Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought

6. Friendship in the Civic Order: A Reformation Absence

In Michael Pakaluk’s anthology of the key writings in the Western literary and philosophical tradition concerning friendship, which begins with Plato and Aristotle, there is a major lacuna. So, too, in several recent collections of scholarly treatments of the topic in the self-same tradition, or even in wider comparative context.1 Missing in every case are all of the sixteenth-century Reformers. This gap seems not to be from arbitrariness or capricious ideology: we look in vain for a treatise or even a brief, consolidated treatment concerning friendship, especially civic friendship, among any of them—Zwingli, Luther, Calvin, Bucer, Menno Simons. Their biographers tell us of friendships, so the problem is not that the phenomenon or its experience was personally alien to them.2 This essay focuses on the problem of friendship in two of these Reformers: Martin Luther and John Calvin. Both explicitly rejected 163 6 Friendship in the Civic Order A Reformation Absence Thomas Heilke 020 pt 2 (113-194) 3/20/08 12:49 PM Page 163 Aristotelian teleology, and we might imagine that this dismissal disabled them from thinking about friendship in specifically teleological Aristotelian terms. Both, however, were heavily influenced by Augustine , who had a good deal to say about friendship,3 leading us to expect that their anti-Aristotelian handicaps would not have hindered them from understanding the importance of the topic. This topical gap is widened by the absence or abbreviation of friendship in modern accounts of political life,4 but that is reading backward: Luther and Calvin did not set out to be “modern” in our sense of the word, and both were raised in the cultural context of a waning medieval period in which friendship had been a core experience and a key element of political life.5 It may be the case, then, that these two Reformers provide a clue to the curiously thin treatment and understanding of friendship in the modern period. Given the centrality of these figures to our modern religiopolitical landscape, what are we to make of this friendship gap, both in the original writers and in subsequent scholarly treatment? What, if any, are its implications for us? If my reading of Calvin and Luther is correct, an evaluation of their notions of friendship becomes a report on an absence. Like the problem of counterfactuals in historical writing, such a report must refer to what could have happened, what could have been said, but was not. It is a report in the subjunctive mood. Therefore, to highlight what is both present and missing in Calvin’s and Luther’s treatments, I will conduct a brief excursus that maps out a few mythic, literary, and biblical aspects of civic friendship before returning to these two Reformers. Since they both rejected the Aristotelian tradition of inquiry, I deliberately consider examples of pre-Socratic, non-Greek sources to indicate the basic structure of questions found even in myth that could have been available—not in specific content, but in general structure—to Calvin and Luther, but seemingly were not or were considered to be unimportant . In the same way, I consider briefly some biblical examples that Calvin and Luther did know, but did not exegetically or theologically exploit. The role of this contrast is to point briefly to neglected options and missed opportunities (that do not require the acquaintance with Aristotle that both Reformers actually had), which then permits us to ask why such omissions occurred. 164 T Thomas Heilke 020 pt 2 (113-194) 3/20/08 12:49 PM Page 164 Friendship and Philosophical Analysis Friendship is portrayed as a vital part of civic life—and therefore as a central problem of human life together—long before Greek philosophy. The Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, includes an extensive treatment of friendship in the medium of epic myth, and we know that this epic existed in various forms in a number of diverse cultures in the wider Mesopotamian region.6 Gilgamesh is the ruler of a city, a great doer of deeds, physically perfect, wise, but arrogant and demoniacally energetic. His worn-out subjects plead with the gods to create a companion for him who will redirect his energy away from them and their sons and daughters to more worthy pursuits. The gods find/create Enkidu, a “natural man,” who “was innocent of mankind and knew nothing of the cultivated land.” Seducing him by...