Transforming Friendship: Thomas Aquinas on Charity as Friendship with God

Traditions of Friendship

As many scholars have noted, Thomas’s views on friendship owe a great debt to Aristotle’s work. From his classical master Thomas receives a strong (albeit imprecise) association of friendship with virtue. Likewise, Aristotle emphasizes friendship as an essential component of any full human life. Both these points are made immediately at the start of Book 8 of the Ethics. And both are taken up in the Summa. ⁷ The great Dominican’s definition of friendship is likewise decidedly Aristotelian in character. He quotes the ‘five things that belong to friendship . . . [namely] that a man wishes a good to a friend; . . . that he wishes him to exist and to live; . . . that he eats and drinks (convivere) with him; . . . that he should choose the same things as him; . . . that he sorrows and rejoices with him.’ ⁸ More important, however, is the initial definition in Question 23 of the secunda secundae. Here Thomas argues that, ‘according to the Philosopher,’ the sort of love that qualifies as friendship must be characterized by three things: goodwill or benevolence (benevolentia), which desires the good of the other; mutual love (mutua amatio), which accepts and rejoices in the other for who he or she is; and some sort of sharing (aliqua communicatio), a ‘common ground,’ so to speak, for the common life and fellowship of the two friends. ⁹ Friendship is also characterized by a commonality of choice and desire (concordia), a point on which Thomas cites both Aristotle and Cicero. ¹⁰

However, Thomas diverges from Aristotle regarding friendship with the divine. Aristotle writes:

. . . if there is a wide disparity between the partners as regards their virtue, vice, wealth, or anything else . . . they are no longer friends or even expect to be friends. The most striking example of this is the gods, for their superiority in all good things is exceeding . . . . The friendship can still remain even when much is taken away, but when one partner is quite separated from the other, as in the case of the divinity, it can remain no longer. ¹¹

He even goes so far as to say that we should not wish our friends to become gods—or perhaps that we cannot truly so desire. ¹² Even if apotheosis might objectively be the greatest good for them, it would separate us from them forever; and to be deprived of friends is to damage the possibility for our own happiness. Since happiness ‘is the end or goal of human aspirations,’ ¹³ this would put our basic desires irremediably in conflict. Furthermore, the life of virtue requires friends. So how could a person desire what is contrary to the pursuit of virtue? Such reasoning need not mean that friendship is a ‘selfish’ love; as Fergus Kerr argues, Aristotle’s humanism may also be at play here. Happiness seems to entail being like the divine in some way, through virtue and contemplation. ¹⁴ But to become a god is to cease to be human. How could one love one’s friend while wishing that she cease to be truly herself? ¹⁵ Aristotle does later remark that ‘friendship of children to their parents and of man to the gods is friendship to what is good and superior.’ ¹⁶ Nevertheless, this latter form of ‘friendship’ with the gods seems far removed from the mutuality and profundity of relationship with ‘another self’ that he initially describes. Yet such mutuality, in its most robust form, is clearly the ideal from which Thomas borrows as he explores what friendship with God might mean. ¹⁷

Thomas was not, of course, the first in the Christian tradition to engage seriously with questions of friendship; both early and medieval authors addressed the subject—though their evaluation was not always entirely positive. Christ’s commandment of universal love for one’s neighbours could lead to wariness about exclusive relationships. ¹⁸ This may be part of the reason Saint Benedict was so careful to warn abbots against any preferential treatment, except for reason of superior virtue. The key, he insisted, was ‘equal love.’ ¹⁹ Similarly, John Cassian expressed concern about the damage that exclusive relationships could do to the community. ²⁰ He did argue in his Conferences that friendship in its ideal form, ‘the true and indissoluble love that grows by the combined perfection and virtue of the friends,’ is a means of growth in divine love. ²¹ But many people, he argued, fall short of such friendship, because they do not remain united in striving toward perfection. Although this part of the Conferences associated amicitia and caritas, in David Konstan’s words, ‘One has the impression that Cassian exploited the terminology relating to amicitia in the theoretically-oriented framing paragraphs of the colloquy in order to attach his treatment of friendship to the classical tradition, but that in the body of his work he reverted to language that he felt to be more at home in Christian discourse.’ ²² For Cassian, the real focus remained ascetic development and the life of the monastic community.

