Aquinas on friendship

The origin of the Latin is unknown to Don Gifford (Ulysses Annotated), though ‘Stephen implies that this is a quotation from St. Thomas Aquinas’. In fact it is taken verbatim from Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles (vol. 1, book 3, ch. 125, section 5), translated in the twenties ‘by the English Dominican fathers from the latest Leonine edition’ as:

Besides. It is most necessary in human society that friendship be among many.

Joyce also quotes from the Summa Contra Gentiles slightly earlier in ‘Scylla and Charybdis’, at 9.430-1, and refers to the Summa at 9.1089-90.

John Simpson

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