Christian Faith and Friendship in the Academy

I thank the organizers for inviting me to discuss our theme, how Christian faith can inform friendships in the academy. As I begin, I would invite all of us here to try thinking of an example of Christian academics, in any field, who nourished one another in friendship. How did their friendship assist them with the academic work? How did their Christian faith inform their friendship? I am personally inspired by the friendship of Augustine and his friend Alypius. The latter was present at Augustine’s conversion, both experimented with different forms of friendship community in their early lives as Christians, and both later became bishops in North Africa. Another well-known example of Christian academic friendship is that of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the Inklings.

We have been invited to consider how Christian faith informs our friendships in the academy. At one level, this is an obvious topic to explore, given the state of the academy and society more broadly. Loneliness is increasingly seen as a major health crisis in terms both of physical and spiritual health. Our students suffered this intensely last year by having to study on “Zoom.” Loneliness also seems related to the increased political polarization. The academy is also divided against itself, subdivided into numerous insular disciplines, ideological cliques, and suffering the bureaucratic pathologies of “organization man” where the administrators, not the faculty, are the ones most likely to interact with those outside their own disciplines. In fact I know several people who took up administrative positions as a way of finding more meaningful personal interactions than their academic work provided. A consideration of both the meaning of friendship and how it can help in improving the lives of academics is worthwhile, as is a consideration of how Christian faith can help sustain those relationships and academic endeavors.

At another level, though, it seems strange to put together these three themes: Christian faith, friendship, and the academy. One suspects it might be asking too much to expect friendship to be a central component of life in a university, or in the broader “republic of letters.” We normally speak of academics expecting to enjoy collegiality or collaborative relationships. We may wish to transcend these somewhat utilitarian relationships and to enjoy deeper friendships with our fellow academics, but it is unclear whether such deepening can be fulfilled in a purely academic setting.

Similarly, friendship is not a topic with which Christians have always been comfortable. Jesus himself commands us to transcend friendship of a certain sort when he warns, “if you love those who love you, what reward will you get?” (Matt. 5:46), and is not the Passion story one of the failure of the disciples to help and sustain Jesus as friends ought? These Scriptural admonitions on the limits of friendship historically led Christians often to prefer other forms of relationships including first and foremost charity, but also ones that are akin to familial relations including “brethren” and “brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Christianity and Friendship

I want to suggest, though, that Christians have something to learn from, and to teach about, the idea of friendship and life in the academy. The other terms encourage us to focus too much on our relations with other Christians while friendship invites us to consider ways that our lives and pursuits are shared with both fellow Christians and non-Christians in the academy. I also think that there is an insightful tradition of thinking about friendship within Christianity, and a good part of it includes the friendship practices of Christian scholars and thinkers that today we can learn from.

Even noting the Scriptural hesitations regarding friendship, they convey the sense that they share broad agreement with the classical world about its moral significance. The famous text of John 15:13 has Jesus proclaim that, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He utters these words at the Last Supper, the paschal feast he shares with his friends. The moral meaning, though not perhaps their prophetic meaning, would have been immediately understood by his friends because it had long been understood as the highest act of love one person could perform for another. Aristotle confirms this when he identifies the beautiful selfless act as the aim of friendship.

Indeed, the ideal of shared possessions of the church in Acts 4:32 finds its counterpart in the aphorism of Pythagoras that friends share all things in common, which forms the basis of Greek and Roman political ideals. These ideals are celebrated in diverse sources including Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and also further abroad in the older Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Analects of Confucius in the classical Chinese world. It is perhaps noteworthy that the first European to publish a book in China was On Friendship by Jesuit Matteo Ricci at the end of the sixteenth-century, which he wrote at the request of a Chinese prince. This suggests that there is something ecumenic about friendship.

It is not so much that Christians should reject these non-Christian exemplars but that Christian faith brings them into a more perfect completion. An example of this view is Augustine, who was very much inspired by the ideals of the classical world but concluded that “friendship is genuine only when you [God] bind fast together people who cleave to you through the charity poured abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us” (Confessions IV.4). Augustine reminds us that we cannot do it on our own.