Caution toward friendship persevered in the later patristic era, as did a tendency to subordinate it to more typically Christian language of charity or brotherhood; but the classical tradition could also be congenial, particularly insofar as it emphasized likeness and growth in virtue. Augustine’s example is instructive. In the Confessions, he placed a surprising emphasis on the way that unvirtuous and ungodly friendships—which, admittedly, the classical tradition might not have considered true friendships at all—could actually draw one deeper into sin. Moreover, he was intensely aware that even seemingly good relationships, if not oriented toward Christ, can be spiritually harmful. ²³ On the other hand, as his epistles make clear, the mature Augustine found that friendship could be a profound part of his life in God:

I confess that I readily throw myself entirely upon the charity of my closest and dearest friends . . . and I rest in their love without anxiety. Indeed I feel that God is there . . . . Whenever I feel that a man burning with Christian charity and love for me has become my friend, when I entrust any of my plans and thoughts to him, I am entrusting them not to a man but to Him in whom he abides, so as to be like Him, ‘for God is charity, and he who abides in charity abides in God.’ ²⁴

At its highest, friendship with another human being is an experience of life in God, together with that person. Importantly, though, this does not abolish the particularities of the human relationship. Augustine here is writing to Jerome, and much of his epistle grieves the fracturing of the latter’s longstanding friendship with Rufinus. Augustine also uses the language of friendship toward Jerome himself, and laments the physical distance that separates them. ²⁵ Yet, as the quotation above makes clear, Christian charity has infused and reshaped the way he thinks and writes about Christian friendship. It is striking that Augustine can speak as he does toward a person he has never actually met. Some of this may be literary convention, or a rhetorical move. Still, it seems that for Augustine, as for Cassian, holiness and communion in Christ take precedence over a shared physical location. ²⁶

A new flowering of friendship took place in the 12th century, alongside a renewal of monasticism, especially among the Cistercians. In some authors, wariness toward particular friendships seemed almost to disappear. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, emphasized the role of affective love and desire, not only in one’s relationship with God, but with the brethren as well. His rich mystical theology of union with God profoundly shaped his vision for union with the human friend. ²⁷ The two go hand in hand—a metaphor Bernard might have appreciated.

But perhaps the most remarkable pre-Thomistic development of a vision for Christian friendship proceeded from the pen of another Cistercian, Aelred of Rievaulx, whose Spiritual Friendship and Mirror of Charity offer a thorough adaptation of Cicero’s De Amicitia. ²⁸ While we have no evidence that Thomas knew Aelred’s work directly, it is worth taking a moment to consider the latter’s teaching by way of comparison. For Aelred, only virtuous and sanctified friendship was truly worthy of the name. But such friendship was not to be feared; it could be intimate, particular, and profound. Indeed, it offered a pathway to God:

. . . a friend praying to Christ on behalf of his friend, and for his friend’s sake desiring to be heard by Christ, directs his attention with love and longing to Christ; then it sometimes happens that quickly and imperceptibly the one love passes over into the other, and coming, as it were, into close contact with the sweetness of Christ himself, the friend begins to taste his sweetness and to experience his charm. Thus ascending from that holy love with which he embraces a friend to that with which he embraces Christ, he will joyfully partake in abundance of the spiritual fruit of friendship, awaiting the fullness of all things in the life to come. ²⁹

As Aelred writes elsewhere, ‘man from being a friend of his fellow man becomes the friend of God, according to the words of the Saviour in the Gospel: “I will not now call you servants, but my friends.”’ ³⁰ Aelred quotes Ambrose to suggest that Christ’s action in calling his disciples ‘friends’ establishes the model for human friendship. ³¹

