Platonic Friendship Is Non-Carnal Friendship - Catholic Answers

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☰AboutShopDonatewww.catholic.com/qa/platonic-friendship-is-non-carnal-friendshipQ&APlatonic Friendship Is Non-Carnal FriendshipFr. Hugh Barbour, O. Praem.2019-11-07T14:17:58Share🖨️🔗

Question:

What is a "platonic" relationship?

Answer:

It’s a friendship or love relationship that is separate from any genital, sexual expression. In common use, this is all that the expression means: namely, that the two friends, whether of different sexes or of the same sex, are not involved carnally with each other.

Yet in the philosophical and moral tradition of the West, this expression implies more. A Platonic relationship is one in which the persons who love each other see each other as expressions of the goodness and beauty for which they strive together spiritually. They begin with bodily beauty and rise to the goods of virtue and the soul and the community and finally together to God. This is the way Plato describes in his dialogue Symposium. This concept could be helpful in today’s context, where, sadly, practically any intimate friendship is imagined to be open to sexual relations.

Chaste friendship is for Christians the normal ideal of a relationship: we affirm the beauty and attractiveness of our friend, but in order to rise with him or her to an even higher beauty and goodness in the practice of virtue and in union with God. St. Thomas Aquinas describes the love of one friend for another as a mutual indwelling, where each reaches to the innermost parts of the other. This is the way revelation describes God’s life in us: “If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.”

Sacred Scripture gives us as examples the friendships of Jonathan and David, of Ruth and Naomi, and indeed of the Savior and St. John, the beloved disciple. The lives of the saints are filled with this kind of friendship. One can think of Sts. Gregory and Basil, Sts. Augustine and Alypius, Sts. Clare and Francis, Sts. Clare and Agnes of Prague, Sts. John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, and Sts. Francis de Sales and Jeanne de Chantal. There is also the correspondence between St. Thérèse of Lisieux and Frs. Maurice and Roland, or between St. John Paul II and a few of his friends, male and female. St. John Henry Newman went so far as to have the images of his friends on the wall next to the altar of his private chapel as a cardinal, so as to remember them.

This is no surprise, since what we call platonic friendship is really for Christians a normal part of life. It was the Savior himself who said, “I no longer call you servants but friends.” If this ideal were taught to the faithful, especially young people, many of our problems concerning sexual morality and sexual identity would be greatly helped. Unfortunately, in our hyper-sexualized society, no one believes in non-genital intimacy, and faithful orthodox Catholics are suspicious of friendship in the same way.

This attitude leads to loneliness and emotional repression and fosters the very evils it fears. The solution is the divine friendship, which is the grace of the Triune God dwelling in Christians who love each other as friends. In his On True Religion, St. Augustine says that Plato believed in this but did not know how it could be brought about, since he lacked the revelation.

Let us thank Jesus that because of him we have Christian friendship to perfect and fulfill the hopes of Platonic friendship.

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