Friendship and Ways to Truth

by David B. Burrell, Fr David B., C.S.C. Burrell

The death of a friend is a source of pain and grief for anyone. For David B. Burrell, it is also a source of reflection on the role of friendship in our ongoing pursuit of truth. In this small but penetrating book, Burrell offers five essays that explore friendship as the bond that links us to the religious traditions we embrace in our search for truth. Known for his many and lasting contributions to philosophical theology, Burrell here makes a definitive statement for that field while also continuing the cross-cultural discussion among Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Burrell considers how friendship can be constitutive of the spiritual exercises one employs to seek truth, and he examines the influences on his thinking of Bernard Lonergan, Stanley Hauerwas, and Augustine to show how friends can open our minds and hearts to interfaith dialogue and the mutual illumination it offers. He also explores cross-cultural understanding through a comparison of the teaching of Aquinas with that of Islam's al-Ghazali, suggesting that their complementary perspectives can fruitfully expand our view of friendship to include our relationship with God. In the end, he offers a model of friendship as a relationship which gives us the courage to maintain our philosophical pursuits and which helps us to persevere in the face of the radical unknowing which characterizes philosophical theology. Just as Burrell learns from death that friendship cannot end, he celebrates how each of us can present to another the face of the good as we journey together through life. And just as our journey toward the truth continues forever, he enables us to see that the gift of friendship is not limited to our earthly existence.

Genres: Theology

136 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2000

Reviews

[Ryan Thorpe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this for my book club. I will divide my review into four parts.

Part A: A personal reflection: friendship as a means to confront the truth of myself
Part B: So what is the book all about
Part C: The aforementioned plot summary
Part D: Review, quotes, and questions

Part A: Omitted due to Goodreads restrictions on review length

Part B: So what is the book all about

At its core, this is a book about how to be a good friend. More than that it’s a book about how to get to the truth of life. About how you cannot do so through reason alone. Instead, you must suspend your disbelief and trust in the unearned gift of friendship to show you the world from a point of view you could never get to on your own. About how that’s the only form of truth worth giving a damn about. Not the truth of the head but the truth of the heart. Not the certain truth enjoyed by those who feel themselves to be in charge but the journey to mutual understanding of the striving many, bound together in care and love and above all trust. And with that the author would have already achieved a life changing book.

And the author does not need to prove this to me. My friends have been kind enough to show me the path to truth. One I could never have identified on my own.

But of course the author does not stop there. He suggests, if friendship is so crucial to our understanding of the world - this profound leap of trust into the warm embrace of a caring peer - well perhaps all knowledge of the world works the same way. Perhaps by taking a leap into the unknown one can befriend God. And what on earth does he mean by that?

I am no theologian, but I will offer my interpretation. I do not have a relationship with the God of any religion. But I chose not to ignore the sentences where the author talks about God. They are too crucial to his message. I chose to engage with the author in an inter-textual way, acknowledging that I will always be subject to the limitations of a translator. But eagerly seeking to see what he sees. To see how he sees.

So here is what I did. I found the thing outside myself that I am capable of having faith in. I substituted that in place of God. And as I read those last two chapters, I did not make them merely about the friendship of a peer in this life. I imagined what it would be like to make friends with my ‘god.’ I gave myself a chance to experience what this man is talking about, even while recognizing I will never really ‘know’ what it feels like to be him.

Would this pass muster for the good theologian? I suspect it would not. But I also suspect that this particular theologian would welcome me with open arms despite that shortcoming. I suspect he would want to be my friend before he wanted to be my teacher. What a gift that would be.

Ultimately the "God" offered to us here is not one of control and certainty. It is one we meet only in the radical uncertainty of letting go. Of trusting. A form of knowing that we learn through friendship and perfect through faith. Faith in what is for you to decide. It is perhaps the only meaningful decision that you need to make.

Part C: The aforementioned plot summary

Burrell believes friendship enhances our lives because through friendship we come to understand deeper truths about ourselves, others, and the world we live in. Specifically, he likes the kind of friendship that is grounded in a community of shared values (e.g., a religious one). And from that firm footing, he believes we are able to step out and "open our hearts and minds" to interfaith dialogue and ultimately to "extend the reach of friendship to the creator" in the face of radical unknowing. In the face of a world that refuses to offer answers - and our own egos, that have us search in all the wrong places, Burrell echoes the ideas of the British poet and philosopher that we only get by with a little help from our friends.

