The Threefold Cord

Scripture is the King James Version. The philosophers and poets are read from public-domain sources — Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero's Laelius, Bacon's and Emerson's essays, and the classic quotation cyclopedias; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is quoted with credit.

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: friendship — the great and ordinary good.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

There is an old complaint that the best things in life are the ones we notice least. We would notice, if it were taken away. But while we have it, it hides in plain sight, disguised as the furniture of an ordinary evening — a shared meal, a walk, a long and pointless conversation that we would not trade for anything. Friendship is like that. We keep waiting for it to feel profound, and it mostly just feels like doing life together. Tonight we want to say a slow word in its favor, and to let some of the great voices say it better than we can. Not the romance of friendship — the greatness of it. The plain, structural, load-bearing greatness of having someone beside you.

We begin, as we often do, with the oldest working philosopher in the Scriptures, the Preacher of Ecclesiastes — a man who has looked at everything under the sun and found most of it to be vapor, a chasing after wind. He is not sentimental. He is the last man on earth to sell you a feeling. And this is exactly why it matters when he stops, in the middle of his great disillusionment, and points to friendship as one of the few things that survives his audit.

Listen to how he sets it up. From the book of Ecclesiastes:

Then I returned, and I saw vanity under the sun. There is one alone, and there is not a second; yea, he hath neither child nor brother: yet is there no end of all his labour; neither is his eye satisfied with riches; neither saith he, For whom do I labour, and bereave my soul of good? This is also vanity, yea, it is a sore travail.

There is the picture. A man alone. Not a poor man — a rich one. His hands never stop; his eye is never full; and one day, in a rare quiet moment, the question surfaces from underneath all the labor: For whom? For whom do I do all of this? He has no answer, because he has no one. And the Preacher, who has called almost everything vanity, calls this by a sharper name. A sore travail. A grievous evil. To have everything, and no one to have it with.

And then, against that darkness, he lays down the plainest and most practical case for friendship ever written. He goes on:

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Notice what he does not say. He does not say your friend will complete you. He does not say you will gaze into one another's eyes and feel your soul answered. He is a working man, and he gives you the working case. Two get more done. If one falls, the other picks him up. Two bodies keep each other warm on a cold night. Two can stand off an attacker that would overwhelm one. It is almost embarrassingly practical. And that is the point. The Preacher is trying to rescue friendship from our expectations, which are the very thing that kills it. He is saying: this is not a luxury you earn once your life is impressive enough. This is insulation. This is survival. This is the difference between falling and being lifted, between freezing and being warm, between being overrun and standing your ground. Woe to him that is alone when he falleth. Everyone falls. The only question is whether there is a hand.

Hold that image — two travelers, and a third strand that makes the cord — because we are going to keep meeting it tonight in the mouths of people who never read Ecclesiastes and arrived at the same place anyway.

Go back four centuries before Christ, to a pagan in Athens who set out to map the whole territory of the good life, and found he could not finish the map without a long chapter on friends. Aristotle. He is not a devotional writer; he is a scientist of human happiness, cataloguing it the way a botanist catalogues plants. And when he comes to friendship he stops being clinical, almost in spite of himself.

Aristotle writes:

Next would seem properly to follow a dissertation on Friendship: because, in the first place, it is either itself a virtue or connected with virtue; and next it is a thing most necessary for life, since no one would choose to live without friends though he should have all the other good things in the world.

Read that again slowly. No one would choose to live without friends though he should have all the other good things in the world. That is the philosopher's version of the Preacher's rich man alone under the sun. Give a person everything — health, money, honor, power — and take away friends, and no one, Aristotle says, would take the deal. He presses on the point:

In fact, men who are rich or possessed of authority and influence are thought to have special need of friends: for where is the use of such prosperity if there be taken away the doing of kindnesses of which friends are the most usual and most commendable objects?

