Category Archives: Friendship

Saint John Henry Newman and Chastity

Communion of Saints, Defending the Faith, Friendship, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, Sin, , , , , ,

In the days leading up to now St. John Henry Newman’s beatification in 2010, NPR’s All Things Considered turned its consideration towards the question as to whether the Cardinal may in fact have been gay.  Never one to miss the opportunity to promote the LGBT agenda, Fr. James Martin retweeted the article on the eve of Newman’s canonization saying, “This doesn’t imply that the man who will become a saint tomorrow ever broke his promise of celibacy. And we may never know for sure. But his relationship with Ambrose St. John is worthy of attention. It isn’t a slur to suggest that Newman may have been gay.”  Although no one in the Church hierarchy is likely to correct Fr. Martin, it is both a slur and manifestly false to suggest that the saint may have been gay.  A comment such as this is not only disingenuous, but reveals the lavender glasses that color everything that Fr. Martin says and reveals his animus for true Catholic teaching.  In the 2010 NPR piece, Fr. Martin was interviewed and offered that, “It is church teaching that a gay person can be holy, and a gay person can be a saint.  And it’s only a matter of time before the church recognizes one publicly.”  This reveals a serious flaw in his thinking and shows why he is ultimately unfit to minister to those people who struggle with same sex attraction. 

The Saints and Heroic Virtue

The second step in the process of canonization is to be declared Venerable.  This declaration, which, in Newman’s case, occurred in 1991, declares that the man exercised all of the virtues, both theological and natural to a heroic degree.  The point of such an examination is to show how deeply grace had penetrated the man’s life enabling him to practice the moral virtues with ease and the theological virtues eminently.  Among these natural virtues, chastity plays a key role meaning that, in Newman’s case, the Church has declared that he practiced chastity to a heroic degree.  And herein lies the problem with Fr. Martin’s hypothesis, both regarding the new saint and any canonized saint in the future: you cannot exercise chastity to a heroic degree and also be gay.

This may seem rather harsh, until we examine the nature of virtue in general.  The role of virtue in the moral life is to habitually order our faculties towards their proper end.  These powers of the soul “train” the lower faculties to respond in accord with right reason.  The man who struggles with disordered anger, or what we would call the vice of anger, by developing the virtue of meekness not only is able to keep himself from angry outbursts, but actually so governs his feelings of anger that it is only felt when it is reasonable to do so.  A similar thing can be said about all of our other vices or disordered inclinations including Same-Sex Attraction.  Just as meekness roots out any disordered anger, chastity roots out all disordered manifestations of our sexual faculties and orders them towards their proper ends.  The man who is truly chaste would no longer experience SSA.    

Notice that I did not perform any of the usual moral hairsplitting that many people make regarding this topic between homosexual activity and the vice of SSA.  While this may have some value in assessing personal culpability, it has no place when it comes to the virtue of chastity.  To employ such a distinction, such as Fr. Martin does in this case only serves to muddy the moral waters making chastity harder, not easier.  It all stems from an error in thinking that chastity and celibacy are the same thing.  But they are most certainly distinct.  Celibacy has to do with restraining the exterior actions.  Chastity has to do with properly ordering interior inclinations.  A man may be celibate without being chaste, but an unmarried man cannot be chaste without also being celibate.  Fr. Martin seems to suggest that St. John Henry Newman fell into the former category—celibate without being chaste.  To suggest that a canonized saint wasn’t chaste is a slur, especially given that the Church has declared him to be a man of heroic chastity.

Deep down, Fr. Martin knows all this.  This is his motivation for trying to change the designation of SSA from disordered to differently ordered.  If it is merely that there is a different ordering, then the chaste person could in fact experience SSA.  But if it is disordered then it will be rooted out as the person grows in chastity.  There is no reason why a person who struggles with SSA (or to use Fr. Martin’s designation of gay) couldn’t become a Saint someday, but it will only happen after they have removed that vice (and all the others) from their lives.  In fact, there may already be some Saint that had this difficulty at some point, but to suggest that we might someday have a gay saint is like saying that we already have a fornicating Saint in St. Augustine.  St. Augustine is a Saint because he became chaste and rooted out all the sexual vices he had in his soul. 

