P^3: Pray Past Pleasure [Part 1: True Friendship]

Aristotle classifies three distinct categories of friendship. Friendships of use, friendships of pleasure, and  true friendships.

Friendships of use are when we are friends with people because they will help us study for tests, will give us rides places, or are a way into the crowd of which we would like to be a part. They occur when your sole reason for being with a person is for something they can provide you.

Friendships of pleasure occur when we are friends with someone purely because we enjoy their company. They make us laugh, we may share common hobbies, and they help us pass the time. These will be the majority of our friendships, and there is nothing inherently wrong with this category. Not all of our friendships can be true friendships.

In fact, Aristotle makes the category of "true friendship" exceedingly narrow. To qualify as a true friendship, your commitment to the relationship must be beyond the motivations of the first two categories. There is a Spanish song I absolutely love called Alegate de Mi, and in many ways I think it is a very astute embodiment of true friendship.

I'm going to do a side by side of the original Spanish and then my rough translation. I can't bear to just do one because if I just post Spanish, English speakers won't get anything out of it, and if I just post the English all that will be there is my butchered version. If you're reading the English please know that the Spanish version I fell in love with is so much more beautiful and poetic than my rough approximation, but hopefully the English is sufficient for its purposes.

Alejate de mi y hazlo pronto antes de que te mienta. Tu cielo se hace gris , yo ya camino bajo la tormenta. Alejate de mi, escapa ve que ya no debo verte. Entiende que aunque pida que te vayas, no quiero perderte. La luz ya, no alcanza..... No quieras caminar sobre el dolor descalza....... Un Angel te cuida....... Y puso en mi boca la verdad para mostrarme la salida.... Y alejate de mi amor.... Yo se que aun estas a tiempo.... No soy quien en verdad parezco.... y perdon no soy quien crees YO NO CAI DEL CIELO Si aun no me lo crees amor............ y quieres tu correr el riesgo veras que soy realmente bueno en engañar y hacer sufrir a quien mas quiero.. Alejate de mi pues tu bien sabes que no te merezco

Remove yourself from me and do it soon before I lie to you. Your sky is made grey, I now walk below the torment Remove yourself from me, escape, see that now I should not see you Understand that although I ask that you go, I don't want to lose you. The light now, it does not rise You don't want to walk through pain barefoot An angel cares for you And put in my mouth the truth in order to show me the exit And Remove yourself from my love I know that you still have time I am not who I appear to be And I'm sorry, but I am not who you believe, I did not fall from heaven If you still don't believe me, love, And you want to run the risk You will see that I am truly good at deceiving and making suffer those whom I love the most Remove yourself from me since you know well that I do not merit you

So what does a Spanish love song have to do with Aristotelean friendship? I put my favorite line from the song in bold. Essentially, the voice of the song is acting completely selflessly here. He loves her and wants to be with her. To be with her gives him pleasure. Nonetheless, he knows that it is better for her to not be with him and is therefore willing to sacrifice all pleasure derived from his relationship with her for her greater good. True friendship is desiring the good of another and devoting yourself selflessly to that regardless of what you get out of it.

True friendship, however, is not about you just being a slave to everyone else. You would be acting as a true friend to those people by doing so, but that does not necessarily equal a true friendship because a true friendship must be reciprocal. That means that both of you are dedicated to the relationship not for pleasure, but for the other person's good. One of the primary reasons our nation's divorce rate is so high is because people marry when they are still only on the second level of friendships: friendships of pleasure. These friendships easily decay and fade away because they are based on common interests, transient sensorial feelings, and emotional stimuli. True friendships endure because they are based on a choice to pursue the good of the other. In a true friendship, you see and desire the beauty of their soul.

God has already shown himself to be a true friend to us by the incarnation and redemption, so that part of the true friendship will never be lacking. In fact, God is incapable of having any other type of friendship because he is entirely self-sufficient (no friendships of use) and is already the highest perfection in every thing, so his happiness can in no way be increased by us (no friendships of pleasure).

The question then remains, do we solidify our relationship with God as a true friendship by being true friends to Him?

Part 2: Consequences
Part 3: Real Life Implementation

Catholicism is [a] Mean

Mean ³ |mēn|

noun

2 a condition, quality, or course of action equally removed from two opposite (usually unsatisfactory) extremes: the mean between two extremes.

Aristotle describes a virtue as a mean: the point between an excess and a deficiency. One of the most easily comprehensible examples of this is courage, which is a balance between cowardice and foolhardiness. 

Thomas Aquinas argues in the Summa Theologica that religion is a virtue. 1 

If religion is a virtue and [all] virtues 2 are a mean, then religion is a mean. QED.

Objection: Religion is not a mean because obviously there are religions which are extremist. For example, you may have the extreme of a radical, conscienceless psycopath, but you can also have the opposite extreme of people who are overly prudish and obsessed with their own righteousness and therefore lose sight of what is truly valuable in life. The latter category is what is often associated with religion from a secular point of view. Sometimes you even get a combination of the two where you have radical psychopaths -- in the name of religion -- persecuting others for failing to confirm to their particular worldview.

Refutation: This is not true religion, but a corruption of religion. It's been too long since I've read the relevant Aristotle, but I believes he makes a similar point when defending the virtue of just government.  For example, if you were to write lengthy treatises on the nasty character of chocolate chip cookies based on the large quantities of burned ones you had consumed, you would be condemning a corruption of the good rather than the good itself. 3

Therefore, if religion is a virtue and if all virtues are a mean, then if Catholicism is not a mean, it is not a religion in the proper sense of the word [abbv. ipsow]. Conversely, if Catholicism is a religion ipsow, then Catholicism is necessarily a mean. There are two ways this could be approached. Firstly, from an apologetics standpoint, to show that Catholicism is religion ipsow by demonstrating that it is a mean. The second way is to start with the assumption that Catholicism is indeed a religion ipsow and then examine the faith from the perspective of a mean for further edification. While the former approach could be most interesting, for my purposes I will be pursuing the latter.

This promises to be a fairly lengthy analysis so I will split the various reflections on Catholicism's meanness into different blog posts and leave this as the introduction.

Salvation is [a] Mean (in between Faith Alone and Works Alone)
Penitence is [a] Mean (in between Scrupulosity and Sin)


Hyperlinks to be added later.

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1 Summa Theologica 2.2.81.2 (aka the Second Part of the Second Part [Secunda Secundæ Partis], Question 81, Article 2) http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3081.htm 

2 I am not exactly sure if I can accurately say that all virtues are a mean. I know that there are some vices which are an excess by nature and cannot have a mean, so it is possible there are some things of which you cannot have too much. Nothing comes to mind though. Love seems an obvious example, but the true virtue of caritas is the mean between the excess and deficiency of affection. You cannot, however, have an excess and a deficiency of lust, because lust is itself an excess. 

3 It is one thing to say that the ideal for which a thing attains is impossible to reach and another entirely to say the thing is bad. Eg. if I laud the qualities of levitating chocolate chip cookies above all others, it would be perfectly reasonable to condemn me.  If a thing actually exists which conforms to my specifications, however, it is completely irrelevant to attempt to discredit the worth of my good by citing things which obviously do not fall within its parameters. This would be like saying the fish are not cold blooded by citing the whale.