> "Explain: The second reading is what your small-communities conclusion quietly assumes. "

Take the two readings and run each one against the conclusion from the page.

Strict reading: character friendship exists only between people who are already virtuous. Aristotle gives grounds for this — he says the perfect friendship is that of good men alike in virtue, and that bad or immature people can't sustain it because they're not stable enough to be loved for their character (their character is still in flux, or not lovable).

Aspirational reading: character friendship can exist between people who are seriously pursuing virtue together, even though neither has arrived. The bond is grounded not in achieved excellence but in a shared orientation toward it.

Now look at what the conclusion claimed: edumonia gets rebuilt "by practice, in small communities, around shared texts and shared tables, at the scale of friendship before the scale of the polis." The friendships are doing the forming. People enter the seminar or study group unformed — that's the whole point, they're there to be educated — and the friendship is the mechanism that makes them virtuous.

But on the strict reading, that mechanism is unavailable to them. If character friendship requires virtue as a precondition, then the unformed people in your study group can only have utility or pleasure friendships with each other — and we already said those two kinds can't do formative work. The argument would eat itself: you need virtue to get the friendships, but you need the friendships to get virtue. Nothing bootstraps. The small community becomes a place where already-virtuous people enjoy each other, not a place where virtue is produced — a finishing school for the finished.

So for the conclusion to work at all, it has to be assuming the aspirational reading, even though it never said so — that's the "quietly." The load-bearing hidden premise is: a friendship grounded in the shared pursuit of the good is already of the character-friendship kind, or close enough to do its formative work. The parish study group counts as the right sort of friendship not because its members are virtuous but because what binds them is the good itself, held in common as an object of serious attention — which is exactly what the shared text on the table provides.

There's real Aristotelian warrant for this. He allows that friendships come in degrees and that lesser friendships can resemble the perfect kind; he describes friends as sharpening one another, becoming better by exercising the friendship ("a sort of training in virtue," as IX.12 has it); and his whole account of habituation implies that you become just by doing just acts before you are just — so why not: you become capable of character friendship by practicing its activities before you fully qualify for it. The apprentice friendship would stand to the perfect kind the way the learner's just acts stand to the just man's.

But it's an interpretive choice, not a given, and the strict reading has teeth. That's why I flagged the Thomist alternative: if nature can't bootstrap — if unvirtuous people genuinely cannot will each other's good for its own sake, because their loves are still disordered — then something from outside the circle has to break in. Grace, in that account, does exactly the work the aspirational reading assigns to shared practice: it makes possible a love (charity) that doesn't wait on achieved virtue. The two readings are, in effect, the naturalist and the theological answers to the same bootstrapping problem your conclusion glossed over.