Let nobody place those other common friendships in the same rank as this. I know about them – the most perfect of their kind – as well as anyone else, but I would advise you not to confound their rules: you would deceive yourself. In those other friendships you must proceed with wisdom and caution, keeping the reins in your hand: the bond is not so well tied that there is no reason to doubt it. ‘Love a friend,’ said Chilo, ‘as though some day you must hate him: hate him, as though you must love him’.* That precept which is so detestable in that sovereign master-friendship is salutary in the practice of friendships which are common and customary, in relation to which you must employ that saying which Aristotle often repeated: ‘O my friends, there is no friend!’*
In this noble relationship, the services and good turns which foster those other friendships do not even merit being taken into account: that is because of the total interfusion of our wills. For just as the friendly love I feel for myself is not increased – no matter what the Stoics may say – by any help I give myself in my need, and just as I feel no gratitude for any good turn I do to myself: so too the union of such friends, being truly perfect, leads them to lose any awareness of such services, to hate and to drive out from between them all terms of division and difference, such as good turn, duty, gratitude, request, thanks and the like. Everything is genuinely common to them both: their wills, goods, wives, children, honour and lives; their correspondence is that of one soul in bodies twain, according to that most apt definition of Aristotle’s,† so they can neither lend nor give anything to each other. That is why those who make laws forbid gifts between husband and wife, so as to honour marriage with some imagined resemblance to that holy bond, wishing to infer by it that everything must belong to them both, so that there is nothing to divide or to split up between them. In the kind of friendship I am talking about, if it were possible for one to give to the other it is the one who received the benefaction who would lay an obligation on his companion. For each of them, more than anything else, is seeking the good of the other, so that the one who furnishes the means and the occasion is in fact the more generous, since he gives his friend the joy of performing for him what he most desires. When Diogenes the philosopher was short of money he did not say that he would ask his friends to give him some but to give him some back!* And to show how this happens in practice I will cite an example – a unique one – from Antiquity.
Eudamidas, a Corinthian, had two friends: Charixenus, a Sicyonian, and Aretheus, also a Corinthian. As he happened to die in poverty, his two friends being rich, he made the following testament: ‘To Aretheus I bequeath that he look after my mother and maintain her in her old age; to Charixenus, that he see that my daughter be married, providing her with the largest dowry he can; and if one of them should chance to die I appoint the survivor to substitute for him.’ Those who first saw his will laughed at it; but, when those heirs learned of it, they accepted it with a unique joy. One of them, Charixenus, did die five days later; the possibility of substitution was thus opened in favour of Aretheus, and he looked after the mother with much care; then, of five hundred weight of silver in his possession, he gave two and a half for the marriage of his only daughter and two and a half for the daughter of Eudamidas, celebrating their weddings on the same day.*
This example is a most full one, save for one circumstance: there was more than one friend. For the perfect friendship which I am talking about is indivisible: each gives himself so entirely to his friend that he has nothing left to share with another: on the contrary, he grieves that he is not two-fold, three-fold or four-fold and that he does not have several souls, several wills, so that he could give them all to the one he loves.
Common friendships can be shared. In one friend one can love beauty; in another, affability; in another, generosity; in another, a fatherly affection; in another, a brotherly one; and so on. But in this friendship love takes possession of the soul and reigns there with full sovereign sway: that cannot possibly be duplicated. If two friends asked you to help them at the same time, which of them would you dash to? If they asked for conflicting favours, who would have the priority? If one entrusted to your silence something which it was useful for the other to know, how would you get out of that? The unique, highest friendship loosens all other bonds. That secret which I have sworn to reveal to no other, I can reveal without perjury to him who is not another: he is me. It is a great enough miracle for oneself to be redoubled: they do not realize how high a one it is when they talk of its being tripled. The uttermost cannot be matched. If anyone suggests that I can love each of two friends as much as the other, and that they can love each other and love me as much as I love them, he is turning into a plural, into a confraternity, that which is the most ‘one’, the most bound into one. One single example of it is moreover the rarest thing to find in the world.
The rest of that story conforms well what I was saying: for Eudamidas bestows a grace and favour on his friends when he makes use of them in his necessity. He left them heirs to his own generosity, which consists in putting into their hands the means of doing him good. And there is no doubt that the force of loving-friendship is more richly displayed in what he did than in what Aretheus did. To sum up, these are deeds which surpass the imagination of anyone who has not tasted them; they make me wondrously honour the reply of that young soldier when Cyrus inquired of him how much he would take for a horse which had enabled him to win the prize in the races: ‘Would he sell it for a kingdom?’ – ‘No, indeed, Sire; but I would willingly give it away to gain a friend, if I could find a man worthy of such an alliance.’* Not badly put, that, ‘If I could find’; for you can easily find men fit for a superficial acquaintanceship. But for our kind, in which we are dealing with the innermost recesses of our minds with no reservations, it is certain that all of our motives must be pure and sure to perfection.
