Are You A Virtuous Friend? The Answer Might Surprise You.
In college, I was required to take two philosophy classes: one on ancient philosophy and the other on modern philosophy. This was the extent of my foray into philosophy; theology is much more my style. Over the course of the year, I learned that I appreciated Aristotle, didn’t care for Descartes, couldn’t stand Rousseau, and needed my professor to explain the readings in everyday language because my brain (admittedly in recovery from a concussion) just could not handle the readings.
But while the classes themselves ranged from sort-of-okay to not-enjoyable-at-all for me, I’ve found that the concepts I learned in these classes have, actually, come up in everyday life. For instance, when I watched The Last Jedi in theaters with the rest of my Star Wars loving family, I left incensed – not just because the movie was bad (this is pretty much universally agreed on), but because Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophy (he’s known as the father of the French Revolution, by the way) was splattered front and center across the entire plot. For most people, the movie was bad for a number of reasons, mostly involving a badly-done plot line. While I agreed with this, to me it went deeper. The movie was bad because the plot line was bad, but the plot line was bad because of the philosophy underpinning it. And I hated it. There’s too much for me to go into more detail now, but maybe – just maybe – you’ll get a blog post down the road rehashing all my thoughts on Rousseau’s philosophy in The Last Jedi.
On a brighter note, not all I took away from my philosophy classes has had this effect. I did have some positive takeaways from this class, one of them being Aristotle’s ideas on friendship. They’ve stood the test of time, and they can be incredibly helpful in understanding the roles various people have in our lives. Language is important, after all: the Word became Flesh in the Incarnation, and brought a whole new sacredness to words themselves. Having language to understand friendship – particularly in this age where friendship can be difficult for a number of reasons – can be a game changer for many of us.
Without further ado, let’s dive into Aristotle’s most significant ideas on friendship.
Aristotle’s three types of friendship
According to Aristotle, there are three distinct types of friendship. The first of these types of friendship is what he terms friendship of utility. I know it sounds awful – who wants to be accused of having a friendship based on usefulness, after all? – but I promise that it isn’t actually awful. We have friendships of utility all the time. Perhaps you frequent a particular coffee shop, and have a nice rapport with a particular barista. That, my friend, is a friendship of utility. You wouldn’t have this rapport with this barista if you weren’t purchasing a coffee on the regular from this particular coffee shop; and the barista wouldn’t have a rapport with you if you didn’t happen to be a frequent customer at their workplace. There is a degree of usefulness that creates the foundation for your rapport, your friendship if you will. Hence – this is a friendship of utility. Every one of us encounters friendships of utility in our own lives all the time. According to Aristotle, this is the most common type of friendship, because it underpins the whole of society. (In case you’re wondering, coworkers tend to fall into this category due to the nature of working together.)
The second type of friendship is labeled a friendship of pleasure. You most likely have plenty of “pleasure friendships” at this very time. These are the people we have common interests with, and are brought together because of a group. Maybe you’re involved in your church choir, or you’re part of a fitness group. It could look like the people in your bible study, or the small group you’re part of. The people you enjoy talking to and find yourself getting to know a good bit in this shared space would be fall into this category. You might go out for coffee with one or two of them outside of practices or meetings, or you might gather for a game night once in awhile. The friendship is pleasant and enjoyable. It enhances your life, and it enhances the life of the other person. These types of friendships tend to be for a season, and they don’t tend to go deep in the way lifelong friendships go. But friendships of pleasure can be a simple delight in life.
Aristotle calls the third type of friendship a virtuous friendship. These, he says, are the rarest of friendships because they require each person to will the good of the other and pursue excellence together. There’s a sacrificial love at play in a virtuous friendship, where each friend desires the best for the other, encourages them to pursue the good, and remains steadfast through thick and thin. The good news? We only need one or two of these friends in our life at any given point in time. Sometimes we get more than that, but we don’t need a huge circle of virtuous friends. The author of the Book of Sirach, without using the same language as Aristotle, refers to virtuous friendships when he says:
“A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter:
he that has found one has found a treasure.
There is nothing so precious as a faithful friend,
and no scales can measure his excellence.
A faithful friend is an elixir of life;
and those who fear the Lord will find him.