Aelred develops and emphasizes the connection between these two loves perhaps as much as anyone ever had. At the end of book 1 of Spiritual Friendship, his interlocutor asks: ‘What does this all add up to? Shall I say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, says of charity: “God is friendship”?’ Aelred responds with caution, but does not reject the locution. ‘That would be unusual, to be sure,’ he answers, ‘nor does it have the sanction of the Scriptures. But still what is true of charity, I surely do not hesitate to grant to friendship, since “he that abides in friendship, abides in God, and God in him.”’ ³² This is an astonishing statement about friendship as a pathway to divine love—friendship which also has its ‘foundation’ in ‘the love of God.’ ³³ For Aelred, friendship is an expression of charity, almost interchangeable with it, though we have not yet reached Thomas’s equally bold definition of charity as ‘a kind of friendship.’ And while direct friendship with God does not play a central role in Aelred’s work, it does appear—notably, as he engages with the Gospel according to John.

As Thomas takes up the subject of caritas, many of these themes reappear. John 15:15 drives the definitional sed contra of the first question on charity. Thomas quotes: ‘“Now I will not call you servants, but my friends.” But this was not said to them except by reason of charity. Therefore charity is friendship.’ ³⁴ However, where Aelred speaks chiefly of human friendship, which becomes a pathway to (and revelation of) divine love, Thomas begins at the other end: ‘charity is a certain friendship of man with God.’ ³⁵ This shift in starting-point is partly methodological, a result of the two writers’ very different projects. But it also suggests a real and substantive development Thomas makes to the traditions that precede him.

Indeed, Thomas’s distinctive formulation appears to have no precedent. Nicholas E. Lombardo notes that ‘Hugh of St. Victor seems to be the first to connect the theological virtue of charity as such to friendship (in De sacramentis 2.13.11),’ although ‘Aquinas may be the first to integrate the Aristotelian concept of friendship into a systematic portrayal of charity.’ ³⁶ But in fact, a careful examination of De sacramentis highlights Thomas’s contribution by contrast. Hugh does, in passing, identify friendship (as described in Proverbs 17:7) as a form of love, and therefore of caritas; but this is tangential to his main consideration of whether the virtue of charity can be lost. He does not suggest that a connection between friendship and caritas might, in itself, entail important theological implications. ³⁷ This is a far cry from Thomas’s move to define charity in terms of friendship. ³⁸

The Twofold Movement of Divine Friendship

Thomas discusses the nature and significance of divine–human friendship in terms of a twofold movement, which we may summarize with the words grace and participation. An element of reciprocal participation is ultimately necessary for friendship, as Thomas makes clear: ‘Charity signifies not only love of God, but also a kind of friendship with Him, which adds besides love a returning of love for love along with a certain communing of one with another . . . . “He who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (I John 4:16).’ ³⁹ Martin Ostwald observes that, in the Aristotelian tradition, ‘it is the bond that gives different people something “in common” that counts in philia.’ ⁴⁰ But as Thomas remarks, ‘charity is the very sharing of spiritual life, by which we arrive at blessedness.’ ⁴¹ Aristotelian thought as Thomas deploys it therefore requires that the Christian’s relationship with God be understood in terms of amicitia: ‘Since . . . there is a sharing [communicatio] of some kind between man and God . . . it is necessary that upon this sharing some friendship be founded.’ ⁴² This act of philosophical jujitsu—using Aristotle to establish a claim Aristotle specifically rejected—plays alongside Johannine friendship-language to set the tone for the entire discussion.

However, Thomas does not neglect the difficulties inherent in communion between divine and human friends. ⁴³ Throughout his discussion of charity, he is clear that God always makes the first move:

. . . the virtue according to which God gives his gifts to each person is a preceding disposition or preparation, or a striving (conatus) of the one who receives grace. But the Holy Spirit comes before even this disposition or striving, moving the mind of a person either more or less according to its will. And so the Apostle says . . . ‘[The Father] who has made us worthy to partake of the lot of saints in light.’ ⁴⁴

