Commonplace (Friendship)
The goods we notice least are usually the ones holding the most weight, which is why friendship so rarely feels like the great thing it is. It hides inside the furniture of an ordinary evening, in a shared meal or a walk or a long conversation that went nowhere in particular, and because it looks ordinary we keep waiting for it to feel profound before we will honor it. That waiting is a large part of the trouble. A man who expects his friendships to answer his soul will be disappointed by every friend he has, while a man who expects nothing from them will let them starve. Both have mistaken what kind of thing a friend is, and the older writers, sacred and pagan, spent a remarkable amount of ink correcting the mistake.
The Preacher's Audit
The oldest working philosopher in Scripture is the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who looked at everything under the sun and found most of it to be vapor. He is the last man you would expect to sell a feeling, so it matters when he stops in the middle of his disillusionment to point at friendship as one of the few things that survives his audit. He sets it up with a portrait of a man alone:
Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun. There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail. (Ecclesiastes 4:7-8)
The man in the portrait is rich. His hands never stop and his eye is never full, until some rare quiet moment lets the question surface from beneath all that labor: for whom? He has no answer because he has no one, and the Preacher, who has called nearly everything vanity, gives this condition a sharper name. It is a sore travail, which is what it means to have everything and no one to have it with.
Against that darkness he lays down the plainest case for friendship ever written:
Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12)
What he leaves out is instructive. He never says your friend will complete you, and nothing in the passage suggests two people gazing at one another until their souls feel answered. He is a working man giving the working case, in which two get more done, the one who falls gets picked up, two bodies keep each other warm on a cold night, and an attacker who would overwhelm one man finds himself facing two. The practicality is almost embarrassing, and I suspect that is the point, since the Preacher is rescuing friendship from the expectations that usually kill it. Friendship in his account is insulation, the kind of thing a person needs long before his life has become impressive enough to deserve it. Everyone falls, so the only open question is whether there will be a hand when he does.
That image of two travelers, with a third strand that makes the cord, keeps turning up in the mouths of people who never read Ecclesiastes and arrived at the same place anyway.
Aristotle's Refuge
Four centuries before Christ, Aristotle set out to map the whole territory of the good life and found he could not finish the map without a long chapter on friends. He wrote as a scientist of human happiness, cataloguing it the way a botanist catalogues plants, and yet when he reaches friendship the clinical tone slips:
Next would seem properly to follow a dissertation on Friendship: because, in the first place, it is either itself a virtue or connected with virtue; and next it is a thing most necessary for life, since no one would choose to live without friends though he should have all the other good things in the world.
Here is the Preacher's rich man again, translated into Greek. Give a person health and money and honor and power, take away his friends, and Aristotle says no one would accept the trade. He presses further:
In fact, men who are rich or possessed of authority and influence are thought to have special need of friends: for where is the use of such prosperity if there be taken away the doing of kindnesses of which friends are the most usual and most commendable objects?
Prosperity with no one to be generous toward has become storage. Then Aristotle turns the coin to the side the Preacher had named:
In poverty moreover and all other adversities men think friends to be their only refuge.
When everything else has been stripped away, the one shelter still standing is another person who stays. To make his case Aristotle reaches back to Homer, who had described two warriors going out together, and borrows the line "They two together going" as though it settled the matter. A preacher in Jerusalem and a philosopher in Athens, who never met, keep finishing each other's sentence.
Aristotle also sorts friendship into kinds, which deserves attention because so much of our disappointment with friends comes from confusing them:
Not everything indiscriminately, but some peculiar matter alone, is the object of this affection; that is to say, what is good, or pleasurable, or useful.
We befriend people because they are useful to us or pleasant to us, and Aristotle grants that such friendships are real while warning that they are fragile, since what they love is what the person provides. When the usefulness ends or the pleasure fades, the friendship dissolves along with its reason. Above these he places a higher kind:
That then is perfect Friendship which subsists between those who are good and whose similarity consists in their goodness: for these men wish one another's good in similar ways; in so far as they are good; and those are specially friends who wish good to their friends for their sakes, because they feel thus towards them on their own account and not as a mere matter of result.
The phrase worth keeping is for their sakes. A friend in this sense has come to want another person's good the way he wants his own, on that person's account, and Aristotle says such friendship is slower to form and rarer to find and far more permanent, because goodness has in it a principle of permanence. Use runs out and pleasure cools, while two people who simply want each other to flourish have tied a knot that time cannot easily pull loose.
Cicero's Arithmetic
The Romans took up the theme, and no one handled it more warmly than Cicero in the small book on friendship he wrote near the end of his life, putting the words in the mouth of an old man remembering a friend he had lost. His definition has not been improved on:
Friendship is nothing else than entire fellow feeling as to all things human and divine with mutual good-will and affection; and I doubt whether anything better than this, wisdom alone excepted, has been given to man by the immortal gods.
