The Kiss of Friendship: Establishing a Culture of Friendship in a Culture of Sex

By Matthew Jacobs

What if friendship were the force that makes the world go round. What if friendship were the solution to the loneliness so evident in the rates of suicide in our modern society. What if friendship were the real intimacy being sought after in our culture of sex—of sexual extravagance. In short, what if friendship were the key that unlocked the secret door of the universe unleashing a transcendent form of love that only God can give. This book offers you that key.

This book not only points out that friendship in its full classical splendor is a good thing that can rectify many evils of our culture of sex but also argues that friendship is a way of life. Moving through the classical Graeco-Roman pleasurable, useful and virtuous friendships and then mining through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, the author offers the modern world a profound new understanding of friendship: supernatural perfect friendship.

With a collab-chapter on social media and friendship by the author's very own supernatural perfect friend, the author paints a never before seen picture of friendship. It ranges from the ideal model of supernatural perfect friendship to tension between friends, including why there should be any tension at all, to the sexualization of friendship in modern culture; on to how and why we should expect the whole spectrum of sexual preferences and expressions we see today given the classical and traditional understanding of man to the law of friendship and finally the proposal and covenant between those whom God has appointed to be special supernatural friends. The author also offers unique insights in each chapter on the human lips. He argues that the lips' two acts of speaking and kissing are absolutely essential to human happiness and flourishing in general as well as to friendship in particular.

The Kiss of Friendship is a seamless argument for the superiority of a culture of friendship over a culture of sex. And it proposes that supernatural perfect friendship is a way of life, a vocation to be discerned, a calling from God that must be answered. For those overwhelmed with and disheartened by the sexual life of whatever preference, The Kiss of Friendship gives a new way of fulfilling your sexuality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ThomasDismas
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223677758

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Kiss of Friendship

Greet one another with the kiss of charity. (1 Pet. 5:14, KJV)

The lips are the sacrament of the soul. They are the primary vehicle by which the soul reveals and manifests its interior life to the world in a human way. By them the greatest travesty in the history of the world was caused: the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth (Lk. 22:47-48). And by them the greatest work of God is brought about: the justification of the ungodly (Rom. 10:10; Mt. 12:36-37). If death and life are in the power of the tongue (Pr. 18:21), then hatred and love are in the power of the lips.

Speaking and kissing are the two actions proper to human lips. Both of these actions flow from what we hate and what we love. Our speaking and kissing are always relative to and explained by the object of our hatred and love. Our hatred and our love are unveiled and transmitted from our interior to our exterior life by the means of our lips in speaking and kissing. So what have you been doing with your lips?

The love of Passion

In the classical and traditional understanding of man (male and female), love is the most basic passion (emotion)—even hatred being a result of love. Let me explain. To love, in this very basic sense, is simply to perceive something as somehow good (or fitting or appropriate) for oneself, for one’s well-being. Accordingly, to love something in this sense means, at the same time, that one hates its opposite (i.e., perceives something as somehow evil or unfitting or inappropriate). To love something or someone is to hate whatever or whomever is opposed to the object loved.

Let’s go through some examples.

You look at a cheeseburger and a Mountain Dew and perceive it to be good (or fitting) for yourself, for your well-being (Such could be questioned.), but nonetheless, you are then moved by desire to seek and obtain the perceived good. Having obtained it, you then rest in your object of love and desire and have pleasure or joy. On the other hand, if you saw a plate of cookies and a glass of milk set out (say you were a child) and perceived it to be good for you, for your well-being, moved by desire to obtain it but were interrupted by your mother claiming those cookies to be for Santa Clause, you would hate (perceive as evil or unfitting or opposed to your good) your mother’s intervention, would want to move to avoid such prevention, and having been thwarted in your efforts to obtain the cookies and milk, you would have sorrow or sadness.

These six passions or emotions that I have just articulated (namely, love, desire, pleasure or joy; hatred, avoidance, sorrow or sadness) are called the concupiscible passions. As a result, the love that is at the root of all these passions is called the love of concupiscence. What is common to all forms of this love is self-interest: the love of concupiscence concerns the things that we love for our sake, because they benefit us; we love ourselves in this love.

Now this love isn’t necessarily evil or wrong in itself. We might read the expression we love ourselves in this love and be inclined to think somewhat automatically that this love is equivalent to selfishness. It isn’t; however, it very easily can be.

The old Greek philosopher Aristotle, from the 4th century B.C., had a lot to say about friendship, and we will be drawing upon him a lot throughout this book. When Aristotle spoke of friendship, he described three types or kinds: there was the pleasurable friend (or friend of pleasure), the useful friend (or friend of utility) and the virtuous friend (friendship based on virtue). The love of concupiscence relates to the first two named types of friend. Let us examine this relationship and then come back to the third type later.

The Love of Concupiscence and Friendship

We humans are classically defined as rational animals. We share all the essential attributes of being animals (with the chimpanzees, monkeys, horses, cows etc.) such as nutrition, growth, locomotion (moving from one place to another) and the sensitive life, this last including the five senses (seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting) as well as the passions that we’ve been talking about. But the human’s rational capacity is what specifically differentiates him from all other animals—as a matter of fact, it puts him in a class all his own on the entirety of the earth. Man’s rationality is twofold: intellect and will. By the intellect, the human person is able to know the true and by the will, the same is able to choose the