A Nation of Friends

While family may seem like the single most important thing in modern life, the shared vision of true friendships should not be lightly put aside.

By Jack Franicevich

Wrestling with Aristotle

A friend of a friend told me that, as a culture, “we don’t have a friendship framework that gives unmarried people stability, or reliable companionship, when we always prioritize our spouses and children over friends, on the basis that those family relationships are ‘more important.’”

I used to write a lot on friendship, and did so zealously. When I was in college, I read in Aristotle that friendship was, “at once, both the flower of Ethics and the root of Politics,” the fulcrum of the individual life and the communal life. Cicero agreed. Jesus said that “greater love hath no man” than friendship, and the Cappadocian Fathers frequently used the phrase “society of friends” to describe the Church.

As anyone who has cracked a book on the history of the idea of friendship knows, it all starts with Aristotle, who says that there are three successive “rungs” of friendship. The first rung is a mutual appreciation of one another’s usefulness. Each person has something to offer the other. The second rung is a mutual enjoyment of one another’s company. The third rung is a mutual admiration of “the good” in one another, coupled with a mutual pursuit of “the good.” Such men, per Aristotle, are exemplars of the individual life, and their friendships form the basis of a happy and virtuous polis.

Many classicists swear by Aristotle, and so did I. I thought he provided a succinct solution to the question of how to live “the good life”: Go to a liberal arts university, meet other ambitious and idealistic young Christians, build and lead just and peaceable institutions, and prize our friendships with one another above every other good in the world. Including family. My hometown never taught me that there was a “good, true, and beautiful”; my college did.

Since those four precious years, I have hit The Wall; or, whatever you call what happens to idealistic young friends when they graduate and move away, and what we call “life” and “family” happen. One of the symptoms of my case of Idealism was an inner conflict over what to do with my college friendships. Sometimes, I was guilty of nostalgia, valorizing the past to the point of ingratitude for the new goods of the present. I didn’t love my place, and I spent two weekends a month taking budget flights on Spirit to visit my college friends. I dated someone from my college in order to recover the spirit of the place.

Other times I was a zealot for the poor, taking the side of ethicists like Kant and Kierkegaard, who came down hard on “Friendship,” calling it the “earthly love,” inherently unethical because it is based on preference. “Neighbor-love,” on the other hand, is the “love which befits heaven,” which makes it the ethical one. I eschewed old friendships for a season in order to meet and befriend people around me with different backgrounds.

We were the aristocracy of a small polis—our college and our house—and we imagined we would be the aristocracy of our idealized future world.

The Avengers

I studied at Biola University, where I took a degree in business. But all of my best friends came from Biola’s honors college. Each of us had taken different majors, but we all read Dante and Shakespeare together, and we swapped questions and insights and ambitions from our respective disciplines.

Thirteen of us lived together in a house half a block from campus, both because that’s what you have to do to afford rent in California—and because we really enjoyed life with one another.

Each of my housemates was an ambitious and idealistic young Christian man. The light came through a side door every morning by 7:00 a.m., where many of them would sit and read physical copies of the newspaper. Three of us would pray through the Psalms. One of us made (a very tall pot of) coffee and would pour it for the rest of us. The guy who was studying human resources updated our Chore Chart. Most of us wore shirts that fit, ties, and shoes that actually cost some money. They had jobs off campus—interesting jobs that positioned them well for growth in their fields, or for graduate school.

Now for the embarrassing part.

A small group of us casually called ourselves “The Avengers.” Our plan was that each of us would do whatever seemed best—marry, move away for graduate school, take a residency—and then become excellent within our respective fields. Then, we’d all pick a “manageable city,” like Milwaukee or Detroit, move there when we turned thirty, and then “infuse” or “stimulate” that city by building a handful of life-giving institutions together. You know, like The Avengers. One guy was going to start a school. I’d plant an Anglican church in the same neighborhood. Obviously, we’d all send our kids to that school and worship at that church. Someone would be in charge of getting a medical clinic going. Enough guys worked in lucrative fields that we knew we could fund the thing. We’d written a mock business plan for a socially-conscious grocery store.

We’re all turning thirty this year, and The Avengers isn’t going to happen. One friend got married and took an MBA from Duke. They love it out there, and his wife’s parents moved there to retire and hold their grandchildren. Another friend has a daughter with a congenital heart defect, and he’s just putting his head down, making money, and praying. They may move back to where family support is. There’s another guy we don’t really hear from anymore.

