Ethics as Theology: Volume II

“The classical writers had an idealized conception of friendship: just two people (always men) from youth to age totally loyal to one another, both totally virtuous, somehow standing out. . . . For Aelred, it’s so different. You have to have lots of friends and they will be at all sorts of different levels of development in your friendship. You’ll have the friends you can wholly rely on and you will have the friends you can rely on a bit. And this sort of adapting of the ideal of friendship to the realities of the life of sanctification and grace in which, ah, ‘we’re not all sanctified yet,’ is very important.” — Oliver O’Donovan In this extended Conversation with theologian and ethicist, Oliver O’Donovan, O’Donovan talks about how “love” as an ethical and existential category connects to the theological virtue of love consummated in the Kingdom of Heaven. O’Donovan’s final volume in the Ethics as Theology series, Entering into Rest, deals primarily with how love is transformed and “ma