Ecclesial leadership as friendship

132 Coding the discourse friendship concept: parrēsia . 48 Though parrēsia does not appear in this text, its sense is one of boldness in speech, the kind of plain-speaking indicated by 15:15. 49 Verse 15 also differentiates friendship from master-slave relationships, clarifying that friendship’s obedience is informed by revelation in the context of intimacy. Rather than obviate obedience, such intimacy provides a different basis for obedience. 50 Friendship, then, may still include the elements of submission to authority and obedient service comprised in the doulos/diakonos constellation of meaning but goes further, offering shades of intimacy and revelation. As friends, the disciples receive ‘understanding upon which to choose action consistent with the intent of . . . Christ as the “principal” for whom they are agents’. Whereas slaves’ obedience follows from their deemed lack of personal will, which has been subsumed through coercion by their master’s, friends can choose – or not – to act for the other. 51 The message conveyed is that ‘disciples do not obey Jesus’ commands merely because he has the authority to command them to do it, but because, as friends of Jesus, they want to obey him’. 52 Thus, obedience is freely chosen, deriving from relationship and knowledge: submission is offered out of love. Interestingly, what has been presented as obedience is also presented by the text as appointment to a telos. This is the fourth implication of friendship with Jesus. It is already abundantly plain from 15:12–15 that friendship is at Jesus’ initiative. John 15:16 reiterates this: having been ‘called’ (15:15), 53 the friends have also been chosen 54 and appointed to a telos. This election is not ‘unto office but that which pertains to every Christian’ 55 and, so, is the telos not of a few but of the whole Jesus-community. Whereas some treat this as a missionary telos, 56 context would suggest the love which is obedience as being also the telos to which friends are appointed and the primary fruit to be sought. 57 Thus, to enjoy friendship with Jesus means to offer friendshiplove to others. The final aspect of friendship with Jesus is its mutuality. On one level, to label the friendship between Jesus and his followers a relationship of mutuality is extreme presumption. Surely Jesus, in promising friendship with himself and – through him – his Father, cannot intend to offer such a thing? Carson assumes this stance, denying reciprocity since Jesus is never called their friend. 58 Insofar as modern notions of friendship might understand equality, we certainly cannot ascribe equality to this friendship. The disciples are human and Jesus is uniquely the God-man: he alone initiates the friendship. 59 Yet, in light of this appointment to friendship, it is awkward to follow Carson in denying the relationship’s mutuality. 60 The text may not explicitly describe Jesus as his followers’ friend but, in many ways, this is the lesser claim. The greater is that which has been advanced: his followers invited to be his friends. Accordingly, to exclude the lesser claim is unreasonable, 61 especially given Jesus’ affirmation of love for his followers in 15:12 and previous references to the mutuality of the indwelling life (15:1–8). In fact, the incarnational dynamic – the disciples’ participation in Jesus’ very life – is precisely the underpinning of this friendship as a mutual reality. Friendship

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 133 with Jesus, then, is an invitation into a friendship where ‘one will appreciate the other’s mind so completely that each will be . . . fully authorized to act on the other’s behalf’, consistent with ancient practices of ‘approximating’ equality when friendship occurred between those of different social status: this happened by a ‘reciprocal entering into the other’s place’. 62 The obedience required appears to be ‘more an expression of covenant-loyalty . . . than the subordination of a client to a patron’, suggesting a friendship characterised by ‘ideals of loyalty, intimacy and sharing’ and resembling Greek concepts of friendship equality. 63 The wider context, as the sharing of final words, coheres with conceiving Jesus’ followers as intimates in the context of fictive kinship rather than as political friends. 64 Notwithstanding dissenting views, 65 the earlier incarnational language and imagery together with the level of intimacy offered not only with the Son but also, through him, with the Father weigh heavily in my construal of this friendship more as a conjoining of Jesus’ life with his followers’ lives than as some kind of royal patronage. 66 Though its contemplation may surely provoke deep wonder in us, the mutuality between Jesus and his friends is real. ‘Love one another’: a community of friendship The breathtaking presentation of friendship in 15:12–17 represents one marker of how Jesus loved his followers. 67 Yet, in light of the command to ‘love one another as I have loved you’, it is also the measure of how they are to love one another 68 and the reason for such love (15:12–17). Friendship with one another is both the obedience which constitutes the disciples’ friendship with Jesus and the fruit of that friendship which will abide. Love of one another within the Jesus-community, then, is to be mutual friendshiplove: one willing to sacrifice their life for their friend, whether simply to risk it or lay it down, either literally or in other-preferring service; each committed to relational intimacy and openness with the other such that submission of one to another is born of relationship. As their friendship with Jesus constitutes an appointment to a specific telos, so their friendships with one another represent participation in that telos as they fulfil the relational expectation core to friendship with Jesus by obeying his command. Further, as the disciples’ friendship with Jesus offered a window of revelation into his friendship with the Father and even, perhaps, a sharing in that intra-divine friendship (15:15), perhaps these human friendships act correspondingly as windows revealing, to the other, one’s friendship with Jesus, itself the source and paradigm for the friendship-love which he commands amongst them. John thus provides us with a richly woven perspective on the Jesus-tradition concerning friendship, revealing the inseparability of believers’ human friendships from the divine-human friendship in Christ. To love Christ and participate in his friendship is to love others with the same love which we have received. As windows of revelation, perhaps human friendships operate sacramentally in some way, or as icon of friendship with the Friend: because

134 Coding the discourse friendship with Jesus means being incarnationally indwelt by him (15:1–11), the other is necessarily brought up against Jesus’ presence in the believer. If so, then for the other to respond in the context of this human friendship in love is, in a sense, to respond in love also to Jesus. Such a response would be itself an incarnational movement towards deeper abiding in the divine life of love (15:10, 12). Yet how far does later Christian tradition develop this perspective? I turn now to thinkers who engaged Scripture and the classical tradition as they had received it, seeking to articulate innovative theological formulations for the church’s sake. The thirteenth century contribution of Thomas Aquinas, particularly, explores human friendship as participation in the divine-human friendship. 69 Thomas and friendship Friendship, love and happiness Thomas defined caritas (charity/love) in terms of amicitia (friendship), 70 instituting participation in the divine-human friendship established in Christ as the foundation for human friendships and recognising such human friendships as ever-deepening, ever-transforming participation in the divine love. Whilst much of his work conversed with Aristotle, his thought on charity is influenced also by Augustine. 71 Augustine (354–430) wrote on amicitia in conversation with the classical tradition, especially Cicero, 72 yet sought to differentiate the concept of Christian friendship, 73 identifying four key characteristics: (i) friendship is given by God; (ii) it is established in God; (iii) grace transfigures Christian friendship; (iv) friendship attains its perfection only in heaven. 74 In recognising God as ‘the end . . . of all true friendship’, 75 Augustine places God at friendship’s centre. Nevertheless, though suggesting in passing in lectures on John 15:14–16 that by his grace humanity can become ‘in some . . . indescribable but real way’ God’s friends, 76 Augustine does not give the reciprocal nature of this friendship much attention, 77 emphasising mainly its human side. Love towards God thus overshadows God’s love towards humanity, with ‘love of neighbour as the best “step” . . . to the love of God’. 78 Accordingly, whilst for Augustine amicitia denotes both ‘Christian’ and ‘secular’ relationships, 79 friendship finds completion only in the former. For Summers, this dualism ultimately leads Augustine to problematic ambivalence regarding the value of friends. 80 Carolinne White, however, explains this apparent ambivalence as progression in Augustine’s thought: commencing with a ‘humanist view of friendship’, he moved to emphasise ‘love of God at the expense of love of man’, such that everything other than God is merely useful for attaining enjoyment of him, and ended valuing ‘love of man within a theological perspective’ and thus as able to be enjoyed. 81 This variety, however, whether attributable to ambivalence or progression of thought, renders Augustine’s work less helpful here. For he does not account fully for love of neighbour. Rather, as Liz Carmichael

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 135 notes, his characterisation of caritas as ‘linear and “vertical”’ with neighbour being used for ‘our “enjoyment” of God’ risks it ‘being a neo-Platonic flight of the alone to the Alone’. 82 A fuller account of the ontologically prior love of God for humanity as foundational to human love towards God and others is important. For this, I turn to Thomas who avoided Pelagianism 83 by beginning with the divine-human friendship given in Christ, consistently perceiving human friendships as response thereto, rather than means of attaining to God as Augustine occasionally implied. 84 In making this turn, I do not intend a comprehensive assessment of caritas as Thomas describes it. Instead, I propose a reflective, critical reading in conversation with recent scholarship, for the sake of ascertaining the robustness of the discourse of friendship within Christian tradition. 85 For Thomas, humanity is created for happiness: human life is ‘a journey to whatever we think will fulfil and complete us . . . and bring peace to our relentlessly restless hearts’. 86 Thomas locates happiness in friendship with God, a friendship in which neighbour is loved as self. 87 This friendship, amicitia, is equated with charity or love, caritas . 88 Whilst the Cistercians had employed friendship in describing humanity’s relationship with God, Thomas was the first to equate friendship and love formally. 89 His work converses with, and subverts, Aristotle’s presentation of philia and its relation to the final good of human life, its telos, which Aristotle called eudaimonia . 90 Sometimes translated happiness, eudaimonia’s sense in Aristotle is normative: ‘the best possible life’, it is not ‘some particular good which surpasses all others, but the kind of life in which all those intrinsic goods are included’, 91 with virtues the shape of this good life. By the virtues, humans come to fulness and flourishing ( eudaimonia ), 92 which Aristotle perceived as ‘an unqualifiedly good life among free men in the city-state of Athens’. 93 The virtues are not preparatory to a complete human life but constitute it, 94 for the telos which is eudaimonia is not external, a goal towards which one moves, but a reality in which one participates. 95 Certain friendships are directed towards eudaimonia although Aristotle also identifies two other categories of friendship, those directed towards pleasure or utility. 96 Each category assumes the pre-condition of koinōnia between friends, 97 whether the communion of humanity, kinship, citizenship or common enterprise. 98 The latter two – pleasure and utility friendships – are lesser, albeit socially necessary, for the friend is loved not for themselves but for the benefit they provide. 99 Virtue friendships, by contrast, constitute a life of virtue. In such friendships, koinōnia is constituted by common pursuit of the good and by similarity of virtue: ‘each loves the other for . . . [their] own sake because each loves the good, and the friend, to some degree, embodies that good’. 100 Because the good sought is shared, to pursue the other’s good is to augment one’s own 101 and, because this good willed to oneself is the good of virtue, 102 this is free from selfishness. As the context of practising good towards others, these friendships make people virtuous, and may comprise a variety of related benefits including, perhaps, utility or pleasure. 103

136 Coding the discourse Sharing God’s happiness: divine-human friendship Thomas agrees with Aristotle that humanity’s telos is whatever activity corresponds with humanity’s proper function. 104 His subversion is in how he characterises that telos. For Thomas, God alone is happiness in his being, and God’s being is his activity in the enjoying of himself, 105 ‘the eternal friendship love between Father and Son, that exemplar generosity which begets Spirit . . . where love offered is love wholly received and wholly returned’. 106 Humanity’s happiness – the activity corresponding with its proper function and constituting its telos or fulness – is to share in God’s happiness, a gift communicated by God. 107 The gift which is this communicatio is participation in the God who is happiness. 108 The divine friendship-life is thus the basis of divine-human friendship which shares in it, a sharing located in fellowship with Christ through the Spirit. 109 Grace precedes and enables caritas, 110 and thus this communicatio is not only the sharing or participation itself but also ‘the act of communicating the ability to participate’. 111 Indeed, without grace to ‘draw .  .  . us beyond the inescapable limitations of our nature’ and make us fitting to God, humanity could not enjoy this telos which is divine participation, for it lies wholly beyond us. 112 Accordingly, whereas Aristotle could not define charity as friendship with God because the inequality between parties rendered mutuality impossible, Thomas sees the shared ‘social relational context’ which necessarily founds friendship as met in that, though in human bodily life fellowship with God may not be immediate, grace enables in Christ a spiritual conversatio, or sharing together in friendship’s activities. 113 That is, through the grace-gift of this divine initiative by which Jesus calls us friends, a ‘derivative equality’ and the necessary likeness between God and humanity are established, and divine-human friendship becomes possible. 114 ‘In charity, God becomes . . . [a] person’s friend, and the person, separated by an infinite distance from God, becomes God’s friend’. 115 Mutual benevolence, an active working to benefit the friend for the sake of the friend’s happiness, evidences this communicatio . 116 Such benevolence makes not the pleasure or usefulness derived from a friend the ground of one’s happiness but rather locates happiness in pursuing the friend’s happiness. 117 Thus divine-human friendship is that we actively seek God’s good for his sake, making his good our own, 118 whilst God’s love for humans is benevolence as absolute, that we might participate in his own goodness. 119 That love is expressed, as we saw, in the friendship offered in Christ, specifically in his atonement and continuing presence in the sacraments. 120 Humanity’s response of love is minimal but necessary: making God’s good our own for his sake means receiving and co-operating with his grace-gift, our reciprocity being ‘simply the return . . . of what God has given to us’. 121 This benevolence is not disinterested, however. Thomas assumes affective union: 122 mutuality of benevolence encompasses a mutual warmth and even sharing of oneself in openness to participating in another. 123 Friendship with God thus means ‘to suffer the possibility of being one heart with God’, 124 the

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 137 indwelling of lover and beloved, causing the lover to consider the beloved as identified with himself or herself. 125 In this union, each is to the other another self, meaning similitude in the context of difference. 126 Implicit in this account of friendship as encounter with God is an element of transformation. 127 Thomas understands that interaction with God in a relationship of mutuality cannot leave humans unchanged, recognising three degrees to which the imago Dei may be in humanity, governed by the quality of one’s love for God. 128 This transformation, reorientating movement towards the telos of full humanity, means becoming both more like God and more unlike God: ‘in making God’s good our own . . . we most fully become not God, but ourselves’. 129 Because of this friendship-union in Christ, we image God more completely – yet as humans rather than divine. Our likeness becomes pronounced as we embrace God’s good as our own yet our difference also becomes more delineated: to be human means to be ‘not-God’. In the context of transformation, however, the dynamic of grace does not obviate humanity’s need to join Christ’s vicarious covenant response. That is, caritas is not only a grace-gift but also a virtue to be embodied through habitual practices. 130 Christ is not only mediator, but exemplar, 131 and so humanity’s response of mutuality, though minimal, is, as I have said, necessary. In Paul Wadell’s words: we misunderstand the nature and purpose of grace if we receive it and remain unchanged . . . [G]race . . . summons and empowers us to live in the world differently by modelling our lives on the God who dwells within us. 132 We are, in words used a moment ago, to return what God has given to us. Formation to Christ, then, requires a life patterned on Christ as response to grace, and acts of charity towards others are the shape of this discipleship. 133 Caritas thus increases in us indefinitely in that each act of charity disposes us towards future acts of charity. Because we are formed towards what we love, it is not only our acts but also our affections which we must learn to direct towards love for God. 134 Grace enables this progression in our affective passions: by forming us and our passions in the good that is caritas, it inclines us progressively more thereto. 135 Such an increase of caritas means fuller participation in charity, rather than an increase in ‘quantity’ of charity, and it constitutes deeper union with God. 136 Sharing God’s happiness: the place of human friendship So far, I have emphasised the divine-human aspect of caritas. Yet Thomas is insistent that caritas -as- amicitia has four objects: God, neighbour, our body and ourselves, with God being loved as the source from which happiness flows and all else as participants with us in this communion. 137 God is to be loved more than our neighbour as the cause of happiness is loved more than

