For Aristotle, the closer in equality two friends were, the deeper and more real their friendship could be. Any kind of inequality among friends subverted and threatened the legitimacy of that friendship.
Power-dynamics alter relationships. For Aristotle, and it seems for contemporary culture writ large, democratic friendships, equal friendships, are best. Anything unequal should be viewed with suspect.
A problem with such an arrangement is that it ignores the way in which the vast majority of real friendships come into being, for they are often unequal and enjoy variations in their constituent arrangements of power. Chief of all friendships to be thus ignored is the friendship of God. How does the kind of friendship which exists between God and Moses (Ex. 33:11), for instance, make any stab at equality?
Christ calls his disciples “friends” and astounds them, for the power relations are steep (Jn. 15:14).
Christina Casagrande has explored the way in which the role of “master” and “servant” situate the friendship between Frodo and Sam. Frodo is Sam’s master, Sam is his servant. And yet, by the time Samwise alone assails the tower of Cirith Ungol to rescue his friend, he has become the “master” and Frodo the one who obeys his commands to eat, dress, and follow (Casagrande delightfully notes that Tolkien calls the chapter “the choices of master Samwise” underscoring this transformation).
She notes that such a transformation in the dynamics of their relationship, far from achieving an equality of persons, instead reconfigures the dynamics of patronage so that power between friends ceases to exist on a simple spectrum and instead fluctuates over time, and in more than one dimension.
As Chris Bruno and I argued in our contribution to the forthcoming volume on Tolkien and Theology, the friendship between Frodo and Sam follows the same logic as the friendship between Jonathan and David and Naomi and Ruth. The Master-Servant / patron-client dynamics are maintained, and yet, at varying times and in different moments, are altered, reconfigured, and reforged.
Among friends I find the idol-goal of equal friend a thing that tends towards despair. “Somebody just like me, my equal, my other self.” When we make equality the necessary gateway to union, we raise up an illusory target, and set ourselves up for profound tristia. The Bible, and Tolkien, offer us good news: there is something better than finding my perfect equal. I can be one in friendship with a whole array of different persons because the criterion for friendship is not equality of powers but the willingness to lay any and all those powers down for those we love.
There is no truer friendship than that (Jn. 15:13).