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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 18, 2003
Friends, revisited
One speaks of a person having "the virtue of his vice" or vice versa the vice of his virtue . Nothing is so simple as first appears even in human nature. There is always a little more around the next bend. Since writing in this space some weeks ago on friendship and more precisely on how friendships have been bent and broken by huge issues of war and peace at stake in the world around us I've received some remarkable letters: from total strangers telling me wonderfully personal stories and thus embracing me as a friend. It was an "I Ching" moment in the approach to the Iraq war. Unknown to me just as I was writing so was one columnist in the United States (Rod Dreher) and another in England (Stephen Pollard). We had the same point of departure. We had simultaneously noticed the same phenomenon: old friendships breaking up all around us. Perhaps the wisest point made was in a letter from a difficult old friend; someone who politely evaded my main thesis that there are things more important than friendship and my inference that the sense of betrayal is tied up in one's own apprehension of a higher loyalty. His was an indirect and friendly attack on my thesis that lesser goods depend on greater goods (see Thomas Aquinas). It added to rather than subtracting from what I had written. I quoted Christ himself who predicted that people would often have to choose through the centuries ahead between him the Incarnate God and not only their friends but even their parents and siblings and children. And so I argued down the line: for one has an obligation not only to the Truth in the highest but if that is to mean anything also to the truth in its lesser contingent forms -- not only to the Truth but to truths and even such little truths as facts. This old friend a talented poet reminded me that even if friendship is a lesser allegiance there is an aspect of friendship that cannot be subsumed under the hierarchical. Even a great shaft of truth does not quite pass through the whole thing. Friendship is broad as well as tall. "I believe we have to be loyal to the history of our friendships he wrote. We have to remember that our old friend is not only the person with whom we disagree profoundly on a matter more important than the friendship itself, but also our old friend. We agreed about other things. And if we ever loved our friend, there was something else to love. That touches on the reason why every friendship (even or especially a long one I would add) has the potential to explode in our faces. Knowing each other well means knowing each other's bad impulses and traits. Everyone has some. At a crisis point we can believe that our friend was bad all along and that we had overlooked crucial flaws in his or her character." But maybe we never did. Maybe we saw the virtue in the vice beforehand and now we are looking only at the vice in the virtue. And we are only able to do this from our privileged position because we have loved. (There is no knowledge without love.) E.M. Forster an author for whom I would give two cheers once wrote memorably that If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I would have the guts to betray my country. This has always struck me as a shallow and pompous remark not only because it treats friendship as an end in itself but because it was so posturing so designed to win applause from his Bloomsbury social set. And even my own friend the poet discounted it noting that by refusing to betray one friend one is usually betraying another. More deeply our friendships are themselves conditional upon the cultures that have shaped us -- which is why people from radically different backgrounds seldom become close friends; more likely beloved pets objects of affection. (We are human of course on both sides a miracle in itself and the most remarkable things can in fact happen; but not every day.) And our loyalty must always be to the larger not the smaller interest; this is what is required by the Good. Contrariwise the very nature of Evil is putting the lesser interest above the greater. So putting the survival of a friendship above the survival of everything that has made us what we are is a stupid moral position. It leads to very wicked over-simplifications. My loyalty to my country is not so simple as my loyalty to its state. I might act against the interests of the Canadian state out of a greater loyalty to the Canadian nation and it would have nothing to do with my choice of friends. The judgements must be on the questions in themselves according to our own humble lights not on whom we know and whom we'd rather please. What Forster was counselling was just plain corruption: for you don't sell-out 30 million people in order to ingratiate yourself with one. But you must still confront the history the whole history of your friendship with that one person; for in the end this is no numbers game either. The friendship is larger than can be seen for people exist not in the moment but in time. None of us is what we see in the mirror each is all that we have been. We have an obligation to love our friend for ceasing to love him is the betrayal not only of the friend but of ourselves of our common past and of the God who commands Love in every instance. The choice cannot be therefore between loving and not loving: for love in itself is higher than friendship. We are after all commanded even to love our enemies; a category that surely includes former friends. The issue does not boil down that way at least not in Christendom. It is not a question of whether but how to love. And there are so many ways: including through anger. But against the temptation of morbid anger when one can no longer pretend to what the friendship shared the way and place to love is in secret and at a distance. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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