138 Coding the discourse the one receiving with us a share in that happiness, 138 and also more than oneself. 139 Yet that God is to be loved more than neighbour does not exclude neighbour-love. Rather friendship with God brings us to his command to love everyone as our neighbour, namely to engage in acts of charity towards others, seeking their well-being materially and spiritually. 140 This is how we return the love which God has given to us. Indeed, it is the same act whereby we love God and neighbour: to love one’s neighbour is to will for them what we will for ourselves, namely ‘the good that is God . . . [their] beatitude, and the means that allows . . . [them] to attain God – grace and charity’. 141 Just as we will God for ourselves not for our own sake but that we might belong to him and be for his sake, similarly loving one’s neighbour desires the good that is God not for their sake ‘in the sense that . . . [they] would be the ultimate end, but rather because of God and in order that . . . [they] might belong to God’. 142 Gerald Beyer notes that there is an ‘ontological unity’ between love for God and neighbour. Whilst love of God is primary: love of neighbour is . . . existentially prior . . . we ‘meet with’ the concrete neighbour before we encounter God . . . reflectively . . . Therefore, while our love for God ontologically precedes and flows on to the neighbour, it is the encounter with the concrete neighbour that provides the first opportunity to love God. 143 Thus neighbour-love is cast as expansive, ‘absolutely ecstatic and indiscriminate’, 144 ‘an open friendship-love, within the all-encompassing mutual friendship we have with God’. 145 That caritas must be offered to all yet friendship requires mutuality and preference is no threat to their synthesis. Enemies, strangers and sinners can all be objects of caritas -as- amicitia because of the charity we have towards God to whom charity is primarily directed: 146 to love these is to love them as objects of the divine Friend’s love. 147 Loving others for God’s sake means loving ‘their truest and most promising identity’ 148 and, being love related to whom the other ‘most intimately is’, is not merely instrumental love. 149 Just as each person is a concrete instantiation of humanity so the intimacy of each human friendship, though ultimately motivated by God, will also be influenced by other ‘motives for lovability’. 150 Indeed Thomas proposes an order of neighbour-love such that those closest in terms of biological ties and affective bonds are loved most. 151 This may actually render charity harder, of course: growth in friendship with God comes through love’s ‘often tiresome and exhausting demands’, especially as we embrace ‘the pivotal but often taxing relationships of our lives’. 152 Such love, especially for those close to us, is ‘risky and costly’, shaped by ‘the risk-taking love of God that we see dramatically embodied in Jesus’ and thus orientated towards eschatological joy. 153 Thomas’ call to love all in friendship thus does not nullify the particularity of certain friendships: 154 where there is special affection for some friends rooted in character

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 139 similarity or family relations and nurtured in the intentional sharing of life together, these friendships will be more intense than others. 155 However, this does not obviate the need to extend love to all. Particularity, and varying degrees of intimacy, is valid given human finitude; exclusivity is not. Because this love we offer others in human friendship is inseparable from the reality of divine-human friendship, 156 being a participation in divine love, it operates to unite the soul to God. 157 Indeed: it is particularly in the faces of intimate friends that the divine Face is freely and generously revealed . . . in the vulnerability and the trust of mutual influence and commitment that the divine life is engaged and co-participated. 158 This reality means that human friendships as expression of, and response to, 159 the divine-human friendship operate first, as we saw above, to transform the one offering friendship and, second, as invitation to the beloved to receive God’s transforming love and reciprocate the offered human friendship. Regarding this second aspect, it is ‘ through our friendship [that] . . . God’s love for humans is enacted’. 160 Thus when a believer who has received God’s love offers friendship to another, they are returning God’s friendship and operating as channel of God’s friendship to that other. 161 When the other responds to this offer in mutual love, they begin – or deepen – their own participation in the God who is friendship-love. Matrices of such friendships with their rituals and practices thus constitute a community of transformation. For friends, in the shared good which they seek for us, mediate that good increasingly deeply to us. 162 When the shared good is God, in Christ by the grace mediated through his Spirit, these communities of friendships operate to deepen each member’s participation in God through Christ. 163 Each draws the other towards God and, as another self, shows the other who they are becoming since both have ‘been formed, shaped, defined by the same love’. 164 In this way friendship with God, and with humans as a return of his friendship, constitutes transformative participation in the divine love, itself humanity’s telos as articulated by Thomas. Aelred and friendship Friendship appears in the Christian tradition not solely in more systematic treatises but also in writings of believers who sought to make concrete the concept of a community of friends in Christ. Perhaps the most well known of these is the work of Aelred of Rievaulx, abbot of a Cistercian monastery from 1147 until his death in 1167, 165 a work considered by many to be Western literature’s greatest presentation of friendship. 166 Influenced by Cicero’s De Amicitia167 and Augustine’s Confessions, 168 Aelred wrote Spiritual Friendship as an expression of the place of friendship in a monastic community, considering how it might be conducive towards life in Christ. 169 The book

140 Coding the discourse establishes three categories of friendship although the first two have little affinity with genuine friendship. 170 The first category comprises ‘carnal’ relationships where the shared good is the pursuit of vice. 171 The second type are inconstant, motivated by desire for gain and ‘marked by fraud and deception’, but these ‘worldly’ friendships can lead towards true friendship. 172 The third category, ‘spiritual’ friendship, alone seeks the proper end of friendship, movement towards God, and alone recognises its proper locus, namely Christ. Spiritual friendship unites friends ‘in virtue of the God they both seek’. 173 It is a ‘“ consensio” in things human and divine with goodwill and caritas’, where caritas is will and love directed towards God and goodwill an interior loving feeling. 174 This consensio is the ground for loyalty, joy and service with openness to correction by both parties. 175 Beginning in Christ, such a friendship is preserved according to him and has ‘its end and fruition referred to Christ’: he is its shared good, being the ‘third’ in the relationship. 176 Accordingly, spiritual friendship is a locus of his presence and his friendship 177 and is an expression of friendship with the God whom Aelred is almost prepared to say is friendship. 178 Love of God and love of others are, in spiritual friendship, inseparable. 179 Aelred places grace, which draws us to love God, first such that loving God precedes and enables love of others and self. 180 In parallel, it appears also that human friendship may lead to deeper participation in the divine-human friendship, 181 emphasising that the former, though expression of the latter, also intensifies experience of it. 182 The friend thus desires not only to love the other but, thereby, to love God also. In Wadell’s words: ‘Aelred forges a connection between the fullness of life in God, which is the goal of every friendship, and the ongoing life of the friends in Christ by which that fullness is attained’. 183 This fulness has eternal consequences and consists ultimately in knowledge and love of God. 184 Spiritual friendship’s reward is thus intrinsic: ‘those whom it has united will be immersed in contemplation of him’. 185 Aspects of Aelred’s proposals warrant specific mention. First, spiritual friendship requires doing the friend’s will 186 to the extent of offering one’s life 187 but not to the extent of sin: 188 goodness is required of friends, although perfection is not. 189 This standard of goodness relates to the second aspect for discussion: Aelred’s schematisation of the development of such friendships. Goodness could be expected because of the process of choosing one’s friends. This process comprises four elements: choice; testing; admission; the summa consensio already described. 190 Friendship is thus for Aelred a term used only of very specific relationships which admit utter intimacy, ‘communicating all . . . secrets and aspirations’. 191 Anything less than this is not friendship but at most an affective relationship engaged in the prefriendship testing stage. 192 Choice of friends is to be careful: the evil are excluded, 193 although there is room for those guilty of lesser faults, subject to their willingness for transformation. 194 Testing is for loyalty, intentionality in the search for God and the intrinsic blessing of friendship, discretion in acting appropriately (especially in correcting a friend wisely) and patience

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 141 in receiving correction and suffering for the friend’s sake. 195 In testing, one should not withdraw from a proposed friend if ‘hope for improvement’ remains, evidencing that testing allows for growth of friendship as a process over time whereby friendship deepens as each finds the other worthy of trust. 196 For Aelred, then, friendship is intrinsically of worth. 197 Even broken friendships were worth pursuing, whether broken through one’s own sinfulness 198 or the other’s. 199 Though friendship might be painful, it was not to be avoided. 200 Nevertheless, Aelred’s conviction of the need for ongoing similarity in relation to commitment to growth in caritas is core; 201 thus, rarely, friendships might pass beyond repair, necessitating disengagement. 202 Even then, however, an element of friendship continues: 203 though affection, security and enjoyment may wane, love remains. 204 This love may not be mutual but Aelred considers it vestigial of the friendship. 205 The third aspect for consideration is the aforementioned intimacy, such friendships being places to ‘relax our heart’. 206 Once consensio is instituted, confidences are shared 207 which explains the degree of testing prior to admission to friendship, for not all can bear this. Aelred recognises that this vulnerability is progressive, friends trusting one another with smaller confidences at first. 208 This intimacy offers many advantages including deemed equality of the friends 209 and more efficacious intercession on the beloved’s behalf in which a contemplation of Christ himself brings the lover to ‘taste’ his sweetness. 210 Such intimacy occasioned allegations of favouritism against Aelred in the wider Cistercian context, creating ‘resentment, even hatred, from those who felt excluded or incapable of response’. 211 Aelred considered this risk of favouritism, noting that friends might be given community office but only for the community’s good, not the friend’s. 212 A final aspect of interest is that whilst Aelred believed friendship within the community could not be universal, 213 he perceived the monastic community as one of love, or caritas. 214 For him friendship, though limited in its particularity, was simply the concretion of love in the community. Caritas was that ‘always . . . potential friendship’, being ‘already friendship-love in the sense of the steady practice of the willed and rational element of friendship’, 215 if not including the loving feeling of goodwill. 216 Charles Dumont argues that, for Aelred, ‘L’amitié n’est donc pas exclusive, mais elle est limitée par notre condition présente’. 217 In support of it being only human finitude that limits friendship’s reach, Aelred implies that it is, at least partly, because love includes many that only some can be admitted to friendship. 218 He also declares hope for unlimited friendships in the eschaton, with human joy being augmented proportionately to the number of friendships then experienced. 219 Aelred’s testimony, then, is rich. In ways similar to Thomas, he celebrates Christian friendship’s theological profundity together with its potential implications for life in Christ now, and he does this in the context of a far-reaching eschatological vision for what friendship will one day be. Neither these theologians nor the gospel of John gives us reason to doubt that friendship is a discourse richly coded in the Christian tradition. Indeed, on

142 Coding the discourse the contrary: the theology of friendship towards which they point appears well able to reverse the effect of popular culture on ecclesial understandings of friendship, offering instead a robust narrative by which to fund prophetic imagination. In the next chapter, I will draw themes from the discourse as it has been articulated to this point in order to interrogate them in light of more contemporary scholarship. For there is a need both to develop this narrative through conversation with other voices and also to wrestle with the tensions implicit in what has been presented so far. Notes 1 Glenn Adams and Victoria C. Plaut, ‘The Cultural Grounding of Personal Relationship: Friendship in North American and West African Worlds’, Personal Relations 10 (2003), 333–347. 2 Further regarding non-Western contexts: Amit Desai and Evan Killick (eds.), The Ways of Friendship: Anthropological Perspectives, Oxford: Berghahn, 2010; Sandra Bell and Simon Coleman (eds.), The Anthropology of Friendship, Oxford: Berg, 1999. 3 Paul J. Wadell, ‘The Role of Charity in the Moral Theology of Thomas Aquinas’ (134–169) in G. Simon Harak (ed.), Aquinas and Empowerment: Classical Ethics for Ordinary Lives, Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1996, 136–139; cf. Benjamin Myers’ list of ways – and Wesley Hill’s additions thereto – in which friendship has been marginalised, part of private correspondence referenced in Wesley Hill, Spiritual Friendship: Finding Love in the Church as a Celibate Gay Christian, Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015, ch.1, 123. 4 Dwight J. Friesen, Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks, Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009, 51 (referencing Martin Buber, I and Thou (tr. Ronald Gregor Smith), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1958). I am aware that the Facebook generation is already giving way to the generation formed by Snapchat and other social media platforms: my first-year theology students delight to tell me just how passé Facebook is for anyone under the age of 25! Yet I retain this particular lens because, whilst I believe the issues of virtualisation of friendship are broadly similar across platforms, the bulk of the literature engages Facebook specifically. 5 Brett McCracken, ‘The Separation of Church and Status: How Online Social Networking Helps and Hurts the Church’, The Princeton Theological Review 17:2 (2010), 21–34, 26. Ray Pahl recognises a similar category (albeit not explicitly related to virtual friendship): ‘trophy friends’ ( On Friendship, Cambridge: Polity, 2000, 146). 6 Milgram’s ‘small world experiment’, foundation for the popularised ‘six degrees of separation’ thesis (Christine Rosen, ‘Virtual Friendship and the New Narcissism’, The New Atlantis 17 (2007), 15–31, 20), supported by later research (Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, London: HarperPress, 2010, 26–27). 7 It is not just SNSs affecting contemporary perceptions of friendship: concerningly, an evolutionary psychologist claims that ‘the human brain has difficulty distinguishing real friends and people they see on TV’ (Satoshi Kanazawa, ‘Bowling with Our Imaginary Friends’, Evolution and Human Behavior 23 (2002), 167–171, 171). 8 Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other , New York: Basic, 2012, 182.

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 143 9 Rosen, ‘Virtual’, 26–27. 10 Rosen, ‘Virtual’, 27. 11 Elizabeth Drescher, Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation , New York: Morehouse, 2011, 100. 12 Christakis and Fowler, Connected , 276. 13 McCracken, ‘Separation’, 29. 14 Pahl, Friendship , 172. 15 Mark Vernon, The Philosophy of Friendship, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 57. 16 Barbro Fröding and Martin Peterson, ‘Why Virtual Friendship Is No Genuine Friendship’, Ethics and Information Technology 14:3 (2012), 201–207. 17 Deborah Chambers even suggests that SNSs are ‘forging new ways of being intimate and “doing intimacy”’ ( Social Media and Personal Relationships: Online Intimacies and Networked Friendship, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 3). 18 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000, 177. His first concern is less of an issue nearly twenty years later (www.ons.gov.uk/businessindustryandtrade/ itandinternetindustry/bulletins/internetusers/2018, accessed 06/08/18). Zygmunt Bauman comments similarly about the depersonalisation of virtual relationships generally ( Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds, Cambridge: Polity, 2003, 63–65). 19 Putnam, Bowling, 174–178; cf. Bellah’s ‘lifestyle enclaves’ (Bellah et al., Habits, 71–75). In the British context, Graham Allan notes contextual differences between middle- and working-class friendships. Whilst the former expand into social contexts beyond the original one, the latter remain generally limited to the original context of interaction ( Kinship and Friendship in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 87–89), which may give the lie to Putnam’s assertion. Nevertheless, the high-specialisation of virtual friendships is real, echoing in some sense Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘peg’ communities, ‘momentary gathering[s] around a nail on which many solitary individuals hang their solitary individual fears’ ( Liquid Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 2012, 37). 20 William Deresiewicz, ‘Faux Friendship’, Chronicle of Higher Education 56:16 (12/11/09), B6–B10. Todd May cites virtual friendship’s lack of face-to-face interaction as potentially problematic in the building of the shared experiences requisite to friendship ( Friendship in an Age of Economics: Resisting the Forces of Neoliberalism , Lanham: Lexington, 2014, 149). 21 Adriana M. Manago and Lanen Vaughn, ‘Social Media, Friendship, and Happiness in the Millennial Generation’ (187–206) in Melikşah Demir (ed.), Friendship and Happiness: Across the Life-Span and Cultures, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2015, 189. 22 Deresiewicz, ‘Faux’. 23 Alex Lambert, Intimacy and Friendship on Facebook, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 178. 24 Chambers, Social , 172. 25 Whilst Michael Hyatt claims to differentiate Facebook ‘friends’ from ‘fans’, it is unclear whether those who ‘like’ his page will appreciate the distinction, especially because he still seeks to interact with messages on the wall of his fan page much as one might interact with ‘friends’ posting on one’s profile page ( Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012, 181–182). 26 McCracken, ‘Separation’, 26–27; cf. James K.A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works , Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013, 145–148.

144 Coding the discourse 27 Bellah et al., Habits , 44–48, 115. 28 Bellah et al., Habits, 134; cf. Antony Giddens’ ‘pure’ relationship, a pseudocontractual arrangement of utility, characteristic of modern friendship ( The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity, 1992, 58; Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age , Cambridge: Polity, 1991, 87, 90). 29 Aristotle recognised three categories of friendship: utility, pleasure and virtue. Some utility friendships such as work relationships may develop into deeper friendships. Pahl considers factors affecting such development ( Friendship, 16–19). 30 Digby Anderson, Losing Friends, London: Social Affairs Unit, n.d., 30; Michael Schluter and David Lee, The R Factor, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993, 13. 31 Pahl, Friendship , 86–88. 32 Allan, Kinship, 85–86. ‘Everyone knows what friendship is – until asked to define it . . . There are virtually as many definitions of friendship as there are social scientists studying the topic’ (Beverley Fehr, Friendship Processes, Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996, 5). Further: Pahl, Friendship, 73–77; Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl, Rethinking Friendship: Hidden Solidarities Today, Woodstock: Princeton University Press, 2006, 33–35; Anderson, Losing, 29–30; Rosemary Blieszner and Rebecca G. Adams, Adult Friendship, Newbury Park: Sage, 1992, 3. 33 Between 1985 and 2004 the number of close confidants of the average American dropped from 2.94 to 2.08, whilst those claiming ‘no close confidants’ increased from 10 per cent to 24.6 per cent (Miller McPherson, Lynn SmithLovin and Matthew E. Brashears, ‘Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades’, American Sociological Review 71:3 (2006), 353–375, referenced in Turkle, Alone , 341–342, L. Gregory Jones, ‘My Facebook Friends’, Christian Century (15/07/08), 35 and Summers, Friendship, 43–44). Friendship is the ‘Cinderella topic’ of sociology in Britain and elsewhere (Allan, Kinship, 3) which may explain citation of the same study by multiple sources and the lack of more recent figures. The aforementioned fluidity of friendship ‘criteria’ also renders measurement difficult. It is this which may (partly) underpin academic debate regarding validity of the McPherson et al. study, debate summarised by Charles Hecksher, Trust in a Complex World: Enriching Community , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 90 n.38. 34 Lenora Rand, ‘The Church on Facebook: Why We Need Virtual Community’, Christian Century (30/06/09), 22–25, 25. Cf. Steve Summers, ‘Friends and Friendship’ (688–704) in Adrian Thatcher (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality and Gender , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, 701. 35 Turkle, Alone , 239. 36 Turkle, Alone, 288. ‘One might say that absorbed in those they have “friended” children lose interest in friendship’ (293). 37 Turkle, Alone, especially ch.14. Putnam also concludes that ‘computer-mediated communication will turn out to complement, not replace, face-to-face communities’ ( Bowling, 179). In her latest book, Sherry Turkle identifies growing reservations amongst young people about mobile phones as a medium of friendship, texting having become a replacement for ‘real-time’ interactions ( Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, New York: Penguin, 2015, 143, 174). 38 Jesse Rice, The Church of Facebook: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community, Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2009, 139. ‘As . . . society continues to transform . . . dominant patterns of friendship will in turn be affected, changing to meet the new conditions’ (Graham Allan and Rebecca G. Adams, ‘Reflections on Context’ (183–194) in Rebecca G. Adams and Graham Allan (eds.), Placing Friendship in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 193).