Charity, we must recall, is an infused virtue. It is a gift of grace. And initially, such grace-giving appears to be a worthy act of friendship. Aristotle had established that the action of a friend concerns ‘benefits freely given.’ ⁴⁵ Indeed—following Aristotle’s lead—Thomas affirms that giving love and mercy to another is good precisely because it is the human action most resembling God’s own. ⁴⁶ But this explanation also introduces a serious problem: it appears to exclude the possibility of reciprocity, the very objection Aristotle had raised. Thomas describes this friendship’s ‘sharing’ in a way that seems necessarily unidirectional: ‘charity, since it hyper-exceeds the proportion of human nature, as was said, does not depend on some natural virtue, but only on the grace of the Holy Spirit that infuses it. And so the quantity of charity does not depend on the condition of nature or the capacity of natural virtue, but only on the will of the Holy Spirit . . . .’ ⁴⁷ Aristotle had written, ‘In all friendships which involve the superiority of one of the partners, the affection, too, must be proportionate: the better and more useful partner should receive more affection than he gives.’ ⁴⁸ Only such proportionality allows for the sort of equality that friendship, as traditionally understood, requires. But proportionality is obviously impossible in the case of friendship with God. How could any human love surpass God’s own?

The priority of divine action is non-negotiable for Thomas. In the Catena Aurea on John 15, immediately after a selection of patristic remarks on the key verses about divine–human friendship, Thomas quotes Augustine on the subject of predestination ‘before the foundation of the world.’ ⁴⁹ The quoted text insists that God did not choose people because he foreknew their faith or good works. Rather, they have both faith and good works precisely because they were chosen and given the gracious gift of love. It is his own action that God foreknows. In Thomas’s words, ‘No one can love God unless he has the Holy Spirit: because we do not act before we receive God’s grace, rather, the grace comes first: “He loved us first” (1 Jn 4:10). We should say, therefore, that the apostles first received the Holy Spirit so that they could love God and obey his commands.’ ⁵⁰ This hardly seems like a solution to the problem!

However, the focus on love is telling. We must not miss the content of this divine gift. Jean-Pierre Torrell writes:

If Thomas does not mention grace as the foundation of our friendship with God [in II-II 23.1 ad 1], but instead appeals directly to the love by which God loves himself, this is because he wants to speak of something more precise: not of participation in the divine nature, which is a given, but of the act of love and the mutual joy that flows directly from this participation, the reciprocal sharing of joy that comes from the presence of the beloved. ⁵¹

We get a hint of this when Thomas answers one of his own proposed objections: ‘some love on account of being loved, not so that being loved is the end of their loving, but because it is a kind of way leading to this—that a person may love.’ ⁵² It is at least possible, he seems to say, that one might give love to a person precisely in such a way as to enable that person to love in return.

This love, this ‘gift freely given,’ must therefore entail some sort of transformation of the recipient. And that is precisely what we find in the Summa. As Samuel Kimbriel observes, ‘The appearance of language both of “communication” and “participation” throughout Aquinas’s comments on charity is significant.’ He continues, ‘Aquinas’s language about the directness of the encounter is startling . . . . “Charity, by loving God, unites the soul immediately to Him with a chain (vinculo) of spiritual union.”’ ⁵³ In this friendship-love, the two friends arrive at ‘mutual inherence’ (mutua inhaesio) one with another. ⁵⁴ Thomas describes the beatitude which infused virtues bring as ‘a happiness surpassing man’s nature, which man can arrive at only by the power of God’—here again is the priority of divine action—but then he adds, ‘by a certain participation in divinity, and so it is written that by Christ we are made “partakers of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4).’ ⁵⁵ Human nature for Thomas is already ‘metaphysically rooted in God via participation,’ ⁵⁶ but the graced participation which characterizes divine–human friendship supernaturally transcends the possibilities innate in created human nature. ⁵⁷ Those joined to God in love become ‘deiform’ (deiformes). ⁵⁸ ‘For it is necessary that God alone should deify, communicating a sharing of the divine nature through a certain participation of likeness.’ ⁵⁹