Intellectual Friendship

Even so, I wish to share with you an important passage from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics where he describes the crowning experience of friendship, that of friends contemplating together. This ideal finds its way into Christian thinking about charity and it also provides us contemporary academics an ideal of what our vocation is about.  Let us listen to Aristotle:

[O]ne’s being is choiceworthy on account of the awareness of oneself as being good, and such an awareness is pleasant in itself. Therefore one also ought to share his friend’s consciousness of his existence, and this would come through living together and sharing conversation and thinking; for this would seem to be what living together means in the case of human beings.[1] 

Like the Christian mystics, Aristotle thought that contemplation is the highest activity that we human beings can perform. We can have all the wealth and prestige the world has to offer, but our lives will be empty unless we can share our lives with friends. Love is superior to all else, and loving is superior to being loved. The highest things friends can share with one another are intellectual goods because our minds are the highest part of us, and because the goods that our minds seek are the most shareable of all. While eating or playing together have their own enjoyments, it is in the joint-pursuit of wisdom, of “conversation and thinking,” that constitutes the best kind of living together for human beings.

So important is friendship that Aristotle claims that without it, a political society cannot exist. He does not expect citizens all to share philosophical wisdom or even all to be intimate friends with one another. But a political society depends on what he calls “homonoia” or “like-mindedness.” It does not mean that everyone shares the same opinions. Rather, it means that they agree on the fundamental moral goods that citizens ought to pursue and share. They agree on ends, however dimly perceived, while being firmly dedicated toward one another in deliberating about means.

In the passage I just cited, Aristotle uses a rare word to describe the crowning achievement of friendship. The Greek word is “sunaisthesis.” It can be translated variously as “shared consciousness,” “shared apprehension,” or “shared seeing.” For Aristotle, we are not fully human unless we also share our thoughts with another. More than that, this passage suggests we experience an expansion of our souls to the other. The word conjures up the image of binocular vision. Viewing through a single-lens monocular can magnify distant objects, but viewing them through a set of binoculars provides greater depth and texture. So too with friendship. How often do we observe or admire a beautiful view or work of art alone, and then wish we could share that vision with someone? It is not simply that we wish to benefit that other person with that beautiful scene, but instead that our enjoyment of the scene is enhanced by mutually enjoying it with another. This is one of the reasons why Augustine thought that in the Resurrection, the saints would behold one another while they also behold and praise God. He spoke of the city of God; redemption is not enjoyed in isolation of other creatures.

Friendship and Creativity

So far I have spoken about friendship as an aim or end of moral and intellectual striving. But it also there at the beginning of our striving. Many of the accomplishments and achievements that come about are the result of collaborative friendships. Friendship is a seedbed for creative endeavours. Many of you will know that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein were very good friends, and each man’s magnificent literary achievements may not have occurred without that friendship. In the case of Augustine, he built his monastic ideal upon the ideal of shared possessions expressed in Acts 4:32, which was meant to inform the church and serve as a foretaste of the life of the saints. In a more secular vein, one can point to various friendship circles and salons that took place during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries and that gave fruition to many scientific and Enlightenment ideas. Major figures including Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Adam Smith partook in those salons, with Hume and Smith constituting perhaps the most noteworthy friendship of that intellectual era.

Friendship Inside and Outside of Institutions

One of the noteworthy aspects with these examples is that, as creative endeavours, they took place outside formal institutions such as universities and churches. Lewis, Tolkien, and the Inklings met at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford. Diderot and the other Enlightenment thinkers met at the Parisian salon of Baron Holbach. And Augustine had a monastery built as an addition to his bishop’s residence in Hippo.

These exemplars may inspire us in our own academic work. They remind us of how much of our creative work takes place outside the formal classroom, office, or lab. Much takes place in those unexpected and random encounters in the hallway, or in the pub. We may wish to consider ways of promoting informal academic activities that cross interdisciplinary boundaries, including sponsoring reading groups, guest lectures, or workshops. We should also bear in mind how frequently friendships and partnerships of leaders in society have their origins in the friendships they made in university. It seems that those youthful experiences of “sunaisthesis” place their imprint on the souls of friends for years to come, and provide a source of intellectual and moral creativity. Our own time here together is but one example of such a somewhat informal and interdisciplinary common inquiry into our topic.

While I don’t wish to denigrate the importance of institutions, these examples suggest how much what goes on inside those institutions depends upon what goes on outside. This suggestion fits with how Augustine, Aristotle, and others have thought about friendship. Friendship is a moral practice that takes place inside of our institutions because it is within those institutions that we meet and nourish our friendships. Our institutions provide shelter for our pursuits, and even help to form them. This is true of the workplace but also of our political societies, which provide the peace, good government, and laws that offer the shelter for us to pursue our friendships.