Prosperity with no one to be generous toward is not prosperity. It is storage. And then Aristotle turns the coin over to the dark side, the side the Preacher named, and he lands on the very same word:

In poverty moreover and all other adversities men think friends to be their only refuge.

Their only refuge. When everything else is stripped away, the one shelter left standing is another person who stays. And here is the small marvel: to make his case, this Greek philosopher reaches back and quotes an even older Greek, the poet Homer, who had described two warriors going out together, and Aristotle simply borrows the line — "They two together going" — as if to say, there, that is the whole of it, two together, that is what I mean. Two are better than one. The Preacher in Jerusalem and the philosopher in Athens, without ever meeting, keep finishing each other's sentence.

But Aristotle does something the Preacher leaves implicit; he sorts friendship into kinds, and the sorting is worth your attention, because most of the disappointment we feel about friends comes from confusing the kinds. He names the raw materials of it without decoration:

Not everything indiscriminately, but some peculiar matter alone, is the object of this affection; that is to say, what is good, or pleasurable, or useful.

Good, pleasurable, or useful. From those three, Aristotle says, come three kinds of friendship: we befriend people because they are useful to us, or because they are pleasant to us, or because they are good. Friendships of use and friendships of pleasure, he says, are real, but they are fragile, because they do not love the person; they love what the person provides. When the usefulness ends, or the pleasure fades, the friendship dissolves, because its reason has dissolved. And then he describes the third and highest kind:

That then is perfect Friendship which subsists between those who are good and whose similarity consists in their goodness: for these men wish one another's good in similar ways; in so far as they are good; and those are specially friends who wish good to their friends for their sakes, because they feel thus towards them on their own account and not as a mere matter of result.

There is the definition to keep. Those are specially friends who wish good to their friends for their sakes. Not for what the friend returns. Not because it is useful, not merely because it is pleasant, but because you have come to want that person's good the way you want your own — for their sake, on their own account. Aristotle says this kind is rarer and slower and more permanent, because goodness itself, he says, has in it a principle of permanence. Use runs out. Pleasure cools. But two people who simply want each other to flourish have tied a knot that time cannot easily pull loose. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

The Romans took up the same theme, and no one took it up more beautifully than Cicero, in a little book he wrote near the end of his life on friendship — on friendship — putting the words in the mouth of an old man remembering a friend he had lost. It is one of the warmest things to survive from the ancient world. Cicero gives us a definition that has never really been improved.

Cicero:

Friendship is nothing else than entire fellow feeling as to all things human and divine with mutual good-will and affection; and I doubt whether anything better than this, wisdom alone excepted, has been given to man by the immortal gods.

Nothing better, except wisdom itself. And notice — entire fellow feeling as to all things human and divine. Not agreement about trivia; a shared sense of the whole of things, the human and the divine together. Cicero, like Aristotle, roots it in character. He will not let you have deep friendship on the cheap:

It is virtue itself that produces and sustains friendship, and without virtue can friendship by any possibility exist.

And then Cicero gives the line that generations have carried in their pockets, the answer to the question of what a friend actually does for the texture of a life. He says a friend

at once enhances the lustre of prosperity, and by dividing and sharing adversity lessens its burden.

That is the whole economy of friendship in a single breath. Your joys, shared, shine brighter; your sorrows, divided, weigh less. It is the Preacher's arithmetic set to music. Two are better than one — because two double the reward and halve the fall. Good news, carried alone, curdles a little. The same news, run to a friend's door, becomes twice itself. And grief, that would crush one person flat, gets picked up at both ends when there are two to carry it.

Cicero cannot let the thought go. He turns it over and over, almost pleading:

How can life be worth living, if devoid of the calm trust reposed by friend in friend? What sweeter joy than in the kindred soul, whose converse differs not from self-communion?

And he marvels that friendship, unlike every other good, fits every occasion:

Friendship combines the largest number of utilities. Wherever you turn, it is at hand. No place shuts it out. It is never unseasonable, never annoying.

