Abstract
The work begins by dialectically elaborating on Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous suggestion that hell is other people. This essay cultivates Sartre’s insight, exploring the various ways that others may present a heaven or a hell. For Thomas Aquinas, this presencing of heaven or hell occurs most definitively in friendship. Aquinas’s discussion of friendship illuminates Sartre’s claim, where Aquinas argues that friends always adopt both the other friend’s goods and evils. Aquinas’s provocative claims are paired to the modern thought of Iris Murdoch, whose expansive understanding of the imagination facilitates the use of such extreme terms, as heaven and hell, when analyzing the nature of the other experienced in friendship. The discussion culminates in the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich. Her visionary relationship to Christ serves as a witness to the heaven and hell endemic to all relationships that attempt to embody the joy and suffering of the other.
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