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 145 39 Cf. Harry Blatterer, Everyday Friendships: Intimacy as Freedom in a Complex World, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 44–45; Rosen, ‘Virtual’, 20, 28; Ethan J. Leib, Friend v. Friend: The Transformation of Friendship – And What the Law Has to Do with It, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 24. I do not intend utterly to negate these relationships as friendships since, for some technologically proficient people, virtual friendships approach ‘a firsthand, unmediated experience’ (Summers, Friendship, 33–34). I only assert that friendship is more than this. 40 Concerning other Scriptural references to friendship, and Jewish and Hellenistic backgrounds thereto: Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of John: A Commentary, Peabody: Hendrickson, 2003, 1004–1016; Eldho Puthenkandathil, Philos: A Designation for the Jesus-Disciple Relationship, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993; Stählin, ‘ Phileō/Philos’ (113–171) in Gerhard Friedrich and Gerhard Kittel (ed.), TDNT Vol. 9 (tr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974; Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘Making Connections: The Material Expression of Friendship in the New Testament’, Interpretation 58:2 (2004), 158–171. 41 Despite the clear value of historical criticism, I limit myself to a text immanent study for the received text is the foundation of the church’s worship and therefore it is this Jesus with whom practical theology must engage. Cf. Sykes, Power, 124–125. I shall refer to the author as John and will not debate authorship, the historical Jesus, this account’s historicity or the community context from which it emerges. Further, see: Wes Howard-Brook, Becoming Children of God: John’s Gospel and Radical Discipleship, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1994, 49; Ringe, Wisdom’s, ch.2; Ruth Edwards, Discovering John, London: SPCK, 2003, 41–46; E. Earle Ellis, The World of St. John: The Gospels and the Epistles, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984, ch.1. 42 George R. Beasley-Murray, John (WBC), Waco: Word, 1987, 274; Gail R. O’Day, ‘Jesus as Friend in the Gospel of John’, Interpretation 58:2 (2004), 144–157, 149, 152. John often uses huper to denote Jesus’ sacrificial death ( BDAG, 1030). Some render philoi ‘those he loves’ because of the relative interchangeability of phileō and agapaō in this gospel (D.A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, Leicester: Apollos, 1991 , 521; Gail R. O’Day, ‘John’ (491–865) in Leander E. Keck (ed.), The New Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 9, Nashville: Abingdon, 1995, 758). I retain the language of friendship to point to the large body of then-extant material on friendship which surrounds use of philos/philoi in this pericope. 43 J. Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010, 812. 44 Ringe, Wisdom’s , 80–81. 45 Ringe, Wisdom’s , 68–69. 46 Carson, John, 522; Victor Paul Furnish, The Love Command in the New Testament , London: SCM, 141. 47 Puthenkandathil, Philos , 208, 226–227. 48 Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (tr. James D. Ernest), Peabody: Hendrickson, 1994, 3:449. Cf. chapter 8 n.172. 49 O’Day, ‘Jesus’, 155; Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Gospel According to St John: Vol. 3 (tr. David Smith and G.A. Kon), London: Burns & Oates, 1987, 110; Wilbert F. Howard and Arthur John Gossip, ‘John’ (437–811) in Nolan B. Harrison (ed.), The Interpreter’s Bible Vol. 8 , Nashville: Abingdon, 1952, 723. 50 It is typical of John that knowledge, the distinguishing factor between friend and slave, should be so closely related to love, with love here the specific obedience demanded in 15:12 and 15:17 (C.K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St John , London: SPCK, 1978, 477). 51 Susan M. Elliott, ‘John 15:15 – Not Slaves But Friends’, Proceedings EGL & MWBS 13 (1993), 31–46, 38–39, 42.

146 Coding the discourse 52 D.F. Tolmie, Jesus’ Farewell to the Disciples: John 13:1–17:26 in Narratological Perspective , Leiden: Brill, 1995, 213. 53 B.F. Westcott finds a weightiness in this calling, a title ‘finally conferred’ ( eirēka ) and not merely ‘used as the occasion arises’ ( legō) ( The Gospel According to John , London: John Murray, 1882, 221). 54 The perfect tense here emphasises that this friendship is ‘an already established fact’, to which Jesus’ followers are invited to respond (Puthenkandathil, Philos, 238–239). 55 William Hendriksen, A Commentary on the Gospel of John, London: Banner of Truth, 1959, 308. 56 Carson, John, 523; Michaels, John, 815–816; Beasley-Murray, John, 275; Barrett, John, 478; Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1971, 665; Leon Morris, The Gospel According to John (rev. ed.), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995, 600. 57 Andrew T. Lincoln prefers to read this as love but does not consider a missionary sense incompatible with this primary sense ( The Gospel According to Saint John, s.l.: Hendrickson, 2005 , 407). Also in favour of love is Herman N. Ridderbos ( The Gospel According to John: A Theological Commentary (tr. John Vriend), Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, 521–522). Johns Varghese agrees, adding that this love commandment ‘makes present the non-present (physically) Jesus’ ( The Imagery of Love in the Gospel of John, Rome: Gregorian and Biblical, 2009, 356). 58 Carson, John, 522. It is concern with ‘a chummy view of friendship’ which motivates this rejection (D.A. Carson, Jesus and His Friends: An Exposition of John 14–17 , Carlisle: Paternoster, 1995, 104). 59 Ernst Haenchen, A Commentary on the Gospel of John Vol. 2 (tr. Robert W. Funk with Ulrich Busse), Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984, 132. 60 Summers calls it a ‘novel attempt at an escape from the implications of friendship via semantics’ ( Friendship, 15). Puthenkandathil, in less caustic mood, argues that Jesus is not here called his followers’ friend in ‘a deliberate attempt . . . to show that friendship is an offer’ to be participated by his followers as a reciprocal relationship through obedience ( Philos , 239). 61 In Luke 7:34 and Matthew 11:19 Jesus is called ‘friend of sinners’, supporting this contention. How much more is Jesus his followers’ friend! 62 Marilyn McCord Adams, ‘God’s Friends!?!’, ExpTim 117:7 (2006), 291–292. 63 Keener, John, 1014–1015, 1006–1007; Martin M. Culy, Echoes of Friendship in the Gospel of John , Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010, 163. 64 Greco-Roman culture knew two varieties of friendship: political/patronal and fictive kinship. The latter involved treating friends like kin, a reciprocal seeking of the other’s well-being (Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary on the Gospel of John, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998, 235–236). 65 E.g., Lincoln, John , 406. 66 Speaking of 17:21, Moltmann calls this reality a ‘perichoretic unity’, ‘christological and pneumatological perichoresis, mediating between the inner-trinitarian perichoresis and the perichoretic community of human beings’ (Jürgen Moltmann, ‘God in the World – The World in God: Perichoresis in Trinity and Eschatology’ (369–381) in Richard Bauckham and Carl Mosser (eds.), The Gospel of John and Christian Theology , Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008, 376). 67 The second, found in 15:9, exceeds my limited interest in this text, although I would note that I consider it perhaps one of the most mind-blowing statements in John’s gospel. 68 The verb used in reference to the followers’ love (15:12) is agapate. As a present subjunctive, it suggests that followers’ love of others should be ‘continuous and lifelong’ (Brown, John, 663) or ‘habitual’ (Morris, John, 598 n.29). John also employs phileō to connote love (Stählin, ‘ Phileō/Philos’). Cognates of both verbs

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 147 appear throughout this chapter: compare 15:9, 10, 12, 13a, 17 with 15:13b, 14, 15. Their close proximity and commingling imply their interchangeability, cohering with the proposal that agapaō and phileō are synonymous throughout this gospel, something widely accepted: O’Day, ‘John’, 758; Fernando F. Segovia, Love Relationships in the Johannine Tradition: Agapē/Agapan in 1 John and the Fourth Gospel, Chico: Scholars, 1982, 134; Furnish, Love, 134; Ringe, Wisdom’s, 65. 69 Though Aelred (1110–1167) lived a century before Thomas (1225–1274), there is no evidence that Thomas knew of his work (Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas: Spiritual Master Vol. 2 (tr. Robert Royal), s.l.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003, 277 n.4). Thus, reading Aelred subsequently does not disadvantage the reading of Thomas. 70 ST II-II 23.1. 71 Bernard V. Brady, Christian Love, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003, 164; Anthony W. Keaty, ‘Thomas’ Authority for Identifying Charity as Friendship: Aristotle or John 15?’, Thomist 62 (1998), 581–601, 586–594. 72 Summers, Friendship , 94 n.8. 73 Augustine, Confessions (45–207) in Philip Schaff (ed.), A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church Ser. I Vol. 1, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d., IV: 4. 74 Marie Aquinas McNamara, Friends and Friendship for Saint Augustine, Staten Island: Alba House, 1964, 215–216. 75 McNamara, Friends , 223. 76 Augustine, Tractates (John’s Gospel) (7–452) in Philip Schaff (ed.), A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church Ser. I Vol. 7, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d., no.85. 77 Liz Carmichael, Friendship: Interpreting Christian Love, London: Continuum, 2004, 62. 78 Carmichael, Friendship, 63–64. This suggests a using of friends to obtain enjoyment of God (Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana (519–597) in Philip Schaff (ed.), A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church Ser. I Vol. 2, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, n.d.), I.XXIII.22, I.IV.4. 79 McNamara, Friends , 214. 80 On one hand, Augustine wants to affirm secular friendships; on the other, he fears they may lead one from God (Augustine, Confessions, II.5.10; Summers, Friendship, 83). To love God in the friend implies that non-believers can offer only ‘limited capacity for Augustine’s ideal friendship’ (Summers, Friendship, 85). 81 Carolinne White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 200. 82 Carmichael, Friendship , 66–67. 83 Samuel Kimbriel, Friendship as Sacred Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 144. 84 Augustine did not always do this (see Tractates (John’s Gospel) no.82.2–3) but the inconsistency is unhelpful. 85 Given such constraints, I attend solely to Thomas’ mature and most complete account, the Summa Theologiae. 86 Paul J. Wadell, ‘An Itinerary to Glory: How Grace Is Embodied in the Communio of Charity’, Studies in Christian Ethics 23:4 (2010), 431–448, 431–432. 87 Carmichael, Friendship , 126. 88 In engaging with Abelard’s Sentences, Thomas had depended on Aristotle but later depended on John 15:15 to assert that amicitia is full expression of caritas (Carmichael, Friendship , 105–107). 89 Jean-Pierre Torrell, Christ and Spirituality in St. Thomas Aquinas (tr. Bernhard Blakenhorn), s.l.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011, 45. 90 Further on Thomistic engagement with Aristotle: Catherine Cowley, ‘Philia and Social Ethics’, Forum Philosophicum 14 (2009), 17–37, 23–24; L. Gregory Jones,

148 Coding the discourse ‘The Theological Transformation of Aristotelian Friendship in the Thought of St. Thomas Aquinas’, New Scholasticism 61:4 (1987), 373–399, 374; Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 139–163. Patrick Quinn claims that what essentially differentiates Aristotle and Thomas is ‘the theological context which Aquinas believes grounds all authentic forms of friendliness’ (‘St. Thomas Aquinas and the Christian Understanding of Friendship’ (270–279) in Oliver Leaman (ed.), Friendship East and West: Philosophical Perspectives , Richmond: Curzon, 1996, 270). 91 Paul J. Wadell, Friendship and the Moral Life, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1989, 34, 37–38, cf. J.L. Ackrill, ‘Aristotle on Eudaimonia’ (15–33) in Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980, 16–17. Whilst pleasure accompanies this virtuous life, this is ‘secondary to and derivative of the virtues’ because it can only be known by becoming good (Wadell, Friendship , 39). 92 NE, 18 (1099b); he also recognises the need for sufficient external goods to enable that life ( NE , 22 (1101a). 93 Paul J. Wadell, ‘Charity: How Friendship with God Unfolds in Love for Others’ (369–390) in Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd (eds.), Virtues and Their Vices, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, 369. 94 MacIntyre, After , 149. 95 MacIntyre, After , 175. 96 NE , 194 (1155b). 97 NE , 207 (1159b). 98 Carmichael, Friendship , 17. 99 NE, 195 (1156a). There is some debate regarding whether these are friendships at all since merely exploitative relationships fail the friendship criterion of mutual benevolence – Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, 355–356; NE , 194 (1155b). 100 Wadell, Friendship, 52. Mutuality is core ( NE, 230 (1166b), 194–195 (1155b– 1156a)). Equality and likeness in virtue are fundamental to virtue friendships for the one friend must operate as mirror to the other, offering objective knowledge of the self (Aristotle, Magna Moralia (425–685) in Aristotle in TwentyThree Volumes (XVII) (tr. G. Cyril Armstrong), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977, 680–683 (1213a)). 101 Wadell, Friendship , 53. 102 Carmichael, Friendship, 22; Jules Toner, Love and Friendship, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003, 48–49. 103 Carmichael, Friendship, 18; John M. Cooper, ‘Aristotle on Friendship’ (301– 340) in Rorty (ed.), Aristotle’s , 309; NE , 140 (1170a). 104 Wadell, Friendship, 122, 128; ST I-II 3.2. For Aristotle, these activities are the virtues. Thomas agrees, identifying charity as the ‘mother and root’ and ‘form’ of all the theological virtues ( ST I-II 62.4). 105 ST I-II 3.2. 106 Wadell, Friendship, 122. Note that Thomas does not explicitly state this friendship-love in God but does admit ‘God’s essence is charity and . . . therefore, by implication, God is friendship’ (Nathan Lefler, Theologizing Friendship: How Amicitia in the Thought of Aelred and Aquinas Inscribes the Scholastic Turn, Eugene: Pickwick, 2014, 127). Cf. Carmichael, Friendship , 125–126. 107 ST I-II 3.2; II-II 23.1. 108 Joseph Bobik identifies three Thomistic uses of communicatio. The first two describe either an active sharing of friendship’s activities or sharing of the same ‘social relational context’. The third underpins amicitia as caritas: a sharing of the divine life with humanity, the gift the foundation from which divine-human

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 149 friendship may arise (‘Aquinas on Communicatio, the Foundation of Friendship and Caritas ’, Modern Schoolman 64 (1988), 1–18, 13–14). 109 ST II-II 23.1; Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, Happiness, God, and Man (ed. Hubert Philipp Weber, tr. Michael J. Miller), San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010, 35; cf. Lefler, Theologizing , 118–120. 110 ST II-II 24.3; Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, Oxford: Clarendon, 1993, 291–293; Wadell, Friendship , 124–125. 111 ST I-II 109.9; Carmichael, Friendship , 111. 112 Wadell, ‘Itinerary’, 435. 113 ST II-II 23.l; Torrell, Christ , 51–52; Schönborn, Happiness , 35. 114 William W. Young, III, The Politics of Praise: Naming God and Friendship in Aquinas and Derrida, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007, 102; ST II-II 23.1; Bobik, ‘Aquinas’, 17–18. 115 Eberhard Schockenhoff, ‘The Theological Virtue of Charity’ (tr. Grant Kaplan and Frederick G. Lawrence) (244–258) in Stephen J. Pope (ed.), The Ethics of Aquinas , Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002, 246. 116 ST II-II 23.1. 117 Paul J. Wadell, Friends of God: Virtues and Gifts in Aquinas, New York: Peter Lang, 1991, 31. It is not the benefit per se which motivates this work – such would be only love-of-desire – but the person who is loved ( ST I-II 26.4). 118 Wadell, Friendship , 132; ST II-II 31.1. 119 Leo M. Bond, ‘A Comparison between Human and Divine Friendship’, Thomist 3:1 (1941), 54–94, 94. 120 L. Gregory Jones, Transformed Judgment: Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990, 101–104; Jones, ‘Transformation’, 384. The sacraments are significant as the reality of God’s continuing presence to humanity in Christ, continuing presence being important in satisfying the criterion of mutuality (Jones, Transformed, 102– 103; cf. Bond, ‘Comparison’, 69–77 regarding God’s self-communication). 121 Nicholas E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion, s.l.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011, 162–163. 122 ST II-II 27.2. 123 Whilst union may be real or only affective depending on the presence/absence of the parties from one another ( ST I-II 25.2, 28.1), in the divine-human friendship even the degrees of union articulated by the Christian mystics ‘remain . . . only the most exceptional kinds of affective union’, being impermanent (Lefler, Theologizing , 128 n.138). 124 Wadell, Friends , 32–33. 125 ST I-II 28.2. ST I-II 28.3 describes this as ecstatic movement. Note that ‘parallel sameness cannot generate “mutual indwelling” unless there is “some kind of communication” between the . . . selves (I-II 28.2, II-II 23.1) . . . fellowship . . . made possible by sustained sharing of conversation and other activities (II-II 23.1 . . . 25.3)’ (Diana Fritz Cates, Choosing to Feel: Virtue, Friendship, and Compassion for Friends, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, 109). Thomas sees this as ultimately perfected in heaven ( ST II-II 23.1). 126 ST I-II 28.1; David M. Gallagher, ‘Desire for Beatitude and Love of Friendship in Thomas Aquinas’, Mediaeval Studies 58 (1996), 1–47, 26. Regarding the nature of the similitude between humanity and God (which does not undermine their difference): Summers, Friendship, 91; Jones, Transformed, 102; Bond, ‘Comparison’, 57–69. Language of ‘another self’ evokes Aristotle. Regarding whether Aristotle’s emphasis was on similarity or also accommodated difference: Lorraine Smith Pangle, Aristotle and the Philosophy of Friendship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 152; Sandra Lynch, Philosophy and Friendship , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, 31–36.

