St Albert the Great: Champion of Faith and Reason by Kevin Vost

Author:Kevin Vost [Vost, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781935302766
Publisher: TAN Books
Published: 2011-02-28T06:00:00+00:00

Great Idea #8: Friendship

Friendship was an important subject for classical philosophers such as Aristotle and Cicero, was addressed in the Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, and was portrayed through examples in both testaments, from the powerful enduring friendship of David and Jonathan to that between Jesus Christ and St. John, his beloved disciple. St. Augustine reflected on his friendships in his classic Confessions. Relatively little was written in the Middle Ages about human friendships, though, so keen was the focus on the relationship between man and God.9 But Albert was keenly aware of its importance and addressed it in his writings—reflecting on Aristotle’s notion that the highest level of friendship is based on shared virtues and on Cicero, who wrote “friendship is nothing other than the harmony between things divine and human, with goodwill and love.”10

One interesting twist to Albert’s perspective on friendship is that true friendship, like joy, is an effect or result of the virtue of love. Another is that the self-love of a virtuous person focuses on the goods of the soul that are best when shared with others, whereas the self-love of a vicious person is focused on one’s own material desires, which cannot be shared in kind with others. One more is that even the contemplative needs friends to reach the heights of contemplation, since each individual person stands in some measure “in potency,” with a potential that can only come to its complete fruition through the interchange of ideas, goodwill, and benevolent deeds with virtuous friends.

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