Friendship and the Moral Life

Paul J. Wadell

Description

Friendship and the Moral Life is not simply a theoretical argument about how moral theology might be done if it took friendship more seriously. Rather, the book exhibits how without friendship, our lives are morally not worth living. The book begins with a consideration of why a new model of the moral life is needed. Wadell then examines the ethics of Aristotle, who viewed the moral life as based on a specific understanding of the purpose of being human, with friendship being an important factor in enabling people to acquire virtues necessary for achieving this purpose. Through the thought of Augustine, Aelred of Reivaulx, and Karl Barth, the question is raised whether friendship is at odds with Christian love or whether their relation depends on one's narrative account of friendship. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of charity as friendship with God is examined to clarify this relationship.

By locating friendship within the story of God's redemption through Christ, Wadell helps us see why friendship properly understood is integral to the Christian life and not at odds with it. Such a friendship draws us to love all others who seek God and teaches us not to restrict our concern to a special few in preferential love. The book closes by investigating how friendship as a model for the moral life might work in everyday life.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Thomas Aquinas
• Ethics
• Christianity
• Augustine of Hippo
• Aristotle
• Augustine
• Karl Barth
• Thomas d'Aquin

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 novembre 1990
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268096793
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

FRIENDSHIP AND THE MORAL LIFE
Friendship and the Moral Life
PAUL J. WADELL, C.P.
U NIVERSITY OF N OTRE D AME P RESS
N OTRE D AME , I NDIANA
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Copyright 1989 University of Notre Dame
Reprinted in 1993, 1998, 2003, 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wadell, Paul J.
Friendship and the moral life / Paul J. Wadell.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-268-00973-2 (cl.)
ISBN 0-268-00974-0 (p bk.)
1. Friendship. 2. Friendship-Religious aspects-Christianity. 3. Christian ethics-Catholic authors. I. Title.
BJ 1533.F8W33 1989
241 .676-dc20
89-40022
ISBN 9780268096793
This book is printed on acid-free paper .
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] .
T O M Y M OTHER AND F ATHER
Contents
Foreword , Stanley Hauerwas
Preface
1. Friendship and the Moral Life: Why a New Model for Morality Is Needed
I. An Autobiographical Beginning
II. Why a New Model for the Moral Life Is Needed
2. A Look at Aristotle s Ethics: A Search for the Center That Did Not Hold
I. A Little Prelude: A World in Disarray
II. Making Good on Life s Purpose: What Aristotle s Ethic Is All About
3. Aristotle on Friendship: What It Means for the Moral Life
I. From the Polis to Friendship: Why Aristotle Makes That Move
II. Friendship: What It Means and Why We Need Them to Be Good
4. Friendship as Preferential Love: Can It Be Justified?
I. Why Friendship Pales as Christian Love
II. How Christian Love Thrusts Friendship Aside
III. Friendship as a School in Christian Love
5. The Christian Life as Friendship with God: What Aquinas Means by Charity
I. An Almost Blasphemous Claim: Why We Can Be Friends of God
II. How Our Friendship with God Begins and Why It Is Happiness
III. The Three Marks of Friendship and What They Mean When the Friend Is God
6. Friendship and Everyday Life: Discovering the Source of Our Moral Deliverance
I. Taking a Chance with Others: The Beginning of the Moral Life
II. The Shape of Our Encounter with Another
III. Conclusion
Notes
Index
Foreword
I was not much beyond my own graduate student days when I discovered I was to teach a Ph.D. seminar at the University of Notre Dame. Unsure how or what I should teach, in desperation I organized a seminar around readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Barth. I was not sure what such a course would do but I was sure that anyone who wanted to become a theologian concerned with matters ethical should wrestle with these positions. I had the feeling that you would not come out of that course with many answers but you would certainly know where many of the problems were. In truth, I had some vague intuitions about how these texts might illumine one another-for example, how friendship as a constitutive element of Aristotle s account of moral rationality would starkly contrast with Kant-but I had no idea how to draw out the implications of these intuitions in a constructive manner.
Students have a way of making more of a course than a teacher even knew was in it. That is certainly what Rev. Wadell has done with this wonderful book-a book that at once humbles and gladdens me. It gladdens me to see how he has imaginatively transformed the stuff of that course into a constructive account of the Christian moral life; it humbles me because reading this book reminds me that the work we are called to do as theologians really should make a difference for our own and other lives. Accordingly this is not just another book in moral theology, but it is a book that is meant to engage seriously and, perhaps, change our lives by helping us discover that God means to claim us as a friend through our learning to be friends with one another.