Blinded by the Lavender Light

All of this reveals why Fr. Martin is ill-suited to minister to those who have SSA.  All he can see is gay.  In examining the life of John Henry Newman, it is quite obvious that he deeply loved Fr. Ambrose St. John.  But it is only someone who sees all things in a lavender light that would mistake the love of friendship with erotic love.  The aforementioned St. Augustine, on losing a friend said:

I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I had loved as though he would never die, and still more amazed that I could go on living myself when he was dead – I, who had been like another self to him. It was well said that a friend is half one’s own soul. I felt that my soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies, and I shrank from life with loathing because I could not bear to be only half alive; and perhaps I was so afraid of death because I did not want the whole of him to die, whom I had love so dearly.

This seems very similar to what Newman said at the loss of his friend “I have always thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s but I feel it difficult to believe that anyone’s sorrow can be greater than mine.”  Would Fr. Martin have us believe that St. Augustine was gay or bisexual?  Or is it, that he is fundamentally incapable of acknowledging that there is a proper, non-sexual love between same sex persons in friendship?  One of the ways in which chastity is increased in the person with SSA is to acknowledge that to the extent that his love for the other person is real, it is really a disordered love of friendship.  Once this is realized the person is able to develop a healthy and ordered love for the other person.  What makes Fr. Martin unsuited then to help these people is that he would not admit to the true love of friendship.  Otherwise he would not make such a stupid comment about St. John Henry Newman, but put him forward as an example of how those with SSA might purify their love for a person of the same sex through authentic friendship. 

On True Friendships

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For those who approach Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for the first time, they are often surprised by the fact that he devotes more pages, two whole books in fact, to the topic of friendship than to any other.  From the modern viewpoint, this seems to be an unnecessary tangent that has little to do with ethics.  That is, until we realize that for Aristotle and most Christian Philosophers up until the Middle Ages, ethics was not an abstract set of rules, but practical principles for living a full and happy life.  So when Aristotle apportions such a large percentage of his book on ethics to friendship we realize that he sees it as one of the most important components of a life well lived.  In fact he ranks it among one of the greatest of life’s goods saying that “friendship is especially necessary for living, to the extent that no one, even though he had all other goods would choose to live without friends.”

First, a disclaimer of sorts.  Because Aristotle struck out in his physics and his views on women and slaves, he has fallen out of favor in modern times.  But there is a certain timelessness to his writings, especially in his ethics, because he roots them in unchanging human nature.  Therefore we ought to take what he says seriously, even if we find good reasons to disagree with him.  In a culture undergoing a crisis in friendship his writings on the topic are like a hidden treasure whose mining promises to enrich our lives greatly.

Because everyone needs friends, everyone wants friends.  This natural desire for friendship can lead us into unhealthy friendships.  This is what makes his study of friendship so important—it enables us to see our relationships more clearly and to have the right expectations.  There is not a single person among us who has not at some point experienced betrayal in one of their friendships.  Like all the loves, friendship requires a certain level of vulnerability, but much pain can be avoided through a proper understanding of friendship in general and Aristotle’s three levels of friendship in particular.

For Aristotle, there are two factors of friendship.  There is the good will that the two friends bear towards each other and there is the common good that brings them together.  As a form of love, friendship is first and foremost about willing the good for another person.  Friendship is not just a relationship, but a mutual relationship in which both parties actively will some good for the other person.  Without this, no real friendship can be found.

CS Lewis in his book The Four Loves captures the second aspect well when he compares friendship with erotic love.  He says that erotic lovers stand face to face while friends stand side by side looking at the thing that brings them together.  He says that “friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.”  This is what Aristotle means by the common good that brings them together.  Friendships are always based upon not just willing the good but willing a particular good.  These goods fall into three broad categories, each one corresponding to the different levels of friendship.

