Happiness and Friendship

Anne-Isabelle Bouton (1)

1 HALMA - Histoire, Archéologie et Littérature des Mondes Anciens - UMR 8164

Happiness and Friendship 1 Aristotle notes that friendship is generally taken to be essential to happiness (EN 8.1, 1155a5-15). The Confessions suggest that Augustine is similarly unable to conceive of happiness without friends. However, it took Augustine some time to settle on a notion of happiness which he regarded as authentic, and also to resolve to conform his life to this notion. Friendship 2 proved to be an experience which was essential to this process, though it was also one which was somewhat paradoxical: This is the happy life and this alone: to rejoice in you, about you and because of you. This is the life of happiness, and it is not be found anywhere else. Whoever thinks there can be some other is chasing a joy that is not the true one. 3 Augustine subscribes to classical eudaimonism; he holds that human beings' end is happiness, and that this demands the realisation of a certain perfection, 4 namely, the acquisition of wisdom. As a Christian, he identifies wisdom with God, and maintains that our relations with others should be ordered in accordance with our love for God, though he does not hold that friendship is reducible to charity. 5 This search for an ordinata dilectio runs

Mots clés: Augustine of Hippo; friendship; Confessions; happiness; ancient philosophy; Cicero

Domaines: Littératures; Philosophie; Religions

Anne-Isabelle Bouton. Happiness and Friendship. The Cambridge Companion to Augustine's Confessions., Cambridge University Press, pp.138-153, 2020. ⟨hal-03615979⟩