Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Child's Moral Imagination

by Vigen Guroian

Whereas parents do not choose who their children are or children their parents, Charlotte chooses Wilbur as a friend and Wilbur willingly accepts that friendship. That is, Charlotte is a mentor to Wilbur and theirs is a mentoral friendship. This takes into account the fundamental inequality in their friendship, while it also keeps in view the important characteristic of mutual affection that belongs to all true friendships. Again, Aristotle is our best guide. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he discusses relationships of inequality like Charlotte and Wilbur’s and defines these as friendships of a special sort. “But there is another kind of friendship,” Aristotle notes, “that which involves an inequality between the parties, e.g. that of father to son and in general of elder to younger” and the like. In such friendships the love that the lesser gives to the greater makes up the difference. In other words, “when the love is in proportion to the merit of the parties, then in a sense arises equality, which is certainly held to be characteristic of friendship.”6 Without wanting to understate Charlotte’s true affection for Wilbur, we still are bound to say that Wilbur’s love is of greater intensity and is the more all-consuming, just in the same way that his need for a friend is greater. Yet, according to Aristotle, this is as it should be: a proportionality in love appropriate to kind establishes ground for a true friendship.