150 Coding the discourse 127 Jones, Transformed, 100. Nevertheless, this does not render friendship only instrumental: for Thomas, its purpose is not only ‘to fit us for union with God’ but is union with God (Cowley, ‘Philia’, 24; cf. n.157). 128 ST I 93.4. Ultimately, deification occurs through grace given in the form of faith, hope and charity – the theological virtues (A.N. Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 35; ST I-II 62.1). 129 Wadell, Friendship , 137–140. 130 ST II-II 24.6. 131 Wadell, ‘Role’, 159. 132 Wadell, ‘Itinerary’, 437. 133 Jones, Transformed , 109–112; cf. ST II-II 28–33. 134 Wadell, Friends , 56. 135 Lombardo, Logic , 164; ST II-II 24.11. 136 ST II-II 24.4–7, 9. 137 ST II-II 25.12. Merely wishing to enjoy God for one’s own sake is love-ofdesire; however, ‘because in itself . . . [God’s] good is greater than any we can derive by enjoying it’, we actually love him with friendship-love, meaning we love him more than ourselves ( ST II-II 26.3). 138 ST II-II 26.2. 139 We do, however, love ourselves more than our neighbour, whom we love more than our bodies ( ST II-II 26.4–5). 140 ST II-II 27–33, 44; Brady, Love , 172. 141 Torrell, Christ , 57; ST II-II 25.1. 142 Torrell, Christ, 57. Don Adams clarifies how love for God’s sake as the ultimate end co-exists with loving the other as an end (‘Loving God and One’s Neighbor: Thomistic Charity’, Faith and Philosophy 11:2 (1994), 207–223). Cowley summarises his argument (‘Philia’, 27). 143 Gerald J. Beyer, ‘The Love of God and Neighbour According to Aquinas: An Interpretation’, New Blackfriars 84 (2003), 116–132, 120. 144 Wadell, ‘Itinerary’, 438. 145 Carmichael, Friendship, 121. Being created by and for God constitutes ‘sufficient likeness . . . to ground a kind of friendship’ (Cates, Choosing, 127, 231– 232). Thus ‘friendship with God does not narrow our world but dramatically expands it’ (Paul J. Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life: An Introduction to Christian Ethics , Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008, 36). 146 ST II-II 23.1. 147 Friendship’s mutuality and preference are located here, that these are (potential) friends of the Friend. This is what is to be loved in them. Further, because love of them is for God’s sake (‘by ricochet’) mutuality is experienced with him if not them (Torrell, Christ, 53–55; ST II-II 25.6, 25.8). Yet ‘special act[s] of love’ towards these are not required absolutely since human finitude renders this impossible; rather a readiness so to love in charity if required is proposed ( ST II-II 25.8). Thomas implicitly opens here the possibility of preference in friendship-love as able to be learned, even indicating that caritas ‘makes our affections accord with God’s’ and ‘affects how the intellect judges particular objects as desirable or repugnant’ (Lombardo, Logic, 163–164, referencing ST II-II 24.11 and 26.9; Jean Porter, ‘ De Ordine Caritatis: Charity, Friendship, and Justice in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae’, Thomist 53:2 (1989), 197–213, 204–205). 148 Wadell, ‘Charity’, 381. 149 Young, Politics , 120. 150 Torrell, Christ , 57–58.

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 151 151 ST II-II 26.6–7. 152 Wadell, ‘Charity’, 384–385. 153 Wadell, Happiness , 41. 154 It is ‘in the particular attachment to concrete human individuals with whom we are contingently connected in life’ that we ‘experience an interdependence with all other human beings’ (Carlos Steel, ‘Thomas Aquinas on Preferential Love’ (437–458) in Thomas A.F. Kelly and Philip W. Rosemann (eds.), Amor Amicitiae: On the Love That Is Friendship, Leuven: Peeters, 2004, 458; cf. Adams, ‘Loving’, 211). 155 Cates, Choosing, 128–129. Per Brady, the level of intimacy in human friendship is influenced by three aspects. These are: the intensity or emotion of the one loving; the species of the love referring to two types of quality in the beloved (their creation in the image of God and their proximity to the one loving and also to God); and what is shared between the friends (at the most basic level, the shared good that is God) (Brady, Love, 172). G. Mansini clarifies that the intensity of affection depends on the degree of likeness between the friends and any natural communicationes (‘ Similitudo, Communicatio, and the Friendship of Charity in Aquinas’ (1–26) in E. Manning (ed.), Thomistica, Leuven: Peeters, 1995). 156 ST II-II 25.1. 157 ST II-II 23.2. 158 Cates, Choosing , 130. 159 ‘God’s friendship is only properly returned when returned for God’s sake. However, charity as the return of this friendship implicates the neighbour’ (Hans S. Reinders, Receiving the Gift of Friendship: Profound Disability, Theological Anthropology, and Ethics, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008, 321–322; cf. Schockenhoff, ‘Theological’, 252). 160 Young, Politics , 121. 161 ST II-II 25.1 discusses the possibility of acting ‘ministerially under God’ in helping ‘bring about God’s love for another’ (Cowley, ‘Philia’, 25). Reinders comments that, for Thomas, receiving God’s love is ‘necessarily prior to knowing how to give’ ( Receiving, 318) and, using Hauerwas’ phrase, notes that what matters is what the other does by ‘claiming me as a friend’ ( Receiving, 366; cf. Stanley Hauerwas, Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998, 144). ‘To know how to receive the gift of God’s friendship is to know how to receive the gift of God’s friends’ (Reinders, Receiving, 374). 162 Wadell, Happiness, 36; Cates, Choosing, 224; Wadell, Friendship, 135–136. Lefler characterises friendship in terms of communal reality as only implication in Thomas, however; the explicit emphasis is dyadic friendships ( Theologizing, 126). 163 ‘The church should be the primary setting for learning, growing in, and being increasingly conformed to the happiness that is found in a life of friendship with God’ (Wadell, Happiness , 26). 164 Wadell, Friendship , 137. 165 Chrysogonus Waddell, ‘The Hidden Years of Aelred of Rievaulx: The Formation of a Spiritual Master’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 41:1 (2006), 51–63, 54. 166 John R. Sommerfeldt, ‘Aelred of Rievaulx on Friendship’ (140–150) in Gary M. Gurtler and Suzanne Stern-Gillet (eds.), Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship , Albany: SUNY, 2014, 140. 167 Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship (ed. Marsha L. Dutton, tr. Lawrence C. Braceland), Collegeville: Liturgical, 2010, Prologue. Further: Julian Haseldine, ‘Friendship, Equality and Universal Harmony: The Universal and the Particular in Aelred of Rievaulx’s De Spiritali Amicitia’ (192–214) in Leaman (ed.), Friendship , 197–203.

152 Coding the discourse 168 Brian Noell, ‘Aelred of Rievaulx’s Appropriation of Augustine: A Window on Two Views of Friendship and the Monastic Life’, Cistercian Studies Quarterly 37:2 (2001), 123–144. 169 Paul Wadell, Becoming Friends: Worship, Justice, and the Practice of Christian Friendship, Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2002, 97. An earlier work, The Mirror of Charity, also gave limited consideration to this topic (see Brian Patrick McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010, 296–338). Some ascribe aspects of same-sex relationality to Aelred’s life and thought (see John R. Sommerfeldt, Aelred of Rievaulx: Pursuing Perfect Happiness, Mahwah: Newman, 2005, 8–9). As Carmichael comments, even if we deny concerns around applying contemporary categories to a twelfth century figure and proceed with suggestions that Aelred’s orientation may have been homosexual, this does not confine his work on friendship to a narrowed audience. He, at least, believed he was writing for everyone (Carmichael, Friendship, 98). As a related point, friendship language has, of course, been used in contemporary theologies of same-sex relationality. Further: Summers, Friendship, 141–150; Elizabeth Stuart, Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships , London: Mowbray, 1995; Hill, Spiritual. 170 Aelred Squire, Aelred of Rievaulx: A Study , London: SPCK, 1981, 107. 171 Aelred, Spiritual, 1:38. Aelred is apparently inconsistent here. He also describes friendship between Walter and Gratian, his interlocutors, as carnal though it pursues not vice but simply mutual pleasure in being together. This ‘carnal’ friendship is then described as a potential ‘first step towards a holier friendship’ if unspoilt by anything shameful ( Spiritual , 3:85–87). 172 Aelred, Spiritual , 1:38, 42, 44. 173 Wadell, Friendship , 105; Aelred, Spiritual , 1:46. 174 Carmichael, Friendship , 83; Aelred, Spiritual , 1:46–47. 175 Aelred, Spiritual, 1:20; 3:88–108. The aspect of service does not undermine the equality-in-difference of friendship, which Aelred also celebrates ( Spiritual, 1:20; 1:57; 3:88–108). 176 Aelred, Spiritual , 1:1, 8. 177 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:20–21. 178 Aelred, Spiritual , 1:69–70. 179 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:3, 127. 180 Aelred, The Mirror of Charity (tr. Elizabeth Connor), Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1990, 3:4. Katherine M. TePas says: ‘the second person of the Trinity inspires and breathes into the friends the sacred love they have for each other’ (‘Aelred of Rievaulx: The Correlation between Human Friendship and Union with God’, Catholic University of America: unpublished PhD dissertation, 1992, 338). 181 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:127, 133–134. 182 Charles Dumont, ‘Seeking God in Community According to St Aelred’, Cistercian Studies 1:4 (1971), 289–317, 312–313; TePas, ‘Aelred’, 339. 183 Wadell, Friendship , 106; TePas, ‘Aelred’, 348–362. 184 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:9, 14. 185 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:61; cf. 3:133–134. 186 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:83. 187 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:33–36. 188 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:43–44, 69. 189 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:38–40, 43; cf. nn.193, 199. 190 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:8. 191 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:83. 192 Cf. Thomas who is more willing to recognise as friendship a range of degrees of intimacy.

‘I have called you friends . . .’ 153 193 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:59. 194 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:14, 55. 195 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:61, 62, 71, 72–73, 103–105, 107. 196 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:74, 76. 197 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:61. 198 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:26. 199 Certain transgressions should be tolerated by preferring the friend’s will to one’s own (Aelred, Spiritual , 3:17–20). 200 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:49–52; 3:15–17. 201 Carmichael, Friendship , 92. 202 Aelred, Spiritual, 3:39–41. Some vices wound friendship fatally (3:22–26), especially those contravening friendship’s relational expectations of security (3:28–29) or confidentiality (3:30) or which ‘eliminate the humble confession which alone could heal a wounded friendship’ (3:24). 203 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:44. 204 Aelred, Spiritual, 3:51–52; Carmichael, Friendship, 92–93. For Adele M. Fiske, dilectio (love) denotes ‘the actual services that express good will’ ( Friends and Friendship in the Monastic Tradition, Cuernavaca: Cidoc Cuaderno, 1970, 18.11). Lefler argues, however, that for Aelred amor, dilectio and caritas are ‘virtually interchangeable’ ( Theologizing , 58 n.58). 205 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:52. 206 Wadell, Becoming , 114. 207 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:11; 3:83–84. 208 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:65–66. 209 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:90–97. 210 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:131–134. 211 McGuire, Friendship , 337; Carmichael, Friendship , 97. 212 Aelred, Spiritual, 3:116–118. 3:119–127 records a friendship between Aelred and one whom he appointed supervisor demonstrating how friendship and unequal positional authority might interact. 213 Aelred differentiates between friendship (which is caritas plus goodwill, an interior loving feeling) and caritas. The latter demands universal love of friends and enemies; friends enjoy mutuality of trust and must be tested for worthiness (Aelred, Spiritual , 1:31–32). 214 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:82–83. 215 Carmichael, Friendship , 97. 216 Cf. Aelred, Spiritual , 1:47; n.174. 217 Charles Dumont, ‘Aelred de Rievaulx’ (527–538) in Théologie de la Vie Monastique: Études sur la Tradition Patristique , s.l.: Éditions Montaigne, 1961, 536. 218 Aelred, Spiritual, 3:129, albeit 3:80 implies the limiting factor is rather that few are good. Further: Haseldine, ‘Friendship’, 205; Edgar, God , 86. 219 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:134; Lefler, Theologizing , 87–88.

Human friendship is presented by historical Christian voices as response to, and deeper participation in, the divine-human friendship given in Christ, with related transformative implications. Contemporary theological writings, perhaps unsurprisingly, continue this theme. They constitute a strong foundation for human friendship in Christ as somehow ‘sacramental’, an encounter with God, and thus formative on the basis that to encounter another is to be changed. Orthodox thinker Paul O’Callaghan calls friendship ‘an opening to the presence of God’, 1 even ‘an icon . . . and means of participation’ in God. 2 He sees human friendship as having mystical dimensions, carrying the experience of God’s love 3 and enabling human becoming: ‘I know who I am only . . . because I have encountered you as you and valued you as you’. 4 This perspective is not limited to the Orthodox church. Catholic writers celebrate this transformative dynamic also. Wadell describes friends as ‘creating’ one another through love and patient attentiveness. 5 Carmen Caltagirone agrees. One friend ‘enlivens’ another, ‘through the steadfast act of relentless belief . . . day after day, acknowledging all the other’s potentials and possibilities’. 6 This transformative potential is fed by friendship’s sacramentality: Caltagirone comments that what forms others towards God is ‘[t]he beauty of our intimacy with God shin[ing] . . . through us’ in the context of friendship. 7 Friendships, she says, are sacraments, ‘embodiment and . . . expression of . . . God’s love’. 8 Bernard Cooke, whose definitions of sacramentality are more developed, concurs. Characterising sacraments in terms of symbol, he describes them as ‘specially significant realities that are meant to transform the reality of “the human” by somehow bringing persons to close contact with the saving action of Jesus Christ’. 9 Christian friendship, as described in the last chapter, is thus clearly sacramental, even perhaps the ‘basic sacrament’. 10 It makes present God’s love in the world, a giving of God’s very self in presence and action 11 through the believer who offers friendship, and it operates to transform human reality. Cooke puts it this way: ‘friendships . . . are a “word” that is being constantly created by God. In this word God is made present to us’. Accordingly, ‘[h]uman friendship reflects and makes credible the reality of God’s love for humans’. 12 This perspective supports viewing 8 Friendship: love’s ideal

