In an age where “friends” are counted by numbers on a screen, it is easy to forget that friendship was once considered a central path to human flourishing. For Aristotle, and later for Christian thinkers like Paul Wadell and C.S. Lewis, friendship was not merely a pleasant accessory to life, it was an indispensable aid to virtue. True friendship shapes character, strengthens resolve, and orients us toward the good. Yet friendship, at its core, also reveals something profound: that the pursuit of the good life is not abandoned but fulfilled through love of another.
In the Hellenic, and later in the Christian, tradition, friendship is seen as one of the highest goods that man can cultivate, precisely because it draws him beyond himself without negating his happiness. Paul Wadell recounts in Happiness and the Christian Moral Life the wisdom shared by a university priest at his college reunion: “As adolescents we had come together to pursue the good, and what those years, recollected now three decades later, taught us is that we could not have done so alone. We needed a community in our quest for goodness because it is impossible to become good without others who have made that desire their own.” The pursuit of a virtuous life, and thus true happiness, necessarily takes place in communion with others oriented toward the same good.
Friendship, then, is not a cover for selfishness. It is not a using of others as accessories in the selfish pursuit of my satisfaction. It is a fulfillment of our nature: the recognition that loving another for their own sake is, paradoxically, itself essential to our own flourishing. Loving others rightly is part of what it means to be truly happy.
Of course not all gifts are loved in the same way. From a Christian perspective everything we receive — from the breakfast we eat to the friends we cherish — is a gift of divine grace meant to draw us toward union with God. Yet the way we love these gifts differs. I am grateful for the breakfast that nourishes me, but I do not love it in the same way I love a friend. The breakfast is a good to be gratefully used; the friend is a good to be loved for their own sake. Recognizing this distinction helps clarify the true nature of friendship: friends are not mere instruments for our happiness even though their presence contributes deeply to it.
Aristotle recognized this paradox. As Wadell summarizes, man’s highest happiness, eudaimonia, “is not a single good, but includes all the goods and activities needed for men and women to grow into their most distinctive excellence as humans.” The good life is a collection of goods that allows an individual to fulfill his utmost potential, and “the supreme excellence of human beings is found in goodness, and goodness comes to us through the virtues.” Friendship is one of the key arenas in which these virtues are cultivated:
Friendships teach us what it means to be faithful and fair. They deepen our capacity for generosity and thoughtfulness. They show us why being truthful and trustworthy is morally important. Indispensable qualities of character are chiseled into us in the crucible of friendship. More than anything, friendships teach us the requirements of love.
The pursuit of excellence, like the purification of gold through fire or the sharpening of iron upon iron, requires others. Friendship is not an optional luxury; it is a necessary condition for the growth of the soul.
Wadell points to the same reality when he writes, “The focus of friendship is on the true good and happiness of the friend.” Loving another for their own sake is not a sacrifice of personal happiness—it is an essential part of it. As a parent loves their children not because of the comfort they provide but because of who they are, friendship calls us beyond self-interest into a self-giving love that paradoxically completes us.
I think here of my parents and their love for their children: how often they found themselves doing things for us that, in the moment, cost them comfort, time, or ease. Yet supposedly they would not trade these sacrifices for anything because loving my brother and me is not an obstacle to their happiness—it is one of its highest expressions. The same is true of authentic friendship. It requires a giving of oneself not because we cease to care about our own good but because loving the other is part of what it means to live well.
Modern thinkers have wrestled, often uneasily, with this dynamic. Ayn Rand, in The Virtue of Selfishness, defends a radical form of ethical egoism, claiming that self-interest is the foundation of morality. For Rand a virtue is that which secures and protects one’s rational values—the preservation of life and happiness. Conversely she criticizes altruism, regarding it as a dangerous sacrifice of the self to others.
Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in the same era, offers a strikingly different view: that the encounter with another person—especially in the intimacy of friendship—awakens the self to reflective consciousness. In Sartre’s view, the presence of the other does not diminish the self but calls it forth into fuller realization. Even in secular philosophy, there emerges an acknowledgment that deep connection, even at the cost of self-forgetting, is essential to human flourishing.
Neither Rand’s radical selfishness nor a simplistic altruism captures the fullness of friendship. True friendship draws us toward the good of the other without negating our own good. It is not a trade-off but a communion.
C.S. Lewis offers perhaps the clearest Christian vision of this reality. In The Four Loves, Lewis describes friendship not as a deliberate choice or a calculated alliance but as a divinely ordained gift:
In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality…any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
Friendship, Lewis suggests, is not a means to an end but a revelation: a way God makes his love known through the lives of others. No man is an island; we are made for loving relationship, and friendship is one of its most beautiful manifestations.
C.S. Lewis offers perhaps the clearest Christian vision of this reality. In The Four Loves, Lewis describes friendship not as a deliberate choice or a calculated alliance but as a divinely ordained gift
Wadell, drawing heavily from Aristotle, focuses primarily on the “friendship of virtue”—the highest and purest form of friendship, wherein each friend seeks the good of the other. Yet Aristotle himself recognized lesser forms: friendships of utility, where bonds are based on mutual advantage, and friendships of pleasure, where bonds are rooted in shared enjoyment. These friendships are common and often good, but the highest friendship—the one Lewis points toward—is grounded in willing the good of another simply because they are creatures who too bear an eternal weight of glory.
True friendship demands that we love others not for what they can do for us but for who they are. Yet paradoxically, it is precisely in willing the good of another that we most deeply fulfill our own nature. Friendship is not the abandonment of the self but the flowering of it.
In the end, friendship emerges as a profound and multifaceted good, rooted in both human striving and divine grace. It is a dynamic pursuit, enabling individuals to cultivate virtues, realize their potential, and experience the fulfillment of eudaimonia in communion with others. As Lewis reminds us, friendship is not merely a human construct or a utilitarian alliance but a divine gift—one through which God reveals to us the hidden beauty of others and through them teaches us love.
Image Credit: Camille Pissarro, “Two Women in a Garden” via GetArchive
