Truth Unites - Anselm on Friendship: What the Modern World is Missing

Episode Date: November 6, 2022

Here I unpack Anselm's view of friendship, which reveals one of our culture's biggest blind spots: loneliness.   For Anselm's letters, vol. 1: https://www.amazon.com/Letters-St-Anselm-Canterbury/dp/0879077964/  For Richard Southern's biography of Anselm: https://www.amazon.com/St-Anselm-Landscape-Richard-Southern/dp/0521438187/  For a helpful book on friendship, check out Drew Hunter's Made for  Friendship: The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our  Joys: https://www.amazon.com/Made-Friendship-Relationship-Sorrows-Doubles/dp/143355819X Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

This video is going to be about Anselm's Doctrine of Friendship. I'm so excited to share this with you all. This is the part of his theology, and I would have to say all pre-modern theology that has surprised me the most in terms of how relevant it is to the modern world. So let me start off with a metaphor or kind of a thought experiment. Suppose that someone from our time, early 21st century who lives in New York City were to go in a time machine and go back to the Middle Ages and live in a monastery. and then suppose one of the monks in that monastery switched places and came to New York City early 21st century. Here's an interesting question. Which person would have a greater sense of culture shock? Which person would be more indignant at the sins and flaws of the world he's now trying to understand,

which would be more bewildered, you know? And that's an interesting thing to think about. You can see it going both ways. You can imagine the monk walking around times. square, just bewildered. You know, it'd probably be hard to convince him that the iPhone is not magic. You can imagine the modern person finding a lot about the Middle Ages very bracing, you know, superstitious beliefs that he encounters religious violence. You know, it's not hard to see things in that direction. But I suspect, and this is coming out of a lot of thought about

this, that in many ways and in the ways that touch the deepest place, of the human heart and the deepest places of the human soul, the medieval monk in our world would be more bewildered, more indignant, and would have graver criticisms, graver critiques. Our world is more technologically advanced, but it is lonelier. We have higher mental health issues in our culture. I'm thinking especially of the modern West. We have longer lifespans, but we have higher suicide rates. We have... rejected a lot of the superstitious beliefs of the past, but we've also lost a lot of the faith of the past. We have a flashier world, but all too often we've lost a sense of meaning and

transcendence. There's something very thin about so much of the modern world, and I suspect the monk would see this and see the restlessness and feel that something massive had been lost in the passing of a thousand years. I don't know, maybe don't, don't, don't, don't, don't overthink the thought experiment, but at least it kind of starts us thinking here. All right, so all that is a way to highlight a question that comes up of if we want to learn from the past, because obviously we don't want to romanticize the past either. You know, the transition from pre-modern to modern involves, it's complicated. It's not all good to bad or all bad to good, you know, but the simple fact is this, we can learn a great deal from the past. And we have characteristic blind spots in the modern

world that we can come to understand better by learning from people in the past. If you watch my videos, you know, I'm so excited about this. I think there's just, it's like, it's not unlike time travel or cultural travel and hearing from voices and perspectives that are so different from our own that don't just have different answers to the questions. They have different questions themselves. And so a big focus in my academic work is on theological retrieval, learning from the past and so forth. Well, in this video, I want to talk about what I believe may be our culture's biggest blind spot, and that is loneliness.

I feel this way about it, and I might, you know, I don't want to put this down too hard. This is more how I see things. I'm curious what you think. But in the modern world, we do have a lot of problems we're more aware of. So we're aware that we have issues with mental health issues, greater, anxiety rates. We're mostly aware that we have issues with greed, material greed, issues of sexual libertinism. You can watch TV and see a lot of things, but I think one of the things that we don't see as much is the sheer loneliness. I remember, so I studied St. Anselm. He was a medieval

monk, lived in the 11th century, 1033 to 1109, so a little bit over. And I, you know, when you write a dissertation on someone you really want to do your homework. So I spent a lot of time in his letters because letters and sermons I've found are a unique way to learn about someone as distinct from like theological treatises. Sometimes you get a more personal angle and you get to learn with Anselm lots of amazing medieval names and you'll hear some of those in a second. What surprised me most out of anything that I learned from Anselm what surprised me the most was how high a view of friendship he has. And I never expected that. You know, you never, I didn't see that coming. You think friendship. But here's how I could put it. I'll quote C.S. Lewis. As with so many times in my life, I cannot

possibly say something better than C.S. Lewis has said it. And his treatise, his treatment of this in the four loves is so good. He basically makes the observation that in the ancient world, friendship was considered the highest form of love. And in the modern world, romantic or sexual love is considered the highest expression of love, and he's pointing out all the significance of that difference. Here's what he says at one point. To the ancients, friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all the loves, the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world in comparison ignores it. It is something quite marginal, not a main course in life's banquet, a diversion, something that fills up the chinks of one's time. That is, you know,

one of the simple, sometimes things are really deep and complicated, but sometimes there's just simple reasons. Like one of the simple reasons for that is the transience of our world. People move around so much. And for most of human civilization, people didn't move so much. You kind of have your community and you belong to that community. But there's incredible loneliness in the modern world. And I think it's a huge feature of our world. I think it's very significant to think about theologically and as the church. The implications go on and on and on. So let me get into this just briefly. This will be a brief video. I want to talk about how I saw this through Anselm. And then at the end of this video, I have some personal updates to