The Categories of Friendship

His first category is friendship of pleasure.  Because it is the lowest level of friendship, it is the most common, especially among younger people.  This is based upon two people “having a good time together.”  It might two “golfing buddies” who enjoy playing golf together simply for the pleasure of the game itself.  What makes this friendship rather than simply mutual use is that they each will that the other plays well and has a good time, not so they will have someone to play with again, but because they truly desire that pleasure for them.  They desire the particular good of pleasure for them, although not at the expense of their own pleasure.  These types of friendships tend to dissolve when the pleasure that united the parties ceases.  One of the golfers might stop playing golf for whatever reason and the two eventually lose touch with each other.

Aristotle’s second category is a friendship of utility.  In these types of friendships there is a certain tradeoff between the two parties in which they somehow supply each other’s needs.  They are brought together primarily for the love of the good they get from the other person.  This type of friendship is most common in the adult years when “working your contacts” has become an art form.  It is a mutual coincidence of wants that brings the two parties together, a transaction of sorts.  The notion of mutual service or sacrifice is likely not a part of this type of this friendship.  Once they cease being useful to each other, the friendship usually dies.

There is always a certain amount of use in these two types of friendships because the parties love the thing that unites them more than they love the person.  This does not make them wrong per se, just incomplete.  St. Thomas says they are not friendships essentially but incidentally because the person is loved more for what they can give than in themselves.  This is why Aristotle thought only the third category of friendship, that is a friendship of virtue, was the only true friendship.

A virtuous friendship is one in which, to borrow from CS Lewis’ definition, the two parties are both looking at virtue.  They desire true happiness for each other.  Aristotle thought this the only true friendship because only a virtuous person is capable of loving the other for their own sake and because only a virtuous person can actually help another person be happy.  It is not so much that the two people are perfect, but that they are both striving for perfection.

As a true friendship, it includes the other two friendships but in an authentic way.  Rather than a friendship of pleasure, one derives pleasure simply from pleasure his friend receives in doing something.  Rather than a friendship of utility, one receives payment simply by serving the other person.  True friends look upon each other as an “other self.”

The Work of Friendship

These categories are important for two reasons.  First because many of us lack true friendships.  This lack may be simply because we lack the capacity, that is virtue, for true friendships.  We prefer the superficial to the hard work of growing in virtue.  It may also be that we are trying to form authentic friendships with people who are not capable of it because they lack the virtue or, at least, the desire for virtue that is always necessary. Remember Lewis’ definition—we will not find true friends until we decide virtue is important.

The second reason is that we often fail to properly “categorize” our friends, leaving us with unreal expectations.   A person whom we only have a friendship of pleasure with is not someone we should be going to for personal advice in a time of crisis.  We may develop a friendship of utility with our mailman, but this does not mean we should have him sit down with us to open our mail.  Those types of friendship cannot bear the weight—either because one of the parties lacks the necessary virtue to truly will the good for the other person or because there is a lack of intimacy.  True friendships are rare not only because virtue is rare, but because we simply do not have the time and emotional energy to maintain authentic friendships with that may people.  Overcommitting ourselves to too many true friendships can be a mortal pitfall for our overall well-being.

Many people in today’s culture view friendship as an unnecessary luxury rather than an integral part of a truly happy life.  By reflecting on friendship in the works of Aristotle, we can come to enjoy what the book of Sirach calls “the elixir of life” (Sir 6:16).

Love is Love isn’t Love

Friendship, Homosexuality

In the battle to normalize homosexuality there must be some collateral damage.  Lies are like parasites to the truth—always doing harm and ultimately killing their host.  The truth that homosexuality preys upon is not just erotic love, but the love of friendship.  The push for gay marriage may have done great harm to the love between a man and a woman in marriage, but ultimately it will not be the only casualty.  In the end it will have also destroyed the ability for two men or two women to develop healthy friendships.