Whoever fears the Lord directs his friendship aright,
for as he is, so is his neighbor also.”
– Sirach 6:14-17
A few things worth noting on these categories:
These three categories of utility, pleasure, and virtue don’t always stay rigid. And by this, I mean that a friendship of utility can move up to a friendship of pleasure; and even with time and life, one of these can become a virtuous friendship. That doesn’t mean they’re always going to do this, but that capability and potential is present and real.
Don’t let the term “virtuous friendship” fool you: friends who fall into the categories of pleasure or utility are capable of encouraging us on our journeys of holiness, and vice versa. It’s important to note that Aristotle, while incredibly wise on many topics to the point that much of his philosophy is totally compatible with Christian beliefs, was still a pre-Christian, pagan, Greek philosopher. Virtue, in the language of Greek philosophy, means “good habit.” To pursue virtue is to pursue human excellence. As Christians, we do believe this about the virtues as well, but it’s elevated thanks to the grace of God and the person of Christ. Human excellence takes on a new meaning in the light of Christ. With that being said: as I noted above, a friendship of virtue was, to Aristotle, a friendship in which the friends pursued excellence together. Friends that fall into the pleasure or utility category are still capable of encouraging us in the way of faith, and we are capable of doing so likewise for them.
When it comes to virtuous friends, time and prudence are necessary in discerning who these people are in your life. I’ve made the mistake before on multiple occasions of thinking too quickly a friendship fell into the virtuous category and, as a result, acting imprudently in a way that ended up with pain and heartache at the end. Not everyone is capable of being a virtuous friend to us. Sometimes we ourselves aren’t capable of being a virtuous friend to others. This is why time and prudence are necessary: time, to learn about a person’s character and true colors, and prudence, to examine what we know of a person after time has revealed their character and then to make a decision on whether we want to pursue a virtuous friendship with them. Prudence, after all, isn’t just examining what we know of the facts at hand. It’s also making a decision based on what we know and then acting upon it. To quote St. Thomas Aquinas, prudence is “right reason in action.” And time really is the best and surest way to know a person’s qualities. Nobody can hide their weaknesses for more than several months. After some time has passed, their authentic character - for good, bad, or somewhere in the middle – will show.
But what do I do if I don’t have virtuous friends?
You might be reading this and can immediately name the people in your life who fall into that precious category of virtuous friendship. But if you’ve been reading this and are realizing that you may not have any virtuous friends at all, please don’t lose heart. Of course, I’m entirely unable to tell you exactly why this might be. I'm not God, and I probably don’t know any details about your life. This is why I will only offer a couple of general suggestions, some food for thought on why this could be, and encourage you to keep in mind that these are simply some ideas and questions to ponder that could apply, but might not apply to you in the slightest.
The first “food for thought” I want to offer is more of an encouragement than anything else. Just because you may not have any virtuous friends in your life right now does not mean you’re destined to never have any virtuous friends at all. Aristotle reminds us that these are the rarest and hardest friends to come by. We live in an age where we’re increasingly isolated and disconnected from each other, even as the digital world promises us more connection and less isolation. We’ve tried what the digital world has to offer and found it wanting. Current cultural discourse tends to involve a lot of shouting past each other and not very much listening. Humility is on the out; pride in our own opinions (many of them hard-earned, to be fair) is the trend. It’s a perfect firestorm for less connection and more isolation. The brokenness of the world has real impacts on us. Certain factors in today’s day and age can absolutely have an effect on whether or not we have virtuous friends. But take hope: these factors and any others I may be missing in this discussion do not mean that you are destined to have no virtuous friends throughout the course of your life. Ask God to help you find virtuous friends. He did not make you to journey alone. He made you to live in communion with others. We will never experience that in its fullness on this earth, but God desires to give us a taste of it here. And we will enjoy communion in its fullness for all eternity in Heaven.
