Let Us Note Beauty
The action of the Lysis takes off from the beauty of Lysis the boy and the erotic or passionate desire for him, which Socrates then transforms. There is no life without encounter with beauty. Elaine Scarry, a scholar of aesthetics, spoke (forgive me if I say “beautifully”) about this subject in her Tanner Lectures at Yale. Beauty apprehended moves us to replicate it—in words, in sketches, in sketches that we re-sketch or then write about. One sees a beautiful scene, one writes a poem, one then writes a commentary on the poem. This replication goes on without end. It encompasses even the simple act of staring, the desire to keep the beautiful object continually before oneself. Scarry tells us “that Leonardo, as though half-crazed, used to follow people around the streets of Florence once he got ‘glimpses of it [beauty] in the strange eyes or hair of chance people.’”1 And it extends to the desire of procreative union, that the beautiful one might be replicated in the flesh.
When Socrates first sees Lysis, he agrees that the youth has beauty to be remarked upon, but instead of showing Lysis’ would-be lover, Hippothales, how to get Lysis into his embrace, he takes us all on a dialectical search for the truth about friendship. That search fails, yet the process itself prepares the participants for what might become a friendship. Rather than Socrates becoming Lysis’ lover, Socrates joins Lysis and Menexenus as a friend alongside them.
The question is, What sort of replication is this? If beauty causes us to desire to replicate it, the Socratic response seems to be that beauty is best (or at least better) replicated not in a sexual union but in a friendship that is achieved, if we may put it this way, asexually. This is another point on which we may find ourselves grateful to Plato. The dialogue shows no queasiness around sexual liberties and yet seems to suggest a human fulfillment that is sexually abstinent. That is to say, there is no anxiety here about sexual relations (and not just same-sex relations but man-boy relations), and yet there is a definite preferencing of friendship that is not paired (there are three of them) and is not sexually consummated. Is the best way to replicate beauty found in friendship? Is Socrates suggesting that beauty can spur us to our highest activity when it spurs us to make friends? Would he wish to train our eyes so that we see beauty most of all in friendship?
How Many Friends Can Someone Have?
Dialogues—conversations—take time. We pause to consider further Aristotle’s point that we can’t have a large number of friends because it takes time to test out and form friendships. In 2018, a professor at the University of Kansas published the results of his research, said to be the first of its kind, into how much time forming a friendship actually takes. The study measured hours spent together (“hanging out” and the like) and found that “it takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from mere acquaintance to casual friend, 90 hours to go from that stage to simple ‘friend’ status and more than 200 hours before you can consider someone your close friend.”2 These results, of course, could be challenged for sampling bias (perhaps too many students) and the subjectivity of the difference between the various levels. In addition, common sense would say there can be no hard-and-fast correlation between the closeness of a friend and the quantity of hours spent together. Nonetheless, we do have here a reality check. Two hundred hours is roughly seven hours every day for a month. That large quantity of time is said to be needed just to establish a close friendship. To go further and maintain the friendship would take additional, ongoing time.
It is ridiculous to think one can have very many friends. I remember as a young boy overhearing my farmer-grandfather tell his son-in-law (my father) that a man has only six people he can count on if he gets in serious trouble. The mind of a young boy wondered, Only six? But the mind of a widower might wonder, As many as six?
Yet it is also ridiculous to think of forming friendship as merely spending time hanging out together. The key question concerns what is done during that time. Is the friendship based on the good? Are the friends themselves people who desire to be good and to know truth? Yes, time matters, and it is sobering to realize how much time is required. But activity also matters, and the content of that activity. Which is to say, theologians and philosophers can learn from sociology, but sociology will not give us the last word.
Cicero: Friendship’s Rare Beauty
One last time we turn to a classical thinker, a Roman who famously held friendship to be rare and exalted. He is the statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero. Shortly before his death in 43 BC, Cicero wrote Laelius de Amicitia, a work that claims to be Cicero’s memory of Scaevola (an old man whose student Cicero had been about forty-five years earlier) recounting a conversation that he, Scaevola, had had with Gaius Laelius in the year we know as 129 BC, “just a few days after the mysterious death of Scipio Minor.” The De Amicitia is thus a doubly remembered conversation. The friendship of Scipio and Laelius was widely acknowledged and held in high esteem; consequently, when the opportunity arose shortly after Scipio’s death, it was natural enough for Laelius to be pressed by two sons-in-law to speak to them about what friendship really is. In the main, the De Amicitia contains this remembered discourse on friendship by Laelius. I will consider the teaching that Laelius sets forth to be Cicero’s account of friendship; indeed, it has commonly been taken as such by subsequent writers (one of whom, the twelfth-century Aelred of Rievaulx, plays an important role later in this book). Cicero’s teaching, we will see, has commonalities with that of Plato and Aristotle, yet in “arrangement, plan, style and illustrations,” he is doing something new—something of beauty, done, as W. A. Falconer wrote nearly a century ago, with unmatched “charm.”3
Since it is through his mastering rhetoric that Cicero teaches, there are rewards for taking the dialogue slowly, savoring his elevation of the truths of friendship.