Thomas thus affirms, with Aristotle, that ‘friendship by its own notion denotes a “loving in return” (reamatio) and an equality.’ ⁶⁰ Although divine action always has priority, this does not circumvent human action, but rather enables it. ‘It is necessary that the will be moved by the Holy Spirit toward loving in this way—that the will itself also bring about this act.’ ⁶¹ Humans are not mere passive recipients, but active participants in their own salvation. As he quotes Augustine elsewhere: ‘He who created you without you will not justify you without you.’ ⁶² Of course, according to the Augustinian-Lombardian definition explored in STh I-II 65.4, charity is an infused virtue, and infused virtues are precisely those that ‘God works in us without us.’ This forces us to question how our humanity in its fullness, including its capacity for action, can be perfected by such virtue. Thomas’s response is key: ‘Infused virtue is caused in us by God without action on our part, but not without our consent.’ ⁶³ Charity is given without any human involvement—except to make a choice. But this is what friendship also requires, according to Aristotle: ‘mutual affection involves choice.’ ⁶⁴ Choice is a function of the will, which is thus the seat of charity. This love, Thomas emphasizes, is not automatic. It is dilectio, a chosen love. ⁶⁵

This emphasis may explain why Thomas begins his discussion of caritas by defining it as friendship rather than (as it unquestionably is) an infused virtue. Doing so allows him to accentuate more strongly the aspect of human involvement, human participation. As he had already observed some years earlier, when he discussed caritas in the Scriptum, friendship is distinct from other loves particularly in the way it underscores reciprocity, choice, and freedom. ⁶⁶ Without in any way diminishing the priority of divine action described in the prima secundae, the language of friendship exalts humanity—precisely the thing that divine love itself does, according to Thomas.

This may also be part of the reason Thomas demurs from his great predecessor, Peter Lombard, and insists on a distinction between the infused virtue of charity and the Holy Spirit. Nicholas Healy writes:

Thomas rejected [Lombard’s view], not . . . by denying that the very person of the Holy Spirit enters into us, but on the grounds that it is more fitting to understand the role of the Spirit as making it possible for us, on our part, to make a genuine response to God’s love. If the Holy Spirit were to work in us without having any effect upon us that enabled us to love God in return, then it would not be we who have a friendship with God . . . . At most we would be an instrument of the Spirit, compelled to love. Real friends freely and joyfully love one another; to become a friend of God we must be transformed rather than simply moved. ⁶⁷

Elsewhere, Thomas describes the distinction between a servant and a friend: ‘the free man acts for the sake of himself, as for an end, and he acts by himself, because he is moved to the work by his own will.’ ⁶⁸ Charity thus entails real, full, and mutual participation. The friend of God encounters him as a person encountering another person, friend to friend, ‘face to face.’ ⁶⁹

Such love is not static; it is always ‘on the move.’ Although it cannot be added to, according to Thomas, the virtue of charity can be increased. ⁷⁰ God’s movement toward those he loves both enables and is answered by their acceptance and movement toward him in response. This is revealed as Thomas repeatedly invokes the language of a journey. The Christian life in this world is an experience of being in via, ‘on the way.’ ⁷¹

Friendship Incarnate

The shape of that journey toward and with God recapitulates the pattern of grace and participation in a manner that is fundamental to Thomistic spirituality. On the one hand, the charity given by divine grace is emphatically a created thing, a ‘habitual form.’ ⁷² Consequently, this gift received from the divine friend becomes truly ours; it allows for and even demands the responsive action of our own wills. On the other hand, for Aquinas, charity is itself already a participation in God. ⁷³ It is simultaneously the way and the destination: ‘charity arrives at God, since it joins us to God.’ ⁷⁴ The one who seeks after God for love’s sake must, in some imperfect but real sense, possess God already.

This paradox, I suggest, strongly hints toward the divine–human Subject of the tertia pars. Although Christ is not often explicitly invoked in the questions on charity—just as friendship is seldom named in the Christological chapters ⁷⁵ —the shape of this spirituality, initiated by divine action but uniting grace and participation, is decidedly incarnational. The love which is God, and by which women and men ascend to God, is first of all the love that descends among them. It is the personal union of the Second Person of the Trinity to human nature that allows other humans to participate in the divine. And this incarnational substructure of the questions on charity is established at the outset: ‘About this sharing [which is the basis for friendship with God] 1 Corinthians 1 says, “Faithful God, by whom you are called into the fellowship (societas) of his Son.”’ ⁷⁶ Thomas has already, in the sed contra of the same question, quoted John 15:15, perhaps the key Scriptural reference for the move he is making: ‘Now I will not call you servants, but my friends.’