But friendship as a moral practice also extends beyond our institutions because, as the examples of Aristotle on “sunaisthesis” or Augustine on the community of saints suggest, the moral, intellectual, and spiritual aims of friendship transcend those institutions. Friendship transcends politics which is why friendships suffer when every topic in life gets reduced to politics. One of the reasons our contemporary politics is so polarized is that, despite public cynicism about politics and politicians, we have difficulty conceiving of any moral goods higher than politics. This leads us to treat all other pursuits, including academic and moral, as essentially political and in terms of a zero-sum war between forces of light versus forces of darkness.

But Christian faith and classical philosophy with which it is in conversation remind us that goods like friendship transcend politics. Aristotle notes this when he says that citizenship or “homonoia” is like friendship. Our relations with other citizens take their bearings from a higher analogue in the sunaisthetic friendships that Aristotle admires. And political society derives from the creative friendships of its founders. For example, Canada perhaps would not exist without the creative friendship of John A. McDonald and George-Etienne Cartier, as well as the earlier friendship of Robert Baldwin and Louis-Hippolyte LaFontaine who established responsible government. Similarly, the United States perhaps would not exist if not for the collaborative friendships of its founding generation: George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams.

Christian Faith, Science, and Friendship

Permit me to devote my remaining time to commenting on the ongoing tension that Christian academics feel between faith and science. I sense Christian academics often befriend one another in defensive reaction to a general hostility toward faith that exists in the modern academy, which fetishizes Baconian scientific method, empiricism, and materialism. This defensive posture is understandable but it is short-sighted. I want to suggest some reasons why that science fetish is based upon a less solid foundation than its exponents, and even Christian academics, might think. Evidence of this weakness can be seen in the general way that materialism is socially enforced by scientists as dogma, as a knee-jerk reaction against what it regards as non-materialist alternatives including intelligent design. This dogmatism though breeds group-think, undermines creativity, and ultimately undermines scientific inquiry itself.

First, the ground of the scientific method, whose logic derives from seventeenth-century natural philosopher Francis Bacon, cannot be proven. Science cannot ground its first principles. Defenders of the scientific method point to the accumulation of evidence as evidence of its truth. But this claim entails a leap of judgment. We must stand outside of the act of gathering evidence to render judgment upon it.

Science seems incapable of rendering an account of the standpoint that can justify itself. Some of the more recent efforts to do so reveal inordinate ambition in their willingness to explain science as seeking the mind of God. I am not speaking of anti-religion popularizers including Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett. Rather, I am thinking of scientists like Stephen Hawking’s Promethean endeavor to supplant God with a theory of everything, or Thomas Nagel who in Mind and Cosmos argues that the materialism upon which the scientific community dogmatic embraces is incapable of explaining the intelligibility of the world and therefore incapable of explaining scientific activity itself.[2] Nagel presents the interesting argument that materialism cannot explain the appearance of life, consciousness, and value. He claims that with human beings the universe wakes up points, which seems to point to a kind of pantheism. Modern science is no longer aiming to read the mind of God but rather perhaps to be the mind of God. As political theorist David Walsh has argued, there is something unscientific about the faith claims of modern science.[3] Christian academics who may be defensive about the intelligibility of their own faith may also have something to say about the dogmas, sophistries, and intellectual mistakes that has led modern science to make unwarranted faith claims. These claims share something in common with rivals that Christians have confronted before, including pantheism, Latin Averroeism, and Gnosticism.  Christians, though, understand that genuine faith has an intrinsic link to truth: “Unless you believe, you will not understand” (Isaiah 7:9; Augustine, Sermon 43, 7,9).

Second, science is not an artefact “out there” but is conducted by persons we call “scientists.” Strictly speaking, science exists only within the minds of scientists, collaborating, conversing, and even enjoying “sunaisthetic” friendship with one another. Before there is science or a scientist there is a person who is the condition of science.

It is noteworthy that we can point to the invention of the term, “scientist,” to a group of Cambridge academic friends in the early nineteenth-century that included William Whewell, Charles Babbage, John Herschel, and Richard Jones.[4] This “philosophical breakfast club” consisted of lifelong friends dating back to their Cambridge student days. Whewell invented crystallography, mineralogy, the study of ocean tides, and mathematical economics, and held the powerful position of Master at Trinity College; Babbage’s mathematical genius created one of the first computers; Herschel continued his father William’s astronomical work; and Jones shaped the field of modern economics. Indeed, one cannot help but to be impressed how much civilizational energy derived from the friendships that existed in places like Cambridge and Oxford. They were social clubs as much, and perhaps more than, they were places of learning. The scientific societies that individuals like Whewell founded, including what is now the British Science Association (until 2009: British Association for the Advancement of Science) were also as much social clubs as they were instruments for the advancement of science.