In those alliances which only get hold of us by one end, we need simply to provide against such flaws as specifically affect that end. It cannot matter to me what the religion of my doctor or my lawyer is: that consideration has nothing in common with the friendly services which they owe to me. And in such commerce as arises at home with my servants I act the same way: I make few inquiries about the chastity of my footman: I want to know if he is hard-working; I am less concerned by a mule-driver who gambles than by one who is an idiot, or by a cook who swears than by one who is incompetent. It is not my concern to tell the world how to behave (plenty of others do that) but how I behave in it:
Mihi sic usus est; tibi, ut opus est facto, face.
[This is what I do: do what serves you.]*
For the intimate companionship of my table I choose the agreeable not the wise; in my bed, beauty comes before virtue; in social conversation, ability – even without integrity. And so on.
Just as that philosopher† playing with his children and riding astride a hobby-horse told the man who surprised him at it not to make comments before he had children of his own, judging that the emotions which would then arise in his soul would make him a good judge of such behaviour: so too I could wish that I were speaking to people who had assayed what I am talking about; but realizing how far removed from common practice is such a friendship – and how rare it is – I do not expect to find one good judge of it. For the very writings which Antiquity have left us on this subject seem weak to me compared to what I feel. In this case the very precepts of philosophy are surpassed by the results:
Nil ego contulerim jucundo sanus amico.
[Whilst I am in my right mind, there is nothing I will compare with a delightful friend.]*
In Antiquity Menander pronounced a man to be happy if he had merely encountered the shadow of a friend.† He was certainly right to say so, especially if he had actually tasted friendship. For in truth if I compare all the rest of my life – although by the grace of God I have lived it sweetly and easily, exempt (save for the death of such a friend) from grievous affliction in full tranquillity of mind, contenting myself with t
he natural endowments which I was born with and not going about looking for others – if I compare it, I say, to those four years which it was vouchsafed to me to enjoy in the sweet companionship and fellowship of a man like that, it is but smoke and ashes, a night dark and dreary.
Since that day when I lost him,
quem semper acerbum,
Semper honoratum (sic, Dii, voluistis) habebo,
[which I shall ever hold bitter to me, though always honour (since the gods ordained it so),]‡
I merely drag wearily on. The very pleasures which are proffered me do not console me: they redouble my sorrow at his loss. In everything we were halves: I feel I am stealing his share from him:
Nec fas esse ulla me voluptate hic frui
Decrevi, tantisper dum ille abest meus particeps.
[Nor is it right for me to enjoy pleasures, I decided, while he who shared things with me is absent from me.]*
I was already so used and accustomed to being, in everything, one of two, that I now feel I am no more than a half:
Illam meae si partem animae tulit
Maturior vis, quid moror altera,
Nec charus aeque, nec superstes
Integer? Ille dies utramque
Duxit ruinam.
[Since an untimely blow has borne away a part of my soul, why do I still linger on less dear, only partly surviving? That day was the downfall of us both.]†
There is no deed nor thought in which I do not miss him – as he would have missed me; for just as he infinitely surpassed me in ability and virtue so did he do so in the offices of friendship:
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus
Tam chari capitis?…
O misero frater adempte mihi!
Omnia tecum una perierunt gaudia nostra,
Quae tuus in vita dulcis alebat amor.
Tu mea, tu moriens fregisti commoda, frater;
Tecum una tota est nostra sepulta anima,
Cujus ego interitu tota de mente fugavi
Haec studia atque omnes delicias animi.
Alloquar? audiero nunquam tua verba loquentem?
Nunquam ego te, vita frater amabilior,
Aspiciam posthac? At certe semper amabo.
[What shame or limit should there be to grief for one so dear?… How wretched I am, having lost such a brother! With you died all our joys, which your sweet love fostered when you were alive. You, brother, have destroyed my happiness by your death: all my soul is buried with you. Because of your loss I have chased all thoughts from my mind and all pleasures from my soul… Shall I never speak to you, never hear you talking of what you have done? Shall I never see you again, my brother, dearer than life itself? But certainly I shall love you always.]*
Let us hear a while this sixteen-year-old boy.