Wealth is only good for spending; power, only for the homage it brings; health, only for freedom from pain. Each of the other goods is useful for its one thing. But friendship is good everywhere, at every hour, in every weather — never out of season, never in the way. And then Cicero says the deepest word the pagan world ever managed on this subject:

He, indeed, who looks into the face of a friend beholds, as it were, a copy of himself. Thus the absent are present, and the poor are rich, and the weak are strong, and — what seems stranger still — the dead are alive.

The dead are alive. Because a friend, once truly given, is not wholly lost even to death; he goes on being honored, and carried, and loved, in the one who remains.

Sixteen centuries later, an Englishman with a lawyer's cool eye — Francis Bacon, who was nobody's sentimentalist — sat down to write a short essay on friendship, and arrived at Cicero's very arithmetic, and filed it to a sharper point. Bacon first names the loneliness that friendlessness really is:

For a crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love.

A crowd is not company. You can be surrounded and still be entirely alone; a room full of faces is only a gallery of pictures, and all its talk only a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love in it. And then Bacon names the mechanism — what a friend actually does to the weight of a life:

This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves. For there is no man that imparteth his joys to his friend, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his griefs to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

Redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves. There it is a third time — Solomon's two are better than one, Cicero's dividing and sharing, now in Bacon's plain English. Speak your good news to a friend and the joy doubles in the speaking. Speak your grief to a friend and it is halved in the telling. This is not poetry; it is the oldest observed fact about our kind. We are built to be carried, and to carry.

Bacon adds a second gift of friendship, and it is one we rarely name — that a friend does not only steady the heart, he clears the head:

Friendship maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness, and confusion of thoughts. Whosoever hath his mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth them more orderly, he seeth how they look when they are turned into words: finally, he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour's discourse, than by a day's meditation.

He waxeth wiser than himself. You have felt this. You go to a friend tangled, unable to see your own situation, and you begin to talk — and somewhere in the talking the knot loosens, and you hear yourself say the thing you did not know you knew. You did not go for advice. You went to think out loud in the presence of someone who loves you, and the daylight came. An hour of that, Bacon says, is worth a day of brooding alone.

Even our own careful, modern reference books, when they try to define this thing coldly, cannot quite keep the warmth out. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, cataloguing the concept, puts it this way — that friendship is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other's sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. For the other's sake. Even the encyclopedia arrives where Aristotle stood: the mark of a friend is that they want your good for your sake, and not for the use of you.

And a New England voice, much nearer our own time, named the thing the ancients kept circling but rarely said outright — that a friend is the one person before whom you can finally stop performing. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud.

Before him I may think aloud. Consider how rare that is. Every man alone is sincere, Emerson says; but at the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins — we start managing our face, choosing our words, covering our thought under a hundred folds. A friend is the one exception, the one before whom the performance stops and the undermost garments of pretense come off, and you can simply be what you are. That, Emerson said, is why a friend is so astonishing a thing — that your own being should be reiterated in a foreign form; so that, in his phrase, a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature. The masterpiece of nature. Not the sunset, not the sea. The person across the table who already knows the worst of you, and stayed.

Now let the poets in, because the philosophers give us the structure and the poets give us the ache. For centuries, when men and women sat down to write about friends, a few notes kept sounding. The first is simply how rare the real thing is, and how easily we mistake the counterfeit. Shakespeare, in an early poem, sets the counterfeit and the true side by side:

Words are easy, like the wind; faithful friends are hard to find.

Words are easy, like the wind. We have all had friendships that were entirely made of easy words, wind that felt like weather for a while and then blew somewhere else. Faithful friends — the ones who are still there when the words get hard — are the rare find. The Roman poet Ovid said the same thing more grimly, and it has hardened into a proverb:

Prosperity makes friends, and adversity tries them.