One might quickly dismiss all of this as homophobic hate speech.  But I assure you homophobia is alive and well in the hearts of many young people today—just not in the sense we usually use the term.  They may not have a problem of someone else being gay, but the fear of being gay themselves, or at the very least appearing to be gay, lurks in their hearts.  How could it not be, given what they have learned?

Love is Love and the Harm it Does

“Love is love” they are told.  Hard to believe that a tautology could do so much damage.  Given that it has become a battle cry for a gay agenda, it doesn’t take much logic to conclude that love is about sex.  It is only love when it is expressed sexually.  What is not expressed sexually is not love.

Now enter into the heart of a young person.  They search and realize that they too indeed are drawn to certain members of the same sex.  They find themselves attracted to them and may even want to show affection towards that other person.  They may go so far as to realize that they enjoy that particular person’s company over another person’s or even look forward to seeing them.  All of this is natural.  Ages upon ages, men have loved other men and women have loved other women with a love of friendship.

Now, dear reader, when you read my description above, where did your thoughts go?  Were you thinking “wait, is he saying it is natural to wrestle with feelings of homosexuality”?  Or did you immediately think “he is merely describing friendship”?  The answer can reveal to us how much the culture has infected us and how deeply we need to see friendship in its proper light.

Notice that I called it natural and not normal.  In substituting normal for natural we have created a culture that embraces its brokenness.  Natural, or that which fulfills us as persons, is always good.  “Normal” is what everyone else is doing and usually has a nicer ring to it than rationalizing.  Normal is how we can keep up with Mr. and Mr. Jones.

Returning back to the inner workings of our young man or young woman.  They now begin to apply what they have learned to their feelings.  They are left with two alternatives.  They can think that what they are feeling may be some homosexual tendency and maybe experiment.  Or, and this is more likely, they will feel a sort of revulsion towards that other person because they equate the love they are feeling as something sexual.  Ickiness will win out and that other person will remain at arm’s length.  The chance for an authentically fulfilling friendship will pass them by.

Here is what they won’t do.  They likely won’t seek help to work through this from their parents, teachers, coaches or mentors.  They have been told that homophobia is the unforgivable sin and would never want to appear to say there is anything wrong with it.  They may look to the same people as models and find that they too do not have anything akin to true friendship.  The sages don’t know what true friendship is and are too busy for something so useless anyway.  As a father, a High School Baseball Coach, and a mentor to College Students, I see this as a theme across the board.  It affects kids who have been homeschooled just as much as Catholic school kids and public school kids.  They have no idea what friendship is or why it matters they have them.

An Alternative Explanation

We may quickly blame technology for the dearth of friendships in the young, but what if that is the effect rather than the cause?  What if our entire society has been so damaged in its ability to form meaningful friendships that technology actually offers us an escape from the emotional turmoil brought about by the feelings of friendship?

Obviously, modeling proper friendship is important to redeeming friendship, but it has been lost mostly on an ideological front.  We need to be prepared to challenge the notion that “love is love.”

Love is love, but not all loves are equal.  Some loves are higher than others and their differences are not in degree, but in kind. Classically the Greek classified them into three categories—affection (which they called storge), friendship (philia), and love between the sexes (eros).  As Christians, we would add a fourth, namely the love of God (agape).

I have written other places about these four loves and their differences.  In this essay I would prefer to focus on another important aspect, namely the belief that true love is always expressed sexually.

Love is love but each of the loves has its own proper expression.  Affection, especially as between family members is expressed through hugs, kisses, tickling and the like.  The love of friendship is expressed with hugs, handshakes, high fives and the like.  Eros usually includes those expressions of affection, but also those expressions that we would call intimate and sexual.

What is important in this is that we help to identify that each of these loves has a proper form of expression.  We intuitively know this and it is why we make incestuous relationships illegal, give actresses a hard time for kissing their children on the lips, and make movies about the destruction of friendship when two people become “friends with benefits.”

