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Problems in the History of Christian Friendship

1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/earl.1996.0009

1086-3184

David Konstan,

Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies

Problems in the History of Christian Friendship David Konstan (bio) The fourth century C.E. is especially abundant in materials pertaining to friendship. Apart from special discussions such as the oration Peri philias of Themistius and the concluding chapters of Saint Ambrose's De officiis ministrorum, there survive thousands of letters by pagans and Christians, who together constitute an extraordinary interlocking network of acquaintances. As a result, there exists more firsthand information concerning the personal lives and associations of these men (and sometimes women, too) than about any other figure in classical antiquity apart from Cicero.2 There are some problems with this material, as well. First of all, both pagan and Christian writers were steeped in classical literature, and reproduce in their epistles and other works many of the commonplaces on friendship that derive from Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, or other sources. It is not easy to determine what is new, or when old views have taken on new meanings. Secondly, the Christian writers present a special difficulty. For they are invariably responding to and promoting a set of doctrines that [End Page 87] put enormous pressure on classical views of friendship. To take two examples: the imperative to love one's neighbor was sometimes understood as an injunction against particular love between individuals. Thus the ideal of universal love—sometimes associated with the terms agapê or caritas —was perceived to militate against friendship as it is ordinarily understood.3 Again, the notion that love for the creature as opposed to the creator is a form of idolatry tended to cast purely mortal relationships as derivative rather than primary. Love for another had to be love in Christ. For these reasons, among others, metaphors for Christian ties tended to be derived from the sphere of kinship—paternity or brotherhood—rather than friendship.4 Both the abundance of primary materials and the preponderance of theological considerations in the Christian interpretation of human ties have had consequences for modern discussions of late antique friendship. On the one hand, treatments are often abstractly doctrinal. On the other hand, they frequently focus on individual personalities and cases such as the conflict between Gregory of Nazianzus' preference for monastic withdrawal and Basil's sense of ecclesiastical calling, or Paulinus of Nola's anguish over Sulpicius Severus' failure ever to visit him, or again Saint Augustine's intense feelings at the death of his unnamed friend from Tagaste.5 Some investigators explore areas of tension between the strong personal attachments felt by individual Christian writers and their religious beliefs, which exhorted them to rise above worldly bonds. These are [End Page 88] worthy subjects in their own right. My own interest, however, is in the history of friendship as a social relation rather than in the personal vagaries of individual subjects or in doctrinal issues per se. I shall thus try to steer between the extreme limits of friendship as a universal ideal of charity and as a purely individual phenomenon relating to the temperament of specific people. In particular, I am concerned to see how the classical conception of friendship was assimilated and transformed in early Christian texts. In this paper, I look at three particular aspects of friendship as it is represented in late antique sources. These are: (1) the idea of friendship between man and god, which appears chiefly in Christian but also in certain pagan texts; (2) the ideal of humility in relation to friendship; and (3) the injunction to self-disclosure as an element of true friendship. I believe that these three features of late antique friendship are in some degree novel in respect to earlier ideals and practices from Homer down through the Hellenistic period and the early Roman empire, and that they form a more or less coherent set which, taken together, perhaps point to a new inflection in the nature of friendship in the fourth century or thereabouts.6 That these three traits are peculiar or new to the fourth century presupposes, of course, a conception of one or more earlier stages in the history of classical friendship with which the late antique variety is being contrasted. This is not the place to review earlier conceptions in detail...