Friendship: love’s ideal 155 Christian friendship as a kind of sacramental praxis, its very activity its fulfilment, for it is in human friendship that we respond in mutuality to, and are formed together in love towards, the Friend in whom all other friendship finds its place. To cease the activity of friendship is to cease participation in that telos. This idea of Christian friendship as a kind of sacramental praxis, of course, echoes the dynamic of neighbour-love described in chapter 6 whereby a leader takes the initiative to live out their own participation in Christ by loving persons in the church, intentionally bringing them up against Christ’s presence in the leader and inviting a response of love to the reality of God discerned there. These echoes will be explored in part IV but, first, we must consider how far this leadership dynamic of neighbour-love might, in fact, be in tension with Christian friendship. For my reading of Thomas and Aelred in particular does reveal such tensions, centring around friendship’s particularity and preference and its mutuality. These could prove problematic in the context of a hypothesis that friendship constitutes a discourse by which incarnational ecclesial leadership can be imagined and cause me to ask whether friendship can be a fulfilment of the neighbourlove foundational to incarnational ecclesial leadership or is rather, at best, a step on the way towards neighbour-love and, at worst, largely irrelevant to neighbour-love. This chapter wrestles with these questions and, in doing so, uncovers further layers of Christian friendship in conversation with more recent scholarship in order to build up a richer discourse by which prophetic imagination might be funded. Particularity, preference and exclusivity In Thomas we saw friendship as particular and preferential. Friendship’s preference is capable of extending even to enemies, strangers and sinners in an open friendship-love in the context of the divine-human friendship, with human affections influenced by caritas tending towards accordance with God’s. Because a friend is loved in the concreteness of their humanity, each loved differently in light of their uniqueness, what we may prefer in each is different: liking grows as we come to know others more fully, seeing beyond whatever we might dislike in them. 13 According to Diana Fritz Cates, Thomas indicates that ‘as friends of God we choose to exercise our imaginations in such a way that valued commonalities between ourselves and . . . neighbors . . . come to our attention and elicit individualized, particularized affection on our parts’. 14 Nevertheless human finitude dictates an order to this love. Exclusivity is rejected but particularity is accommodated, with friendship greater in degree towards those nearer. Aelred, too, assumes friendship’s particularity. In principle, at least, its dynamic is inclusive: the day when friendship belongs to all is anticipated. 15 Yet Aelred was also accused of excluding others and freely admitted the necessity of testing potential friends before admission to friendship. Whilst accepting the theoretical possibility of showing both rational and

156 Coding the discourse affective love ( caritas and goodwill) to all, 16 he also notes that in practice the ‘spontaneous pleasant inclination of the spirit’ 17 which is affectus must arise, whether from the Spirit or other sources. 18 For without this affective preference, as in the case of enemies, there is no friendship, only caritas. Thus, we have seen tensions between Thomas and Aelred around particularity, preference and exclusivity. Both thinkers imply that preference is more than just natural impulse: God in some sense transforms our affections as we participate more deeply in him and thus ‘liking’ can develop where there was previously no natural impulse. Yet though accepting that affectus may be Spirit-given, Aelred is perhaps more pragmatic than Thomas, writing from the perspective of experience where friendship is not yet all that it shall be. This tension may be due in part to Thomas’ primary emphasis being on the divine-human friendship and Aelred’s concern being the experience of human friendship in Christ 19 but, whatever its basis, the tension continues in contemporary literature. Friendship’s particularity is sometimes perceived to make it necessarily an exclusive love, which might therefore render it unfit for appropriation into an ecclesial context where ek-static movement towards others is central and where leadership, as I have imagined it, offers love to all both within and without the church, limited only by the leader’s own finitude. Two contemporary scholars in particular have sought to make exactly this point, namely that friendship and other Christian loves are lesser than agapē, traditionally understood as neighbour-love. Friendship, especially, is problematic due to its presuppositions of preferentiality and mutuality. 20 Agapē and friendship opposed? The first of these scholars is Søren Kierkegaard. Explicit in distinguishing friendship from Christian love for neighbour in his Works of Love, he characterises friendship in the same terms as erotic love, namely a ‘love rooted in mood and inclination, preferential love’. 21 Because he considers friendship selfish and exclusive, 22 it cannot be other than contrary to neighbour-love. The latter is neither ‘a matter of impulse and inclination [n]or a matter of feeling [n]or a matter for intellectual calculation’; instead, neighbour-love is a duty. 23 As duty, such love pays no regard to reciprocity, a requirement which Kierkegaard even considers to contaminate neighbour-love. 24 One’s neighbour is everyone; 25 neighbour-love alone can be self-renouncing and inclusive for, whereas in friendship the ‘middle term’ is preference, the middle term in neighbour-love is God. 26 This distinction between preferential and non-preferential love is Kierkegaard’s most significant: 27 for him, preference is ‘friendship’s Achilles heel’, 28 rendering it ‘another form of self-love’ whereby one ‘I’ is ‘intoxicated in the other-I’ until they become ‘one self’, ‘selfishly cut . . . off from all others’. 29 Thus Kierkegaard refuses the integration of friendship with neighbour-love. 30 He is not, however, an ‘unequivocal enemy of friendship’, 31 accepting that whilst not neighbour-love it is ‘the

Friendship: love’s ideal 157 greatest temporal good’. 32 It is perhaps selfishness in preferential love which is problematic to him. 33 There are, however, persuasive critiques of Kierkegaard’s assertions. Friendship-love is not necessarily selfish. Admittedly, the mirror view of friendship highlighting ‘being “like the other”’ can, according to Melvin Tinker, degenerate as Kierkegaard fears ‘into a form of self-love . . . [with] the other as . . . extension’ of oneself. 34 Yet Tinker considers this mirror view insufficient to express the aspect of difference in friendship incorporated by the drawing view. 35 The drawing view claims that being ‘receptive to being directed and interpreted and so in these ways drawn by the other’ is characteristic of friendship. 36 In contrast to the mirror view (one finds oneself disclosed in the other) and the secrets view (one discloses oneself to the other), which treat the self as ‘discrete and . . . static’, the drawing account of friendship conceives the self as relational. 37 Such a perspective counters what John Lippitt calls Kierkegaard’s misguided assumption that friendship ‘depends largely upon likeness between friends’ (the mirror view) and thus is only self-love. 38 Indeed, whilst accepting the existence of relationships which love the other only as extension of the self, Lawrence Blum designates these other than friendship, reserving this term for relationships involving ‘a high level of development and expression of the altruistic emotions of sympathy, concern, and care – a deep caring for and identification with the good of another from whom one knows oneself clearly to be other’. 39 Further, though to promote the friend’s good may ‘enlarge . . . the self’, it does so, contra Kierkegaard, ‘only to the degree that it focuses on another precisely as other’. 40 Finally, despite the alleged absence of universality which Kierkegaard claims as justification to reject friendship, the particularity of love – in its ek-static movement – moves towards an openness to universality: love which prefers one to another is not always offered at the expense of loving another. 41 Seeds of such correction to Kierkegaard’s thought are even perhaps nascent in his own work. Later in Works of Love Kierkegaard suggests that genuine human love – rather than ‘mutual and enchanting illusion’ – requires God as its bond. 42 This, Wadell argues, constitutes a modification of Kierkegaard’s contentions: what makes human love Christian is that God is its middle term, not its lack of preference. 43 In speaking of ‘loverelationship(s) . . . between two or more people’, 44 Kierkegaard refers to ‘special, particular, preferential relationships, and he blesses them insofar as God is their center’, 45 something inconsistent with Kierkegaard’s earlier proposition which measured friendship in terms of agapē, assuming agapē utterly opposed and judging friendship inherently deficient. 46 Thus, although Kierkegaard may not grasp fully these implications, Wadell claims that he can be read as presenting both friendship and agapē as Christian love to the extent that each requires God as its middle term. 47 Stephen Evans makes a similar point, contending that reading Works of Love closely and holistically reveals that Kierkegaard does not believe neighbour-love incompatible with natural preferential loves. 48

158 Coding the discourse Kierkegaard’s position is a precursor to that of a second thinker, Anders Nygren. 49 Nygren presents agapē as ‘the Christian fundamental motif par excellence ’, 50 standing in contradistinction from eros . 51 Philia is, impliedly, a subset of eros since ‘egocentric desire’ is philia’s foundation. 52 As such, it becomes less than Christian love for, whereas love in Judaism is exclusive and particular, Christian love is ‘universal and all-embracing’. 53 Nygren describes divine love as comprising four aspects. 54 First, it is spontaneous and unmotivated, not contingent upon any value in the beloved but grounded in God himself. Second, it is indifferent to value, a restatement of an element of the first aspect which clarifies that Jesus’ solidarity with sinners does not represent inversion of values, rendering sinners ‘better’ than the righteous, but rather the complete irrelevance of the beloved’s godliness. The third aspect of divine love is its creativity: it gives value to those whom it loves. Fourth, because of its creative nature, it initiates divine-human fellowship; without this divine love ‘there is from man’s side no way at all that leads to God’. 55 These four aspects of divine love inform Nygren’s characterisation of neighbour-love, agapē, which conforms to the divine love God manifests. 56 Accordingly, a human love which ‘embrace[s] . . . benefactors of the self’ falls foul of the criteria of agapē : 57 it is not unmotivated but prefers some. Nygren’s logic here is unclear: not to embrace benefactors of the self is more consistent with accepting an inversion of values rather than to see agapē as completely indifferent to value. Surely consistency demands that agapē show blindness to how the self might benefit from another rather than automatically excluding such relationships from the realm of agapē ? Nevertheless, even those relationships which might then come within this understanding of agapē would become somewhat unattractive, in that neighbour-love is abstracted from the neighbour being loved, rendering it impersonal. Nygren’s criteria explain his concern at the Johannine equation of neighbour-love with brotherly love, and specifically the latter’s particularity. 58 Also revealing of his theological programme is his comment that ‘when the Father’s love for the Son is made the prototype of the life of Agape in general, there is always a danger that the unmotivated nature of Divine Love may be insufficiently recognised’. 59 Comparatively with Synoptic and Pauline accounts, he finds John’s account restrictive, claiming its particularity and motivated character weaken the idea of Christian love until it is no longer shaped only by the agapē concept as Nygren conceives it. 60 Although Nygren’s work was so significant as to be designated ‘the beginning of the modern treatment’ of agapē, 61 it is not without critics. Particularly, scholars deny that agapē is used technically in the NT to denote Christian love as differentiated from friendship. 62 Thus, in Werner Jeanrond’s words: Nygren’s . . . was a theological distinction and not a distinction based on an adequate reading of the Greek text . . . the Greek words agape

Friendship: love’s ideal 159 and philia have often been selected for reasons of style, rather than for reasons of semantic distinction. 63 Scholarship also questions from a theological angle the dualism of agapē and friendship espoused by such as Nygren. Critique comes primarily from two perspectives. Some, whilst rejecting the dualism of absolute contrast between the two, accept some tension between them; others deny any such tension altogether, proposing that friendship is ‘the context within which agapē necessarily works and . . . the essence of divine love’. 64 In the first camp are Gene Outka and Gilbert Meilaender. Outka presents love as ‘equal regard’. 65 This allows some interaction between agapē and friendship without obliterating their differences, specifically that friendship fluctuates or may become exclusivistic whereas agapē as equal regard does not, indeed operating as friendship’s ‘guardian’. 66 In this sense, friendship is distinct from agapē, the latter constituting the bonds within which the former may flourish. 67 Meilaender, too, contends that these exist in tension, eventually concluding that friendship ‘need not be grounded in any more universally other-regarding form of love’ but has ‘its own legitimate place in human life’. 68 Nevertheless, though it may ‘train . . . us in the meaning and enactment of love’, it is a natural – not a Christian – love, which is eventually left behind. 69 Such a position runs contrary to Thomas’ proposals, which are closer to the second category of critical response to Nygren’s theological claim. This category is exemplified by Wadell, who rejects the distinction altogether. He argues that attempts to understand agapē and friendship as conceptually independent are erroneous; rather, where friendship is understood within the Christian narrative, they are ‘internally connected’ such that agapē is the fruit of friendship, 70 its telos. To locate friendship within the Christian narrative is, in Kierkegaard’s language, to recognise God as its middle term. Such a recognition changes dramatically the description of friendship. No longer fickle, pagan, selfish and exclusive, it is now founded in ‘mutual preference for God’, ‘touches on the divine . . . [as] a love that makes . . . [the friends] godly . . . [and] leads both persons to God . . . the crucible in which agape is fired’. 71 This kind of preference for God fuels each one’s liking of the desire to love God which they see in each other yet also, because it is a preference for God and his ways located in his narrative, it opens the friends more fully to welcome the outsider whom God loves in the generosity of an agapic love made concrete in friendship. 72 Wadell’s clarity here is helpful. I have already remarked that whilst conceptually friendship has not been utterly denatured in contemporary understanding, there is nevertheless need for a robust rearticulation if it is helpfully to describe incarnational ecclesial leadership. Wadell’s position – that friendship, as a ‘bonding in caritas’ between persons who love God and long for the kingdom, is intertwined with neighbour-love – presents agapē as friendship’s outcome, ‘a love which describes the ever-widening scope of a friendship whose members are trying to be like God’. 73 It might be

160 Coding the discourse asserted that Wadell goes too far, effectively collapsing agapē into friendship and expanding friendship beyond the point of sense 74 such that preference is rooted in the other’s love for God not anything else about who the other is. 75 His essentially Thomistic lens does not, however, inevitably warrant the conclusion that preference in Christian friendship is not also particularised. Further, he is surely right that we must read friendship within the narrative in which it is to be understood, even where that narrative has an eschatological dynamic whereby friendship is not yet all it shall be in Christ. In a Christian narrative, ‘friendship’ which does not constitute an expression of agapē is, whatever else it may be, not Christian friendship at all. Moreover, agapē, as we shall see, must, if it is to be expressed, be directed towards persons: it, like friendship, must be made concrete. Friendship as concrete expression of agapē Though Nygren’s work surely demonstrates some warrant for positing agapē as a universal form of love, I have argued that a fuller reading of agapē and friendship reveals a more complicated reality which may support Wadell’s contentions. 76 This indicates that, notwithstanding its particularity, a conception of friendship may well be constructed which coheres with the neighbour-love which is participation in the divine life. Chapter 7 showed that John 15 presents Christian friendship’s middle term as Christ: it is because of his friendship-love for them that his disciples are to love one another as friends. This love is not selfish but predicated on love for God, as Kierkegaard proposed that agapē should be. Such friendship would be the concrete expression of agapē . 77 Wadell is not the only one to argue this. Daniel Day Williams and Carolinne White make similar assertions; she calls friendship ‘the most intense and perfect form of love of neighbour’, commenting that the Church Fathers generally assumed the virtual identity of friendship and neighbour-love. 78 Friendship’s particularity is not necessarily hindrance to this concept for, first, no characterisation of love is complete which refers only to the neighbour as imprecise generalisation: love must come to rest on particular persons rather than humanity as undifferentiated whole. 79 Whilst Outka comments that agapists experience unease concerning ‘the restrictedness of special relations’, 80 Edward Vacek observes that this unease is characteristic mainly of Protestant writers whereas Catholics are more enthusiastic about special relationships. The latter tend ‘to begin with special relationships, lead through them to the dignity of all human beings, and set as a goal the richest possible variety of special relationships’, recognising that human flourishing is best served in a range of such relationships. 81 Second, whereas God can love each human specially, 82 as embodied beings humans experience relational capacity as finite. This means that no expression of agapē this side of the eschaton can, in any event, be universal in the way which Kierkegaard hoped. In this age, just as friendship is limited to finite numbers of individuals, so also is agapē. Though love hopes eventually

Friendship: love’s ideal 161 for universality, in the context of loving communion in Christ, this is firmly an eschatological hope. Admittedly, whilst these remarks may explain the human impracticability of universal love and its necessary particularity, Meilaender contends that they may not justify love’s preferential rather than random nature. 83 Yet friendship’s preferential nature may also be commended as strength not drawback. For Helen Oppenheimer, a movement away from friendship-love produces a neighbour-love which is primarily ‘camaraderie or civility’, a form of ‘charity’ which ‘people are apt to say that they “don’t want”’, 84 perhaps due to the absence of personal relationship. Indeed, ‘[l]oving without liking . . . can readily become a kind of pretence’: ‘[a]s long as we suppose that we can love people without liking them, whether they are our enemies or not, we shall be apt to let dislike and even contempt creep up upon us under cover of honorary love’. 85 God is not impartial, Oppenheimer proposes. Instead, his partiality is ‘a taking hold of the special character of each creature as uniquely significant’; human impartiality is only an ‘expedient to make up for the limits of our concern . . . and the corruptibility of our affections’. 86 Agapē, accordingly, must be understood in the context of personto-person interactions, for love is not an abstraction. This celebration of a preferential aspect to particularity means that the one loving must find delight in the other. That preference is rooted, generally, in mutual pursuit of the good which is participation in the triune God and, specifically, is influenced by the uniqueness of the person (including their proximity to the one loving and any similarities between them and the one loving). Absence of liking is no excuse, however, 87 for intimacy can grow as the friends’ shared history grows 88 and liking can be learned. In her work on friendship in Thomas, Cates articulates helpfully how the latter might occur: as we focus ‘passionate attention’ on similarities between the other and either ourselves or our existing friends, we ‘establish . . . a basis of likeness that disposes us to encounter differences . . . as potentially much more interesting and attractive than . . . previously perceived’. 89 Liking need not mean liking everything about the friend, especially sin, but it recognises that the friend is more than those aspects of them which we may dislike. 90 If liking can be learned and intimacy can grow, the limiting factor on friendship as concretion of agapē is not preference 91 but simply the particularity rendered necessary by human finitude. Furthermore, because friendship’s particular and preferential nature does not also mean its exclusivity, 92 friendship can remain consistent with neighbour-love. Indeed, good friendships should not encourage exclusivism but teach us to see people more generously 93 so that liking can progressively be learned. Admittedly, a love for the other motivated by one’s own enrichment through the relationship can easily be the outcome of particularity such that the lover seeks exclusivity as a way of preserving the benefit obtained from this relationship. 94 However, where exclusivity renders friendships impermeable to the outsider, they no longer cohere with the ideal of Christian love. Love has been particularised

