Anglicans Discover Friendship!

Via PoliticalTheoryDaily, we learn that the Anglicans have discovered that most unusual phenomena, friendship.

According to Mark Vernon, one of the things raised in recent debates surrounding same-sex marriage/blessings is the status of Platonic friendships. This is a question I’ve raised on countless occasions and I’m pleased other people are asking it. I note that there’s even a name for the politically correct tendency to avoid raising the point: platonophobia, hatred of platonic friendships based on the irrational insistence that our most profound way of relating to others must be sexual.

So in wades Mark Vernon who gives a little bit of lop-sided history of how Christianity has treated friendship, indicting St. Augustine for throwing suspicion on it. Why the suspicion? There’s a strand in Christianity that regards ancient (i.e., “pagan”) friendship (philia) as too egoistic while Christian love (caritas, agape) is selfless and rooted in love of God. Vernon has a book coming out on the subject too.

I agree with Vernon that such a dichotomy is too clumsy, though I disagree on which Christians think that. He mentions Augustine and Aelred of Rievaulx, and lists the latter as a great Christian defender of friendship. He concludes his brief article:

Today, though, there is an opportunity for friendship to be recovered. The networked lives of postmodern individuals rely more and more on friendship. If the Church could stop worrying so much about micromanaging people’s sex lives, and turn instead to nurturing the ways in which they love one another, it might redeem itself yet.

This is true as far as it goes. But where does Vernon wish it to lead? If friendship-love is as sacramental as he claims, does he suggest friendship blessings, for platonic friends, deserve to be sacraments?

Should the Church reach back to the example of David and Jonathan, who signified their friendship with their covenant (Jonathan, son of King Saul, gave David his regal cloak)?

Moreover, is this the best way to resolve conflicts in the Church over same-sex marriage? If this issue arose in those debates, it seems the next step would be to compare the platonic friendships with same-sex relationships involving sex. Given our culture’s general platonophobia, and the fact that it just doesn’t know what to do with individuals of the same sex who share a platonic friendship, I suspect the debate would be slanted toward the culture’s prejudices. However, it would provide the opportunity for some serious consideration of how friendship is to be understood. For instance, what do we learn about these questions by reading Plato’s Symposium or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics?

Let the debate begin!