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi has done a great deal of research into some of the causes of homosexuality.  While he has found that there are a number of causes, a common one, especially in men, is the proper expression of love by the father.  He found that a number of the fathers themselves had terrible relationships with their own fathers and did not have significant male friendships.  They would fail to show their sons what one man loving another man actually looked like.  The spirit of the world, when those children went out into the world, was only too happy to give them an acceptable model.  This is probably why there has been so much backlash against reparative therapy and why we must be prepared to fight this ideological battle.

Reclaiming Friendship

Friendship

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, he found that democratic principles animated nearly every aspect of American life.  He found that these principles even affected the English language itself. In particular he found that Americans have a “passionate addiction” to generic terms because they condense many objects into a few words (Vol. II, Ch. 16).  The problem with this of course is that it also condenses thought and does not readily lend itself to seeing important distinctions between these objects.  There is perhaps no more glaring example of this than the word “love.”  Proponents of gay marriage have been quite insistent that “love is love” and that “two people who love each other ought to be able to marry each other just like everyone else.”  But without an emphasis on the different kinds of love it is very difficult to show where their thinking is flawed.

In his first Encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict posits that “the term ‘love’ has become one of the most frequently used and misused of words, a word to which we attach quite different meanings.” He goes on to ask if “all these forms of love basically one, so that love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to designate totally different realities?” (Deus Caritas Est, 2).While the Pope Emeritus answers this question by differentiating human love from the love of God, he also briefly mentions that there are differences in human loves as well.  There are a number of terms that can be used to describes these human loves, usually the Greek classification of storge (affection), philia (friendship), and eros (love between the sexes) is used.

To address this question properly it is necessary to begin by making a philosophical distinction between differences in degree and differences in kind.  Two things differ in kind if one possesses a characteristic totally lacked by the other or if one can do something that the other cannot while a difference in degree is a characteristic that one has more of it and the other less.  For example, while beer and wine are both types of alcoholic drinks, beer is different in kind than wine.  Adding hops (or anything else) to wine does not make it beer.  Meanwhile different brands of beer are merely differences in degree—one is less filling, while the other tastes great, but both are beer.

I think we all instinctively know that there are differences in kind when it comes to love.  Let’s suppose that a brother and sister are engaged in a sexual relationship with each other and want to have that love recognized in marriage.  We would all agree that this could never be recognized, but why?

One might say it is because of the fact that a consanguine marriage could end up with a child with serious birth defects.  Putting aside the fact that this seems to prove that marriage and children are somehow intrinsically yoked, what if they both agreed to be sterilized before marriage?  Most of us would still recoil at the idea.  This is because we all seem to almost instinctively know that the love between a brother and sister is a distinct type of love from the love of just any man and woman.  Simply adding sex does not make it eros.  There is nothing that can be added to sibling affection that will make it eros.  Only when a man leaves his father and mother (and his siblings) can he find eros because man is truly social by nature and not just familial.  In other words, the consequences are not the reason why there ought not be a sexual relationship between the two.  The consequences are a result of the fact that there ought not be a sexual relationship.

Although this example is based on an improper sexual relationship, sex need not be the only type of expression that makes it wrong.  We have all met people who provide way too much information about themselves after meeting you.  It is not that we don’t care, but that the sharing of personal information is proper to friendship and not simply the affection that follows from first meeting and liking someone.

And here is the point—each type of love is unique and each unique type of love has a proper form of expression.  The expression does not make the love what it is.  It is a sign of a healthy love.  There may be a hierarchy in the loves, but this hierarchy is more like stairs than an inclined plane.  Each step represents a different kind of love, not merely a growth in the degree of love as if we were walking up a ramp.  A couple may certainly have eros without philia even if it is closer to agape when there is both.

These philosophical musings have a rather important practical implication.  For all the talk we have heard about homosexual unions ruining marriage, we should also be greatly concerned about its poisoning effect on friendship.  Gay relationships are not so much a distortion of eros, but philia.  A relationship between two men or two women is limited to the love of friendship.  Friendship cannot bear the weight of a sexual relationship.  “Friends with benefits” always end up ceasing to be friends, whether they are of the same or opposite sex.

