Plato, Thomas and the Daring Ethics of Friendship

Abstract

Fergus Kerr observed that Thomas Aquinas inaugurates a new way of doing Christian ethics focused on human flourishing. It is based on a daring model of Christian friendship that has, though, found little success. Why? Because it stems from Aristotle's model of friendship which is, in turn, based upon self-love and exclusivity. Augustine, in particular, is a figure who portrays such friendship as antithetical to God's selfless and universal love: friendship, for him, needs to be ‘triangulated’ in divine love. However, Thomas suggests charity as friendship because he recognizes that friendship is the best ‘school of love’ for human beings: within the ambivalences of friendship, Christians can practise the habits of divine love so that it becomes an overarching principle in their lives. But, there is an irony in Thomas turning to Aristotle for a model of love that embraces rather than transcends human experience, since Aristotle too cannot quite shake off a vision of the ideal life that is uneasy with friendship. For that, we must turn to the work of Plato on friendship, in his dialogue the Lysis, which not only offers a model of friendship wholly committed to it as a school of love, philosophy and the good life, but does so recognizing the ‘in between’ status of human beings similar to that with which Thomas was concerned.