Justice and Friendship

Abstract

JUSTICE AND FRIENDSHIP1 By GERALD B. PHELAN IT is a commonplace of social and political history that European civilization has come down to us as a heritage from classical antiquity. Everybody repeats, whether to rejoice in the fact or to regret it, that culturally we are Greeks.2 Not everybody, however, is conscious of the vast difference between the Graeco-Roman culture, to which we owe so much, and the Christian culture of Western Europe, from which we have inherited the most and best of what we still possess of civilized existence. Before Professor Etienne Gilson published those epochmaking Gifford Lectures on the Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, how few, even among the learned, were actually aware of the extent to which Christian thought, especially the fully developed Christian philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, had transformed, nay, literally transfigured, the legacy of Greece and Rome! Few as they were who realized at all vividly the gulf that separated the pagan from the Christian culture of Europe, fewer still were those who had any clear conception of how utterly we moderns have broken with our own traditions and how definitely our contemporaries (not among totalitarian nations alone, be they Fascist, Nazi, or Communist, but among our own people, and in our own lands, as well) have cut their moorings in the Christian past and drifted from the course which classical antiquity and Christian tradition, combined, had set. When the same Professor Gilson published his James 1 This paper, the substance of which was given as the St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture , 194!t, at the College of the Sacred Heart, Manhattanville, was written at the suggestion of M. Jacques Maritain after a long conversation about justice and friendship in the teachings of Aristotle and St. Thomas. "' " . . . a chorus from Euripides," said Stanley Baldwin, " awakens an echo in our souls, reviving memories which are ancestral." Presidential Address, The Classical Association, London, 19!t6. 158 154 GERALD B. PHELAN Lectures on the Unity of Philosophical Experience and Professor Maritain wrote those penetrating and provocative studies, The Three Reformers and Integral Humanism, many of their readers began to recognize for the first time that our modern conceptions of human life, human thought, and human culture had thoroughly abandoned the high ideals of civilization which had been laboriously acquired through long centuries of Christian reflection, Christian practice, and Christian prayer. In this paper I propose briefly to discuss two· of these basic concepts, which modern men have either completely lost or distorted beyond all recognition, viz., the concepts of justice and friendship - those two virtues which pagan Greece and pagan Rome regarded as essential to sound social life and which the sublime teachings of Christian revelation, particularly as expressed in the philosophy and theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, transformed into forces of incredible beneficence and elevated to a realm of efficacy transcending,. while preserving intact, the whole order of man's temporal social and political llie. Our Holy Father the Pope has sadly noted the fact that men no longer understand the true meaning of the words justice, charity, and friendship. The consequence is that our leaders, thinkers, responsible guides, and legitimate rulers are at a loss to find a stable basis upon which the upbuilding of a just and peaceful human order of society could even be envisaged, much less actually accomplished. It would carry us far afield were we to pause to consider and criticize the aberrations of modern thought upon the subject of these virtues or even to pass in review the various distortions which modern ethicians and social philosophers have wrought upon those fundamental notions of social morality. Rather, I shall attempt briefly to indicate what justice and friendship meant to the Greeks and to point out how St. Thomas Aquinas carried the thought of those great pagan thinkers to heights beyond their loftiest speculation. Read, if you will, the praise of justice which Socrates pronounces in Plato's dialogue Gorgias and in those eloquent dis- JUSTICE AND FRIENDSHIP 155 cussions in the first, second, and fourth books of the Republic, where Socrates extols justice as the essential virtue of the state, the bond of union among all members of society...