Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Meilaender: Friendship as Preferential Love

Gilbert Meilaender poses interesting insight into the world of friendship as it belongs to Christians. He begins by saying, “Friend must be preceded by various modifiers” (6). Friend, like love, has multiple uses and meanings depending on the situation. However, can Christian’s have friends since they are called to a universal friendship? Dr. Johnson says, “All friendship is preferring the interest of a friend, to the neglect, or perhaps, against the interest of others. Now Christianity recommends universal benevolence, to consider all men as our brethren; which is contrary to the virtue of friendship” (7).

Meilaender brings up the two most common competing theories about friendship from a couple of classicists- Plato and Aristotle. Plato thinks, “friendship is a universal love which grows out of more particular, affective attachments” (8). He thinks of friendship out of sentiment for all of humanity. Aristotle thinks otherwise, “friendship is a narrowing down of the many towards whom we have good will to a few friends whom we especially choose” (8). There are dangers for both, as acknowledged by Socrates. Preferential love can be too narrow; it can become too possessive or dependent. Rather, he suggests that friendship (philia) is a sublimated eros, where lovers can share a life in pursuit of wisdom. It is more disinterested love. Kierkegaard writes, “it is an impossibility of love according to both explanations simultaneously” (27).

Aristotle thinks that preferential love is the highest sort of friendship and that no one would choose to live without friends. He also notices that friends expect certain treatment from us as well as a certain obligation. Strangers, on the other hand, have no expectations and do not feel offense like a friend would. However, Meilaender notices, the story of the Good Samaritan disregards Aristotle’s observations. The Good Samaritan was a stranger to the man he helped. There were no loyalties of friendship and yet he treats that other man as a friend. The implicit point from this Christian story, says Meilaender, is, “The stranger, just as much as the friend has claim upon us for all the care and consideration on which we can muster and that to fail here would be not only injustice but also a betrayal of common humanity” (16). However, the Good Samaritan is also criticizes because the good Samaritan is unrealistic and maybe even lonely since apparently his time and money was not needed by anyone else.

Augustine is also introduced in this reading. He thinks, “The highest form of friendship, intimated by out particular friendship is, that which joins all who share in the love of God. Thus, particular friendships (philia) are transcended into caritas itself, God’s love that unites those who are his. Yet, caritas itself, though universal in scope, does not lack the intimacy of philia” (17). There is, in a sense, a divine lottery. Because of time, place, or circumstance, we become closer to some than others. However, this is all God’s doing because these closer friends “are merely the school in which we learn what it would be like to love anyone, in which we become more open and ready to receive others” (20). Preferential friendship is extended into a larger context.

Contemporary Christian thinkers have other suggestions. Some criticize Augustine because he begins with earthly, natural love and extends that into a universal scope. They think that it should “build down” from universal love into particular attachments. Johnathon Edwards, by contrast, “cannot regard any bond of love as virtuous which is not a narrowing and specifying of universal and general benevolence” (24). Preferential love runs the danger of being egocentric and exclusive to too few. Jeremy Taylor offers to try to justify particular loves on the basis of universal charity. He thinks that since human beings are finite, that our benevolence towards toward others is finite too. He says, “universal love much be expressed in this way” (26). Infinite friendship must be left to God because he is the only one who can do that. Kierkegaard makes this statement, “It is no mistake because when we are speaking of neighbor love, of “friendship of the world,” it really makes no difference” (28).

It seems that how we Christians experience friendship and the love we are to give to everyone as Christians is different. Can they be reconciled? Meilaender thinks that there are various moral goods in human life and friendship, in whatever form is one of them. Both kinds of friendship are necessary though. There is both a universal and a personal factor when it comes to this because we are humans. We need close friends but we also need to take that view of friendship to the service of all of our neighbors. The dynamic force of love will always hold this tension. He says, “To prefer some to others, but to remain open to those others and refuse to harm them for the sake of those we prefer—this may not be ‘friendship of the world,’ but it can be defended as a legitimate way of incorporating the love of friendship as we actually experience it into a system of Christian belief” (31).

Our temporality is what confuses us. Meilaender, after all this, thinks, “to claim that all must strive to transcend that mark would be mistaken—but equally mistaken would be the claim that none should” (35).

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