The “whole essence of friendship,” he says early on, is “the most complete agreement in policy, in pursuits, and in opinions” (iv.15), which is to say, “an accord in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and affection [benevolentia et caritate]” (vi.20). Laelius, having known such extensive agreement and harmony with Scipio, expresses the hope that the memory of their friendship will endure always; it matters more to him even than that his reputation for wisdom would last. Is this because there have been more famous wise men than famous friends? He says at least this much: “In the whole range of history only three or four pairs of friends are mentioned; and I venture to hope that among such instances the friendship of Scipio and Laelius will be known to posterity” (iv.15).
Friendship is rare and exalted. Only those who are good can become friends. What is its root? It arises from a certain fact about human nature, those ties we have to one another that are strengthened by proximity. Nature brings us to give preference to our fellow citizens, neighbors, and relatives. But what arises from those proximate ties generally does not amount to friendship; such ties can survive without goodwill, whereas for friendship, goodwill is of the essence. Thus friendship excels all other relationships. Although there are “infinite ties uniting the human race,” ties that are “fashioned by Nature herself,” friendship is something much narrower, more refined: “The bonds of affection always unite two persons only, or, at most, a few” (v.20).
Rare, exalted, grounded in nature, limited to no more than a few people, friendship gives us the occasion to “repose on the mutual goodwill of a friend,” without which life would not be worth living. There is nothing “sweeter than to have someone with whom you may dare discuss anything as if you were communing with yourself,” someone to share your joys and also help lift the burdens of adversity. In this, friendship, although rare, reaches wide. It “embraces innumerable ends; turn where you will it is ever at your side; no barrier shuts it out; it is never untimely and never in the way” (vi.22). It “excels all other things” by projecting “the bright ray of hope into the future,” not suffering “the spirit to grow faint or to fall.” To look “upon a true friend” is, in a way, to look upon an image of yourself. “Wherefore friends, though absent, are at hand; though in need, yet abound; though weak, are strong; and—harder saying still—though dead, are yet alive” (this spoken by one whose dear friend died just days before; vii.23).
And friendship is widely acclaimed. In a new play written by a “guest and friend” of Laelius (it becomes a story told through the ages, thanks to Cicero), it came about that one Orestes was to be put to death, but the king could not execute the sentence because he did not know which of two friends was Orestes. When he commanded that Orestes step forward, both arose at once, each saying, “I am Orestes!” Orestes’ friend, Pylades, did not want Orestes to die; Orestes did not want his friend to die in his place. Each thus showed himself willing to die in his friend’s stead. At this moment in the play, Laelius reports, “The people in the audience rose to their feet and cheered.” Although the audience, he laments, would lack the courage to imitate this self-sacrifice in their own lives, nonetheless nature in them “asserted her own power” as they approved what they saw performed in drama as human greatness precisely in friendship (vii.24).
Friendship is built into our human nature, but where? It does not arise from our mere neediness, the human weakness and want that drive us to seek proximity and community. Neediness, weakness, and want, Laelius has already noted, can exist without goodwill, but there is no friendship without goodwill. Etymology unpacks the connection: amicitia (friendship) comes from amor (love). It is a love that establishes goodwill, “an inclination of the soul joined with a feeling of love,” an inclination that arises from meeting “someone whose habits and character” attract us not because (or not only because) we find such habits and character “congenial with our own” but because in this person we “behold, as it were, a sort of lamp of uprightness and virtue.” Virtue is attractive: nothing, according to Cicero’s teaching, “more allures us to affection” than virtue (viii.27–28).
So it would be wrong to claim that friendship arises out of mere need, for the wise, as is commonly said, need nothing, yet nonetheless they treasure their friendships. Laelius cites a friendship he had with Africanus. Neither of them had any need that the other supplied. “I loved him because of a certain admiration for his virtue, and he, in turn, loved me, because, it may be, of the fairly good opinion which he had of my character; and close association added to our mutual affection” (ix.30). Even—perhaps especially—virtuous and wise persons enjoy mutual love, share a common admiration for that which is virtuous, and enjoy close association with one another. Of course, advantages then follow, but it is not for the sake of those advantages that friendship comes to be.
Most people find it hard to have friendships that endure to death. Here is Ciceronian realism grounded in the tumultuous public and political life of Rome. Countless contingencies intervene; parties may cease to be advantageous to each other, or their politics may diverge; the burdens of age may make a past friendship impossible to maintain. And, if we may import the word, sin can get in the way, for it might turn out that one’s friend asks one to do something wrong. Laelius is clear that friendship can never excuse wrongdoing; above all, it cannot justify a wrong against the commonwealth. So there is a law in friendship: “Neither ask dishonourable things, nor do them, if asked” (xii.40). But to rest here would be to focus overly on the prohibition; Laelius restates the law positively in order to show that what friends should do for each other goes far beyond the avoidance of things dishonorable: “Ask of friends only what is honourable; do for friends only what is honourable and without even waiting to be asked; let zeal be ever present, but hesitation absent; dare to give true advice with all frankness; in friendship let the influence of friends who are wise counsellors be paramount, and let that influence be employed in advising, not only with frankness, but, if the occasion demands, even with sternness, and let the advice be followed when given” (xiii.44).
