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.
Montaigne 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.
Montaigne takes 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.
All of this I wrote prior to delving into La Boetie’s work, but now having done so, I have a somewhat different interpretation of Montaigne’s essay about his friend. He made La Boetie a deathbed promise that he would help promote his writings, and he broke it. In doing so, he gave a fairly lame excuse about it possibly being interpreted as seditious.
Then he 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?
Montaigne made the argument, through his plural souls, that it was unnecessary for him to publish La Boetie because his spirit lived on in the essays. Then he never brought up his name again through the rest of the project.
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