Per Caritatem

In my preparation for a paper that I will be presenting at Baylor this Fall on von Balthasar and Christocentric friendship, I have been thinking about the ways in which the claims of Christianity with regard to love and friendship go beyond the possibilities offered in classical philosophy, viz., the philosophy of Aristotle. Though my paper focuses on von Balthasar’s view of friendship, I mention in my introductory paragraph that whether we consult Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or St. Augustine’s Confessions, we find the affirmation that human beings are social beings and that friendship plays a crucial role in shaping a person’s moral development. After discussing a number of topics in von Balthasar (e.g., the relation of originary, Trinitarian love to human love, being awakened to love by Love, etc.), my plan is to return in the concluding paragraph to briefly discuss the ways that Christian claims with regard to love and friendship in the broadest terms offer something beyond that which is possible in classical philosophy (again, primarily with Aristotle in mind). Below are a few of the ideas that I am tossing around, and about which, I would love your interaction (be it critical or positive).

In Aristotle’s Ethics, as he unfolds his account of the vicious or dissipated person, that is, the person who was deprived of a virtuous upbringing in which good beliefs were fashioned, and consequently, whose corrupt desires and opinions form a perfect harmony in which no resistance is present, it seems that such a person is in an utterly hopeless situation. In other words, a person in this condition is, as Aristotle says in book VII, paragraph 8, incurable.[1] The vicious person is doomed to his fate with no possibility of breaking free from destructive cycles which may have been part of his family line for generations. Having grown up in an injurious environment, a person in such circumstances has experienced and in turn acts out perverse versions of love and friendship. From this perspective, Aristotle’s view that the dissipated person acts with a kind of necessity rings true. Yet, when we bring the Christian tradition into the conversation, whether appealing to St. Augustine or Balthasar, we find that there is hope for the vicious person, as well as any person who has experienced being bound and fragmented by his or her own will. Turning briefly to St. Augustine, in book VIII of his Confessions, Augustine provides a kind of phenomenology of the will in which he vividly describes his own inability to choose the good, which was the result of many years of debauched living.[2] However, for Augustine, as is the case with Balthasar, the Trinitarian God via the Christ event can and does overcome the power of destructive habits and heals not only the will but the whole person. In his taking on of flesh and giving of His Spirit, Christ, so to speak, works from the inside, and thus, is able to effect a transformation that far exceeds any extrinsic solution or mere modification of one’s behavior.

This transformative healing of course comes at a great cost, and the cost was the life of the Son by way of the Cross in which His experience of utter abandonment has never been surpassed. The giving over of Himself to death and willingness to be forsaken by the Father, brings us to a second point of departure with Aristotle’s philosophy. Would, for example, Aristotle’s magnanimous man or his contemplative philosopher voluntarily relinquish a state of perfect bliss and give his life for his enemies? Would such an act be perceived as virtuous or foolish? Yet, this radical self-donation and self-surrender to the Father’s will are constitutive of the Christ event. Not only did He die for those who hated Him, but He offered (and still offers) His adversaries an unfathomable inheritance—i.e., He is willing to bestow upon them all that His Father has imparted to Him. As St. Paul says, perhaps one would die for a good person; however, Christ’s love exceedingly surpasses the possibility of dying for an upright person, which when said and done leaves us with little cognitive dissonance. Christ’s act, on the other hand, as far as the Greeks are concerned, is difficult understand as anything but the apex of foolishness.

Speaking more directly to the implications of Christ’s radical self-giving in relation to friendship, in John 15:12-16, Christ instructs his disciples to keep his commandments, and specifically highlights that they are to love one another as He self-sacrificially loved them. Furthermore, He says that his disciples are now called friends because they have been brought into the circle of intertrinitarian love (see John 15:5ff). Then in verse 16, in the exhortation to live fruitful lives, there is an implicit invitation to participate in Christ’s ongoing mission, a mission that is characterized by loving God and loving one’s neighbor. Here we see that in Christocentric friendship the vertical and the horizontal are inseparable with the latter flowing out of the former, and by implication, serve as a necessary conduit for the full actualization of the self. This Godward/manward nexus highlights the essentially communal and social nature of Christian philia—a philia that has been and continues to be transformed by divine agape. In other words, in Christocentric friendship, the “I” and the “thou” are seen neither as a threat to one another nor is the other instrumentalized (as is the case with some forms of modern and contemporary philosophy, e.g., Sartre). Rather, the relationship between the “I” and the “thou” is a dynamic, reciprocal encounter of love in which both are brought closer to the realization of the particular person that God desires them to be. Since both share a love for Christ and a common mission, they are aware of the fact that human love is a reflection of a more originary, perfect love shared among the members of the Trinity. This divine love, manifested to us in the Person of Jesus Christ, is itself not static, but dynamic because it is the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.[3] Or to use Balthasar’s words, “the archetypal identity which we discover in creatures within a clear separation of persons who are held together by love, is a creaturely imago trinitatis, veiled and yet not wholly visible.”[4] As Balthasar gathers together the stones of his mosaic of friendship, the final form takes on a distinctively Chirstocentric and hence Trinitarian shape in which the love held out to us in the Christ event is a gift—a gift that involves no less than an invitation to participate in the love of the Trinity, and in so partaking, one naturally engages in a vertical expression of love that is friendship.

Notes
[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 133 [Sachs translation].
[2] Augustine, Confessions, p. 200 [Boulding translation].
[3] Bonnici, Person to Person, p. 36.
[4] Balthasar, Unless You Become Like this Child, pp. 17-18.