The fellow feeling he means extends to all things human and divine, which reaches to a shared sense of the whole of things. Like Aristotle, Cicero roots it in character and will not let anyone have deep friendship on the cheap:
It is virtue itself that produces and sustains friendship, and without virtue can friendship by any possibility exist.
Then comes the line generations have carried in their pockets. A friend, he says,
at once enhances the lustre of prosperity, and by dividing and sharing adversity lessens its burden.
That sentence holds the whole economy of friendship, and it is the Preacher's arithmetic set to music, since two double the reward and halve the fall. Good news carried alone curdles a little, whereas the same news run to a friend's door becomes twice itself, and a grief that would crush one person flat gets picked up at both ends when there are two to carry it. He marvels that friendship, unlike the other goods, fits every occasion:
Friendship combines the largest number of utilities. Wherever you turn, it is at hand. No place shuts it out. It is never unseasonable, never annoying.
Wealth is good for spending and power for the homage it brings, so each of the other goods earns its keep at one task, while friendship is good at every hour and in every weather. From there Cicero reaches the deepest word the pagan world managed on the subject:
He, indeed, who looks into the face of a friend beholds, as it were, a copy of himself. Thus the absent are present, and the poor are rich, and the weak are strong, and (what seems stranger still) the dead are alive.
A friend once given is never wholly lost even to death, since he goes on being honored and carried and loved in the one who remains.
Bacon's Daylight
Sixteen centuries later Francis Bacon, a lawyer with a cool eye who was nobody's sentimentalist, wrote a short essay on friendship and arrived at Cicero's arithmetic by his own road. He begins by naming what friendlessness is:
For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.
A man can be surrounded and still be entirely alone, because a room full of faces where no one loves him is only a gallery. Bacon then describes the mechanism by which a friend changes the weight of a life:
This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves. For there is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less.
So the Preacher's two-better-than-one, which Cicero had rendered as dividing and sharing, appears again in plain English. What these writers keep describing is the oldest observed fact about our kind, which is that we are built to be carried and to carry. Bacon adds a second gift we rarely name, since a friend steadies the head as well as the heart:
Friendship maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness, and confusion of thoughts. Whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly, he seeth how they look when they are turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse, than by a day's meditation.
Most of us know the experience of going to a friend tangled, starting to talk, and hearing ourselves say somewhere in the talking the thing we did not know we knew, which is why Bacon reckons an hour of it worth a day of brooding alone.
Even a careful modern reference work, defining the thing as coldly as it can, cannot keep the warmth out. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in its entry "Friendship," describes it as a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. The encyclopedia ends up standing where Aristotle stood, with the mark of a friend being that he wants your good for your sake.
Emerson's Sincerity
Ralph Waldo Emerson, much nearer our own time, named what the ancients kept circling, that a friend is the one person before whom you can finally stop performing:
A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.
Emerson's observation was that every man alone is sincere, while the entrance of a second person starts the hypocrisy, because we begin managing our faces and choosing our words and covering our thoughts under a hundred folds. The friend is the exception, the one before whom the pretense comes off and you can be what you are. That is why Emerson thought a friend so astonishing, since your own being is reiterated in a foreign form, and why he said a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. The masterpiece he had in mind is the person across the table who already knows the worst of you and has stayed anyway.
What the Poets Knew
The philosophers give us the structure of friendship, and the poets give us its ache. When men and women sat down over the centuries to write about friends, certain notes kept sounding, and the first was how rare the real thing is and how easily we mistake the counterfeit. A line printed under Shakespeare's name sets the two side by side:
Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.
Most of us have had friendships made entirely of easy words, wind that felt like weather for a season before it blew somewhere else. The old proverb attributed to Ovid says the same thing more grimly:
Prosperity makes friends, and adversity tries them.
Prosperity gathers people the way a magnet gathers filings, while adversity works like a sieve that lets most of them fall through and shows you the few who were metal all along. This is the test the Preacher and Aristotle and Cicero each named, in which the friend turns out to be the one present in the fall and the cold. Anyone will drink your wine, though only a friend will help you carry the coffin.
Because that friend is rare, the poets kept insisting on his worth. Edward Young, in his long night poem, weighed a true friend against every risk a man could take:
A friend is worth all hazards we can run.
Longfellow, translating an old German song, put the underlying vow in the plainest words available:
Then come the wild weather, come sleet or come snow, we will stand by each other, however it blow.
Every real friendship rests on some version of that vow, spoken or unspoken, which promises that when the weather turns (and it will turn) the friend will still be standing there.
The poets sound one harder note, which cuts against what we want from a friend, since we would like him to make us feel good, and the older writers knew that the truest friend sometimes makes us feel terrible on purpose and out of love. The novelist Bulwer-Lytton said flatly that there is no man so friendless but that he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths. That is a strange gift, and Scripture puts it near the center of what friendship is for.
