Very early in his famously-touching essay about Etienne de La Boetie–the most emotionally powerful of his works–Montaigne quotes Aristotle on the subject of friendship. I’m going to start my essay with a long section from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 8, because I believe this background is essential to understanding what Montaigne is trying to accomplish:
The perfect form of friendship is that between the good, and those who resemble each other in virtue. For these friends wish each alike the other’s good in respect of their goodness, and they are good in themselves; but it is those who wish the good of their friends for their friends’ sake who are friends in the fullest sense, since they love each other for themselves and not accidentally. Hence the friendship of these lasts as long as they continue to be good; and virtue is a permanent quality. And each is good relatively to his friend as well as absolutely, since the good are both good absolutely and profitable to each other. And each is pleasant in both ways also, since good men are pleasant both absolutely and to each other; for everyone is pleased by his own actions, and therefore by actions that resemble his own, and the actions of all good men are the same or similar.— Such friendship is naturally permanent, since it combines in itself all the attributes that friends ought to possess. All affection is based on good or on pleasure, either absolute or relative to the person who feels it, and is prompted by similarity of some sort; but this friendship possesses all these attributes in the friends themselves, for they are alike, et cetera, in that way. Also the absolutely good is pleasant absolutely as well; but the absolutely good and pleasant are the chief objects of affection; therefore it is between good men that affection and friendship exist in their fullest and best form.
Such friendships are of course rare, because such men are few. Moreover they require time and intimacy: as the saying goes, you cannot get to know a man till you have consumed the proverbial amount of salt in his company; and so you cannot admit him to friendship or really be friends, before each has shown the other that he is worthy of friendship and has won his confidence. People who enter into friendly relations quickly have the wish to be friends, but cannot really be friends without being worthy of friendship, and also knowing each other to be so; the wish to be friends is a quick growth, but friendship is not.
This form of friendship is perfect both in point of duration and of the other attributes of friendship; and in all respects either party receives from the other the same or similar benefits, as it is proper that friends should do.
Montaigne has two purposes in mind with this essay: 1) to demonstrate that his relationship with Etienne de La Boetie fits Aristotle’s description of the perfect virtuous friendship. But also 2) to show that anyone capable of entering into such a perfect pairing is incapable of treachery, in turn defending his departed friend from the charge that an essay he wrote in his youth was a seditious attack on the monarchy.
And it was the essay in questions, La Boetie’s “Discourse of Voluntary Servitude” that brought them together:
Yet I am particularly indebted to that treatise, because it first brought us together: it was shown to me long before I met him and first made me acquainted with his name; thus preparing for that loving-friendship between us which as long as it pleased God we fostered so perfect and so entire that it is certain that few such can even be read about, and no trace at all of it can be found among men of today.
The next section of Montaigne’s essay elaborates on the various forms of friendship. Most of it he straight up stole from Aristotle. He talks about the closeness of brothers, romantic loves, marriage partners, and what we call friendship, but are really nothing more than acquaintances.
Montaigne saw his special friendship to La Boetie as something mystical, pre-ordained:
We were seeking each other before we set eyes on each other–both because of the reports we each had heard (which made a more violent assault on our emotions than was reasonable from what they had said, and, I believe, because of some decree of Heaven: we embraced each other by repute, and, at our first meeting, which chanced to be at a great crowded town-festival, we discovered ourselves to be so seized with each other, so known to each other and so bound together that from then on none was so close as each was to the other.
This leads to a very interesting historical anecdote from Montaigne, about the condemnation of Tiberius Gracchus and the prosecution of everyone who was close to him. Some historical background is in order, from Wikipedia:
Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (c. 163 – 133 BC) was a Roman politician best known for his agrarian reform law entailing the transfer of land from the Roman state and wealthy landowners to poorer citizens. He had also served in the Roman army, fighting in Africa during the Third Punic War and in Spain during the Numantine War.
His political future was imperilled during his quaestorship when he was forced to negotiate a humiliating treaty with the Numantines after they had surrounded the army he was part of in Spain. Seeking to rebuild that future and reacting to a supposed decline in the Roman population which he blamed on rich families buying up Italian land, he carried a land reform bill against strong opposition by another tribune during his term as tribune of the plebs in 133 BC. To pass and protect his reforms, Tiberius unprecedentedly had the tribune who opposed his programme deposed from office, usurped the senate’s prerogatives over foreign policy, and attempted to stand for a consecutive tribunate. Fears of Tiberius’ popularity and his willingness to break political norms led to his death, along with many supporters, in a riot instigated by his enemies.