Don't get me wrong. This is a serious (difficult) work of philosophy and Burrell does not surrender his insights without delving deeply into each and locating them in a philosophical conversation that will be lost on virtually everyone. He does so through an introduction and five essays. Let's walk through each.

Introduction:
Burrell opens the book by reminding readers that The Enlightenment's claim to foundational knowledge was a sham, that everyone exists within a tradition that rests upon assumptions, and that it is friendships, not abstract intellectualism, that allows us to make the most of whatever tradition we are a part of. He calls this "cross hatching of friendships" a community - and a community deepens our understanding of life's core values: love, truth, friendship and all that. In this book, he aims to delve into how that works.

Essay 1:
Burrell shows us how a close friendship helps us understand ourselves and the world thru his personal reflection on his friend's death. In this touching essay, Burrell recounts how their early days of egotistical male sparring and silly power games blossomed into an open and vulnerable relationship. Burrell came to admire his friend deeply and this admiration gave him a glimpse into the face of "the good" - that transcendent feeling we have all had in which we love our friend and see in them something greater than they could possibly see in themself. Further, this relationship provided a "forcible reminder that we cannot make it on our own" - that healthy check to one's own ego that we all deeply need.
Finally, he reflects that grieving the death of a friend provides us a "wisdom borne of suffering" (has wisdom ever come from anything else?), that such wisdom is not something we actively attain but rather something we must allow ourselves to undergo (three action items, this is not). I left this essay with a profound appreciation for how my deepest friendships have paradoxically humbled me to my own limitations and emboldened me to be a better version of myself. I could not help but cry.

Essay 2:

In this essay, Burrell argues that a close friend helps us move in the direction of truth, in part because achieving a profound friendship requires work that is similar to and instructive toward journeying toward spiritual and moral truths such as how to live, love, and ultimately for Burrell worship God. Three main points in this section:

A. Friendship and belief are both rationally impossible. The former depends on trust, despite human frailty and selfishness. We know what people are like. Shoot, we are people. We know the contents of our own thoughts: our jealousies, our petty vices, our shortcomings. Friendship requires that we trust in the face of countless reasons not to. And the spiritual rewards are profound.
The later on faith, despite empirical shortcomings. In both, we deploy the capacity to "let go of our endemic desire to protect our own life, reputation, and opinions." And are thus freed to know ourselves and the world.
Neither of these things are easy to do. So we go to (B)

B. "Spiritual exercises" help us - as limited individuals - achieve what rationality alone cannot deliver. In friendship, friends submit their personal desires and insecurities to the pursuit of being together. You tell a self-deprecating joke to let your friends know you view yourself as among, not above them, but mainly to remind yourself of that fact.
Believers have, over several thousand years, worked out a variety of spiritual practices from prayer to confession that develop capacities within themselves. In both cases, these capacities allow mere mortals to do things that we are not ordinarily able to do.

C. It is through these exercises that we are able to achieve what Burrell calls a proper relationship to the universe, but we might think of as a full appreciation of life and its mysteries. It is not through pure rationality that we're gonna get there.

Essay 3:

Intellectual understanding is sorta like translation. You're never done because you're always within your own head / tradition. It only works when you continually engage with the translated text/culture. That continual engagement stops us from our tendency to fall back into our own way of thinking and misconstrue what the idea out there really is.
So what model works for this? It turns out, the model is an enduring friendship. Why? Well you have a give and take, a lack of presumption, a radical openness and malleability that allows you to approach and get some sense for how it feels to be another person or be in another tradition. You approach the other tradition more like a friend and less like a researcher analyzing and categorizing a fossil (or whatever they happen to be studying) and deluding yourself into believe you have achieved knowledge and can put it on the shelf and keep it there.

In setting all this up, Burrell takes yet another shot at the Western Enlightenment (you can tell it's personal). He points out that it is only thru the cold arrogance of enlightenment thinking that one might proceed to try to deductively analyze something as impossible to imagine as another culture's point of view. It substitutes analysis for understanding and achieves neither.

He concludes this broadside with an undoubtedly personal reflection: "In fact, nothing can be more exasperating on such a journey than the demand on the part of someone on the sidelines for a... univocal description of what it is we are about."

