Love and
Responsibility goes into great depth about the difference between Comradeship
and Friendship; so much so, that I think Comradeship deserves its own formula
as does Karol Wojtyla[1]! He emphasizes the objective qualifiers[2] in
Comradeship as prerequisites for friendship.
In other words, somewhat like sympathy, comradeship is a great aid to
friendship. I would attempt to formulate
it like this, with explanation to follow:
ᵾ Work
or ᵾ Company + ᴲ individual’s role at work or company → ᵾ public ᴲ identity with
both ᴲ role & ᵾ Company
Wojtyla’s
argument for the value in comradery is that it fosters community; it
essentially brings the existential into the universal. While not sacramental, like a marriage
involving the friendship between a man and a woman, comradeship does allow for
a kind of stewardship of family in the broader environment of neighborhood and city,
etc. Simply put, it brings people
together for a common purpose akin to solidarity.
In other
sections of Love and Responsibility, he calls the process of fostering
community “integrating”[3]
the exclusive love between man and woman into the broader network of
relationships. He even warns that if a
couple fails to integrate; their own relationship may not succeed. In terms of comradery then, it can determine
the success or failure of a friendship.
Seen
side by side, the two formulas (friendship and comradeship) look like this. *Please note, sympathy as defined by Wojtyla simply means "shared life together":
ᴲ Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills- ᵾ -( ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy, ᴲ Forgiveness & ᵾ Reconciliation) → ᴲ Virtue of Hope ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy) = Friendship
ᵾ Work
or ᵾ Company + ᴲ individual’s role at work or company → ᵾ public ᴲ identity with
both ᴲ role & ᵾ Company = Comradeship
Integrated
together, I would say they look like this (where “Comradeship” respresents its
own formula in the form of just the single word) :
ᴲ Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills- ᵾ -( Comradeship ᵾ, ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy, ᴲ Forgiveness & ᵾ Reconciliation) → ᴲ Virtue of Hope ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy) = Friendship
I added “Comradeship”
to the “Conformity of Wills” section of the Friendship formula on account of it
being integral to function of community.
Even St. Paul refers to the “proper functioning of each part” of the
Body of Christ, and if certain parts compete or are envious of each other, then
functioning is disintegrated.
[1] Wojtyla,
Karol. Love and Responsibility. “From Sympathy to Friendship”. P. 94 Ignatius: San Francisco, 1993
[2]
Ibid
[3] Wojtyla,
Karol. Love and Responsibility. “The Problem of Integrating Love”. P. 114-118 Ignatius: San Francisco, 1993
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Fr. John Nepil has a thorough article on the quality of certain friendships: pleasant or true, according to Aristotle and the process of either making beer or scotch. I found it interesting in that the chief distinguisher between a true friendship and a pleasant one is reconciliation. In other words, true friendship—like the intense process of making scotch (chemical change and transformation after distilling) —requires painful and transforming demands of forgiveness and reconciliation. His approach adds wholly new (ᴲ) existential and (ᵾ) universal qualifiers to my formula for friendship derived from Karol Wojtyla: ᴲ Sympathy→ Conformity of Wills- ᵾ -(ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy, ᴲ Forgiveness & ᵾ Reconciliation) → ᴲ Virtue of Hope ᵾ (ᴲ Trust & ᴲ Sympathy)
