This seminar will be led by Dr. DeMasi.
Depends on what we mean by “friend.” I think most people would agree that we ought to be “friendly” with our bosses, pastors, senators, and other people who exercise a legitimate authority in our lives, but I also think that most people would agree with the ancients that true friends–complete and perfect friends–must be equal in all things. As Cicero would have it, a friend is an alter ego–”another self”--and any gross disproportion of state in life might preclude the kind of equality that makes up the context of true friendship. On the one hand, how would the person in authority ever really know if his or her friend was really a friend and not a flatterer? For the person on the other side of the relationship, how would he or she ever feel the freedom to exercise the criticism essential to true friendship? In this seminar, we will examine what a friend is, especially in the classical context. Then, we will examine how the Gospel and the Christian tradition radically upsets what it means to be a friend and provides an alternative to contemporary notions of friendship as a relationship, principally, without a power imbalance.