share just a little bit about my travel. Those of you have been praying for me, future video plans. But basically what's happening is I'm reading through Anselm's letters. Walter Frolic, if I can pull these up without making too much noise on my microphone here, has translated and annotated his letters and awesome. They're not that expensive. You can buy those that they're really interesting to read. Again, you get to know him at a personal level. One of the things that you see over and over and over as he's writing letters, especially to his other monks that he's geographically separated from, is the intensity of these expressions of love and yearning for these other monks, so much so that there's discussion in the contemporary academic literature about whether Anselm had homosexual longings

for these other monks. And people say the same thing about David and Jonathan in the Bible, which I'll come back to. I think that reflects more about us and our impoverished view of friendship than it does about Anselm. One of the things that Richard Southern notes, this is Anselm's premier biographer. I just grab this off the shelf. There's one book you want to read about Anselm other than just reading Anselm himself. This would probably be a great one. It's a... fantastic biography. But Southern is talking about that. He's saying, no, you didn't use letters to express secret longings like that. Anselm knew these letters would be widely circulated and read, and they were expressions of public theology. And the fact is that there's nothing inappropriate

about it. It simply reflects a very exalted view of friendship. And I'll just mention one aspect of this. and this is this idea of being spiritually united to another person. This is really interesting to think about. Anselm has this idea that there's a kind of spiritual union that happens between two souls through love. And this doesn't start with Anselm. This is all throughout the Christian tradition. It even goes back to some pagan thinkers as well. And so one of the recurrent motifs in Anselm's letters is this sense of agony at a geographical separation from this person

because their souls have been united in love, and yet they're geographically separate, and it causes this deep pain. And so here's kind of a standard example. This happens. This is not exceptional in any way. He's writing to Lonzo the novice. I'm telling you, the names are really funny in these medieval letters. He says, when I consider most beloved, your desire and mine by which we long for one another,

there's one thing which consoles me about our separation, that through divine mercy, I hope for our eternal union in the life to come. So you're reading and you're thinking, that's kind of interesting. He's talking about the other monk. What does it mean to have an eternal union with another monk? And he explains it in the context of the letter as two souls being bound together through love.

It's a union of love, a spiritual union. Elsewhere, there's another monk named Henry that he's writing to, and he describes it as those whose minds are welded into one by the fires of love. And it's the same idea there. he's talking about the agony of physical separation in light of this spiritual union. There's one letter that Anselm is writing to L'Enfranc, who is his superior, and he's basically explaining that the separation of this other monk has so disrupted his own heart that he cannot bear to remain apart from this other monk.

You know, you can understand why the modern academic discussion can go in certain directions, but I don't think that is right. I think part of it is, again, we've just lost something of this in the modern world. It's kind of like Sam and Frodo and the Lord of the Rings. We don't really have that many friendships like that, that like Deep or David and Jonathan in the Bible. Let me give one other example where you can see a little bit more. So if you've heard of the term paraccharesis, this is the idea of mutual indwelling or interpenetration. People use this word to describe the relationship.

between the father, son, and spirit, and the godhead, or sometimes between the two natures of Christ, divine and human. And Psalms writing a letter to Gundulf, G-U-L-F, Gundolf, isn't that a great medieval name? And what he's talking about sounds like perichesis. He says, for since your soul and my soul can by no means endure to be absent from each other, but are incessantly entwined together. There is nothing in us that is missing from each other except that we are not present to each other bodily.

Think about that quote. It's almost like he's saying these two souls have become so intertwined with each other through love that they have everything in common except physical location, hence the agony of being separated. And boy, if there's one thing, that, you know, in the modern world we can learn a great deal about from the pre-modern Christian tradition and honestly just from the pre-modern world to some extent, I really wonder if

this deep loss of friendship that we have, which I think sometimes drives us to over-emphasize romantic love and look for too much from that. Read C.S. Lewis, if you want a fuller portrait of how wonderful a thing friendship is in this life, it is such a gift that God has given. And then, so this blossoms in Anselm's doctrine of heaven because a big, what my dissertation is all about is basically a commentary on the proslogion. Read through, this is a text of Anselm, read through the book in the climactic portions in chapters 24 and 25, he's just reflecting on how the joy of heaven will be multiplied by the love of heaven. So in heaven, I will have a perfect joy and then I will love my neighbor as myself perfectly. I'll obey the golden rule perfectly. So the person

next to me in heaven, I will be equally happy at their joy as at my own, because I'm loving my neighbor as myself. So now my joy is now 200%. It just got doubled. Now add in a third person, now it in a fourth. Now add in all the angels. There's this perfect union of love that happens that results in this infinite multiplication of joy because it's reverberating back and forth. as their joy redounds my joy, it works back to them. And on and on and on, hence multiplication. It's one of those things that sometimes we don't think, sometimes we tend to, without even realizing it,

think about heaven in a more individualistic way. And it's just pretty awesome to anticipate that. And I think this is something very powerful that we have as followers of Jesus Christ to offer the world today. This isn't just a weird, media evil idea. I believe that hearts, modern hearts, are aching for friendship, aching for community, aching to be known. And, you know, even in the Bible, don't see this as just Anselm. This is biblical.