I hadn’t noticed until Ephraim Radner pointed it out that, in his treatises, Aristotle “founded friendship on a kind of abstracted ‘singleness.’” And that the mode of singleness he addresses most directly is the mode of singleness inhabited by socially elite men with some share in the governance of their own polis. I don’t mean “legally single,” as in “unmarried.” I just mean that, on the spectrum of life experiences, people who have the privilege of operating as if they didn’t have parents to honor, spouses to care for, or children to nurture. Unmarried people who live with and care for their elderly parents don’t count. But anyone who works outside the home, earns a comfortable salary, has the capacity to leave for a several-week trip for work or pleasure, or has hired help to watch their children or clean their house—for all intents and purposes, consider them “single.”

That helped me understand why Aristotle’s vision was so appealing to me, a young man studying business and classical civics at university, living four hundred miles from home, with a number of other similar young men. We were the aristocracy of a small polis—our college and our house—and we imagined we would be the aristocracy of our idealized future world.

I’ve used the word “aristocracy” on purpose, because Aristotle catches a lot of flack from contemporary friendship scholars for the inaccessibility and irrelevance of his vision for friendship. Agreed: not everyone is the politically significant “single” man whom Aristotle generally depicts. Still, I think his vision for aristocratic friendship is more universal than he is given credit for.

The three boys had ascended the mountain as natural leaders who wanted fun, but their experience “lifts” them into a higher plane, the plane of friendship.

Ambition and Polis

The most recent place I saw this vision fleshed out is at the end of the first chapter of Lord of the Flies. It comes when Ralph and Jack, the two most able-bodied “big ‘uns” and therefore the most natural leaders, plus Simon, the martyr figure, leave the rest of the boys to go on an expedition.

The three boys summit a mountain. Their legs bleed as they climb through the creepers. They find a rock the size of a small automobile. Naturally, the boys press their combined weight against a wooden lever to dislodge it and send it careening down the mountainside. Why? Because it’s fun! Reaching the top, they scan the entire circumference of the island, translating the physical features of the island into cartographical knowledge. Ralph turns to the other two, locks eyes, addresses them: “This belongs to us.”

Each of the three boys cheers, and they delight in the moment. William Golding crystallizes the moment brilliantly: “Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the natural right of domination. They were lifted up: were friends.” This line caught my attention.

It’s just one of two places where the narrator uses the term “friends” to describe the boys, and he uses the word in its aristocratic sense. The three boys had ascended the mountain as natural leaders who wanted fun, but their experience “lifts” them into a higher plane, the plane of friendship.

What the boys experience is the transmutation of their natural, panting domination into co-possession. They become a triumvirate of children who can say, “This belongs to us.” This claim is at once the Flower of their vision for individual fun, and the Root of their new no-grown-up democratic society. Free, for a time, from family, and finding themselves the de facto aristocracy of the boys, there is space now for becoming the kinds of friends Aristotle imagines; that is, idealistic co-possessors of their polis.

On the allegorical level, that is what the boys are. But on the literal level, they’re still children. None of them have any ambition to speak of. They don’t know what governance means, or how the difficult issue of “co-possession” will play out. Their experience of co-possession, and their sense of “the good,” is more like affection than ambition.

No one can successfully govern a country for which they have no true affection.

Affection and Patria

In her novel My Ántonia Willa Cather describes this unambitious affection for one’s home country in a scene where Jim Burden, a markedly unambitious romantic, is away from home, reading Virgil at university:

I turned back to the beginning of the third book, which we had read in class that morning. “Primus ego in patriam mecum… deducam Musas”; “for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.” Cleric had explained to us that patria here meant, not a nation or even a province, but the little rural neighborhood on the Mincio where the poet was born. This was not a boast, but a hope, at once bold and devoutly humble, that he might bring the Muse (but lately come to Italy from her cloudy Grecian mountains), not to the capital, the palatia Romana, but to his own little “country”; to his father’s fields, “sloping down to the river and to the old beech trees with broken tops.”

Cather’s discussion of the word patria struck me deeply. Those of us who spent any part of our childhoods riding our bikes up to the top of a hill and climbing and sitting in the same tree, year after year, have what she calls a patria, or a fatherland, and know something like childlike affection for our home countries.

There are many reasons the three boys of Lord of the Flies fail to govern their island well. But one of them is that it was never a home country, or a patria, to any of them. That may be one of the lessons of Golding’s allegory: No one can successfully govern a country for which they have no true affection. Ralph’s political platform was maintaining a fire so they could all go home. The novel depicts him as constantly dreaming of home. Jack’s political platform was using the island for fun and adventure, especially in hunting. Simon had no political platform, although he does lay a private and secret claim to a small grove of fruit trees, overrun with butterflies. Still, he only ever visits it alone, never sharing his affection for this small place with anyone else, and it’s unsurprising that, among the main characters, he is never described as having a “friend.”