In short, a friendship depends on mutual trust and exploration. It cannot work if one person demands the other define all terms and proceed to understand each other deductively. But this is how the enlightenment mind has gone about exploring the world. And what a world of misunderstanding and mistrust its proponents have wrought. And how exasperated it has left the rest of us.
Back to the point. So what does it actually look like to understand another tradition like it's a friend, instead of like it's a fossil to be categorized and analyzed?

Well, first he goes out of his way to show that doing so does not imply relativism. I think this is a distraction. He should have just said go read McIntyre and moved on. I’m skipping it. Sorry not sorry.

Next is the good part. Three steps to deepening understanding through friendship.

First, friendship sustains us in uncertainty which allows us to take the never ending journey toward truth without trying to artificially conclude it with certainty.

Second, friendships provide a model thru which we can reflect on and understand the things that really matter in life.

Third, friendships help us get at an "embodied understanding" of what the important things in life really feel like. And man, after all this is what we're really after with friendships.

Essay 4:
Burrell looks at Christianity and Islam and finds in both the capacity to enter into a spirit of mutual goodwill, reciprocity, and pursuit of a shared good with God, namely a true friendship. How? In the Christian tradition he locates this in the “gifts of the spirit” while in Islam he locates this capacity in the Sufi notion of heart, which permits a continuous path of drawing nearer to God. In both cases, he views this capacity as a gift from God to people.

What might that look like? If you have ever felt an easy relation to the world, as if your spirit were aligned with some greater force that was moving through you, generating in you a spirit of kindness, empathy and openness, I suspect you have felt a little of what Burrell is talking about.

He tells us “the greatest moral possibility is not to act, but to let ourselves be acted upon by God, for it is when we suffer the Divine love that we become most like it.” To be “moved by the Spirit.” And he finds in the Islamic theologian al-Ghazali a “remarkably parallel account,” albeit one that cannot rely on the notion of a Holy Spirit. In other words, both of these serious theologians have touched on something that deeply feeling humans know with their heart. That one can have a feeling of access to a higher power “without intermediaries of any sort” – indeed that humans are at their best only when they feel that way. Whether that sense derives from “the word made flesh in Jesus” or “the straight path in the Qur’an given to Muhammad to recite” or “the universe of which we are both a part and a reflection of” buries the lead.

The lead is humans are capable of friendship with a power that is beyond their comprehension and attain their most moral form when they aren’t sitting around calculating utility but rather allow that friendship to tap into parts of themselves dramatically more powerful than the cognition of their conscious mind.

Essay 5:
Burrell opens the door to mysticism, argues that “mutual illumination in interaction with other religious traditions” is not only possible but perhaps necessary, and makes a push that “divinity must inescapably be anchored in a living religious tradition.” He points out that the most compelling findings from religion come when one lays bear the “fund of grammatical expertise which comes from operating within a living religious tradition” and warns those who would limit their analysis to pure philosophy not to overlook this reality. He concludes that a shared commitment to journey with friends toward truth forms the central commitment of and is the central source from which benefit flows in religion. I suspect those seeking community across the modern world are more open to this message than they realize.


Part D: Review, quotes, and questions
In sum, Burrell puts his heart on display as much as his head and shows us something about what a good life looks like.

Five stars. A profound and humbling book for anyone willing to quiet their ego long enough to see where others are capable of taking them.

He also peppers the text with some absolute bangers. Some of my faves:
"Histories at once bind and empower and friendships both require and acquire a history"

"friendship, death, and grieving all effect capacities in us; it is out of those spaces that we learn how to live"

"we can live out our lives in either resentment or in gratitude - there is no middle ground."

Notes from book club discussion, three main topics of discussion.
1. Summary of literature on philosophy of friendship. Aristotelian idea of friendship as pursuit of truth, friendship as sustaining ambiguity, friendship as a model for relationship with the divine, Augustine’s idea that friendship allows an understanding of embodied truth.
2. Exploration of gratitude and clarification of Catholic theologians are talking about when they talk about God. Particularly for group full of enlightenment atheists that comprise my book club.
3. Burrell doesn’t tell us what he means by truth, we never get “there” and sustaining the journey seems to be the point.