Sometimes we need to face the broken parts of our hearts before we can be a virtuous friend to anybody. Friendship is a two-way street, and virtuous friendship in particular requires intentionality, boundaries, and a healthy empathy and understanding of the other person. Due to the nature of original sin and its effects, we cannot ever be totally healed in this life. However, when we refuse to face certain areas of our hearts because of the brokenness we know is there, we are unable to allow for healing to happen at all. And sometimes that inability to heal causes us to be incapable of being virtuous friends to others. Regardless of where we’re at in our own journeys of healing, let us remember that Christ is the Divine Healer, and let us always ask Him for His grace to accept His healing love. And remember: sometimes Christ heals us directly, and sometimes He desires to heal us through others. Therapy and counseling can be helpful tools, particularly if the areas of brokenness we struggle to face involve trauma.
Finally, when we examine the relationships in our lives, virtuous friendships might appear in the people we might not immediately think of at first. For some of us, it can be easy to think that friendship is limited to people we aren’t related to, or aren’t in a covenantal relationship with. Yet some of the strongest virtuous friendships can be found in spousal or familial relationships! My husband, for instance, and I have a virtuous friendship, and it’s been strengthened by the covenant of marriage that we’ve entered into. St. Thomas Aquinas – who, it’s worth noting, was a huge proponent of Aristotelian philosophy, including his ideas on friendship – tells us this about marriage: “After the love that unites us to God, conjugal [marital] love is the greatest form of friendship.” For more reading on this concept of marriage being the greatest form of friendship, see this fantastic essay. Those in our own families, too, can be virtuous friends for us. Now that I’m in my mid-twenties, the relationship between my mother and I has evolved to include a virtuous friendship in addition to our mother-daughter relationship. You might be nodding along and agreeing, or seeing that your sister or brother or cousin is a virtuous friend. Re-read the description of virtuous friendship above, and ask yourself if any of your familial relationships fall into the category of virtuous friendship. This isn’t to say that you automatically have a virtuous friend in your spouse, your sister, your father, or your aunt. Broken relationships can and do occur within families all too often, and this might not be your situation at all.
Jesus: the ultimate virtuous Friend
God created us to live in communion with each other, and while none of us have the capability to enter into those deep, sacrificial-love, virtuous friendships with every person on this earth, we get a taste of heaven when we do experience those virtuous friendships. But we also get a little taste through our encounters with those friendships of utility and pleasure that we all have in our lives. Any pleasant encounter with another person is a glimpse of the joy that the harmony of communion brings. Consider the fruits of the Spirit according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, chastity.” When these fruits are present in our own lives, it makes us capable of being a better friend – regardless of the level of friendship – and it makes us capable of receiving friendship, too. And how do we find these fruits in our lives? We find them by leaning into our relationship with God, and allowing Him to transform us into the people He created us to be.
On the night before His Passion and Death, Jesus told His apostles that He called them friends – and then He went on to prove it by dying for them. His death, as we know, was not meant only for them, but for us all. He calls us friends, too; and He’s proven to be the very best Friend through His sacrifice for us on the Cross. This is the height of virtuous friendship, a height that only God could achieve and a height that He gives to us as an example of what we’re meant to do for those we love. We may not be called to literally die for our friends, but we can die to our desires and weaknesses for their sakes– like avoiding conflict, being blunt without kindness, or dragging them into our own sins such as gossip. His example is the example we ought to look to in how we behave in our friendships.
But here it’s important to go back to Scripture and remember what Jesus tells us: He is our Friend. Don’t forget, too, that friendship isn’t a one-way street. Our hearts were made for God, and only a relationship with Him will fill the God-sized hole in our hearts. At the end of the day, friendship is meant to point us to God in some way. We can have the best friends in the world and still these friendships would pale in comparison to the friendship God desires to have with us. Even with virtuous friends, we can only hope that the friendship will last into eternity by way of both parties reaching Heaven; but the friendship God offers us is guaranteed to be eternal if we trust Him, love Him, and allow Him to heal the broken pieces of our hearts. Our relationship with God is truly, ultimately, and always the most important friendship of all.
For further reading, I recommend the book True Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness, by John Cuddeback. I read this during my graduate school days for fun, and ended up finding an expansion on the seeds that were planted in my freshman year ancient philosophy class. This expansion of ideas has been very helpful in understanding Aristotle’s types of friendship further as well as St. Thomas Aquinas’s expanded thoughts on them in the Christian life. You can find the book on Amazon here.