Aristotle taught me that friends are single men who have a mutual share in the ownership of their polis, imagining and striving together for its good. These boyhood stories have taught me, later than I wish they did, that friends are also boys who have a mutual share in the ownership of their patria, expressed in a common affection.

A radical reading of John would say that “friendship” itself is inconceivable outside knowledgeable, mutual participation in Christ’s possession of the earth.

New Testament Friends

What the New Testament witness, taken as a canonical whole, does with this notion of friendship is, I think, stunning.

To begin with, the New Testament concerns itself far more with familial language—genealogies, the Father sending His Son, divine adoption, becoming brothers and sisters—far more than it does with the language of friendship. In fact, there is only one point at which the voice of the narrator in the New Testament describes two people as being or becoming friends, and there’s only one other point where the New Testament defines friendship.

The description is ironic:

And Herod with his soldiers treated [Jesus] with contempt and mocked him. Then, arraying him in splendid clothing, he sent him back to Pilate. And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day. (Luke 23:11-12a)

Josephus tells their backstory. When Herod the Great, King of Judea had died, his kingdom was divided amongst his sons. One of these sons, Herod Antipas, the Herod named in Luke 23:12, immediately went to Rome to argue his right to inherit his father’s entire kingdom. Augustus Caesar said “No,” and, to add insult to injury, even decided to install the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, over the Province of Judea. Herod resented the Roman prefecture in general, but especially Pontius Pilate.

Luke’s record of the friend-making of Herod and Pilate reinforces the idea that the word “friends” (philoi) refers to “abstractly single” men in ruling classes who have a mutual possession of their polis, and have a mutual vision for its good. Luke has little to say about the idea of Christian friendship.

John, on the other hand, does. “Greater love,” says Jesus, “has no man than this, that one lay down his life for his friends” (15:13). In John, Jesus goes on to classify friendship among other kinds of relationship. First, he conditions friendship on obedience: “You are my friends if you do what I command you” (v. 14). Then, he distinguishes between the obedience of the servant and the obedience of the friend: “No longer do I call you servants, because the servant doesn’t know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (v. 15).

John doesn’t undercut aristocratic friendship but, rather, radically Christianizes it.

The Old Testament and the classical tradition describe a world in which there are those who possess property and those who work it—heads of household, and then their children, servants, day laborers, neighbors, foreigners, and animals. When Leviticus, the Old Testament’s most visionary political treatise, describes people’s “possession” of land, Yahweh calls himself the lord of the land (“The land is mine,” 25:23), and he calls mortal landlords his servants, or his tenants-in-chief. Part of the significance of Jesus’s incarnation is that he inherits from his Father the land rights to the entire earth. Now, both master and servant are at-will-employees of the Head of the Household of the World. This is why Jesus illustrates forgiveness in one place as a high-ranking servant pardoning the debt of a lesser-ranking servant (Matt. 18:21-35).

The fundamental problem of Christian politics is forming concepts of “possession” that reckon both with Jesus’s inheritance and subsequent possession of the whole earth on the one hand and with the modern need to define our “possession” of it legally. Jesus possesses the earth and he has a plan for it. By virtue of their co-participation in that possession and their knowledge of his plan, he will call those who obey him “friends,” both of himself and of one another. A radical reading of John would say that “friendship” itself is inconceivable outside knowledgeable, mutual participation in Christ’s possession of the earth. Luke, the historian, can call Herod and Pilate philoi. John, the theologian, can’t.

Significantly, Jesus’s possession of the earth grounds the notion that both the Ambitious Aristocrat of the Polis and the Affective Boy of the Patria, regardless of their social status, may participate in this aristocratic vision for friendship—friends as co-possessors.

Yes, “God settles the solitary in families,” but he also sends the solitary to unsettle families.

Adult Friendship

I left my hometown, and my college town, and now I live in Chicago. Some people out here also grew up in California, but no one else knows my hometown, or my special spots, like I do. And there are people out here who have read the same books as me, but they weren’t part of The Avengers, and they’ll never quite understand our unique undergraduate culture.

Making friends as an adult is harder, because you have to bond over common interests, like watching basketball, or playing soccer. Hobbies are great, but no amount of rec league soccer and then going out for beers afterward amounts to the grandeur and idealism that animated my old friendships.

