Aquinas and Arendt on Friendship and the Life We Live with Others

This paper explores how Thomas Aquinas and Hannah Arendt, emerging from radically different metaphysical and historical contexts, each engage Aristotle's concept of friendship to respond to the crises of political life in their respective eras.Aquinas, working within a medieval theological framework, elevates Aristotle's virtue-friendship (philia) into a teleological union grounded in caritas, where human beings, through grace, may even be called friends of God.Both thinkers resist the reduction of human relations to utility or private preference.Aquinas affirms that political life, properly understood, participates in a divine order where friendship sustains community through mutual moral striving.Arendt, by contrast, critiques the modern loss of a common world and proposes that friendship should be redefined in terms of respect in order to preserve the dignity of individuals as they live in the company of other humans.The paper argues that placing Aquinas's amicitia vis--vis Arendt's philia politik reveals two distinct yet complementary visions of relational ethics.Ultimately, this study affirms that political friendship-whether understood theologically or secularly-remains indispensable for restoring meaning, action, and solidarity in contemporary public life.