The Proverbs and the Faithful Wound
The Bible's own portrait of friends is clearer-eyed than our sentiment, and the Proverbs, which return to friendship again and again, have a bracing quality that sentiment lacks.
A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. (Proverbs 17:17)
The phrase "at all times" includes the inconvenient ones, and adversity appears again as the moment that reveals who is true. Then the Proverbs take up the harder note the poets touched:
Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. (Proverbs 27:6)
The appeal of the enemy's kiss is easy to understand, since flattery keeps a man comfortable, and comfort is pleasant even when it is lulling him to sleep. A friend who tells the disagreeable truth will hurt him, and the hurt is faithful because it comes from someone who wants his good for his sake and cannot bear to watch him walk off the cliff smiling. The Proverbs give this its famous image:
Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend. (Proverbs 27:17)
Two blades laid against each other both come away keener, which means friction belongs to the process, so a friend who has never once created friction has never once sharpened you. The Proverbs also refuse to let old friendships become disposable, treating a long friendship as a kind of inheritance:
Thine own friend, and thy father's friend, forsake not; neither go into thy brother's house in the day of thy calamity: for better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off. (Proverbs 27:10)
What matters in that verse is nearness, the friend who is at the door in the day of calamity, which blood alone cannot guarantee. Then comes the verse everyone half remembers, which raises friendship at its height above the bond of blood itself:
A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. (Proverbs 18:24)
Jonathan and Ruth
Israel had a story for that friend, and it is one of the great friendships in all literature. David was a shepherd boy and Jonathan the king's son, so that by every rule of politics Jonathan should have been David's rival, and instead he became the truest friend David would ever have.
And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. (1 Samuel 18:1)
To love another as one's own soul is Aristotle's definition arriving centuries early in Hebrew dress, since it means wishing your friend's good as you wish your own. Jonathan went on to protect David at the cost of his own throne and died in battle before David came into his kingdom, and when the news reached David he sang the most naked lament for a friend in Scripture:
I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women. (2 Samuel 1:26)
This is grief for a friend, full-throated and unashamed, ranked by the mourner himself above every other love he had known. Anyone who thinks of friendship as the lesser love, the one a person settles for, has to reckon with the man after God's own heart weeping like this.
A quieter friendship is easy to overlook because it passes between two women, a widow and a foreigner who had married into her family and was free to go home. When Naomi, bereaved and bitter, told Ruth to turn back and leave her to her grief, Ruth refused:
Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. (Ruth 1:16-17)
We read those words at weddings now, though they were first spoken between two people bound by nothing except love. Ruth tied her whole future to Naomi's at the moment Naomi had nothing left to offer except her poverty and her God.
The Friend Behind the Friends
Everything gathered here, from the two who lift each other to the soul knit to another soul, turns out to be a rumor of someone. The Preacher pronounced woe on the man who falls alone with no one to help him up, and there is One who came looking for us at the moment we had fallen and were alone. On the night before he died he gathered the few friends he had and changed the meaning of the word:
Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. (John 15:13-15)
He could have called them servants or subjects or sinners, and none of those names would have been false. He called them friends, and then he accomplished what Ecclesiastes and Aristotle and Cicero could describe without being able to do. He reached into the ditch where we lay in sin and death and lifted us out, and he took our cold guilt onto himself so that his own righteousness could be laid over us like a shared cloak on a winter night. When the strong man came to take us, the lion who hunts, he went out to meet him and would not let us be taken, because greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends.
The Preacher's last strand still waits to be accounted for. He says two are better than one and then goes past two, since a threefold cord is not quickly broken, and it is fair to ask where the third strand came from. Scripture answers that friendship begins in God, who was never a solitary power in an empty heaven and has been from before all worlds a fellowship of Father, Son, and Spirit, each wishing the other's good and glorifying the other in a love that had no beginning and cannot be broken. Friendship runs through the fabric of reality because the One who made reality is himself a friendship, so the threefold cord was tied before the foundation of the world. When he made us in his image he made us for this, to be knit soul to soul with him and with one another, while the rich man laboring under the sun with his eye never satisfied shows what we become without it.
That is why the ordinariness of friendship deserves no contempt. The shared meal is holy ground, and the long conversation that went nowhere is a means of grace, while the friend who tells you the disagreeable truth is doing the work of God on you. Friendship needs to be valued the way bread is valued, eaten daily without waiting for it to feel profound, since it keeps a person alive in the same quiet way. John Fawcett's old hymn, which the church has sung at the close of countless gatherings of friends, puts the hope plainly:
Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love;
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.
Beneath every friendship worth the name stands a Friend who sticks closer than a brother, and who has called people like us, of all things, his friends.