anonymous@bbncca.ARPA (forwarded anonymous posting) (10/16/84)
The French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) wrote a rather extraordinary essay, "On Friendship", recording his ardent and admiring affection for Etienne de la Boetie, whom he knew for too short a period of 4 years (ended with the latter's death at the age of 33). La Boetie was a little older than Montaigne, married, already a promising young public servant, known as the author of an eloquent treatise on tyranny. His love of mankind, his faith in human nature, his lofty and ardent passion for public welfare, and the high simplicity of his course of life, combined into a vehement and somewhat utopian nature, but also excellent good sense, with peculiar sweetness and delicacy of feeling, made him, in Montaine's phrase, "un grand homme de bien". Here then are excerpts from this essay, written some 10 years after his friend's untimely death. I think it may be of interest to some readers. There is nothing to which nature seems to have inclined us more than to so- ciety. And Aristotle says that good legislators have had more care for friend- ship than for justice. Now the ultimate point in the perfection of society is this. For in general all associations that are forged and nourished by pleas- ure or profit, by public or private needs, are the less beautiful and novel, and the less friendships, in so far as they mix into friendship another cause and object and reward that friendship itself. The ordinary capacity of women is inadequate for that communion and fellowship which is the nurse of this sacred bond; nor does their soul seem firm enough to endure the strain of so tight and durable a knot. And indeed, but for that, if such a relationship, free and voluntary, could be built up, in which not only would the souls have this complete enjoyment, but the bodies would also share in the alliance, so that the entire man would be engaged, it is certain that the resulting friendship would be fuller and more complete. [Ancient] Greek love involved a necessary disparity in age and such a differ- ence in the lovers' functions [and was] simply founded on external beauty, the false image of corporeal generation. For it could not be founded in the spir- it, the signs of which were still hidden [in "the flower of tender youth", the loved one]. [Thus it does] not correspond closely enough with the perfect un- ion and harmony we require here. I return to my description of a more equitable and more equable friendship. For the rest, what we ordinarily call friends and friendship are nothing but acquaintanceship and familiarities formed by some chance of convenience. In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so com- pletely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it again. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I. Beyond all my unsderstanding, beyond what I can say about this in particular, there was I know not what inexplicable and fateful force that was the mediator of thus union. We sought each other before we met because of the reports we heard of each other, which had more effect on our affection than such report would reasonably have; I think it was by some ordinance from heaven. We em- braced each other by our names. And at our first meeting, we found ourselves so taken with each other, so well acquainted, so bound together, than from that time on nothing was so close to us as each other. Having so little time to last, and having begun so late, for we were both grown men, it could not lose time and conform to the pattern of mild and regu- lar friendships, which need so many precautions in the form of long prelim- inary association. Our friendship had no other model than itself, and can be compared only with itself. It is I know not what quintessence of all this mixture, which, having seized my whole will, led it to plunge and lose itself in his; which, having seized his whole will, led it to plunge and lose itself in mine, with equal hunger. I say lose, in truth, for neither of us reserved anything for himself, nor was anything either his or mine. Let not these other, common frienships be placed in this rank. You must walk in them with prudence and precaution; the knot is not so well tied that there is no cause to mistrust it. "Love him," Chilo used to say, "as if you are to hate him some day; hate him, as if you are to love him." This precept, which is so abominable in this sovereign and masterful friendship, is healthy in the practice of ordinary and customary ones, in regard to which we must use the remark that Aristotle often repeated: "O my friends, there is no friend." In this noble relationship, services and benefits, on which other friendships feed, do not even deserve to be taken into account. The union of such friends, being truly perfect, makes them lose the sense of such duties, and hate and banish from between them these words of separation and distinction: benefit, obligation, gratitude, request, thanks, and the like. Everything actually being in common between them--wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, wives, children, honor and life--and their relationship being that of one soul in two bodies, they can neither lend nor give anything to each other. That is why the law- makers, to honor marriage with some imaginary resemblance to this divine union, forbid gifts between husband and wife, wishing thus to imply that everything should belong to each of them and that they have nothing to divide and split up between them. This perfect friendship I speak of is indivisible: each one gives himself so wholly to his friend that he has nothing left to distribute elsewhere; on the contrary, he is sorry that he is not double, triple or quadruple, and that he has not several souls souls and several wills to confer them all on one subject. Common friendships can be divided up: one may love in one man his beauty, in another his easygoing ways, in another liberality, in one paternal love, in another brotherly love, and so forth; but this friendship that possesses the soul and rules it with absolute sovereignty cannot possibly be double. A single dominant friendship dissolves all other obligations. The secret I have sworn to reveal to no other man I can impart without perjury to the one who is not another man, he is myself. It is a great enough miracle to be doubled, and those who talk of tripling them- selves do not realize the loftiness of the thing: nothing is extreme that can be matched. (from the English translation of Donald M. Frame)