Society And its Purpose
Book 1 - Society
CHAPTER 5
Social benevolence and friendship
91. Retracing our steps, we will see that I included social benevolence in the concept of society.— Is social benevolence friendship, or do their concepts differ?
92. The concepts of social benevolence and friendship must not be confused. Friendship is something purer, holier and more sublime than simple social benevolence, at least in the case of a limited society. A friend forgets himself for his friend, he desires and seeks the good of the loved person without considering his own good, which he sometimes sacrifices. Friendship is essentially intellectual, objective. Through it we live outside ourselves and in the object of our love, according to our intellectual conception of the object.
93. This is not true of social benevolence. The members of a society desire, as members, the good of the society to which they belong; social benevolence consists in this good desired for the whole society. I grant that any person wishing the good of a social body, consequently wishes the good of all those forming the body, but he himself is one of these. In social benevolence therefore human beings do not forget themselves, as in friendship; they consider and love themselves as members of the society. Furthermore, they associate with other persons solely for the advantage to be gained from the association. Thus they attach themselves to the society, loving it and its common good only for their own good, that is, for love of themselves. They do not love the good of others properly and necessarily for the others’ good but because they find it a necessary condition for their own particular good. Thus, social benevolence has a subjective source: it is a subjective love generating an objective love, which however occupies a subordinate place in the human heart.
94. We can conclude, therefore, that social benevolence holds a kind of middle-place between the seigniorial bond and friendship; it is more noble than the former and less noble than the latter. It is a first step by which we attain the purest affections of friendship.
95. However we must not think that friendship is normally lacking in actual human societies. The bonds of seigniory, of society and of friendship are in reality intermingled and influential in varying proportions. My sole aim is to determine the difference between ideas; unless we do this, we cannot indicate how much human communal living owes to each of the three bonds. Indeed, only my prior distinction between the concepts of seigniory, social benevolence and friendship enables us to conclude without difficulty that `human unions must be considered happier and more virtuous to the extent that friendship within them dominates the other two bonds, and subordinately to the extent that the bond of sociality dominates those of ownership and dominion.’
96. We must now show how friendship and social benevolence can gradually continue to grow in nobility, and how they meet and unite to become one single thing when they both reach their last possible degree of nobility.
97. The more virtuous friendship becomes, the more it is ennobled until finally it attains the highest point of nobility, that is, virtue which alone is the essence of nobility, and therefore that which ennobles all things. Friendship has reached its highest level of nobility and excellence when friend loves only virtue in friend, and affection is brought to what is true, just, upright and holy as its ultimate aim. At this point any limited object receives our affections like pure glass through which they pass without hindrance, or like a flawless mirror which takes the sun’s rays and reflects them without the slightest alteration.
98. But how does social benevolence attain its highest level of nobility? As we said, it increases as society increases. We also saw that society improves as it increases, because benevolence is perfected by this growth. Society increases in two ways: by the number of persons who come together, and by growth in the good which forms the end for which the union was formed. As long as one person remains outside the society, and some good is excluded from its aim, it remains a limited society; it has not attained its ultimate, possible perfection. Consequently the benevolence that accompanies association has not reached the highest term of perfection to which it can aspire. On the other hand, if we suppose that society is completely unlimited and that no person is excluded from its fold nor any real good from its aim, we have a society that tends to virtue as to its ultimate end, the most excellent good of all. Virtue is not only the best good but the condition and legitimate origin of every good. Such a society will therefore tend principally to virtue as to the greatest good and source of every good. Now the kind of benevolence proper to this noblest of societies will be that by which each member of the society desires principally moral perfection for all the associates. Thus we have arrived at a benevolence which is purely a love of virtue, an essentially objective, unselfish love.
99. Just as friendship, when it has attained its ultimate ideal perfection, is changed into a most noble love of eternal good of virtue, so social benevolence, in so far as we can think about its ultimate possible perfection, is transformed into the same most noble love of moral virtue, and aims at every other good only in relationship to this supreme good.
100. The ideal of social benevolence and the ideal of friendship are therefore the identical pure love of virtue.
101. Before ending this chapter, we must consider how a universal society may really exist on earth in which benevolence and friendship cannot in any way be separated from each other or from virtue. The founder of Christianity in fact made virtuous love, in which both perfect social benevolence and perfect friendship equally have their end, the purpose of the society he founded. He said to the members of this vast association: `A new commandment I give unto you: That you love one another, as I have loved you,’(25) that is, with the most perfect friendship and the most perfect social benevolence.
Notes
(25) Jn 14 [13: 34, Douai].