Bénedicte Sère at Psyche:
In the Middle Ages, friendship was more than a private bond – it was a social instrument, intertwined with moral ideals, religious duties and political hierarchies. Medieval thinkers devoted sustained attention to its meaning and value, often linking it to the Christian ideal of charity. As we shall see, friendship also emerges as a golden thread that weaves together antiquity and Christianity, reason and faith, the individual and the social body.
Medieval Christian Europe inherited from antiquity a deep reverence for the virtue of friendship. Thinkers in the Middle Ages read Cicero and Seneca, and adapted the ancients’ ethical models to their own literature, exegesis and philosophy. But the decisive turning point occurred in 1246 when Aristotle’s major treatise on friendship, found in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, was translated into Latin and began to circulate widely. With Aristotle, the medieval world inherited a powerful, systematic and comprehensive treatise on friendship.
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