The Virtue of Husband and Wife: Understanding Marital Friendship in Aquinas (with a Little Help from Homer)

Abstract

The Virtue of Husband and WifeUnderstanding Marital Friendship in Aquinas (with a Little Help from Homer) Scott G. Hefelfinger (bio) Introduction Thomas Aquinas is well known for drawing on Aristotle’s analysis of friendship in order to understand and to define charity. Less familiar is Aquinas’s approach to marriage in terms of friendship. “Marriage,” writes Aquinas, “is the greatest friendship,”1 and he elaborates this elsewhere by means of Aristotle’s threefold division of friendship: friendship of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue.2 This already contains a great richness to be explored, but Aquinas goes further, adding suggestively: “There is a virtue proper to both husband and wife that renders their friendship delightful to each other.”3 But what exactly is this virtue, and how does it relate to the three kinds of friendship? The Angelic Doctor does not say. Whatever this virtue is, we seem to stand in great need of it. The world today seems a stranger to the delight that Aquinas mentions and is instead overly familiar with serial cohabitation, broken homes, and more recently, what has been termed “sexless marriages,” which result in no small part from the proliferation of pornography. Such sadness, discontentment, and even despair in the arena of marriage renders Aquinas’s provocative remark all the more striking, and so this short article is an attempt to tease out its meaning. [End Page 126] To do this, I will draw from the theory of Aristotle and the poetry of Homer to put meat on the bones of Aquinas’s skeletal remark, namely, that there is a virtue proper to spouses. In a first step, I will argue based on Aristotle and Aquinas that there is an excellence specific to the coordinated and cooperative work of the household. In a second step, I will turn to Homer’s Odyssey, where, I propose, we catch a glimpse of what this mutual work looks like, and in particular the kind of friendship between equals that it entails. Taken all together, Aquinas, Aristotle, and Homer offer resources for a renewed vision of marriage that is strikingly relevant in a world longing for delight and pining for a renewal of culture—a renewal that begins with the friendship, and virtue, of husband and wife. Aristotelian Roots When, in the Summa contra gentiles, Aquinas speaks of marriage as “the greatest friendship,” he offers two reasons to justify the superlative: he holds that husband and wife are “united not only in the act of fleshly union, which produces a certain gentle association even among beasts, but also in the partnership of the whole range of domestic activity [ad totius domesticae conversationis consortium].”4 Admittedly, these reasons might seem a little thin. Indeed, it almost sounds like Aquinas is suggesting that what makes the greatest friendship between husband and wife is that they sleep in the same bed at night and make the bed together in the morning. Understandably, we’re left wanting a little more than that. If we turn to his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, it helps us to appreciate that, as we expect, there is more going on here. The friendship between husband and wife is a complex, multi-faceted reality. One facet is its usefulness; it is a friendship of utility, Aquinas points out, since it “furnishes a sufficiency [of things] for family life.”5 Another facet of this friendship is that it is pleasant or pleasurable; thus, it is a friendship of pleasure, seen most clearly— but by no means exclusively—in marital intimacy. The last facet is [End Page 127] that related to virtue; Aquinas holds that marital friendship can also be based on virtue and thus it can reach the level of a noble or virtuous friendship.6 What is a virtuous friendship for Aristotle and Aquinas? Friendships are based on love and thus the precise object of love will determine the sort of friendship. Because friendships of utility and of pleasure are based on a love that targets some good other than a person, Aristotle sees them as incomplete or incidental. Complete friendship includes the dimensions of utility and pleasure but also goes beyond them. This...