Theologies of friendship
Editor’s Note: Melissa Matthes ’09 M.Div. is a member of the Yale Divinity School Alumni Board. This article is published as part of a collaboration between YDS and the Alumni Board to share board members’ insights and reflections on YDS and theological education with the alumni community.
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My 26-year-old daughter and one of her closest childhood friends recently ended their friendship. The pain my daughter has experienced has been as devastating and heartbreaking as any other form of loss. Perhaps because their bond began in kindergarten, the rupture has called to mind Maurice Sendak’s Let’s Be Enemies, in which two boys—James and John—become fixated on one another’s flaws and forget, though eventually rediscover, that life is richer when they are friends.
Sophia’s and Charlotte’s breakup also reminded me of how casually we, as a culture, often treat friendship: we take it for granted, assume it will endure without care, neglect its maintenance, and fail to be intentional about sustaining it. In a post-Facebook world, the meaning of “friend” has been flattened and quantified; relationships can be measured, cultivated, or suspended through likes and streaks, following and blocking. Largely absent, it seems, is Second-Wave Feminism’s insistence on friendship as a form of resistance—to patriarchy, to compulsory heterosexuality, or to the isolations of domestic life.
Yet the significance of friendship long predates the 1960s. It occupies a central place in the moral reflections of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustine. And who could forget the cautionary tale of Job’s so-called friends—among the earliest and most unsettling examples of how not to be a friend at all.
Aristotle famously distinguishes among three kinds of friendship. The first are friendships of utility: we value these relationships because they serve a practical purpose. In contemporary life, these might resemble professional or networking friendships—people with whom we meet regularly, exchange advice or opportunities, yet rarely see outside that context. Parent-to-parent connections can function similarly: carpools are coordinated, schedules aligned, but the bond is not deeply personal and often dissolves once that shared stage of life ends. Even the easy familiarity between a regular customer and a barista can feel friendship-like, though it remains rooted in a service relationship. Aristotle does not dismiss such friendships; rather, he recognizes them as necessary threads in the fabric of social life.
The second category consists of friendships of pleasure. These are relationships grounded in shared interests and enjoyment—our companions for music, art, golf, or other pursuits. They might be called “leisure partners,” friends bound by a mutual love of an activity such as hiking, knitting, or playing squash. While these relationships bring joy and sociability, they are not typically the ones we turn to in moments of difficulty. Still, Aristotle does not belittle friendships of pleasure; they add lightness, energy, and vibrancy to our lives.
The third—and highest—form of friendship are friendships of virtue. These are the relationships that shape who we become. Such friends help us grow into our best selves, the friend we trust both for their praise and their criticism. They wish the good for each other for the other’s own sake, practicing honesty without cruelty and finding genuine joy in one another’s virtue and happiness. Contemporary social psychologists suggest that having even five such friendships over the course of a lifetime is a rare and profound blessing.
These friendships are not merely secular niceties; they are integral to human flourishing (eudaimonia) and, according to Thomas Aquinas, to the very possibility of a relationship with God. To cultivate a friendship in which one truly wills the good of another is to participate in love itself. For Aquinas, caritas binds human beings to one another in God. Charity (caritas) is the God-given virtue by which we love God for God’s own sake and love ourselves and others in God—a friendship with the divine that animates all moral life and endures eternally.
Such friendships perfect human life by opening it to divine life. What Aquinas means, in part, is that to love God is to love what God loves. But how do we come to know what God loves? For Aquinas, this requires attention to the Trinity itself—the eternal friendship among Father, Son, and Spirit. At the very center of who God is lies a communion of love: a relationship of mutuality, mystery, and grace. As Paul Wadell eloquently explains in Friendship and the Moral Life, “The perfect activity of God is the eternal friendship between Father and Son…which begets Spirit. God’s happiness…is the friendship life that is God; it is this everlasting community of friendship we call Trinity, where love offered is love wholly received and wholly returned.”
Augustine extends this vision further by insisting that we do not ultimately choose our friends—God does. Every genuine friendship is both a gift and a work of God’s love. While friendships must be sustained through affection, care, and mutual effort, they do not begin there. They begin in the love God has for each of us, a love that takes concrete form in the gift of friendship. As Maria Aquinas McNamara notes, friendship “begins not in the love friends have for one another, but in the love God has for them” (Friendship in Saint Augustine). Where Aristotle holds that friends are drawn together by the virtue each recognizes in the other, Augustine contends that friends are drawn together by God. Friendship, for Augustine, is never accidental or arbitrary; it is a sign of God’s redemptive presence in our lives, the personal and particular way God draws us into communion.
Is there any better reason then to tend carefully to our friendships—to be intentional about sustaining and nurturing them? Our friendships are God’s movement toward us in love: they are at once signs of God’s presence and a summons toward a more expansive, universal love. Friendship becomes a constitutive moral practice of human life because it is through our friends that we come into contact with our own goodness. As David Whyte observes, friendship is the way we are “put in touch with our goodness. We reach what we most deeply desire through our friends; their love shapes us into who we hope to become.” (Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words).
Seen this way, friendship is nothing less than God drawing near to us in love. God prepares a community not all at once, but slowly, through the friendships that shape our days and teach us how to belong. The community God intends is not imposed from above but practiced here and now, in the daily work of friendship—of listening, forgiving, delighting, and remaining. These relationships prepare our hearts for the kingdom of God. To learn how to be a good friend, then, is to learn how to live with God—and with one another—in love.
Melissa Matthes is a professor and head of the Department of Government at the United States Coast Guard Academy.