Lazarus our friend

Themes: Friends

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

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David and Jonathan

Themes: Friends

“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?

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The Language of Friendship

Themes: Friends

Sometimes it’s difficult to know who your friends are. Strangely, this truth extends beyond head-shaking experiences of betrayal, and into more trivial domains of linguistics. We’ve already noted the potential dangers of attempting to find out friendship through a simple word study, as though a dictionary entry could tell you what it means to shake a man’s hand, slap him on the back. But we cannot do conceptual work without words, and in particular, we cannot trace the figure of the friend through the biblical-canonical history without knowing his (or her) name. What words do we use to say ‘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.

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Seeking Friends

Themes: Friends

So where would we begin to find ‘friendship’?

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?

Image by Untitled Blue

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Friendship: Brotherhood, Equality, Pathology

Themes: Friends

series begins here

I’ve told you a little of my story, and we’ve listened to the grief of Alfred. We could have started with a taxonomy of forms or a grammatico-historical exegesis of scriptural terms. To do so, however, is to risk substituting the dried specimen for the living organism. It may also be to introduce the pathological form as the normal. This is certainly the contention of Jacques Derrida and I’d like us to spend a little time with him, listening to his meditations in The Politics of Friendship.

The Politics of Friendship is one of Derrida’s later works, after his celebrated ‘turn to ethics’ under the influence of Emmanuel Levinas: a work on friendship and of friendship. The Politics of Friendship is Derrida’s attempt to reflect upon the ‘canonical’ concept of friendship within Western literature and philosophy and to note the entanglement of concepts of friendship with political organisation, particularly democracy. To simplify (extremely), Derrida’s political goal is to use a deconstructive reading of friendship to appeal for a reconstructed form of democracy: one that is better able to make room for the social outsider, immigrant, refugee, etc. The details of this proposal, as you’d expect from anything by Derrida, are maddeningly hard to pin down (which might be the point?), and yet the book is beautiful, melancholic, hopeful.

Derrida’s readings of the canonical concept of friendship continually spiral out from a remark attributed to Aristotle by Diogenes Laertius in his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, “O my friends, there is no friend.” The strange unstable contradiction within this appeal (how can you address someone as ‘friend’ and maintain ‘there is no friend’) captures Derrida’s imagination. Ultimately he reads it (I would say) eschatologically – as though Aristotle is calling out to, making room for, a form of friendship that has not yet appeared but whose trace he feels. Strangely, this line from Aristotle and the trace of the ‘friend who is to come’ keeps bubbling to the surface in the canonical history of friendship.

Against the ‘friend who is to come’ is the canonical form of the ‘friend as brother’. Derrida attempts to show (I think successfully) that the figure of the brother is consistently presented as the exemplar of the friend, and the ‘fraternity’ (brotherhood) as the paradigmatic political community. As you would expect in a deconstructive reading, Derrida highlights and destabilises the apparent ‘naturalness’ of the brotherly bond, and the way that this ‘nature’ is taken up into political discourse. We like to picture our political communities, political friendships in terms of native ties and natural bonds. However, as Derrida points out, the reality of the ties that bind political friends are rarely ‘natural’, and the natural ties that bind biological brothers rarely result in the kind of relation envisaged by political ‘brethren’. Political friendship is particularly seen in the concept of the ‘sworn brotherhood’, a bond of alliance sealed with an oath and then re-imagined under a fraternal narrative. Derrida responds:

“… there has never been anything natural in the brother figure on whose features has so often been drawn the face of the friend, or the enemy, the brother enemy. De-naturalization was at work in the very formation of fraternity… The relation to the brother engages from the start with the order of the oath, of credit, of belief and of faith. The brother is never a fact.” (The Politics of Friendship, 159.)

Derrida asks us to join him in questioning: who does this oath exclude, and what is it for? The answer is found in the other dominant strand of the canonical concept of friendship.