So, Gracchus’s closest friend was Caius Blosius, and he was asked during this inquest how much he would have done for his friend. As recounted by Montaigne:
He replied: ‘Anything.’ — ‘What, anything?’ Laelius continued: ‘And what if he had ordered you to set fire to our temples?’ — ‘He would never have asked me to,’ retored Blosius. ‘But supposing he had,’ Laelius added, ‘Then I would have obeyed,’ Blosius replied.
He goes on to question whether Blosius was a perfect friend for speculating like that on something Gracchus would have never requested. But Montaigne defends him:
Those who condemn his reply as seditious do not fully understand the mystery of friendship and fail to accept the premise that he had Gracchus’ intention in the pocket of his sleeve, both by his influence and his knowledge. They were more friends than citizens; friends, more than friends or foes of their country or friends of ambition or civil strife. Having completely committed themselves to each other, they each completely held the reins of each other’s desires; grant that this pair were guided by virtue and led by reason (without which it is impossible to harness them together) Blosius’ reply is what it should have been. If their actions broke the traces, then they were, by my measure, neither friends of each other nor friends of themselves.
And Montaigne then goes on to say he would give the same answer if asked any hypothetical about his dear friend. He concludes this section with this lovely thought:
Our souls were yoked together in such unity, and contemplated each other with so ardent an affection, and with the same affection revealed each to each other right down to the very entrails, that not only did I know his mind as well as I knew my own but I would have entrusted myself to him with greater assurance than to myself.
This leads him to take the position that, in such a friendship, an ethical necessity akin to spousal privilege emerges. Two souls are merged into one, so it’s pointless to try to set them off against each other or look for distance between them:
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.
There are numerous ways to approach this friendship and the work that had a lingering influence on it. First, I would like to defend Montaigne against the charge that there was something inauthentic in his description of his bond to La Boetie. While it’s true that the friendship was relatively short lived and his description of it seems like a flowery ode to Aristotle’s template, I have no doubt of his sincerity and his alignment with La Boetie’s ideas. The two men clearly saw eye to eye on many things and I think Montaigne wanted to showcase La Boetie’s thoughts in his first collection of essays.
However, there is the thorny question of broken promises. Montaigne made La Boetie a deathbed promise that he would help promote his writings, and he arguably broke it. Instead of including his most provocative essay in his collection, Montaigne attached some of La Boetie’s sonnets, which were not his best work. Montaigne left the Discourse on Involuntary Servitude out for political reasons, at a time when being on the wrong side of power was a very dangerous act. He was still trying to build his power and influence and had not retreated to his estate yet. So, while it’s disappointing that he walked away from his promise, it’s also understandable.
In his essay about friendship, Montaigne made the lovely-sounding claim that he and La Boetie were one. But what does it mean when someone says his soul has merged with another, especially when that person is dead? How do you honor a lost soul and his memories when they’ve been subsumed within you?
I don’t know what to make of the fact that Montaigne never again mentions La Boetie by name, especially when you consider the random nature of the topics he assays. Wouldn’t you think that someone who took up so much of Montaigne’s head space would return in some form later? There are a few unattributed quotes of his sprinkled throughout and Phillipe Desan makes an interesting argument that a sly reference to “other halves” in The Cannibals was Montaigne’s way of firmly embracing the philosophy of La Boetie’s discourse.
Contrast Montaigne’s silence to how Marcel Proust handles important people in his narrator’s story arc. Marcel cannot shake the people who affect him. He has a relationship with a woman named Albertine that spans three books even though it’s obvious from their first meeting that she’s an impossible romantic fit for him. Proust, who was clearly influenced by Montaigne in his belief in embodied consciousness and his reliance on the personal narrative, seems to be directly critiquing the essayist’s emotional distance. Proust insists that we’re never really done with the people who matter to us, they have a way of holding our consciousness captive.
Then again, who knows, maybe Montaigne was somewhat like me and wrote drafts that included La Boetie, but felt compelled to edit those parts out. Let’s not forget the Nietzsche quote “one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.” (For a detailed examination of how ChatGPT led me to mistakenly attribute this quote to Montaigne, please see my story “The Tale of the Fabricated Translation.”) Having poured his soul out once in regard to La Boetie, Montaigne may have just figured he should let the friendship rest.
The best we get in response from Montaigne, indirectly, is his belief in plural souls, in his contention that La Boetie’s spirit has been fully integrated in him, and communicates through him in everything Montaigne writes. While his name never came up again, there’s no question that La Boetie’s thoughts continued to influence his friend until the end. So we’re left with accepting Montaigne’s word for it, assuming that he never walked away from the ideas of his first collaborator, mentor and affectionate friend, even when he felt the need to keep a distance for his political survival.
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