life, in a sense, ending it.

The third is there in the form of the covenant. The sworn oath of the friends is not merely to do and be good to each other. Rather, because of who David is, and who Jonathan is, it is a covenant to make him King. The prince gives David his royal robe, his sword, bow, belt (1 Samuel 18:4). The covenant commits the friends to a plan marked out in the divine anointing. The final consummation of the covenant is done, ‘in Yahweh’s presence’ (1 Samuel 23:18). It is the presence of a third that bids them be friends who are by nature enemies.

It is a friendship known in its traces. Only the fallen Jonathan ever draws out the depth of what the friendship meant to David. But was he friend, or brother? Both. Jonathan the Prince befriended a shepherd boy, freely gave of himself into a relation that did not arise from any prior obligation, not of nature or oath. His friendship arose freely but consummated itself in covenants. Friendship is the freedom to bind oneself to another, a freedom that cannot exist where one is already bound. David the King calls the dead prince, ‘brother’. It the moment of the consummation of their plan. But the friend is not there, he has fallen. David acknowledges in the name ‘brother’, an obligation that cannot be escaped, however freely it came.

But if this is where friendship ends, beside a grave, with only traces, can we truly say with Tennyson,

I hold it true, whate’er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
‘Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
(In Memoriam A.H.H., XXVII)

Friend?

The linguistic problems are complex. It’s difficult enough to pin down the meaning of the word ‘friend’ in English. We use ‘friend’ with a huge variety of referents and shades of meaning, consider the difference between these phrases: ‘facebook friend’; ‘man’s best friend’; Dave and I have been friends since University’. We have been educated into a linguistic community that enables us to almost intuitively distinguish three quite separate (although not unrelated) concepts of friendship behind these phrases. When we operate within one language, its structures and our participation in a linguistic community enable us to work through this complexity without breaking a sweat. The real difficulties arise when we attempt to trace a concept through multiple languages.

Each language divides up its semantic space differently: the family of words which in English cluster around the concept of ‘friendship’ do not neatly map onto a similar family of words in Greek or Hebrew. The various word-families are like jigsaw puzzles which picture the same scene, take up the same surface area, but whose pieces are cut in different shapes. A piece from one puzzle won’t properly fit into another. So, when we come to the Bible looking to discover the meaning of friendship, we can’t go to the index, find the equivalent word in the biblical languages, and look up all the references. While Greek writers employ the noun φιλος in a way that is quite similar to the English ‘friend’, the related verb (φιλεω) is much broader, ranging through various versions of the english word ‘love’. So, while a φιλος is quite distinct from a neighbour, master, father, or brother, it is perfectly possible to φιλεω them all.

When we turn to the Old Testament the problem becomes more difficult. Our English concept ‘friend’ fails to map neatly onto any particular noun or verb at all. Old Testament authors most commonly choose between two quite distinct words to talk about friendship. The first, the Hebrew word ra‘ , is usually translated ‘neighbour’. At its broadest semantic range, ra‘ simply denotes mutuality, i.e., those who are in some form of reciprocal, symmetrical relation, leaving context to specify how that relation arose or of what it consists. The second Hebrew word that concerns us is ’ahab, denoting intimacy (including sexual intimacy). In many contexts (for example, Song of Songs), ’ahab approximates to our English word, ‘lover’. Translators will tend to render either of these terms as the English word ‘friend’ when either the reciprocity is clearly more than mere spatial or economic proximity, or where the intimacy is clearly of a non-sexual kind, i.e., in situations where something like the English/Greek concept of ‘friend’ appears to be present. It’s easiest to see the distinction and overlap between these words when we view them in context:

A man with many friends (ra‘) may be harmed, but there is a friend (’ahab) who stays closer than a brother.
(Proverbs 18:24 HCSB)

A friend (ra‘) loves (related verb to ’ahab) at all times, and a brother is born for a difficult time.
(Proverbs 17:17 HCSB)

In Proverbs 18:24, the Sage distinguishes between two different kinds of friendship. Although he uses the two distinct words ‘neighbour’ and ‘lover’, he is clearly playing upon the fact that they can both be used to describe more or less intimate types of the same kind of relationship. The HCSB translation (above) seeks to draw out this comparison by rendering both the Hebrew words using the same word in English: ‘friend’. The second example, from Proverbs 17:17, also demonstrates the overlap between the words. In this case, the ‘friend’ (translating the word ‘neighbour’) ‘loves’ (using the verbal form related to ‘lover’). In both cases, the author is seeking to express the concept of a relationship characterised, on the one hand, by the kind of intimacy enjoyed between sexual partners, but without the sexual component; and on the other, by the kind of mutuality that exists between neighbours, but with a stronger affective disposition. The solution is to juxtapose the concepts of ‘neighbour’ and ‘lover’ to capture a semantic space for which Hebrew has no precise word.

My suggestion is that, rather than looking for particular words within the biblical-canonical history that might signal the presence of friendship, we look for patterns, juxtapositions, moments that gather a halo of significance, both in their telling and their retelling. Obviously, we can’t afford to ignore the use of certain words or phrases – what we might call the language of friendship – but even when these words don’t appear, we must look out for the particular configurations of mutuality, the patterns of a distinct kind of love, which mark out the presence of a friend. Perhaps from loneliness or loss we can learn the patience, the sensitivity, the subtlety, to recognise the friend when he appears?

Sorry about the rubbish Hebrew transliterations. It’s the result of a surprisingly complex problem with my WordPress installation.

C.S. Lewis warns us against looking too hard. Part of the difficulty is that ‘being friends’ is not about friendship. “That is why those pathetic people who simply ‘want friends’ can never make any.” (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 80). Lewis portrays friends as those who stand side by side and gaze out at the world, in contrast to lovers whose gaze is fixed on each other. It is with this image in our minds that perhaps we can feel our way forward to friendship. Friendship arises not out of ‘naturalness’, sameness, or narcissism, but from a third: an object, goal, vision, project, vocation. Genuine friendship doesn’t arise from within friends, but between friends and an ‘outside’. It is essentially orientated away from the relationship itself. Pathological, counterfeit relationships always fail to have this ‘other’ centred-ness: counterfeit love fails to be ‘other-person-centred’; counterfeit friendship fails to be ‘other-thing-centred’. This is why friendship is best understood in its traces, as Tennyson knew.
We study it when we are lonely.

Maybe there is another reason that friendship is hard to find: that it is somehow essentially resistant to definition. To begin with a definition is to seek the ‘sameness’ of friendships, to isolate the distinctive patterns and markings that make ‘friend’ into a kind. I don’t want for a minute to deny that there is something distinctive about this relation. But what if its distinctiveness lies in its freedom, in the basic unboundedness, the foundational non-obligation of the relationship which makes it into such a gift? If so, maybe we should start with the ‘different-ness’ of friends. Perhaps here we will find traces of the friend who is to come?

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