I’ve never heard it said any better than Richard Dreyfuss’s character does at the close of the 1986 film Stand By Me: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” I enjoyed college more than childhood, so I’d say “twenty” where he says “twelve,” but it’s the same sense.

These reflections on friendship have helped me recognize a couple of things.

First, they have helped me recognize the significance of that famous piece of advice from Christina Rossetti and the prophet Zechariah: “Despise not the day of small things.” Emphasis mine. I play rec volleyball on Saturday mornings with people who are almost completely disconnected from the rest of my life.

And we’re not very good. Alisha is our team captain, but she’s never played before. I taught her how to serve. Every couple of games, Sara’s mom brings empanadas. Dan gave me a ride once, and we talked about life for twenty minutes. I dove to make a dig in front of a very small crowd which didn’t care very much at all, and Andre bent down to help me get up. I bumped into Bill’s back. Andre and Bill and I have figured out a good rotation—Andre and I are the setters, and as the game goes on, we try to get back row sets up for Bill.

We built a team like kids playing in a sandbox. The season ended as predictably as the tide coming in, and the team is gone. It’s not as if the Lawndale gymnasium off Ogden became anyone’s patria, and no one has plans to found a new school together. Even so, building a team—of friends, notably—is a good and joyful thing. Growing up, for me, has involved acknowledging the goodness of things that I wish were bigger.

Robert Spaemann argued that humans express their personhood through “penultimate identities.” Here’s what I mean:

My name is Jack, and my identity is hidden so deeply in Christ’s eternal personhood that I don’t often feel truly understood. But I do feel known, often inarticulably, in the context of my penultimate identity as a volleyball player. I run, cut, and dive; bounce the ball twice, turn it in my hand, scan the defense, calculate topspin, and serve; I yell Mine!, and I pass the ball to my teammates in such a way that expresses my understanding of their preferences. After a strong set, we look out like Jack and Ralph and Simon and say, “This is our house!”

It’s a game, of course. My volleyball skills don’t define my identity—my youth pastor told all of us that—but my commitment to fulfill the role of teammate, regardless of my skill, forms and reveals that identity in the context of friendship. Pressing into our penultimate identities displays our personhood and our character, and opens us up to small, but real, friendships.

Second, prioritizing our friends, even into marriage, helps us be our best selves and do hard things well.

In the last decade, we have seen the Church take the psalmist’s line, “God settles the solitary in families,” to heart. My parish in Chicago, for example, is overrun with twenty-year-old college students who left their homes for a good education in “the city.” Falling in with a family gives them a couple of gifts. It gives them little siblings in the Lord, reminding them how to look out for kids and help parents raise them. It also gives them new parents in the Lord, bearing words of discipline and encouragement, and helping them keep growing up into full maturity.

Yes, “God settles the solitary in families,” but he also sends the solitary to unsettle families.

Andrew—one of The Avengers—and his wife, started a tradition they call Buddymoon. Every couple of years, as an anniversary gift to one another, they buy each other plane tickets to visit their friends for a few days. One year, he flew her to England, and she flew him out to see me. It meant the world to me that a friend who had married, moved across the country, and started a family took a day that American culture has set aside for lovers and reinvested it in a celebration of friendship.

We hiked, ate, prayed, and talked about life. We didn’t have to explain ourselves to one another to feel understood, because we already shared the same reservoir of imagination.

I think it works kind of like the transfiguration: Jesus left almost everyone behind to take a hike and talk about “his exodus, which he was about to accomplish” with Moses and Elijah. Why those two guys? If anyone gets “exoduses,” it’s Moses and Elijah. No offense to Jesus’s family and his disciples, but the gospel texts make a point of how often they didn’t understand him. Why that topic? Jesus was about to do an exodus, and exoduses are big and hard to do. Anyone with big, hard work in front of them of any kind could use some good conversation with familiar friends. When Jesus finished this conversation, his face shone.

Andrew’s wife wrote me after the trip: “Jack, there are parts of Andrew’s soul that I can’t unlock and light up, but you can. When he comes back from seeing you, he’s more himself, and I’m so grateful.”

Friends can never replace family, and they shouldn’t. But taking a weekend to climb an old mountain, and rehearsing your co-possession of that patria or polis can resuscitate your vision of the kingdom of heaven.

And make your face shine.

The Rev. Jack Franicevich is a deacon in the ACNA and teaches middle school in Chicago. His primary research interest is the Church’s reception of the Old Testament’s liturgical concepts, but his primary love is playing recreational team sports.