Having discovered that this work of his has since been published to an evil end by those who seek to disturb and change the state of our national polity without worrying whether they will make it better, and that they have set it among works of their own kidney, I have gone back on my decision to place it here. And so that the author’s reputation should not be harmed among those who cannot know his opinions or his actions, I tell them that this subject was treated by him in his childhood purely as an exercise; it is a commonplace theme, pawed over in hundreds and hundreds of books. I have no doubt that he believed what he wrote, for he was too conscientious to tell untruths even in a light-hearted work. And I know, moreover, that if he had had the choice he would rather have been born in Venice than in Sarlat. Rightly so. But he had another maxim supremely imprinted upon his soul: to obey, and most scrupulously submit to, the laws under which he was born. There never was a better citizen, one more devoted to his country’s peace or more opposed to the disturbances and novelties of his time. He would have used his abilities to snuff them out, not to provide materials to stir them up. The mould of his mind was cast on the model of centuries different from ours.
So instead of that serious work I will substitute another one, more gallant and more playful, which he wrote in the same season of his life.
* Horace, Ars poetica 4. (Poets can create monsters at will; say a fair maid with the tail of a fish, that is, a mermaid.)
* Horace, Odes, II, ii, 6–7 (adapted to apply to Montaigne).
† Catullus, Epigrams, LXVI, 17–18.
* Ariosto, Orlando furioso, X, vii.
* Cicero, Tusc. disput., IV, xxxiii, 70. (In Greek philosophical homosexuality the older man was the Lover; the younger, the Beloved, showed admiration, or gratitude for instruction.)
* Cicero, Tusc. disput., IV, xxiv, 71.
† Cicero, De amicitia, XX, 74.
* Cicero, De amicitia, XI, 33–9.
* Chilo’s chilling judgement was normally attributed to Bias, one of the Seven Sages of Greece.
* Erasmus, Apophthegmata, VII, Aristoteles Stagirites, XXVIII.
† Erasmus, ibid., VII, Aristoteles Stagirites, XIX.
* Erasmus, ibid., III, Diogenes Cynicus, LXXXII.
* From Lucian of Samosata, Toxaris, or, On friendship, XXII.
* Xenophon, Cyropaedia, VIII, iii, 270.
* Terence, Heautontimorumenos, I, i, 28.
† Agesilaus (Cf. Erasmus, Apophthegmata, I, Agesilaus, LXVIII).
* Horace, Satires, I, v, 44.
† Plutarch (tr. Amyot), De l’amitié fraternelle, 82C–D.
‡ Virgil, Aeneid, V, 49–50.
* Terence, Heautontimorumenos, I, 1, 97–8.
† Horace, Odes, II, xvii, 5–9.
* Catullus, LXVIII, 20f.; LXV, 9 f. (adapted).
2
That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities
It is not perhaps without good reason that we attribute to simple-mindedness a readiness to believe anything and to ignorance the readiness to be convinced, for I think I was once taught that a belief is like an impression stamped on our soul: the softer and less resisting the soul, the easier it is to print anything on it: ‘Ut necesse est lancem in libra ponderibus impositis deprimi, sic animum perspicuis cedere.’ [’For just as a weight placed on a balance must weigh it down, so the mind must yield to clear evidence.’]* The more empty a soul is and the less furnished with counterweights, the more easily its balance will be swayed under the force of its first convictions. That is why children, the common people, women and the sick are more readily led by the nose.
On the other hand there is a silly arrogance in continuing to disdain something and to condemn it as false just because it seems unlikely to us. That is a common vice among those who think their capacities are above the ordinary.
I used to do that once: if I heard tell of ghosts walking or of prophecies, enchantments, sorcery, or some other tale which I could not get my teeth into –
Somnia, terrores magicos, miracula, sagas,
Nocturnos lemures portentaque Thessala
[Dreams, magic terrors, miracles, witches, nocturnal visits from the dead or spells from Thessaly]*
– I used to feel sorry for the wretched folk who were taken in by such madness. Now I find that I was at least as much to be pitied as they were. It is not that experience has subsequently shown me anything going beyond my original beliefs (nor is it from any lack of curiosity on my part), but reason has taught me that, if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities.
How many of the things which constantly come into our purview must be deemed monstrous or miraculous if we apply such terms to anything which outstrips our reason! If we consider that we have to grope through a fog even to understand the very things we hold in our hands, then we will certainly find that it is not knowledge but habit which takes away their strangeness;
On Friendship (Penguin) Page 2