Prosperity is a magnet; it gathers people. Adversity is a sieve; it lets most of them fall through, and shows you the few that were metal all along. This is the exact test the Preacher and Aristotle and Cicero all named — the friend is the one who is there in the fall, in the cold, in the refuge of last resort. Anyone will drink your wine. The friend helps you carry the coffin.

And precisely because that friend is so rare, the poets kept insisting on the friend's incalculable worth. Edward Young, in his long night-poem, weighed a true friend against every risk a man could take and said:

A friend is worth all hazards we can run.

All of them. There is no danger not worth braving, no cost not worth paying, for the thing itself. And Sir Philip Sidney gave friendship perhaps its most tender office — that a true friend is the one who does not desert you at your lowest, who stays precisely at the point where staying is hard. Longfellow, translating an old German love-and-friendship song, put the vow into the plainest possible words:

Then come the wild weather, come sleet or come snow, we will stand by each other, however it blow.

However it blow. That is the vow underneath every real friendship, spoken or unspoken. Not, I will enjoy you while the weather is fine. But, when the weather turns — and it will turn — I will still be standing here. Longfellow said elsewhere, in his own voice, what most of us would like to be able to promise someone: that of all who offer you friendship, let me be ever the first, the truest, the nearest.

There is one more note the poets sound, and it is the hardest one, because it cuts against everything we want a friend to be. We want a friend to make us feel good. But the older writers knew that the truest friend is sometimes the one who makes you feel terrible — on purpose, and for love. The novelist Bulwer-Lytton said it flatly: there is no man so friendless but that he can find a friend sincere enough to tell him disagreeable truths. A friend sincere enough to tell you disagreeable truths. That is a strange kind of gift, and a rare one, and the Scriptures, when we turn to them, put it near the very center of what friendship is for.

Because now we come home to the Bible's own portrait of friends, and it is more clear-eyed than our sentiment about it. The Proverbs, that gathered wisdom of Israel, return to friendship again and again, and they are not romantic in the least. They are, if anything, bracing. From the Proverbs:

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

At all times — not merely the convenient ones. And there again is adversity, the sieve, the test, the moment the true one is revealed. But then the Proverbs turn to that harder note the poets touched, the friend who wounds:

Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.

Faithful wounds. What a phrase. An enemy will flatter you; his kisses are lies, told to keep you comfortable and asleep. A friend will hurt you — will tell you the disagreeable truth — and the hurt is faithful, because it is the hurt of someone who wants your good for your sake and cannot stand to watch you walk off the cliff smiling. The Proverbs give this its famous image:

Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.

Two blades, laid against each other, and both come away keener. There is friction in it — sharpening is not gentle — but the friction is the whole point. A friend who never once creates friction has never once sharpened you. And the Proverbs know the sweetness in it too, the counsel that heals rather than cuts:

Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel.

And the Proverbs will not let us treat old friendships as disposable; they command us to keep them, treating a long friendship as a kind of inheritance:

Thine own friend, and thy father's friend, forsake not; neither go into thy brother's house in the day of thy calamity: for better is a neighbour that is near than a brother far off.

Better a neighbour that is near than a brother far off. Blood is not the point; nearness is the point — the friend who is actually there, at the door, in the day of calamity.

And then the verse everyone half-remembers, the one that raises friendship, at its height, above even the bond of blood:

A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.

Closer than a brother. Israel had a name for that friend, and a story to go with it, and it is one of the great friendships of all literature — David, the shepherd boy, and Jonathan, the king's son, who by every rule of politics should have been David's rival and enemy, and instead became the truest friend he would ever have. Hear how it begins. From the first book of Samuel:

And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.

Knit. The soul of the one knit to the soul of the other. Loved him as his own soul — which is exactly Aristotle's definition arriving centuries early and dressed in Hebrew: to wish your friend's good as you wish your own, to love him as yourself. Jonathan will go on to protect David at the cost of his own throne, and he will die in battle before David comes into his kingdom. And when the news reaches David, he sings the most naked lament for a friend in all the Scriptures. From the second book of Samuel:

I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.

