Friendship and the Common Good | Prof. Adam Eitel

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 16 May 2025

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. Adam Eitel explores the nature of friendship and the common good through the lens of Aquinas and Aristotle, emphasizing that true friendship is a mutual, habitual disposition to will and pursue the good of another through concrete sharing and fellowship.

This lecture was given on December 4th, 2024, at Saint Louis University.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Professor Eitel is an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of Dallas. Before joining the UD faculty in 2023, he taught for eight years at Yale University, holding appointments in the Divinity School, the Program in Medieval Studies, and the Humanities Program. A specialist in medieval scholasticism, his research interests include doctrinal and moral theology, with a particular focus on the works of Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries. His teaching and research bring historical Christian theology into dialogue with contemporary moral and political issues.

Keywords: Aristotle, Charity as Friendship, Communicatio, Common Good, Friendship and Love, Habitual Disposition, Mutual Well-Wishing, Thomas Aquinas, Virtue Ethics

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.1	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.4	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:18.4	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.9	to mystic institute.org. Some things are perplexing, not because they are so distant, but
0:30.0	precisely because they're so near. They're so nearly a part, so constitutive of human life itself,
0:42.3	that it's hard to get a grip on it. And so it's worth than talking about friendship and the common good.
0:50.3	And what we want to do is talk about it in the way that one would learn to talk about it if you were to read, say, Thomas Aquinas' scriptum on the sentences and his suma and the commentary on Aristotle's ethics and so on and so forth.
1:09.6	Let's start here.
1:11.7	Hmm.
1:13.1	So Thomas says, I am going to get back to gravity.
1:16.3	I'll do it.
1:17.1	I'll find a way.
1:18.6	Thomas says, look, if you're going to talk about friendship,
1:25.2	then you're going to be talking about love. Because love is
1:30.3	a kind of friendship. Or friendship rather, is a kind of love. Okay? So when we speak of friendship,
1:42.3	we're speaking though not just of any love, but a love of a very particular kind.
1:50.0	I will, you know, at certain points, I'll give you little pieces of the Latin, and that's just so you can know that there's something really concrete to hang on to.
2:03.6	Some of it's hard to get into English.
2:05.5	This is actually kind of, it's really clunky.
2:10.7	Oh, what would you say?
2:13.8	You'd say that's friendship, love.
	...

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