Loyalty

Eric Felten: When Loyalty to Family Conflicts with Loyalty to God: "'The trust you place in men is a total loss,'"

"Medieval monk Thomas of Kempis and Mahatma Gandhi came from very different faiths and lived in very different times. But both argued that friendship was a threat to the relationship we have with God. The problem is loyalty. If you have good friends, you have obligations to them, and those obligations may entail standing with them even if they are in the wrong. (Mark Twain called this the true office of friendship, because after all, anyone can stand with you when you're in the right.) But supporting a wrong can obviously put us at odds with God. If your only friend is Jesus, says Thomas of Kempis, you won't be put in that jam: 'The trust you place in men is a total loss,' he writes, but by contrast, God's love 'is loyal and lasts.' Gandhi renounced friendship and its entanglements this way: 'I am of the opinion that all exclusive intimacies are to be avoided,' he wrote in his autobiography. 'He who would be friends with God must remain alone.'