Here is Thomas’s ultimate solution to the problem of non-proportionality, and thus his answer to Aristotle. He explains the point in the Summa Contra Gentiles:

. . . since friendship consists in a certain equality, things greatly unequal seem unable to be coupled in friendship. Therefore, to get greater familiarity in friendship between man and God it was helpful for man that God became man, since even by nature man is man’s friend; and so in this way, ‘while we know God visibly, we may [through Him] be borne to love of things invisible.’ ⁷⁷

The incarnation also has a revelatory effect: ‘the fact that God was willing to unite human nature to Himself personally points out to men with greatest clarity that man can be united to God by intellect, and see Him immediately.’ ⁷⁸ Taking flesh, the Son of God discloses the possibility of that ‘sharing’ in which human–divine friendship consists. ⁷⁹ Elsewhere Thomas will describe divine self-revelation to the apostles as a friend’s action of ‘reveal[ing] the secrets of his heart to his friend.’ ⁸⁰ And the astonishing fulfilment of this possibility becomes clear when the questions on charity define mercy as a participation in another’s defect, another’s sorrow. ⁸¹ It is not hard to discern in these words an echo of Isaiah 53:4, ‘Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.’ Here, subtly but unmistakably, the cross itself becomes an act of friendship’s ‘sharing.’ After all, in John 15:13, Jesus himself says ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’

As Thomas makes clear in his remarks on this verse, in Christ’s case this means laying down his life not merely for those who already loved him as friends, but also for those enemies whom he loved as a friend does, in order to make them his friends. ⁸² In a loose sense of the word, ‘A person is called a friend either because he loves or because he is loved.’ ⁸³ And divine friendship is clearly a case of the latter: ‘Whoever has been called to this sublime friendship should not attribute the cause of this friendship to himself, but to [Christ], who chose him or her as a friend.’ ⁸⁴ Yet Christ’s next comment, ‘you are my friends if you do what I command you,’ is, according to Thomas, ‘true for both meanings of friend.’ ⁸⁵ Again, the action of divine love draws forth a response from the beloved.

The response is a profound longing for Christ, which leads one to press forward on the journey. Charity is not reducible to benevolence, which might be an act of pure reason; it is seated in the ‘intellectual appetite,’ and therefore also includes affection, which drives it onward. ⁸⁶ As Thomas says, quoting Bernard of Clairvaux, the sole measure of this profound love is measurelessness. ⁸⁷ To capture the affective element, he employs unusually intense emotional language about ‘exile’ and the longing to be with God. ⁸⁸ Aristotle had taught that ‘spend[ing] their days together and . . . find[ing] joy in one another . . . seem to be the chief marks of friendship.’ ⁸⁹ This is the aching desire that every true friend of God must know; and this shared presence and joy describes the experience of beatitude in the homeland, as Thomas characterizes it. At the end of the secunda secundae, he quotes Gregory the Great’s 14th homily on Ezekiel: ‘The contemplative life begins here, so as to be perfected in our heavenly home, because the fire of love which begins to burn here is aflame with a yet greater love when we see Him Whom we love.’ ⁹⁰

At the same time, such life and love really do begin here. Participation—and reciprocation—characterizes the Christian life. Thomas insists that charity must carry with it a real and profound joy, because if we love God and God loves us, God is in us, through the Holy Spirit. ⁹¹ The simultaneous joy and sorrow of life in via leads a soul in charity to press forward on her journey. And it is this persevering action of love, this full engagement of the intellectual appetite, which is entailed in the cultivation of the divinely infused virtue of caritas.