While I said that a “relationship between two men or two women is limited to the love of friendship,” this doesn’t mean that friendship is somehow defective.  The author of the Book of Sirach says that “friendship is the elixir of life” (Sir 6:16).  What he means by this is that a life that is healthy is one that is blessed with friendship.  I think we must fight to restore it to its proper place.

It seems to me that there are very few people over the past century who knew both what it meant to be a friend and what friendship meant better than CS Lewis.  He formed a literary group called the Inklings that included his dear friend JRR Tolkien.  In fact, he credits Tolkien for his role in Lewis’ conversion.  Because of the profound effect that friendship had in his life, Lewis wrote extensively on the subject.  Perhaps the greatest of these writings (and arguably the greatest writing on friendship is general) was presented as one of the chapters in his book The Four Loves.

Webster’s defines a friend as one attached to another by affection or esteem or as an acquaintance or a favored companion.  I, and Lewis I think would agree, find that definition limited.  He says that what many people call “friendship” is truly only companionship.  Friendship is something deeper.  Lewis says that friendship “arises out of mere companionship when two or more companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden)…The man who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance can be our Friend.  He need not agree with us about the answer.”

So Lewis agrees that a friend is a favored companion, but the reason why he is favored is not merely because of affection or esteem, but because he agrees that there is some truth, some question, of utmost importance.  He doesn’t even need to agree with us in the answer, merely that it is an important question.  The deeper and more important the truth that is looked at, the deeper the friendship is.  This is why Christian friendships seem to be the deepest and longest lasting—they are both looking at He Who is Truth itself.

Friendship also is different from other relationships.  “Lovers seek for privacy. Friends find this solitude about them, this barrier between them and the herd, whether they want it or not.  They would be glad to reduce it.  The first two would be glad to find a third,” says Lewis.  He presents friends as side by side absorbed in some common interest.  Friendship is also different from the other loves in that it is the least jealous and best when it includes a third person.  This is because it is usually the third that brings out a side of the other people that would not have otherwise been seen.

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All of this is greatly jeopardized when the State promotes a poisoning of friendships.  People come to think that friendships with members of the same sex can sometimes organically go “to the next level.”  What first starts as a reservation ends up becoming a program of life and a fear of friendship develops.  This fear has always been there to some extent between the sexes.  Friendship can be a mere pretext for eros between the sexes when one of the people may not actually want it.  Now this same reservation will be present in nearly all same-sex friendships.  Many heterosexuals can appear tolerant as long as they are not the ones being hit on and being called a homophobe for cutting off the friendship when this happens.

What results is that the number of true friendships greatly diminishes.  We all begin to suffer from what Fr. C. John McClosky calls Friendship Deficit Syndrome.  What is already in danger because of a completely utilitarian culture, becomes obsolete.  Friendship, because it is based on a relationship with another person, is always an end in itself.  That is why when we were in high school those people who merely wanted to have friends and sought to be popular never were.  As Lewis says, “(T)he very condition of having friends is that we should want something else beside friends.  Where the truthful answer to the question Do you see the same truth? Would be ‘I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a friend.”  How many people do you know that are like this?  They have many friends just for the sake of having many friends.

How can we redeem friendship?  It all begins by seeking to engage in meaningful conversations with people.  There is such an unbelievable hunger in the world for meaning and depth in conversation.   These conversations are the seeds of friendships.  We have to break free from the shackles and political correctness and sound bites and discuss those things that matter.  I always call to mind when GK Chesterton was told he could write about anything other than politics and religion, he responded that there was nothing else and then proceeded to spend the next 20 years writing about nothing other than politics and religion.  We gladly talk about the weather or sports, but we are timid when it comes to talking about the King of the Universe.  We have it so backwards!

In closing we turn to Lewis one last time.  In a personal letter to his friend Arthur Graves he wrote, “[I]f I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.”  If he were with us today he would add that we need to be present to our friends in very real ways—emails and text messages are not enough.  We need to waste time on your friends and be available to them in very real ways.