162 Coding the discourse to such an extent that the friends are no longer available to share their love with a third, the neighbour who is outside. Whilst there are exclusive loves such as marriage, depicting God’s jealous love for humanity, ‘friendship at its best is essentially shareable’: it does not require a forsaking of all others but a serious attention ‘to what this person is like’. 95 Exclusivity is thus not the foregone conclusion to friendship. Instead, friendship is to welcome many, and different, others into the community. 96 For Moltmann, though the Greek ideal celebrated exclusivity, ‘Christian friendship cannot be lived in the inner circle of one’s equals’ because of how Jesus ‘breaks through this closed circle’. 97 This open friendship, so central to Moltmann’s ecclesiology, is founded in the participation of Jesus’ followers in his very being as Friend: their friendship with him issues in open friendship as ‘the bond in their fellowship with one another’ and ‘their vocation’ in the world. 98 It means ‘open affection and public respect of others’, 99 being ready to befriend the friendless. 100 Notwithstanding its public and open character, friendship is still ‘a personal relation, “someone who likes you”, someone you like’, arising out of freedom and preserving that freedom in a sharing of joy and suffering. 101 Yet in Christ it is offered both to those like us and those who are different. 102 Mutuality, vulnerability and fidelity Having noted the interplay of agapē and friendship in light of particularity and preference, we must now consider the dynamic of mutuality. For Thomas we saw that to offer friendship to another is the human response in the context of the divine-human friendship, a return of God’s friendship to us which also operates as a channel of the divine friendship to that other. Thus human friendship’s mutuality is centrally in God and, by it, even love for those who do not return it may be construed within the rubric of mutuality. Yet Thomas recognises a related possibility of mutuality between human friends, a union of affections, such that the intimacy of trust, vulnerability and commitment may effect a deeper participation in the divine life. 103 Mutuality in Aelred is just as foundational to friendship. The shared good which founds this mutuality is Christ, yet Aelred demands more: mutuality of trust and submission are core. 104 Despite the necessity of mutuality for Aelred, breach of friendship’s mutuality need not be fatally injurious unless longstanding 105 or where this arises from unrepentant breach of friendship’s relational expectations. 106 For both Thomas and Aelred, then, mutuality of human friendship is rooted in God/Christ 107 but is expected to issue in some kind of increasing personal vulnerability between the friends. Certainly, friendship’s mutuality renders it potentially consistent with the description in chapter 6 of incarnational ecclesial leadership. Particularly, the neighbour-love described there must be mutual before leadership (as influence towards a telos) can be deemed completed. For an offer of relationship in the expression of love towards the other is an act of leadership

Friendship: love’s ideal 163 yet one which remains, in some sense, inchoate until the other responds in faith/commitment to Christ as he is found in the community of lived transcendence and, specifically, in this relationship with the leader. This offer of relationship from the leader is central, as previously seen. Impersonal acts of agapē are insufficient to bring others up against Christ’s presence in the leader. Required is the offer of a human-to-human personal relationship, an invitation into the vulnerability of mutuality which seeks the other’s good without, in a parody of leadership independence, denying the leader’s own need of the kind of love which comes to fruition in the shared life which is friendship. Notwithstanding these parallels of mutuality in Christian friendship and incarnational ecclesial leadership, some contemporary writers claim that friendship’s element of mutuality makes it less than agapē, the truly divine love which, per Kierkegaard, is contaminated by reciprocity. To complete my case that friendship is not less than agapē and thus appropriate for the coding of incarnational ecclesial leadership, I will engage these contemporary claims before enumerating the conditions for, and effects of, mutuality. Friendship as agapē in its optimal context Meilaender is one who struggles with how mutuality affects the relationship between friendship and agapē. Friendship is, he accepts, reciprocal and has its place in helping humans admit their need of God in the context of a wider ‘desire for mutual love which fulfils and satisfies . . . [their] needy nature’, a relationship comprising ‘giving and receiving between free and equal participants’. 108 Nonetheless, for Meilaender, friendship-love cannot stand without agapē, the ‘love which is purely self-giving’ and, implicitly, ‘higher’. 109 Thus, at issue for him is how to relate the two: on one hand, if friendship demands a response from the beloved it no longer loves them for their sake alone; on the other, a love which only seeks the beloved’s good without desiring to enjoy their presence appears ‘too impersonal’ to be love. 110 Meilaender’s answer, admitting the centrality of the reciprocal love found even in the Trinity, points to an eschatological convergence of benevolent love/goodwill and the desire to enjoy another in reciprocal, affective union such that mutual love is the fruition of goodwill. 111 However, he suggests that present reconciliation of these strands might be premature and thus that mutuality cannot be central to neighbour-love. Meilaender is right: not all agapē will be reciprocated at present. Yet whereas Meilaender presents friendship as in tension with agapē, I find Vacek’s perspective more helpful. He posits friendship as the context in which agapē is best expressed. 112 Friendship is not inconsistent with agapē : rather, the latter ‘can lead to, hope for, or even require [mutuality] .  .  . because part of the very good of both the lover and the beloved may well be . . . a mutual relationship’. 113 Mutual relatedness is core to the expression of love for Elizabeth Johnson also. She argues that the mutuality of

164 Coding the discourse divine relations has ‘powerful affinity with . . . relationality as a way of being in the world’ and that friendship, as ‘the most mutual of relationships’, not only helpfully characterises the triune God but also models ‘the ideal . . . of a relational bonding’ in love in human communities, having ‘person-creating power’. 114 As Vacek contends, friendship, as mutuality, seeks not only the good or happiness of each of us: it also ‘wants to be part of the reason for that happiness . . . to coexperience it . . . to share life’. 115 Accordingly, friendship is more than two independent loves: each love is a response to and is informed by the other’s loving rather than being ‘fiercely independent agapic or eros’ loves. 116 There is a communal life in the space in-between. A relationship whereby each love is influenced by the other’s loving is, of course, reminiscent of Macmurray’s proposals that in constituting a limit to the self, the other enables the self to experience itself as agent, a point he makes when he recognises that the alternative is to be ‘associates, but not friends’. 117 Because relating operates to modify the reality of the self and other, 118 each friendship brings about an aspect of oneself which no other friendship can realise. 119 As Jeanrond comments, friendship ‘affects the development of the friends, what they are in the process of becoming, not individually in isolation from each other, but precisely because of their relationship and its inherent transcendence’. 120 Such mutuality need not work against agapē but can be its fulfilment, 121 protecting against the risk of agapē’s tendency towards an individualistic, impersonal and even task-oriented love, 122 elements already identified as problematic when they influence the praxis of ecclesial leadership. Certainly, mutuality as fulfilment of agapē can only flow from the freely chosen response of the beloved. Any attempt to control this, force change in the other, or take from them what is not freely given frustrates the interaction. 123 So also, unless what the one loving gives of themselves is accepted freely, ‘it is not fully given’. 124 Thus rather than competing with agapē, friendship is ‘a particular manifestation of it’, 125 even agapē’s ideal. 126 Whilst the selfsacrifice of agapē is ‘an indispensable ingredient to love’, it is not love’s aim: love rather seeks mutuality – a ‘union of souls’ – for sacrificial love is not to be an end in itself but is instead, where necessary, engaged for the nurturing and sustaining of relationship , 127 an idea implicit in John 15:13. 128 Nevertheless, that the complete conjunction of agapē with the mutual relationship that is friendship is ultimately an eschatological hope is not denied. This eschatological aspect reflects the reality that bonds of friendship are not so much means to the end which is participation in Christ’s relationship with God and his person-to-person relationships as being constitutive thereof. 129 Certainly friendship’s fulness will not be accomplished in this life. Mutuality and, specifically, the ‘healing, purification, and interior transformation necessary for intimacy and friendship takes time’, 130 something Aelred acknowledges in his testing process. Yet eschatological tensions should not curb enthusiasm for appropriating it to describe incarnational ecclesial leadership which, as we saw, has its own eschatological dynamic.

Friendship: love’s ideal 165 Mutuality: conditions and effects Friendship is, I have argued, not less in its mutuality than agapē. Yet what are the conditions for, and effect of, mutuality? One effect of mutuality is equality. Though some apparently think mutuality presupposes equality, being a condition thereof, 131 it is better to see that mutuality creates equality. The shared life of mutuality is greater than differences in status or goods: this participation in the life of the beloved illuminates the other’s true value, perhaps previously hidden to outsiders, 132 thus rendering insignificant external measures of personal worth. As such, equality in external or material terms is not a prerequisite for friendship, for this is a relationship in which one esteems the other as equal by recognition of that other’s personal value and the desire to promote the other’s good by directing one’s (perhaps unequal) material benefits towards that end. The equality derives from the reality that each has an equal place within the friendship relation and each seeks the friend’s best. 133 Indeed, however much more one friend might seemingly have to give to the other, the most significant part of any gift in the context of mutuality is not the thing itself but the extension of the giver’s person which it represents. 134 The relational involvement of self is central also to other conditions and effects of mutuality. Freely given self-revelation is essential to friendship, as Aelred declares. 135 Whilst others can learn considerable amounts about us by distanced observation, mutuality depends on each choosing to communicate themselves to the other and on the other’s willingness to receive that self-communication. 136 Friendship is, thus, ‘the gift of oneself sustained over time’, 137 a gift which ‘cannot be hurried . . . [or] forced’. 138 This demands vulnerability as the self is opened to influences beyond its control. 139 It ‘puts us in the power of another’, meaning betrayal of friendship may wound deeply. 140 Consequently, mutuality requires trust. 141 Alongside betrayal there is also risk associated with sharing in the pain of another, even unto tears. 142 This trusting vulnerability takes friendship beyond agapē in this sense: agapē can come ‘from one who is self-sufficient . . . in control . . . when others depend on his largesse, not he on theirs’. 143 Agapē need not form relationship with the beloved, caring only that the beloved receives benefit, the difference between ‘getting’ and ‘being’ involved. 144 Yet whereas agapē might promote a disinterested or impersonal and even task-focused service of others, friendship demands receiving as well as giving, 145 vulnerability of self even to the degree of sharing one’s own sufferings with the other. 146 Nevertheless, the vulnerability of self-revelation is never offered all at once. Rather it is progressive, growing in the context of each act of love and response thereto within the relationship. 147 Despite this evolving, potentially ever-deepening nature, friendship is not enmeshment but seeks to cultivate in each person a strong sense of identity, 148 even encouraging the beloved to develop friendships with still others, since one friendship cannot meet all one’s needs. 149 For one friend

166 Coding the discourse cannot draw out all aspects of another but can benefit from the effect on that other created by the other’s friendship with a third who draws out different aspects from them. 150 Mutuality involves interaction between distinct selves ‘where neither side consumes or abnegates’, 151 celebrating unity-in-difference 152 such that the self shares in the life of another without thereby obliterating their otherness. 153 As such, friendship promotes neither dependence nor independence but interdependence: each person can give and take because they belong to the other and, where ‘belonging is primary, we may “take” without necessarily taking anything away from the whole’. 154 As each discloses themselves and hears their disclosure affirmed and reflected back through the friend’s own experience and unique perspectives, they are enriched. 155 Yet where one’s neediness, possessiveness or desire to control influences a friend to collapse the distance comprised in the differentiation core to the friends’ unity, friendship will be destabilised. 156 As to friendship’s longevity, Meilaender suggests that because permanence in love requires that no consideration be given to the particular character of the beloved, friendship (a love which prefers the beloved for who they are) must change or even fade as friends change. 157 Outka argues similarly: whilst agapē prohibits complete abandonment of the beloved, friendships may undergo ‘changes which eat away at the special bond between us’ such that we ‘feel differently’ than before. 158 Yet if the ‘liking’ which is friendship’s foundation is based in whatever is good in the beloved, perhaps a level of relationship can endure. 159 It is thus perhaps better to see that provided friends continue offering deeper commitment of self to the other, friendship’s mutuality will evolve towards permanence notwithstanding fluctuations in feeling and changes in circumstances. Where, however, changes are such that one can no longer share in the other’s life and, furthermore, all efforts to invite them into renewed friendship are rejected, friendship must be subject to erosion because of the loss of mutuality, becoming failed albeit perhaps open to future restoration. 160 Friendship reclaimed Whilst chapter 7 indicated that there may be reasons to question the conceptual robustness of friendship in contemporary Western perception, the theological tradition examined in that chapter and this one indicates sufficient material for a reclaimed notion of friendship which, understood in terms of participation in the divine-human friendship, is a discourse rich enough to ground incarnational ecclesial leadership. Particularly it is Thomas who argues that the love of human friendship is inseparable from the divinehuman friendship, such that human friendships are simultaneously expression of and response to that friendship. Aelred supports this inseparability. In doing so, both thinkers echo the content of Jesus’ characterisation of Christian friendship in John 15. As participation in the divine love, these

Friendship: love’s ideal 167 friendships are transformative of the one offering friendship. 161 They constitute an invitation to the beloved to receive the gift of God’s friendship through his friends and to reciprocate that friendship in a movement of deeper participation in the God who is friendship-love. Where there is a matrix of such relationships, an ecclesial community of friendships in Christ, increasing conformity to the happiness that is friendship with God in the pattern of Christ is to be expected. 162 In tracing friendship’s contours, tensions became evident between it and agapē, crystallising particularly around particularity, preference and mutuality. I have proposed, however, that agapē and friendship are not necessarily opposed, standing here with Wadell, Florensky 163 and O’Callaghan. 164 Specifically, I have argued that where friendship is understood within the Christian narrative, its particularity may be understood as a concretion of agapē . 165 This understanding recognises human finitude, that love must be embodied in particular contexts, yet celebrates universality of agapē as an ever-widening of this love grounded in concrete friendships where friends seek to be like God. Friendship’s preferential nature is, in fact, its strength where properly understood, for love without liking or affection risks becoming impersonal, even empty charade. 166 This liking which friendship demands can be learned though it may require development of a shared history and exercise of the imagination. It does not mean ignoring or liking the other’s sin, yet it chooses to believe more of the beloved. In its ‘constantly burning patience that lasts a lifetime’, friendship thus calls out ‘the irreplaceable and incomparable value and originality of each person’. 167 Yet this commitment to the one does not necessarily render friendship exclusive. In their permeability to outsiders, a communion of friendships can approach universality. Indeed, in Christ they must. Though we attend deeply to one person, we do not thereby forsake all others. The second tensive strand was that of mutuality. I have concurred with Vacek’s characterisation of friendship’s mutuality as optimal context of agapē’s expression and thus its fulfilment, an agapic love which responds to, and is shaped by, the other’s agapic loving. Friendship as the context for agapē is, accordingly, an intensely personal love which modifies both persons in ways specific to that relationship between those friends. This mutuality creates equality and thrives on progressive freely given selfrevelation, growing vulnerability in the sharing of self and in the receiving of another’s self-communication. Such interdependence, which honours unity-in-difference, usually enables deepening commitments of self and may also mean mutual submission. Indeed mutuality for Aelred, in echo of John 15:13, necessitates submission to the friend’s will even as far as death, save where this constitutes sin. 168 Parallel here is Aelred’s concept of suffering for the friend, 169 implicit also in Thomas. 170 Costs such as submission and suffering justify care in the development of friendships. For, even if human difficulty in learning to like can be overcome, friendship is still not an unlimited category in its pre-eschatological form. Aelred recognises