The reciprocity of friendship thus creates a mirroring effect: ‘We love because God first loved us.’ God’s self-giving leads those who receive the gift of charity to desire to give up all things out of love for their divine friend. ⁹² And just as Christ’s love culminates in the cross, so also human friendship for God achieves perfection (insofar as it can in this life) in martyrdom: laying down one’s life for one’s Friend. ⁹³ But the reciprocity of love in action applies equally to everyday living. What ‘obliges’ the disciples ‘to imitate’ their Lord is ‘that he has embraced them in his love.’ ⁹⁴ They actively respond to his embrace, both in their love for Christ directly and—following his pattern—by extending that love to others.

Friends for God’s Sake

This, at last, brings us to the question of how Thomas relates divine and human friendships. One might reasonably assume that friendship is primarily a human relationship, which is then applied analogously to our relationship with God. And certainly, in some sense analogy must be operative here. The human–divine relationship must necessarily transcend our human friendships in innumerable ways. Marie Farrell thus rightly emphasizes the word quaedam in Thomas’s definition: charity is a certain kind of friendship. ⁹⁵

At the same time, however, Thomas is steeped in the Christian tradition, which views divine love as the central type, and arrays all other loves around it as more or less distant echoes or copies of that primary love. This is his heritage from Bernard of Clairvaux, among others. Thomas, moreover, believes that this God—unlike the deities of the pantheon Aristotle knew—has personally been joined to humanity in the incarnation of the Son. Relationship with God is therefore, in some mysterious but definite way, a relationship with a fellow human being. ⁹⁶ Nicholas Healy argues on this basis for a very different analogous relationship. ‘Charity is,’ in Healy’s reading of Thomas, ‘the analogy in graced humanity of the personal union of Christ’s humanity, which is united with the Son at the most intimate level possible.’ ⁹⁷ This raises as many questions as it answers, perhaps. But it does not seem a stretch to say that, for Thomas, the human relationship with God really is the normative and definitive form of friendship. ⁹⁸ The sed contra of STh I-II 28.2 offers an example of God’s (biblically described) love as norming all other loves to the divine-friendship pattern. All loves, in their different ways, are oriented toward the mutual inherence of lover and beloved in one another, because that is what divine love is like. In other words, Thomas does not extend the definition of friendship to include the divine–human relationship. Rather, human friendships are exalted, illuminated, and transformed precisely insofar as caritas is revealed as the highest and truest form of amicitia.

Human friendships, therefore, are extensions of friendship with God. Thomas reasserts this point several times in the questions on charity: ‘God should principally and most of all be loved out of charity, for God is loved as the cause of blessedness, whereas our neighbour is loved as participating with us at the same time in blessedness.’ ⁹⁹ Thus ‘we can speak of charity according to its own proper aspect, namely as the friendship of human beings with God principally, and consequently with the things that are of God.’ ¹⁰⁰ And perhaps most bluntly, ‘God is the principal object of charity, whereas our neighbour is loved out of charity on account of God.’ ¹⁰¹ The second great commandment, to love one’s neighbour as oneself, flows from and is an extension and expression of the first: ‘the aspect that belongs to loving our neighbour is God, since this we must love in our neighbour—that he is in God. So it is manifest that the act by which God is loved and that by which our neighbour is loved are of the same kind.’ ¹⁰² Union with God becomes the basis for the truest possible union with our neighbour. This is Thomas’s solution to the initial Aristotelian challenge that we cannot ‘wish our friends the greatest of all goods, namely, to be gods’ without also wishing that ‘they would no longer be our friends.’ ¹⁰³ The possibility of divinization, the reality of incarnation, and the re-situating of friendship in God himself transform the situation entirely. Even Aelred says nothing more radical.

