All Responsible for All
Jan 14, 2026 | By Tori Cook JE ‘27
We’re forgetting how to be friends. Over the past two decades, researchers and social observers alike have noted a steady drift toward isolation above social engagement. People, especially youth, are spending less and less unstructured time with each other, and genuine companionship is ebbing quietly out of our daily routines. One study looking at US trends in social isolation and social engagement from 2003 to 2020 found the average time spent “socially engaged with a non-household member” was 35 minutes in 2003 and decreased to 28 minutes by 2019, representing a loss of 43 hours per year of social engagement [1]. That’s 43 hours that are not going towards the upkeep necessary to maintain strong friendships.
We live in a time when our friendships proliferate but seem strangely fragile. We have thousands of contacts, group chats, connections, and people we “do life with,” yet so many of our relationships are cautious, provisional, and thin. Many of us cannot name more than one or two people we would trust with our grief, failures, or hopes outside of immediate family. We have fewer confidants, fewer people who can lovingly hold us accountable, and fewer relationships strong enough to bear inconvenience. It seems that friendships today take place in the utilitarian realm of compatibility or emotional pleasantness rather than deeper connective love: our friends are people we enjoy who don’t ask too much of us, and of whom we don’t ask too much as well.
Frustratingly, when friendship does deepen to involve genuine sacrifice, loyalty, and accountability, it is often misread as unhealthily clingy or even romantic. We’re losing our shared public language for serious friendship: intimacy becomes synonymous with the erotic, vulnerability becomes something your therapist says you should do more often, and commitment is reserved only for the people we plan to marry. A culture of self-sufficiency that glorifies independence makes interdependence feel shameful. As deep friendship is flattened into a relic of our childhoods, we as a society seem to be longing for relationships that are not only friendly but formative.
The Christian tradition has always understood friendship in these terms. Scripture and the Early Church understood friendship covenantally, as a place where souls are shaped, and fear, grief, and sin are confronted together. One illustrative example of Biblical friendship is David and Jonathan, the son of David’s enemy, King Saul. 1 Samuel 18:1-3 describes their relationship: “the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David…Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul [2].”
The Early Church Father Gregory of Nazianzen described his friendship with Basil the Great by saying, “We seemed to have one soul, inhabiting two bodies [3].” Friendship for the Christian is meant to be soul-binding, to involve shared life, not mere affection. God’s presence is supposed to be made manifest in the life shared between friends.
This version of friendship is a theme drawn out by Fyodor Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov. For Dostoevsky, friendship is not merely affection—it is the mandate of every Christian. This claim of the novel is given its fullest expression by the elder Father Zosima, a spiritual mentor and father figure to Alyosha Karamazov, the youngest and best of the brothers. Truly each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, only people do not know it, and if they knew it, the world would at once become paradise [4].” Not a metaphor or sentimental expression of empathy, this claim is a moral law demonstrated through the relationships of the characters.
Dmitri Karamazov is sensual and passionate. Ivan is intellectual and cold. Alyosha is simple and loving. When their father is killed, each character is implicated, not by physically committing the act, but by their responsibility for the atmosphere that made it possible. Dmitri is implicated by his violent nature and motive, Ivan by his intellectual claim that if there be no God, everything is permitted [5], and Alyosha by his absence during the moments of crisis when his brothers needed him. While the brothers may or may not have physically committed the act (no spoilers!), their contributions to and neglect of the web of resentment and moral degeneracy that made the sin possible make them responsible “before everyone for everyone.” The claim that all are guilty before all does not collapse moral distinctions. Rather, it shows that the boundaries of blame are much bigger than we thought.
I don’t point this out (nor does Dostoevsky) in order to encourage a sort of moral scrupulosity where one selfishly takes the weight of the world’s evil on their shoulders to expiate their complicity. Rather, Dostoevsky is pointing out that the soul is never and can never be truly isolated. We are impressionable creatures who often learn by example. Every instance where we respond in anger to a bus driver or give money to a homeless man creates impressions in others’ minds that butterfly effect their way into the the creation of the world in which we live. My choices affect your salvation, and your despair touches mine, the novel says.
Reenter friendship. Friendship is the arena in which this truth becomes a conscious way of life. To be a friend is to take active responsibility for another’s soul. “I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams [6],” says Father Zosima to a woman grieving. Friendship in this sense—active love—is a choice to bind ourselves willingly to another person whom we call friend. This is where, as the scriptures say, we bear one another’s burdens, comfort those in need of comfort, and mourn with one another. In light of this, Dostoevsky has no room for the friendship of convenience or pleasure to be the preeminent way we form platonic relationships.
No, his claim goes even deeper. In true friendship, to take responsibility for another’s soul is also to glimpse the divine. “The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul [7].” Friendship draws us beyond ourselves to guard the well-being of another, to will the good of the other for their own sake, and in so doing, becomes a living encounter with Christian eternity.
Alyosha’s friendships embody Zosima’s teaching. He befriends several schoolboys, offering them advice and care not from a position of authority, but from a position of love. Of Alyosha, the ringleader says,
“‘He and I will either become close friends at once and forever, or from the first we’ll part as mortal enemies!’
‘And surely you already loved me as you said it!’
‘I did, I loved you terribly [8].’”
Through his love, he shapes the boys’ moral characters. They become kinder and closer. He tells the boys, “You must know that there is nothing higher, nothing stronger… than some good memory [9].” Friendship becomes a sacred space where virtues are nurtured, wrongs are gently corrected, and hope is preserved. In loving this way, Alyosha demonstrates that true friendship is simultaneously relational and spiritual: it is a conscious participation in the divine life.
Friendship is profoundly mistaken as a secondary form of relationship. Dostoevsky portrays it, rather, as a school of virtue, a sanctuary for the soul, a place where friends are tied together in God’s command to love one another as ourselves—a scriptural form of encouraging all to claim responsibility before everyone for everyone. The implication of that responsibility is that we share in the love of our neighbors as well. We are guilty before all for the bad done in the world as well as the good. By reclaiming friendship in its highest sense, we reenter the shared moral and spiritual life that forms us into people capable of both giving and receiving the love of God to a higher degree, fostering more good and less bad. The call is urgent, and the opportunity is always before us: to love, to bind ourselves to another, and to see the divine in the midst of human companionship. Friendship is more than a psychological necessity. It is a universal vocation.
[1] Kannan, Viji Diane, and Peter J. Veazie. “US Trends in Social Isolation, Social Engagement, and Companionship ⎯ Nationally and by Age, Sex, Race/Ethnicity, Family Income, and Work Hours, 2003–2020.” ScienceDirect, Mar. 2023.
[2] The Bible. Authorized King James Version, Oxford University Press, 2019.
[3] Nazianzen, Gregory. “Oration 43: Funeral Oration on the Great S. Basil, Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia.” New Advent, www.newadvent.org/fathers/310243.htm.
[4] Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Everyman’s Library, 1992, p. 298.
[5] Ibid., 82.
[6] Ibid., 58.
[7] Ibid., 56.
[8] Ibid., 558.
[9] Ibid., 774.