Therefore this book is not just a theoretical argument about how moral theology might be done if it took friendship more seriously, but rather the book exhibits how without friendship our lives morally are not worth living. Yet Wadell s strong argument about the importance of friendship has often been missed in Christian moral reflection because the preferential nature of friendship seems to be in tension with the Christian obligation to love all people. By locating friendship within the story of God s redemption through Christ, Wadell helps us see that the very idea we must choose between the universal or preferential friendship is based on a mistaken account of friendship. He does this by showing how friendship rightly understood cannot help but lead us to new friends without in any way denying their inherent particularity. For a friendship but names that relation in which we learn to rejoice in the particularity of the other and in the process learn how that particularity enlivens our own and other lives.
This point, moreover, accounts for the extraordinary style of this book. Wadell writes in an engaging manner drawing on novels and his own experience to illumine his position. This is not just a tactic to make the text more readable or accessible to those not trained in moral theology. Rather the stories Wadell narrates are intrinsic to his position as he must help us appreciate how the particularity of our lives are constitutive of the kind of friendship that makes friendship with God possible. But narratives require details-like drinking Virginia Dare sodas with a friend or riding F-trains to New York-that help us capture our narratives and friendships that we might otherwise fail to acknowledge. Wadell is a moral theologian with the eye of an artist, and I am convinced anyone reading this book will realize Wadell has set a new paradigm for how moral theology should be conceived.
The fact that this is a book in moral theology that is done with such style and verve may lead those who associate moral theology with more formal argument to overlook this book s considerable methodological importance. To be sure, this book can be read for profit by both laity and professional moral theologian. But it is important that those in the latter category not miss this book s extraordinary importance as a model for how moral theology might be done that avoids that unhappy distinction between spiritual and moral theology. For here is a book written in a manner that wants to make us better through the reading of it. I would like to think this at last is the kind of moral theology for which Vatican II called-that is, moral theology enriched by biblical and theological reflection. Moreover, it is distinctly Catholic, but in being so it is determinatively ecumenical. Thus in the same book we have Aquinas and Barth being used to equal effect to advance our understanding of friendship.
Another reason the systematic significance of Wadell s book for moral theology may be overlooked is that he does not write as a polemicist. He is clearly at odds with both the style and substance of Catholic moral theology, both in its conservative and liberal forms. Yet he is not out to score points against past positions or people. Rather what we find here is an attempt to do moral theology in a constructive manner that can enliven all our lives by helping us discover the telos that gives our lives more coherence. That is why this book is at once so radical and yet so conservative, for Wadell means to do nothing less than to see how our everyday lives are charged with God s grandeur.
It is equally important that the political implications of this book not be missed. Amid all the discussion about liberation theology, the social and political implications of a book like Wadell s can be overlooked. For it is Wadell s argument that a community and corresponding political organization is to be judged by its capacity to engender lives capable of forming friendships. Accounts of friendship are thus prior to accounts of justice. Therefore he joins hands with the insights of some feminists in challenging contemporary social practices that make friendship so unlikely.
This book, therefore, will not be easily characterized or pigeon-holed in terms of our contemporary disciplinary boxes or current intellectual styles. Rather it is a book of great seriousness and great humor, for what could be more serious than the joy that comes with the discovery that we are meant to be friends with God?
Finally, Wadell s book at least means, for me, that I will continue year after year to take graduate students through seminars on Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Barth. I do so, not because I have got any clearer idea of what I am doing, but because Wadell s book convinces me that in spite of the teacher it can have very rich results; or, even more important, it means that through that process I discover that my students have become my teachers and hopefully my friends.
Stanley Hauerwas The Divinity School Duke University
Preface
This book is an argument for another way to think about the moral life. It is hard to say where it began. In one sense it began in the fall of 1981 when I started reading Aristotle and noticed friendship was integral to his conception of the moral life. But Aristotle articulated something of which I was always convinced, that friendships are not only enjoyable, they are also highly morally formative, and in this sense, long before my reading of Aristotle, the book took shape in those friendships that continue to change my life. Aristotle, along with Augustine, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Aquinas, tutored me in an insight: The moral life is the seeking of and growing in the good in the company of friends who also want to be good. Friendship is the crucible of the moral life, the relationship in which we come to embody the good by sharing it with friends who also delight in the good.
Obviously, this gives a different slant to the moral