Current use of the word friendship in the Euro-Western world is challenged by a myriad of experiences and uses. Our lives and friendships tend to be segmented and compartmentalized: we may have leisure friends, business friends, and church friends. We can boast of how many friends we have on a social networking site yet have minimal contact with most of these people. Moreover, certain characteristics of friendship may vary through life stages. Childhood, teenage years, college, work, singleness, marriage, parenting, and retirement all provide diverse opportunities for and challenges to friendship. Currently many diverse interpersonal relationships go by the name of friendship, including easy friendships, not-so-easy friendships, increasingly difficult friendships, toxic friendships, aspirational friendships, ambivalent friendships, and unrequited friendship. Some would question the appropriateness of calling all these relationships friendship.
A variety of definitions of friendship have been proposed over the centuries. In antiquity, the Greek word philia, typically translated as friendship, included a range of relationships characterized by reciprocity in both willing and doing good for the other. Aristotle depicted philia as a symmetrical bond amongst equals, and philein as being characterized by reciprocity in wishing for another “what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for [the friend], and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about” (Rhetorica 1380b36–1381a2). Such relationships could include family and business associates (Nicomachean Ethics 1156a7).
Subsequently, in the early Middle Ages, Isidore of Seville identified a friend (amicus) as a guardian of the spirit/soul (animi custos).2 Commenting on this more open-ended definition, attributed to Gregory the Great, 540–604 ce, historian Brian McGuire identifies a sense of responsibility for another’s well-being, and knowledge of this person’s inner life, as elements implied by a custos animas relationship.3 This sense of guardianship may or may not be reciprocal. Equality and mutuality are not essential, nor are they ruled out. Aelred of Rievaulx also focused on guardianship, alongside an emphasis on the ability to maintain confidences, exhibit patience and share all things. “A friend is called the guardian of love, or… the guardian of the soul itself” (De spiritali amicitia 1.20).
More recently, sociologists Liz Spencer and Ray Pahl have identified a variety of types of friendship, ranging from simple friendship, including associates and fun friends, to complex friendships, including helpmates, comforters, confidants, and soulmates.4 According to Charlie Brown, an icon of contemporary popular culture from the Peanuts comic strip created by Charles M. Schulz, a friend is someone who loves you despite your faults. A similar sentiment is expressed in the title of a mid-twentieth-century book for children: A Friend is Someone Who Likes You.5
These definitions focus predominantly on personal relationships. Friendship has also been recognized as relevant to how we live together in community, and as providing a model for civic relationships. This is evident in the writings of Pope Francis and contemporary political philosophers, as well as philosophers of antiquity. In Fratelli tutti, Francis advocates for social friendship, the love capable of transcending borders.6 Social friendship calls for the recognition of the worth of every person, regardless of time or context, and makes possible true universal openness.7 Social friendship is also called for by Southern Africa’s concept of ubuntu, with its acknowledgement that “a person is a person through other persons” or “I am because we are.”8
Aristotle and others speak of civic or political friendship (politikē philia). Some contemporary writers use this term narrowly, focusing predominantly on politics in the context of government. Others use it more broadly. For political philosopher Sibyl Schwarzenbach, civic friendship is “that form of friendship whose traits operate via a society’s constitution, its public set of laws, its major institutions and social customs.”9 My understanding of civic friendship reflects this broader, systems-level use and is influenced by Danielle Allen’s encouragement for us all to recognize ourselves as implicitly “founders of institutions,” as we affect the shape of life in our communities.10 Whereas personal friendship is characterized by affection and by both willing good and doing good for the friend, civic friendship is characterized by affection and by both willing good and doing good for the broader community.
In short, friendship has been understood in a variety of ways over the centuries. Variations tend to reflect some of the key changes and challenges of particular times and places. They also reflect diverse approaches to friendship. Anthropological, sociological, philosophical, and theological approaches will be further considered in this and subsequent chapters.
Is Friendship Essential or Peripheral to Being Human?
Currently, friendship is treated as essential for children and optimal for the aged but given relatively little attention in the in-between years. It attracts minimal consideration within the church, academy, and workplace, or within the provision of social services. In religious contexts, friendship is rarely recognized as a virtue or personal discipline, integral to human flourishing. In the academy, friendship has been ignored or disdained as a focus for research. In the workplace, friendship is often regarded as a distraction. In some situations, friendship is recognized as unnecessary and even subversive. Within various environments, people relate to others primarily as clients, workers, consumers, and attendees rather than as friends.11 There seem to be few contexts where having deep friendships is regarded as the most essential thing for human beings.
Anthropologists have focused on kinship, neglecting the sometimes-overlapping concept of friendship. When friendship has been studied, the focus has been primarily on formal relationships with well-defined mutual obligations, including kinship, trade, and working relationships. Most of these studies have focused on male friendships and disregarded friendships between females.12 Nevertheless, in the early twentieth century the study of friendship emerged as a research field within anthropology, challenging the previous dominance of kinship studies.13 As anthropologists have begun to take up the topic of friendship in their work, they have identified friendship as a highly flexible social phenomenon and advocated for contextualized studies.14
Anthropologists who have considered friendship include Agnes Brandt and John Terrell. Brandt engaged in ethnographic fieldwork within Aotearoa New Zealand in order to “uncover the everyday construction of friendship in different socio-cultural contexts.”15 Her exploration of friendship worlds features within Chapter 2. Brandt observes that friendship has been regarded as a “social phenomenon of modernity.”16 This is somewhat ironic, given that contemporary theories of friendship are typically informed by Western-European traditions of thought, beginning with the writings of ancient Greeks and Romans. Furthermore,