168 Coding the discourse this tension perhaps more than Thomas. Some, he reminds us, are not as fit as others for friendship, being neither able to offer the trustworthiness which is part of mutuality nor desiring growth in doing so. This trustworthiness is fundamental to Aelred since friendship means revelation of all one’s plans 171 and presupposes plain-speaking. 172 Further, some friendships may falter or fail. Here, human sin may be responsible, whether the choice of one to walk away from Christ rather than towards him (which renders the foundational shared good of Christian friendship null, even if some degree of mutual liking remains) or the difficulty experienced by one or both in learning to like – or learning to continue liking – the other. In all his pragmatic realism about its challenges in light of human weakness, however, Aelred certainly does not give up hope on the possibility of widespread Christian friendship before the eschaton. Instead he provides for a development in friendship slow enough that both trust and trustworthiness may grow before final admission to utter mutual vulnerability in security. Admittedly, perhaps some friendships may never reach that point or may lose that security. Yet Aelred is explicit that the latter do not cease to be vestigial friendships. 173 It is also not clear that relationships in the former category are not friendships, being instead perhaps inchoate friendships, relationships on the way to becoming. Having traced these various contours, I am now in a position to draw together key strands of a discourse that is markedly rich in its potential for the coding work of the prophetic imagination. Fundamentally, we have seen Christian friendship as (i) a shared pursuit of God with sacramental, transformative and eschatological implications. Being intimately connected with the divine-human friendship offered in Christ, Christian friendship is immutably cruciform, a reality made express in John 15 and implicit in Thomas and Aelred. As an eschatologically directed relationship, such friendship hopes eventually for universality, to include unlimited others in an eternal communion of friendships located in Christ and directed towards the enjoyment of God. Thus friendship seeks universality, permanence, complete mutual vulnerability and to mirror the partiality of God for each. Now, however, friendships are in pre-eschatological form: some fail or never begin for our failure to learn to like, to stay open to outsiders, to continue pursuit of the shared good, to offer and receive mutual vulnerability or to demonstrate trustworthiness. Christian friendship is further characterised by (ii) limited particularity (given relational finitude) albeit not exclusivity and (iii) preference as an affective liking which is learnable. Also central is friendship’s (iv) mutuality of benevolence which (a) celebrates unity-indifference, even so far as creating equality, and (b) flourishes in the context of trustworthiness through progressive vulnerability in self-revelation, in willingness to speak plainly with the friend, and even in mutual submission or co-suffering. Taken together, these factors of particularity, preference and progressive mutual vulnerability mean that (v) Christian friendship recognises degrees of intimacy. 174

Friendship: love’s ideal 169 Resonances between these themes and the proposal in chapter 6 concerning incarnational ecclesial leadership have been intimated throughout this part of the book. In the final part, several tasks remain. First, chapter 9will crystallise what has so far been only intimated, defending Christian friendship as the discourse for a prophetic imagining of incarnational ecclesial leadership and identifying practices of hope at the interface of friendshipleadership praxis and power. In that chapter, I will also deepen the pragmatic element of my proposals by suggesting a trajectory for the next stage in this act of prophetic imagination, a pathway which would begin to engage some of those questions previously designated secondary. Finally, the last chapter will face the pragmatic reality that incarnational ecclesial leadership is prophetic hope in a creation that groans. What, I will ask, do we need to consider in light of the fact that the prophetic imagination’s practices of hope are performed in contexts that are not yet all that we imagine? Notes 1 Paul D. O’Callaghan, The Feast of Friendship , Wichita: Eighth Day, 2002, 45. 2 O’Callaghan, Feast , 81. 3 O’Callaghan, Feast , 137–141. 4 O’Callaghan, Feast, 77. This becoming is shaped by the relationship itself. It is not that each operates as individual to affect the other: rather, it is that eachas-modified-by-this-particular-other affects the other (O’Callaghan, Feast, 22; cf. Macmurray). 5 Wadell, Friendship , 161. 6 Carmen L. Caltagirone, Friendship as Sacrament, New York: Alba House, 1988, 51. 7 Caltagirone, Friendship , 39. 8 Caltagirone, Friendship, 7; Brother Roger of Taizé, Violent for Peace (tr. Emily Chisholm/Taizé), Oxford: Mowbray, 1981, 73. 9 Bernard J. Cooke, Sacraments and Sacramentality (2nd ed.), Mystic: TwentyThird, 1994, 10. 10 Cooke, Sacraments , 78–87. 11 Michael G. Lawler, Symbol and Sacrament: A Contemporary Sacramental Theology , New York: Paulist, 1987, 56. 12 Cooke, Sacraments , 83, 91. 13 See chapter 7 nn.147, 150. 14 Cates, Choosing , 128, 27. 15 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:79–80. 16 Aelred, Mirror, 3:108. 17 Aelred, Mirror , 3:31. 18 Aelred, Mirror, 3:30–40. Further regarding this affective element: Fiske, Friends, 18.6–18.10. 19 Lefler, Theologizing, 136. Typical of monastic theology, Aelred’s theology was largely experiential, hammered out in his context rather than divorced from it (Amédée Hallier, The Monastic Theology of Aelred of Rievaulx: An Experiential Theology (tr. Columban Heaney), Shannon: Irish University Press, 1969, xxxi; Lefler, Theologizing , ch.1). 20 Edward Collins Vacek lists others holding this view ( Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics, Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1994, 312 n.1).

170 Coding the discourse 21 Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love: Some Christian Reflections in the Form of Discourses (tr. Howard Hong and Edna Hong), London: Collins, 1962, 58. 22 Kierkegaard, Works, 68. Toner critiques this, denying that friendship’s mutual love can ever be selfish ( Love , 243–244). 23 Kierkegaard, Works , 143, 40. 24 Kierkegaard, Works , 227. 25 Kierkegaard, Works , 58. 26 Kierkegaard, Works , 70. 27 M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 43. 28 Wadell, Friendship , 76. 29 Kierkegaard, Works , 65–66, 68–70. 30 Vernon, Friendship , 78; Lynch, Philosophy , 35; Pangle, Aristotle , 3. 31 John Lippitt, ‘Cracking the Mirror: On Kierkegaard’s Concerns about Friendship’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 61 (2007), 131–150, 149. 32 Kierkegaard, Works , 249. 33 Ferreira, Love’s, 46; C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 208. 34 Melvin Tinker, ‘Friends: The One with Jesus, Martha, and Mary; An Answer to Kierkegaard’, Themelios 36:3 (2011), 457–467, 462. Regarding how philosophical friendship literature has popularised this ‘one self’ perspective: Lippitt, ‘Cracking’, 136–139. 35 Tinker, ‘Friends’, 462, 466–467. 36 Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett, ‘Friendship and the Self’, Ethics 108:3 (1998), 502–527, 503. 37 Cocking and Kennett, ‘Friendship’, 503, 505–506. 38 Lippitt, ‘Cracking’, 131. Incidentally, it also shows how friendship with God in Christ may operate transformatively as Jesus in his alterity directs and interprets each one towards an eventual mirroring of his own humanity (Tinker, ‘Friends’, 463). Presumably, the same applies to human friendships which are in Christ: the friends direct and interpret one another in his love. 39 Lawrence A. Blum, Friendship, Altruism, and Morality, London: Routledge, 2010, 50. 40 Wadell, Friendship , 80. 41 Wadell, Friendship , 79. 42 Kierkegaard, Works , 112–113. 43 Wadell, Friendship , 81–82. 44 Kierkegaard, Works , 113. 45 Wadell, Friendship , 82. 46 Wadell, Friendship, 82–83. Wadell notes the qualities ascribed by Kierkegaard to friendship (fickle, pagan, selfish, exclusive – Kierkegaard, Works, 58, 68–70) but questions Kierkegaard’s premise that these are basic to friendship (Wadell, Friendship , 78). 47 Wadell, Friendship , 82–83. 48 C. Stephen Evans, ‘Can Love Be Commanded? Kierkegaard’s View of Neighbor Love’ (73–83) in Craig A. Boyd (ed.), Visions of Agapé: Problems and Possibilities in Human and Divine Love, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008, 75. 49 ‘As unconditional love, Kierkegaard’s neighbour-love becomes Nygren’s “Agape”’ (Carmichael, Friendship, 159). 50 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (tr. Philip S. Watson), London: SPCK, 1953, 48. 51 Nygren, Agape , 31, 217. 52 Nygren, Agape, 181 n.3. Nygren’s focus is not philia but agapē and eros; however, his conclusions ‘render friendship as alien to the heart of Christian love as Nygren claims are both eros and what he calls the “caritas-synthesis” of Augustine and the Catholic tradition’ (Paul Wojda, ‘Dying for One’s Friends:

Friendship: love’s ideal 171 The Martyrological Shape of Christian Love’, The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1997), 121–142, 125). 53 Nygren, Agape , 63. 54 Nygren, Agape , 75–81. 55 Nygren, Agape, 80. Wadell expresses concern that the first two aspects of divine love ‘abstract God’s love from the people God loves’ such that whilst God may always love, he appears to do so without needing to know who we are, making this love impersonal ( Friendship, 89–90). Wadell also warns that whilst humanity depends absolutely upon God’s grace for life with him and thus God’s love must be first, Nygren indicates no recognition of the place of a human response to that love ( Friendship, 92). Such a response is, as chapter 4 notes, foundational to the covenant between God and humanity: the Word demands an answering, an answering made possible only in the Word’s vicarious response, but an answering nonetheless. 56 Nygren, Agape, 91–92. The link between the qualities of agapē and of God is methodologically central to Nygren: God is agapē, and agapē can only be understood in terms of God (Wadell, Friendship , 85–86; Nygren, Agape , 156). 57 Nygren, Agape , 96–97. 58 Nygren, Agape , 153. 59 Nygren, Agape , 153. 60 Nygren, Agape , 151–155, 158. 61 Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972, 1. Thomas Jay Oord calls him ‘perhaps the 20th century’s most influential love theologian’ (‘A Relational God and Unlimited Love’ (135–148) in Boyd (ed.), Visions , 139). 62 Cf. chapter 7 n.68; Craig A. Boyd, ‘The Perichoretic Nature of Love: Beyond the Perfection Model’ (15–30) in Boyd (ed.), Visions, 28–29; Furnish, Love, 219–231. Thomas Jay Oord gives NT examples of agapē referencing not only true but false agapē ( Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement, Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010, 35). For critique external to a Christian perspective, rejecting the idea that human value is created by divine love and questioning this distinction between loves, see: Tony Milligan, Love, Durham: Acumen, 2001, 61–69. 63 Werner G. Jeanrond, A Theology of Love , London: T&T Clark, 2010, 28. 64 Wojda, ‘Dying’, 126. 65 This is ‘an active concern for the neighbor’s well-being which is somehow independent of particular actions of the other’, differentiated from self-sacrifice and mutuality. It need not have an affective element (Outka, Agape , 260–274). 66 Outka, Agape , 274, 282. 67 Wojda, ‘Dying’, 126–127. 68 Gilbert C. Meilaender, Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 32. 69 Meilaender, Friendship, 66, 34–35. Cowley highlights Meilaender’s ‘circular reasoning’ that friendship is not Christian love because ‘only agape can count’ (‘Philia’, 22). 70 Wadell, Friendship , 72–74. 71 Wadell, Friendship , 83–84. 72 Wadell, Friendship , 95–96. 73 Wadell, Friendship , 73–74, 119. 74 Wojda, ‘Dying’, 129. 75 Cf. n.55 regarding Wadell’s apparent condemnation of this concerning divine love. 76 It cannot hurt his position either that some believe the conception of agapē’s universality derives more from Enlightenment thought (Stanley Hauerwas,

172 Coding the discourse ‘Happiness, the Life of Virtue and Friendship: Theological Reflections on Aristotelian Themes’, Asbury Theological Journal 45:1 (1990), 5–48; Stephen G. Post, A Theory of Agape: On the Meaning of Christian Love, London: Associated University Presses, 1990). William Werpehowski disagrees, however (‘“Agape” and Special Relations’ (138–156) in Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski (eds.), The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1992, 153). 77 Wadell, Friendship , 70–74. 78 White, Friendship, 58. Daniel Day Williams treats agapē and philia as identical ( The Spirit and the Forms of Love, Welwyn: James Nisbet, 1968, 46). Consider also Barth’s description of the friend as ‘the root of the concept of the neighbor’, the one who is ‘the gate to other people in general’ such that friendship operates as a corrective concerning egotism by presenting the friend as ‘representative of the neighbor in general’ whom we are to love as ourselves (Karl Barth, Ethics (ed. Dietrich Braun, tr. Geoffrey W. Bromiley), Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1981, 187–191; cf. Simone Weil, Waiting on God (tr. Emma Craufurd), London: Collins, 1959, 158). 79 Helen Oppenheimer, The Hope of Happiness: A Sketch for a Christian Humanism, London: SCM, 1983, 124–139; Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and the Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, Leicester: IVP, 1986, 240. 80 Outka, Agape, 272. This tradition emphasises Jesus’ commands to love one’s enemies and hate one’s family (Vacek, Love , 283). 81 Vacek, Love, 306; cf. Stephen J. Pope, ‘The Moral Certainty of Natural Priorities: A Thomistic Alternative to Equal Regard’, The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1990), 109–129, 110. 82 Oppenheimer, Hope , 135–136. 83 Meilaender, Friendship , 28. 84 Oppenheimer, Hope , 133, 124. 85 Oppenheimer, Hope , 126, 130. 86 Oppenheimer, Hope, 131; cf. Stephen J. Pope, ‘Proper and Improper Partiality and the Preferential Option for the Poor’, Theological Studies 54 (1993), 242–271, 271. Inverting Meilaender’s position, Jones supports this. Since ‘impartiality is not the goal of Christian life . . . [but] the result of human limitations’, the goal ‘is to grow in friendship with God so that people are increasingly able to see every other human being as loved uniquely by God’, with agapē and friendship as ‘co-extensive’ (Jones, Transformed , 107). 87 Christian friends are chosen for, rather than choosing, one another (Guido De Graaff, Politics in Friendship: A Theological Account, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, 162–164). This is so even if there is also an element of choice in deciding whether to offer/reciprocate friendship. 88 Cf. Aelred’s recognition that vulnerability in friendship develops over time and Thomas’ emphasis on the conversatio. Summers describes friendships in military life, ‘constructed friendships’ which are forged over intense time together (‘Friends’, 701–702). Notwithstanding, concomitant with friendship’s requirement for mutuality, for an offer of friendship to mature into friendship requires the other to respond in kind. This cannot be guaranteed. 89 Cates, Choosing, 233–234. ‘[P]eople can in principle develop special relations with everyone by finding a variety of grounds for those relations . . . It seems both possible and desirable to have as many special relations as possible, and on a variety of bases. Heaven, to take . . . the limit case, is a universal communion of friends’ (Vacek, Love , 303). 90 Partiality regards ‘sinfulness differently . . . [not] as . . . intrinsic, but as woefully impeding or damaging the real person . . . Sometimes when we really look,

Friendship: love’s ideal 173 we dislike intensely what we see, but what partiality tells us is, That is not the whole story’ (Oppenheimer, Hope, 137). Also, whilst ‘liking’ is necessary to friendship, ‘even the best friends do not always like one another, simply because none of us is always likable’ (Wadell, Becoming , 56–57). 91 In principle, although chapter 10 recognises challenges in a creation that groans. 92 This is also true, of course, of the incarnation. The ‘scandal of [its] particularity’ did not prevent its inclusivity of effect (Thomas C. Oden, Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology , New York: HarperOne, 1992, 18, 279–280). 93 Wadell, Becoming, 56, 153–154; Martin E. Marty, Friendship, Allen: Argus, 1980, 226. 94 Even if preferential love is perhaps ‘the most easily corruptible of all loves . . . that does not make it essentially corrupt’ (Helen Oppenheimer, Incarnation and Immanence , London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1973, 188). 95 Oppenheimer, Hope, 134; cf. Joel Backström, The Fear of Openness: An Essay on Friendship and the Roots of Morality, Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2007, 316; Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative: A Study in Christian Ethics (tr. Olive Wyon), London: Lutterworth, 1939, 133–134, 518. Whilst I contend that friendship makes room for outsiders, I accept Vacek’s point that the dynamic of certain friendships is ‘unique and would be distorted by the presence of other persons within that bond’ ( Love, 317 n.106). Marriage is his example; there may be other such special relations but, in any event, this category is small enough not to impinge upon such relationships in the context of incarnational ecclesial leadership. 96 McFague, Models , 175. 97 Moltmann, Power , 120. 98 Moltmann, Open, 57. Open friendships do not mean surrendering our identity but ‘expand[ing] the relationships in which this identity can be experienced’ (Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Open Friendship: Aristotelian and Christian Concepts of Friendship’ (29–42) in Leroy S. Rouner (ed.), The Changing Face of Friendship, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, 41). For an example of the power of open friendship, see: Peter Slade, Open Friendship in a Closed Society: Mission Mississippi and a Theology of Friendship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. 99 Moltmann, Open, 61. This friendship characteristic is borrowed from Kant (Stephen Rhodes, ‘The Church as the Community of Open Friendship’, Asbury Theological Journal 55:1 (2000), 41–49, 44). 100 Moltmann, Open , 62. 101 Moltmann, Open , 51–52. 102 Moltmann, Power , 121. 103 Cates, Choosing , 130. 104 Aelred, Spiritual , 1:32, 2:69. 105 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:39–41, 44. 106 Aelred, Spiritual, 3:17–25, especially 3:24 which allows repentance to ‘heal a wounded friendship’. 107 Aelred’s emphasis is consistently Christological, Thomas’ less so (Lefler, Theologizing , 138–139). 108 Meilaender, Friendship, 37, 41, 46. Friendship is thus more than agapē and more than desiring-love: it is relationship and sharing of common life. This desire for union with the friend is not the product of self-interest for it is enjoyment of the friend we seek, ‘not the pleasure which accompanies . . . [their] presence’ (Meilaender, Friendship , 48). 109 Meilaender, Friendship , 43, 38. 110 Meilaender, Friendship , 48, 43. 111 Meilaender, Friendship , 49–51.

