Immanuel Loyalty

I am not a particularly virtuous person, and I have squandered many gifts and hopes. But one thing I have managed to do well is maintain friendships, over time and even in the face of real difficulty. I like to think that I am a “loyal” friend. 

But is that actually a good thing? Not everyone thinks so. It depends on what we mean by loyalty. The celebrated theologian Stanley Hauerwas was much criticized for his reticence following revelations of his colleague John Howard Yoder’s abuse of female students. Hauerwas and Yoder were friends, and the latter’s work had deeply shaped Hauerwas’s own views. When Hauerwas explained the whole affair in a later interview, including his initial reticence, he mentioned two things. First, he said that he “owed” Yoder a truthful account of the man, both the gifts he had received from him and his shortcomings; for, after all, Yoder had been a friend and a benefactor to him in matters of truth itself. Second, Hauerwas noted that Yoder’s family members were also his friends, and that he was reluctant to cause them further pain by stirring up more sorrow. 

Hauerwas had a fair amount to say about his own failures and inhibitions in the relationship with Yoder: preferring to ignore his suspicions, being unwilling to confront, and so on. But overall, I admire Hauerwas’s friendship in this case. He was “loyal,” and I consider that a very great good. Yet he was also roundly criticized for leaning on this loyalty in his self-descriptions, to the detriment of expressing solidarity with the victims of Yoder’s predatory behavior. 

I once brought the whole matter up in a discussion with graduate students. We were debating whether “rogues” can write “good theology,” on the principle of Matthew 23:3, where Jesus cautions his hearers with respect to religious teachers: Do what they say, not what they do. Augustine applied this verse to immoral preachers who nonetheless have good things to say, things worth listening to. Of course, preachers would be yet more effective if they lived what they taught! Classic conundrums here include not just Heidegger and his open Nazi sympathies, but also (as scholars tell us) Athanasius and his personal nastiness. People naturally argue whether this or that writer was a true rogue. There is a perennial temptation to exculpate those whose thought one admires. But Hauerwas complicated the argument by interjecting loyalty to a friend as something positive, to be sustained in relationship to rogues. The real question, then, is whether we should be friends with a rogue and loyal to him. Some of my students were aghast that such loyalty could be favorably considered at all.

I don’t want to suggest that many of my friends are in fact rogues. But all of them certainly fit Alexander Pope’s description of the human condition: “Virtuous and vicious every man must be, / Few in th’ extreme, but all in the degree, / The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise; / And even the best, by fits, what they despise.” If we would have friends at all, there will be “viciousness” in play at every step—for them and for us. Loyalty demands, in turn, that we remain friends nonetheless.

“Demands” is the operative word here. Friendships are filled with feeling, indeed with love of a sort, though often varied and changing. But at some point, friendships cease to depend on feeling, and affection is surpassed by friendship itself. At that juncture, friendships are driven by the imperative mood. The word loyalty derives from law. It describes the duties “owed” to another according to the moral tenor of a given relationship—subject to sovereign, servant to master, and, yes, friend to friend. Once the relationship of friendship is firmly established, loyalty is demanded, and a kind of bondedness takes root, in which one sticks to the other, come what may. But the reality of loyalty is primarily exhibited in embodied practices that define where one literally stands in relation to the friend (or for that matter, to a social superior or inferior): close or far, giving or receiving, helping or being helped. Moral assessments of behavior, at this point, impinge upon the relationship only in part. My friends who have done bad things are still my friends, as I hope I am to them in my many failures and sins.

Our culture is not comfortable with this presumptive bond, although at the same time it yearns for real friendships where loyalty survives assault. One of the most common worries is that loyalty, if overly prized, will somehow trump justice. This worry reflects a long-standing classical view: Aristotle, Cicero, and Aquinas each, if in different ways, argued that the demands of virtue place strict limits on loyalty. Friendship’s loyalty can never be allowed to compromise truth, honor, or fidelity to God and God’s law. Contemporary concerns over justice are very much in this line, although the concern has shifted from that of preserving individual integrity and the soul’s character to corporate and systemic principles. Today, we tend to believe that society should not tolerate the toleration of vice (or at least certain bad vices singled out as especially damaging). And persons who remain friends with the vicious undermine the necessary moral purity demanded in the social sphere. 

To be sure, there is more than a generic social element in today’s worries about loyalty. Bad people often hurt others. For this reason, to be friends with those who hurt is to be the enemy of those who are hurt—to fraternize with their victimizers. I had a brother-in-law (now deceased) who was discovered to have sexually abused some children years earlier. He was sent to prison. I chose to visit him there. By doing so, I deeply offended others in my family who felt I was somehow providing support and solace to a horrendous malefactor. I visited not out of mercy but out of loyalty, that is, out of obligation. The obligation arose, in this case, out of a former well of affection, and if the affection had become strained, the obligation itself was at that point firmly in place. The conflicts of individual emotion are real here, and they have little to do with grand theories of social justice.

Perhaps concern with loyalty’s entanglement with individual feeling is an especially modern issue. It was David Hume, the quintessential modern philosopher, who argued that loyalty (which he lumped with “partiality” or preference) was a sentiment necessary to human life—making possible a range of relations, from friendship to compassion. In the private sphere, observed Hume, loyalty does trump justice. Contemporary philosophers like Michael Stocker have provocatively explored this field: How can we live rich relational lives if devoid of loyalty and its siblings? “Impartiality” is a dry and hollow foundation for most of the goods we cherish. 

 Augustine himself tellingly struggles with the power of loyalty’s demands. In a classic account of an early friendship, he underlines the ongoing deep personal bond of friendship’s obligations. A childhood companion, who was his closest friend in a time of scholarly and religious growth, dies and leaves Augustine inconsolable. The sorrow of this loss was decisive, driving him to leave his hometown behind and set out for Carthage. It was also so profoundly disturbing that, in retrospect, he realizes that he had misplaced his affections onto a human friend instead of onto God (a judgment that becomes a fundamental Augustinian orientation toward all earthly goods). Yet Augustine’s loyalty to his friend’s memory nonetheless causes him to devote to this dead comrade one of the longest sections in the Confessions.

At one point, Augustine writes: “Blessed be he who loves You [God], and his friend in You, and his enemy for Your sake.” The paradox here is that, while Augustine is clear that friendship, and thus the trust that establishes it, is contingent and ultimately untrustworthy in comparison with the true love that is owed to God, just that love of God can render our friendships, even the most betrayed and finally inimical, steady. We love friends and enemies both in our love for and from God. They oddly merge, such that “love your enemy” can illuminate what it means to “love your friend.” This, in the end, fits my sense of the Christian’s world: Friend and enemy both receive our steadfast loyalty. That is why we stick with vicious friends. Although Augustine doesn’t say so, this “sticking with” epitomizes Jesus’s own identity: Immanuel, “God with us”—even as we have shown ourselves to be enemies of God. Such loyalty is not opposed to truth; it is the very shape truth takes.

I am a Christian. I hope, therefore, that as I get older and the phone calls and emails, let alone encounters, become fewer and fewer, I shall never give up on my friends. I hope, too, that they shall not give up on me.