As Laura Snyder demonstrates in her book about this group, the “philosophical breakfast club” objected to the lowly status and meagre resources devoted at the time to those studying the natural world, at the expense of the study of classics, philosophy, and theology. At that time, those “natural philosophers” who studied the natural world tended to be generalist polymaths who were often independently wealthy, and worked outside the academy. The efforts of the “philosophical breakfast club” at promoting the academic study of the natural world in its diversity—what we now call “science”— influenced the shape of the modern university, including its levels of specialization that now contribute to its industrial character.

These men are a paradox because they were classically trained, polymath, and generalist “natural philosophers”—Whewell published a translation of Plato’s dialogues before Benjamin Jowett— but they generated the “scientist,” whose ever-narrowing specialization in the modern university makes him or her increasingly estranged from the first principles of science, and more like a worker-bee whose job consists of applying a supervisor’s paradigm to a problem without fully understanding the nature of that paradigm.

The scientific faith of the original “philosophical breakfast club” is on shakier ground now than it was in the nineteenth-century when the advancement of science was considered both an unalloyed good and grounded in a more confident assumption of the mind’s interface with an intelligible cosmos.

If during that time, the emphasis on being a generalist “natural philosopher” inhibited science, then today perhaps the problem lies with there being too much emphasis being placed upon being a specialist scientist whose estrangement from science’s first principles makes genuine science increasingly difficult to conduct amidst a socially-enforced group-think that enforces the dogma of materialism.

The way modern universities are constituted to incentivize worker-bee careerism also undermines science. Over-specialization seems to contribute to a replication crisis that plagues science: how can one replicate what one cannot adequately understand?[5] The aim of a lot of science seems not to be truth but rather precision, which is actually the aim of technique rather than understanding.

It’s one thing for physicists not to be able to understand chemists. But perhaps now specialized chemists have difficulty understanding other, evermore specialized chemists. Consilience, which for Whewell was the gold standard for determining the basis for a scientific law that can explain the unity of a diverse set of phenomena, seems as far off as ever. Whewell understood that establishing consilience depends upon cooperative scientific inquiry, and also facilitated by networks of friends.

And today the public is even more estranged from their esoteric pursuits, which instead of leading to some sort of priestly aristocracy, has instead led to public skepticism and even hostility towards scientific pursuits, with scientists and other academics having only petulant assertions of their own “expertise” in response to public skepticism.

Christian academics today are well-placed to constitute their own kinds of “philosophical breakfast club” that can nourish a deeper understanding of the nature of science and academic inquiry more broadly. Christian faith has an intrinsic link to truth because faith in the truth of what we seek is the condition of seeking it. Lack of faith in the pursuit of truth is what is often characterized as the “postmodern condition.” The lack of scientific faith that science leads to truth is a major reason that scientists make the unscientific move of regarding the precision of data results as their standard. Data results from the method but the method is unquestioned. But as Walsh notes: “Faith is prior and more certain than knowledge because it is a knowledge of what is sought. It is the knowledge born in love.”[6] Christian faith orients us far differently than the unwarranted faith of scientific method.

Christians can recapture some of the interdisciplinary and personal modes of inquiry that have been lost in the industrialization of knowledge in the modern university. They know how both believing and knowing involves falling in love. Theirs is a relational or second-person form of knowledge that sees with the eyes of the other. Their faith offers them the impetus to explore ways their specialized scientific pursuits line up with first principles. Pope Emeritus Benedict called on Christian laypersons to form groups to live out the Gospel message as exemplars for the secular world. So too Christian academics from all denominations can form Christian versions of the “philosophical breakfast club” or latter-day Inklings not only to promote and encourage one another, but to challenge the modern university to be a place where authentic thinking and even “sunaisthetic” friendship can prosper.

Please accept this challenge as my token of friendship to you.

Notes

[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by Joe Sachs, (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002), IX.1170b10 – 12. I discuss this passage in The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship, (Montréal-Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2016), chapters 1 & 2.

[2] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

[3] David Walsh, The Priority of the Person, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), chapter 15.

[4] Laura Snyder, The Philosophical Breakfast Club: Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World, (New York: Crown, 2012).

[5] Fiona Fidler and John Wilcox, “Reproducibility of Scientific Results,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, December 3, 2018, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-reproducibility/ ; David Peterson, “The Replication Crisis Won’t be Solved with Broad Brushstrokes,” Nature, June 8, 2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01509-7

[6] Walsh, The Priority of the Person, 287.

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