Political by nature is the title that I was given and I'd like to speak to.

What inspires me about the topic is a kind of threefold crisis in the family, in our polity and in religion.

And that is a crisis of friendship. The common good of family, polity, and

religion, each of those common goods requires friendship. And so I'm going to talk tonight about

classical and contemporary visions of friendship. And I then want to look at how Catholic Christianity

expands our capacity for friendship and what this means for politics before returning to some

of our contemporary political difficulties as being related to this crisis in friendship.

Friendship has enjoyed a great deal of philosophical speculation in the pre-Socratic tradition.

Friendship or Philia was an attractive principle.

It was an attractive principle that ordered the whole physical universe in Plato.

In Lysis, Plato sees a metaphysical principle at work. Friends share an attraction to

the supreme good. And this constitutes the common good between them. Aristotle begins book aid of

the Nicomachean ethics with a discussion of the necessity of friendship for living well.

Friendship is, quote, most necessary with a view to living. The rich need friends.

For what use is prosperity, Aristotle asked without them. The poor and unfortunate, well,

they need friends to be a refuge in difficulty.

The young need friends to keep them from error, Aristotle says. The old need friends to assist

them in weakness. Those in the prime of life need friends to stimulate them to think and act nobly.

One observes friendship in the family, between children and their parents, between siblings

and their cousins. There's friendship according to nation. Since Aristotle says, quote,

friendship seems to hold states together, and lawgivers care more for it

than justice, for Concord seems to be something like friendship. When men are friends, they have no

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