To foreclose the possibility of having to endure the breakup of a friendship, either under the contingencies of life or the exposure of a friend’s lack of virtue, one might think it better to try to live without friends. This, however, is humanly devastating; to thus “deprive life of friendship” would be “to take the sun out of the universe.” It is also, as a general point, self-contradictory to avoid occasions wherein one’s virtue could be put to the test; virtue is obtained and grows in us precisely when we meet trouble and then, through “rejecting and loathing” the things that are contrary to virtue, thereby grow in kindness, temperance, bravery, justice, and so forth (xiii.47). Furthermore, virtue is not hard in every part of life; “especially in friendship,” virtue “is so pliable and elastic that it expands, so to speak, with a friend’s prosperity and contracts with his adversity” (xiii.48).
To have friendship that endures is to have friendship that is knit together by virtue. Therefore friends must exhibit some shining virtue from which love springs forth. Good people will love and join themselves to other good people. This is far removed from mere expediency, which would remove “from friendship’s chain its loveliest link.” For we do not delight in the gain that we may obtain from a friend but rather in “his love, and his love alone” (xiv.51). Advantage attends on friendship, not vice versa.
Everything hangs on the friends having, and seeking to have, good character. When their characters “are blameless, then there should be between them complete harmony of opinions and inclinations in everything without any exception.”4 And when character falls short, Laelius finds room for accommodation. Should a friend wish for something that is “not altogether honourable,” if he nevertheless is desiring of and seeking to have good character, it may be that we should for his sake (his life or reputation, say, being at stake) “turn aside from the straight path,” provided that it will not lead to “utter disgrace” (xvii.61).5
Laelius finds it astonishing that most people know exactly how many goats or sheep they have but cannot say how many friends they have—that they take “pains to get the former” but are “careless in choosing the latter” (xvii.62). How then should one go about securing friends? They need to be tested; we should not be like fickle children who quickly take on friends without considering their character. One looks for loyalty in a friend, because loyalty is a sign of a friend’s potential for constancy over time. One also looks for a friend to eschew feigning and hypocrisy and to avoid suspecting that the friend has done wrong; such behaviors of openness manifest goodness and wisdom. One looks too for a certain affability of speech and manner.
Should one seek out new friends? Not necessarily, for old friends are not to be despised. Yet new friends are not to be scorned if they offer hope of becoming good friends. There must be equality among friends, and so if one is superior to the other, he should treat the inferior as a superior in order to manifest their equality. (Laelius gives examples of Scipio doing this in xix.69.) And, perhaps obviously, decisions about friendships require that one be oneself a person who has matured with strength and stability of body and mind. The problem that Cicero seems to have in view is that “ungoverned goodwill”—which could go back to one’s childhood, when one had not yet developed virtue—could get in the way of one doing what one should do with and for one’s friends. One needs also to be able to endure “the temporary separation of friends” when separation is a matter of duty; dishonorably refusing to part would be another instance, it seems, of “ungoverned goodwill” (xx.75). Thus friendship’s ongoing exercise requires virtue, even as its coming into being was through attraction to the friend’s virtue.
Sometimes one must break off a friendship, but if so, it should be done gradually, if possible. The sole security against the ills and annoyances of friendships that must be broken off is “neither to enlist your love too quickly nor to fix it on unworthy men” (xxi.78). It is, it seems, necessary to give thought to the various ways friendship can fall short. But it is unsatisfactory to conclude with thoughts of failure. So Cicero turns the end of his work back to an exhortation to attend to virtue, which is necessary for our happiness and indeed without which we cannot obtain friendship. Friendship is essential to human life, for if someone had every desired material thing in the world, if she were completely alone, deprived of all human intercourse, her condition would be most unendurable of all. Since, therefore, “things human are frail and fleeting, we must be ever on the search for some persons whom we shall love and who will love us in return; for if goodwill and affection are taken away, every joy is taken from life.” In a supremely eloquent affirmation of the classical ideal of friendship, beyond the distinction of private and public, of action and rest, of engagement and study, grounded in virtue and ever seeking virtue, Laelius gives us our final words:
Of all blessings that fortune or nature has bestowed on me, there is none which I can compare with Scipio’s friendship. In it I found agreement on public questions; in it, counsel in private business, and in it, too, a leisure of unalloyed delight. . . . There was one home for us both; we had the same fare and shared it in common, and we were together not only in our military campaigns, but also in our foreign tours and on our vacations in the country. Why need I speak of our constant devotion to investigation and to learning in which, remote from the gaze of men, we spent all our leisure time? . . . I exhort you . . . so to esteem virtue (without which friendship cannot exist), that, excepting virtue, you will think nothing more excellent than friendship. (xxvii.103–4)