For Samuel 18, the relationship of David and Jonathan, it doesn't just say that Jonathan loved David as himself, an expression of the golden rule. You see the union idea. The soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David. And then in verse four of this chapter, when he gives you, he gives you. him the robe and armor and sword, the reason that's so significant is that Jonathan was giving up his right to be king. He was the son of Saul, but he's recognizing David, who had been anointed as king two chapters earlier, and he's recognizing he's saying, he's giving up the throne for David. That's

how much he loves him. That's the depth of their friendship. I think sometimes today we think of friendship as just like a pragmatic thing, like, oh, it's great to have friends, but we don't think of it as a spiritual thing. And this is one of the things we can learn from church history. It's a blind spot. This is a major blind spot in the modern world. So what do we do about it? Two ideas. Number one is as the church, this is one way we can show a better way to the brokenness and lostness of our world. This is one way, you know, there's such barrenness and flatness in the modern world. People are aching for transcendence. Friendship, just modeling genuine love, genuine community is one way we can make the gospel and the implications of the gospel a little more tangible to the people around us who are

often without realizing it very lonely. And another application is it will enrich our anticipation of heaven to remember that the fullest realization of this will be in heaven. And how awesome of a thought is it that our joy in heaven will multiply over and over because of the joy of all the saints, all the angels, and then, as Anselm directs it, God's own joy. Anselm has so much helpful treatment of heaven. I mean, at one point he says, do you realize in heaven you'll be omnipotent? And I was like, what? And then he's saying, your will be perfectly united to the will of God. God is omnipotent. Therefore, in a sense, you're omnipotent, because whatever you desire will come to pass, because your will be made perfect and united to gods. That's just the kind of thing.

Like, I never thought about that before reading Anselm. So he's really enriched my understanding of heaven as well. So hopefully that could be interesting to somebody out there, just to spark thoughts. This is something we need to think about a little bit more today. Let me finish this video by just saying thanks to my patrons especially, but everybody who watches my videos and who is praying for me, as you know, and I put up a notice on my blog, it's been a really busy fall. I was in Chicago for about one week speaking at a symposium at Wheaton College and then at a conference, the Center for Pastor Theologians Conference, really enjoyed both of those experiences. And then I flew down to Florida and there was an apologetics conference at Palm Beach Atlantic

University. So that was a 10-day stretch. Got back late Saturday night, big day at church yesterday. Today's a Monday. And this coming Saturday, I fly to Alabama to speak at the Beeson Divinity School alumni conference. The week after that, it's ETS in Denver. And I'll just go for one day there, the evangelical theological society. So it's just been, now that is very unusual for me. I don't have a lot more. I haven't had as much and I won't have it. It's just this unusual concentration. So my mom was out with my wife helping with the kids and stuff.

So my family's taken care of. But I just asked for prayer. A lot of you were praying for me. Thank you for praying. The reason I'm kind of explaining that in addition to asking for prayer is to explain why some of my videos lately have been more repeats of old discussions or a sermon. and then why in November and December, I'll just be throttling back a notch. I'll try to do a video each Tuesday, but there will be some weeks where I won't have one.

We're doing a vacation after ETS. I'll be totally unplugged. So I appreciate your understanding of that. I've got the debate with Trent Horn coming up. I'm really excited about that. Pines with Aquinas, Matt Fraud, those guys invited us to do that. I feel honored to do that. That's on March 2nd.

so I'll need to prepare for that. I've actually mapped out every day of my life between now and the end of May. And then I'm taking next summer, just so you know, I'm taking the entire summer off. I'm not going to do any videos, any interviews, any speaking, any traveling, anything except just love my family, love my church. Because I find it's okay for me to be busy, but then I just have to take breaks. And so my book will be due on May 31st. That's why that is the deadline.

and then there may be a potential other dialogue I'm doing in April. I'll say more about that as those plans solidify. And then, yeah, I won't go through all the details. But so if I say, I got a lot going on. So I appreciate your patience. I have a full-time job and I have five kids. And then I've got writing things and these other things that I'm doing, the traveling and stuff. So with my YouTube channel, I feel committed to this to do it.

But I really appreciate your understanding that I'm also committed. to being wise and stewarding my time well. So I appreciate your understanding as things would be a little more spotty over the next two months as I'm just wanting to prioritize things wisely and take Sabbath rest when I need to. So all right, that's it. Thanks for watching, everybody. Thanks for your prayers about my travels. God bless you.

Actually, I will say one more thing. Some of the videos I'm having come out in December are more in the apologetics vein, some dialogues and things like that. So that'll be really fun. By apologetics, I mean general. like existence of God, resurrection of Christ, that kind of thing. So that'll be fun to have a little more focus on that as well. All right.

Thanks for watching everybody. God bless you.