Alongside the motif of the friend as brother, Derrida traces the theme of the essential ‘equality’ of friends. Reaching back to Aristotle once again, we find the idea of the friend as ‘one soul in two bodies’, taken up through Cicero, and becoming hyperbolic in Montaigne’s love for his friend Étienne de La Boétie. This essential equality must be an equality of virtue, and thus, of manliness, excellence. We are measured by the quality of our friends. In our friends we see ourselves reflected back. The oath of friendship, of fraternity, that founds the political community, is an oath between equals that narcissistically reflects the excellence of the one back to the other. It is against the stranger, the immigrant. It is a friendship that makes outsiders.
Much of the rest of The Politics of Friendship is Derrida’s reading of these twin themes – brotherhood and equality – as they shape the concept of friendship, and through friendship, the modern concept of democracy. (For what it’s worth, my sense is that Derrida is attempting to respond to Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberal democracy by turning Nietzsche against him. But really, who can tell?)

Derrida’s reading of the history of friendship is eminently contestable but what we can gain from him is a judicious suspicion of the rhetoric and narrative of friendship mediated to us through our culture. Might there be something structurally wrong with the way we think about friendship most of the time? An essential narcissism, an inbuilt exclusionary impulse?

We shouldn’t be surprised that friendship has pathological forms: this is the reality, living, as we do, in the wake of Adam’s sin. We don’t need to travel far to see friendship turned into a conspiracy against others: a primary school play ground. Or to see friendship as narcissism: facebook.com

Series Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

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Friendship: How to think ‘friend’?

Themes: Friends

series begins here

Why begin this way?
Is it true that we cannot see the face of the friend, only glance his back as he walks into remembrance?
Emma disagrees, she tells me she knows her friends, and she knows and loves them as friends, in the moment of loving. This may well be, but even here I’m willing to argue that it is the inevitable oscillation between loneliness and togetherness that make the friendship an object of reflection. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m trying to draw a distinction between our experience of participating in a friendship, and the conditions under which we come to reflect upon that friendship, or ‘friendship’ in general. I’m not trying to denigrate the experience of participation or to argue that friendship is only ‘real’ when it is gone.

The experience of participating in a friendship is no less real for not being reflected upon. Actually, part of what I’m arguing is that this is intrinsic to the nature of friendship: it is oriented out towards the world and thus struggles to become the object of its own attention. (This might become clearer as we go forward, so hang in there).

Just a little more clarification: in these Meditations we are seeking to do ‘conceptual’ work together, to take a step outside our particular times and places and try to puzzle out a shared understanding of ‘friendship’. It is itself a friendly occupation, hammering away together in the mental shed. We do conceptual work when we move beyond retelling our particular stories and experiences and seek to fit them all together into a coherent shared narrative (or picture, or drama, the metaphors never quite cover it all). We do this as we share with, and listen to, each other, and through this to pay attention to the patterns, figures, repetitions, motifs, that keep recurring throughout our lives and throughout creation. It is a difficult process, not least because often this requires us to become the objects of our own attention. It can be a little like standing in front of a mirror and trying to watch your eyes look at your hands. Maddening! In fact, the process involves the process of coming to know ‘oneself as another’ (Paul Ricoeur coined the phrase), and we can only genuinely and authentically do this when we pay attention to how we, ourselves, really are known by others. So, we swap stories, interrogate our memories, attend to other people’s reactions to our actions, and listen to the wisdom of those in other times and places. Really good conceptual work is always collaborative, even when it looks, or pretends to be, solitary. In the present case, we are working on developing a conceptual understanding of friendship, something that goes beyond the experience of participating in friendships and attempts to describe the features of ‘the friend’ that would enable us to pick him out of the crowd, regardless of local garb. In doing this we don’t leave behind the realities and particularities of our experiences. We aren’t trying to ‘get behind’ these stories, but to find the history that makes them one.

Series Part 1, Part 2.
Image by The Round Peg

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