Thy love to me was wonderful. There is no romance in it and there is nothing thin about it; it is grief for a friend, full-throated, unashamed, ranked by the mourner himself above every other love he has known. This is the Bible's answer to anyone who thinks friendship is the lesser love, the one you settle for. Passing the love of women. Wonderful. That is how the man after God's own heart wept for his friend.

And there is one more, quieter, and easy to overlook, because it is between two women — one of them a widow, and the other a foreigner who had married into the family and could have gone home free. When Naomi, bereaved and bitter, told her daughter-in-law Ruth to turn back and leave her to her grief, Ruth would not go. Her answer is one of the most beautiful vows of loyalty ever spoken. We read it at weddings now, but it was first spoken between two friends bound by nothing but love:

Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me.

If ought but death part thee and me. There is the friend who refuses to be sent away — who ties her whole future to yours at the exact moment you have nothing left to offer her but your poverty and your God. Come the wild weather, come sleet or come snow; she will stand by you, however it blow.

Which brings us, on this last night's hour, to the friend behind all the friends. Because everything we have heard tonight — the two who lift each other, the philosopher's refuge, Cicero's fellow-feeling in all things human and divine, the wounds that are faithful, the love that is knit soul to soul and stronger than death — all of it turns out to be a rumor of someone. The Preacher said woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up. And there is One who came looking for us precisely when we had fallen, and were alone, and had no one to help us up.

On the night before he died, this One gathered the few friends he had, and he redefined the word forever. From the Gospel according to John:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you.

I have called you friends. He might have called them servants, subjects, students, sinners — all of it would have been true and none of it would have been wrong. He called them friends. And then he did the thing that Ecclesiastes and Aristotle and Cicero could describe but could not accomplish. He lifted the one who had fallen — reached down into the ditch where we lay in our sin and death and pulled us out. He warmed the one who was freezing — took our cold guilt onto himself and laid his own righteousness over us like a shared cloak on a cold night. He stood off the enemy that would have overwhelmed us alone — went out to meet the strong man, the lion who hunts, and would not let us be taken. Greater love hath no man. He laid down his life for his friends.

And now hear the Preacher's last strand, the one we passed over. Two are better than one — but he does not end at two. And a threefold cord, he says, is not quickly broken. Where did the third strand come from? The Scriptures answer that friendship, in the end, does not begin with us at all. It begins in God, who was never alone, who was never a solitary power in an empty heaven, but was from before all worlds a fellowship — Father, Son, and Spirit, wishing one another's good, glorifying one another, bound in a love that has no beginning and cannot be broken. Friendship is woven into the fabric of reality because the One who made reality is himself a friendship. The threefold cord was tied before the foundation of the world. And when he made us in his image, he made us for this — not to labor alone under the sun with our eye never satisfied, asking for whom, but to be knit, soul to soul, to him and to one another.

So do not despise the ordinariness of it. The shared meal is holy ground. The long and pointless conversation is a means of grace. The friend who tells you the disagreeable truth is doing the work of God on you. Do not wait for friendship to feel profound before you will value it; value it the way you value bread, and eat it daily, and it will keep you alive. Two are better than one. A friend is worth all hazards we can run. And there is a Friend that sticketh closer than a brother, who has called you, of all things, his friend.

We will close, as the church has closed a thousand gatherings of friends, with the hymn John Fawcett wrote when he decided he could not, after all, bear to leave his little congregation — a hymn about the tie that binds hearts together, and the pain of parting, and the hope of meeting again.

Blest be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred minds Is like to that above.

Before our Father's throne We pour our ardent prayers; Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one, Our comforts and our cares.

We share our mutual woes, Our mutual burdens bear; And often for each other flows The sympathizing tear.

When we asunder part, It gives us inward pain; But we shall still be joined in heart, And hope to meet again.

Sleep well. Call your friend tomorrow. Good night.