Yet Thomas does not allow the two dominical commandments to be wholly collapsed into one. Both are necessary. This is, in part, due to human limitation: not all people have perfect knowledge, and not all of us can work out the logical progression from love of God to its consequence in love of neighbour. ¹⁰⁴ But ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is not merely a concession to human weakness. These human relationships matter, and they matter in themselves. ¹⁰⁵ The reason is that they are personal. Thomas writes: ‘friendship is borne toward another. So Gregory says . . . “charity cannot be had between fewer than two people.”’ ¹⁰⁶ Here the friendship language pays off once again, as it allows Thomas to make sense of the fourfold order of love, borrowed from Augustine, and the twofold Gospel commandment. Earlier, he had argued that love of self comes before love of neighbour, since the union of identity is necessarily prior to and closer than the union of sharing in a common good. ¹⁰⁷ Now, however, he is able to nuance that teaching. Friendship with another human being is friendship in the proper sense, in a way that love for oneself is not. Both are expressions of love for God; but only love of neighbour is love for another person, a true friendship with its own integrity. Earlier, Thomas defined the single ‘sharing’ that unites all truly charitable friendship as (at least the possibility of) ‘sharing of eternal blessedness.’ ¹⁰⁸ But now he is able to say that ‘we ought to love others out of charity, since they are neighbours to us, both according to the natural image of God and according to the capacity for glory.’ ¹⁰⁹ Not only future blessedness, but also the sort of creatures humans are, as persons bearing the divine image of a personal God, makes such friendship possible.

At one point, Thomas references 1 John 4:20 to consider whether friendship with neighbour should take priority over friendship with God. After all, a neighbour is present to our senses, and Aristotle taught that ‘vision is the principle of love.’ ¹¹⁰ Thomas offers a more nuanced interpretation: ‘It is not that something which is more visible is more lovable, but rather that the visible is what first occurs to us to love.’ ¹¹¹ Nevertheless, this ‘first’ suggests that love of neighbour may be a pathway to fuller love for God. As Thomas says later, ‘the end of all human actions and affections is the love of God, by which we most of all attain the ultimate end.’ ¹¹² This is not so different from Aelred’s notion of human friendship as an ascending road toward love for, and friendship with, Christ.

Thomas, however, arrives at his conclusion by a different route. Although neighbours are nearer through sense perception, in the order of the Holy Spirit’s action as well as in the Augustinian ordering of loves, God comes first. This is what allows Thomas to state that love of neighbour is ‘complete love of God,’ since it assumes love of God as the starting place and expands that love to those around us. ¹¹³ And this is how Thomas can argue in his commentary on the Gospel of John that Christ makes divine friendship known to his disciples precisely in order to inspire them with caritas toward those around them: ‘Everything I said to you was to lead you to love your neighbour.’ ¹¹⁴ As Thomas says explicitly about intercession, all charity’s acts of friendship toward a neighbour are ways of drawing that person to share in one’s friendship with God. ¹¹⁵

Conclusion

Just as, for Thomas, grace perfects human nature in ways that supersede its inherent capacities, so also Thomas’s teaching on caritas transfigures the very notion of friendship. He uses Aristotle in order to reverse Aristotle: whereas ‘the Philosopher’ says that one cannot desire that one’s friend become a god, Thomas argues that one must become ‘deiform’ in order to enter into true friendship, with God or (consequently) with one’s neighbour. Deification enables rather than hindering the truest human friendships. Thomas’s characterization of the infused virtue of charity as ‘a certain friendship’ also significantly reframes earlier Christian discussion. Particular human relationships are no longer just a potential threat to Christian community, or even—more positively—a pathway to love of God. Rather, human friendships are, or at least are meant to be, an extension and fulfilment of the divine–human friendship that finds its greatest expression in the God-man who calls his followers ‘friends.’ Thomas thus strikes a new note in the long debate about the problem of particular friendships, especially in monastic and religious communities. The extent to which Christian communities (then or later) recognized and responded to this new theological configuration is a fascinating question in its own right and deserves further study.

More than this, however, the emphasis on caritas as friendship reveals the spiritual vision that grounds Thomas’s own theological project. The study of theology, he suggests, represents an attempt to know and delight in the secrets shared by the divine friend. ¹¹⁶ At the same time, such language represents a rhetorical appeal to the reader’s own ‘intellectual appetite,’ the desire for friendship grounded in the human capacity for dilectio. Thomas’s careful exposition of charity as amicitia quaedam, as the highest form of friendship, is an invitation for the reader to participate, by grace, in that same love and joy—to become more truly a friend of God.