174 Coding the discourse 112 Vacek, Love , 280. 113 This appears to have been the case in Jesus’ invitation of disciples made not merely ‘agapically, simply for their sakes (or for the sake of still others), but . . . with a goal of fellowship’ (Vacek, Love , 311). 114 Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse , New York: Crossroad, 1993, 216–219, 235. 115 Vacek, Love , 285–286; cf. Wadell, Becoming , 60. 116 Vacek, Love , 287–288. 117 Macmurray, Persons, 150; Gregory Brett, The Theological Notion of the Human Person: A Conversation between the Theology of Karl Rahner and the Philosophy of John Macmurray, Bern: Peter Lang, 2013, 134–139. 118 Macmurray, Persons , 166. 119 Wadell, Becoming , 70–71. 120 Jeanrond, Love, 214; cf. Michael R. Weed, ‘Friendship as a Moral Category’, Austin Seminary Bulletin 98:9 (1983), 41–51, 46. 121 Although to idealise selfless love might appear attractive (John Inge, ‘Friendship and a Christian Understanding of Relationship’, Theology 101:804 (1998), 420–427), Stephen G. Post argues that ‘it rests on an unsatisfactory concept of God. Mutual love or reciprocity is the only appropriate fundamental norm for human interrelations, and for the Divine-human encounter as well’ (‘The Inadequacy of Selflessness’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 56:2 (1988), 213–228. Also: Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 242; Post, Agape , 85–89). 122 Vacek, Love , 283–284. 123 Whilst benefits are not calculated, these are part of friendship and their persistent absence tends to indicate non-mutuality (Vacek, Love, 297–298; cf. James H. Olthuis, ‘Face-to-Face: Ethical Asymmetry or the Symmetry of Mutuality’ (131–158) in James H. Olthuis (ed.), Knowing Other-Wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality, New York: Fordham University Press, 1997, 149–150). 124 Vacek, Love , 290. 125 Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 160. 126 In championing friendship as agapē’s optimal context I would not suggest that ‘agape unrequited is not fully agape’ (Outka, Agape, 36, 36–42 offers a helpful overview of the ambiguity of some writers concerning this tangential point). Rather, I argue only that friendship is not inconsistent with agapē. 127 Wadell, Becoming, 61; also Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of Truth (tr. Boris Jakim), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, 326. 128 Even the self-sacrifice of the cross is presented as a penultimate reality which cannot frustrate eventual mutuality: Christ lays down his life (John 15:13; 10:11, 17–18) and he takes it back up (John 10:17–18). 129 Soskice, Kindness , 187. 130 Wadell, Becoming , 54. 131 E.g., Carson, John , 522. 132 Vacek, Love, 299, 320. Indeed, where friendship is founded in Christ, it is in his life that each one shares their life with the other. Jason Reimer Greig expresses this helpfully by contrasting mutuality with what he calls ‘exchange reciprocity’ ( Reconsidering Intellectual Disability: L’Arche, Medical Ethics, and Christian Friendship, Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015, 130–133). 133 Hugh Lafollette, Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, 139. Aelred is explicit about this, whatever the friends’ differences in rank, wealth or knowledge ( Spiritual , 3:90–97).

Friendship: love’s ideal 175 134 Ellen K. Wondra, ‘Participating Persons: Reciprocity and Asymmetry’, Anglican Theological Review 86:1 (2004), 57–73. 135 Aelred, Spiritual , 2:11; 3:83–84. 136 Ignace Lepp, The Ways of Friendship: A Psychological Exploration of Man’s Most Valuable Relationship (tr. Bernard Murchland), New York: Macmillan, 1968, 113. The centrality of self-revelation in friendship appears also, of course, in Jesus’ words in John 15. 137 Philip A. Rolnick, Persons, Grace and God, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007, 183. 138 Andrew M. Greeley, The Friendship Game , Garden City: Image, 1971, 43. 139 Similarly, Florensky describes the other as an ‘ other I’: ‘the membrane of self is torn’ and the ‘friend is received into the I of the lover’, ‘a homoiousion unity’ ( Pillar , 310–311). 140 Wadell, Becoming, 64; Caltagirone, Friendship, 40; Olthuis, ‘Face-to-Face’, 147–148; cf. Aelred, Spiritual , 2:49–2:52, 3:15–17. 141 McFague, Models, 162. Pahl ascribes this to ‘modern’ friendship ( Friendship, 61–63); David Konstan suggests that intimacy, mutual affection and commitment characterised Greco-Roman ideals of friendship also ( Friendship in the Classical World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, 19). Further: Heather Devere, ‘Reviving Greco-Roman Friendship: A Bibliographical Review’ (149–187) in Preston King and Heather Devere (eds.), The Challenge to Friendship in Modernity , Ilford: Frank Cass, 2000. 142 Florensky, Pillar, 311, 318; A.C. Grayling, Friendship, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, 178. 143 James Nelson, The Intimate Connection: Male Sexuality, Masculine Spirituality , London: SPCK, 1992, 55. 144 Vacek, Love , 299–300. 145 Janet R. Reohr, Friendship: An Exploration of Structure and Process, New York: Garland, 1991, 87. 146 Stanley Hauerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997, 48. How hard, this, in ecclesial leadership: harder even than sharing another’s tears! The nature of vulnerability is considered powerfully by Vanessa Herrick in the context of pastoral ministry. Although not connecting her thinking with friendship, she contends that relationship must be the basis for vulnerability ( Limits of Vulnerability: Exploring a Kenotic Model for Pastoral Ministry , Cambridge: Grove, 1997). 147 Vacek, Love , 293; cf. Aelred (chapter 7 n.196). 148 Weil, Waiting, 158–159; Johnson, She, 235; Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Reflections on Friendship, Sex and Survival, London: Chatto & Windus, 1998, 210–211. 149 O’Callaghan, Feast , 113. 150 C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves , London: Collins, 2012, 74–75. 151 Outka, Agape, 35. R.D. Laing writes in terms of ‘collusion’ ( Self and Others (2nd ed.), London: Tavistock, 1969, 90–93). 152 Wadell, Becoming, 63. Not all accounts of friendship prioritise this element of difference. Soskice critiques Lewis’ description as ‘sterile and self-regarding’ because ‘it rules out as a possibility friendship with one who is distinctively other’ ( Kindness , 165; cf. Lewis, Four , 87). 153 Florensky, Pillar , 312. 154 Vacek, Love , 309–310. 155 O’Callaghan, Feast, 19–20; Graham Little, Friendship: Being Ourselves with Others, Melbourne: Scribe, 2000, 245; cf. Cocking and Kennett’s ‘drawing view’ (‘Friendship’). Diana Fritz Cates explores how friends experience shared selfhood, a shared vision of the good which is constantly being redefined and

176 Coding the discourse reinterpreted in conversation between them (‘Toward an Ethic of Shared Selfhood’, The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1991), 249–257). 156 O’Callaghan, Feast, 99–101; John Swinton, Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007, 242; Samuel Southard, Theology and Therapy: The Wisdom of God in a Context of Friendship , Dallas: Word, 1989, 212–213. 157 Meilaender, Friendship, 64. He points to the eschaton as the only hope for faithfulness in friendship, when ‘temporality and change might lose their relentless power over our commitments’ ( Friendship , 65). 158 Outka, Agape , 282. 159 Vacek, Love, 301; cf. Oppenheimer, Hope, 137. We may even still be able to like the other in their uniqueness despite being saddened by the changes in them provided that they do not reject continuing overtures of friendship. 160 Vacek, Love, 301–303; Caroline J. Simon, The Disciplined Heart: Love, Destiny, and Imagination, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, 107. This coheres with Aelred’s contentions: though friendship is painful and its relational expectations may be tested by the friends’ sin, it should be pursued until passed beyond repair. Even then, what love remains may offer hope. Further, see chapter 10 for comments regarding when mutuality fails. 161 Swinton perceives Christian friendship as ‘catalytic’, transformative ‘not because of what it does , but because of what it is ’ ( Resurrecting , 143). 162 Fowl argues strongly for the indispensability of this matrix. To deepen friendships with God and others ‘require[s] a social context in which they can be nurtured and sustained. Isolated individuals cannot sustain such friendships’ (Fowl, Philippians , 218). 163 Florensky, Pillar , 326. 164 O’Callaghan, Feast , 136. 165 Florensky calls friendship agapē’s embodiment, ‘as in a living medium’ ( Pillar, 326). 166 Indeed, though celebrated, impartiality may not be virtue so much as the result of present human difficulty in seeing the unique preciousness of each person as loved by God. 167 Florensky, Pillar, 312. 168 Perhaps Aelred’s mutual submission ( Spiritual, 3:83) might even also be conceived to echo, in a way adapted to be appropriate for human friendships, Jesus’ expectation of obedience from his friends (John 15:14)? 169 Aelred refers to offering loyalty in adversity and patience in bearing hardship ( Spiritual , 3:61–63, 101, 107, 132). 170 In Thomas, it is more the sharing of the friend’s pain although, parallel to Aelred, there is also a sense of suffering the friend’s difficulties becoming one’s own ( ST II-II 30.2; cf. Wadell, Friends , 33). 171 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:82–83. 172 Aelred, Spiritual, 3:102–109. Thomas also identifies fraternal correction as one of the acts of caritas ( ST II-II 33). Plain-speaking ( parrēsia) has a long tradition in friendship thought: John T. Fitzgerald (ed.), Friendship, Flattery, and Frankness of Speech: Studies on Friendship in the New Testament World, Leiden: Brill, 1996; Spicq, Theological, 449; Gail R. O’Day, ‘Preaching as an Act of Friendship: Plain Speaking as a Sign of the Kingdom’, Journal for Preachers 28:4 (2003), 15–20; Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (ed. Joseph Pearson), Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2001, 11–20. 173 Aelred, Spiritual , 3:52. 174 Thomas accepts this. Though Aelred tries to limit friendship to relationships of utter intimacy, he also recognises that friendship develops in intimacy progressively (see above).

Part IV Practising hope

The last movement of the prophetic imagination involves the active practice of hope. Hope refuses ‘to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion’, 1 instead speaking ‘ concretely about the real newness that comes to us and redefines our situation ’. 2 Having refused to accept the leadership narrative of the dominant consciousness and having proposed a new discourse coded in terms of friendship, it is now time in this final part to make concrete this newness, first by crystallising the correlation between incarnational ecclesial leadership and friendship and then by articulating the practices of hope by which friendship-leadership praxis is embodied. This chapter will engage the correlative work and will further articulate how friendshipleadership praxis shapes power dynamics in concrete ecclesial reality. Recognising that there are clear avenues for further development of thought into those questions previously designated secondary, I will then take one of these questions around governance structures and decision-making with a view to indicating possible initial responses consistent with the answer proposed regarding the primary issue of leadership as activity. Imagining incarnational ecclesial leadership as friendship Conceptual coherence between Christian friendship and my leadership construct must be demonstrated not only regarding the activity which is their respective praxis. Correlation of the end to which Christian friendship moves and the telos of incarnational ecclesial leadership is also essential. Admittedly, this is, in some sense, to force a wedge into a dynamic which is internally connected. A praxis is participation in its telos; they are aspects of the same reality. Yet it is understanding of the telos of each which will clarify whether parallels between their praxes are actual or only apparent. Thus I begin with this task, notwithstanding a certain artificiality in the division of the following discussion. Further to engagement with Anderson’s theology of incarnation and ecclesiology, I argued that incarnational ecclesial leadership seeks as its telos the church’s deepening participation in Christ’s life and ministry. It would direct the church towards this end, a participation in the Son’s relationship with the Incarnational ecclesial leadership and the prophetic imagination 9

180 Practising hope Father, sharing in his personhood and becoming fully human. This participation is expressed concretely as self-emptying neighbour-love in the context of the Son’s ek-static movement of love towards the Father and is located in the community of lived transcendence, the ‘place’ where God is encountered as personal reality through the evidences of Scripture and indwelling Spirit. Accordingly, incarnational ecclesial leadership operates sacramentally, inviting believers towards transformative divine encounter through the offer of relationship within this community where they may be received in the context of the re-enactment of Christ’s life in his ongoing ministry and may respond in transformed depth of faith/commitment to Christ as he is found in this community. 3 The good of Christian friendship, too, is deepening participation in the divine-human friendship. 4 John, Thomas and Aelred have all demonstrated that God’s offer of friendship in Christ 5 is received by humanity as it is enacted by believers, those who are already God’s friends. Such human friendships, their locus in Christ, not only enact the divine offer of friendship but also constitute the context for human response to this divine offer. As we have seen, the love of God and of humanity are inseparable. To love another for God’s sake is to love God, a reciprocation of his love for us, and is thus to participate in the divine relational life of love, being increasingly open to mutual indwelling with Christ and its transformative implications. This reality develops progressively: in its orientation towards this good, Christian friendship defines itself in relation to an eschatological maximum. It ultimately seeks universality, unlimited numbers of particular individuals loved and liked for who they are in an eternal communion of everlasting friendships having the same shared good in Christ. Both Thomas and Aelred affirm this hope for human friendship in Christ: that it might find ultimate fulfilment in union with Christ and others in the divine-human friendship, ‘all of us together loving and delighting in God and loving and delighting in one another in our mutual enjoyment of God’. 6 Yet Aelred also recognises the pre-eschatological reality of friendship, which is not yet all that we hope: Christian friendship, in its praxis, experiences as proleptic reality its good, the telos towards which it is directed. It is clear that the telos of incarnational ecclesial leadership coincides with that of Christian friendship, a deepening participation in Christ and his ministry of love. In each case, this is experienced as the reality towards which praxis strains, an apprehension of the desired good – the adventus reality 7 – which is breaking in upon the world. Yet present reality’s pre-eschatological dimension means that the praxes of incarnational ecclesial leadership and Christian friendship are in some sense inchoate. Only by participation in these praxes may the adventus reality of full participation in the divine life break in more completely, incrementally perfecting and completing these praxes in lived experience in a movement towards the eschatological maximum. That this dynamic operates incrementally should not permit its denial by those wishing that lived reality more quickly conformed to adventus

Leadership and the prophetic imagination 181 reality. In a creation that groans, progress may be slow, as the next chapter will explore. First, however, we must review each praxis. Though the discussion above has already indicated, in both cases, a telos which is expressed and participated in a praxis of love, the contours of these praxes of love must now be compared to determine the degree to which they correlate. The praxis of incarnational ecclesial leadership, we have already seen, means taking the initiative to live out one’s own participation in Christ by loving persons in the church, with the intention of bringing them up against Christ’s presence in oneself by the Spirit and also in the Scriptures which affirm him as the reality of God. Though committed in its solidarity with the world, thus valuing the inclusion of outsiders in its ek-static movement, the love to which incarnational ecclesial leadership points believers is strongly evangelical concerning its centre in Christ. Treating others as ends, not means to an end, this love presumes personal relationship between leader and follower, rather than a functional relationship giving primacy to role. Nevertheless, it does not presuppose unmitigated personal openness: the differentiation of both parties in this leadership relationship is honoured, as is relational finitude. 8 What is core is a degree of personal vulnerability, a kenotic offering of self not without cost to the leader, itself a leadership act inviting the other to respond in deeper faith/commitment to Christ as he is found in the church. It operates as influence not necessarily as explicit directiveness, and certainly not as coercion, but rather in terms of an intentionality to bring the other more fully into the ‘place’ where they now become capable of pursuing the telos towards which incarnational ecclesial leadership would direct the church. Where leadership influence operates successfully the other responds with this same neighbour-love, though this may take many ‘lengths of love’ to materialise. Such leadership is shaped by its location, the gathered church. It thus includes a commitment to focus not only on individual neighbour-love relations but also to ensure that the church as a whole operates as relational matrix where each person is both growing in personhood and, eventually, committed to offering relational spaces for mutual growth with yet others. To be the community of lived transcendence, this relational matrix must be characterised by the poles of transcendence. Thus leadership must keep central the testimony of Scripture and the practices of community which enact Christ’s life and ministry, since these are the markers of the reality of God by which the church interprets and shapes its life and ministry. Maintenance of these priorities operates to preserve the hermeneutical frame of this community, an important leadership component by which believers are enabled to make choices such that their own stories and symbols (both as many individuals and as one body) remain consistent with the larger narrative of the One in whom they participate. 9 How far does Christian friendship parallel this leadership praxis? Friendship as a pursuit of the shared good which is participation in the triune God is characterised by benevolence between two (and sometimes more)