Friendship in Plato, Augustine and Montaigne

Plato, Augustine and Montaigne all define friendship in different ways, though they share many similarities. Augustine, for instance, defined it in terms of the ultimate aim of man as a Christian, which is to be united to God: a friend was thus one who assisted or supported the development of that holy union. Plato viewed friendship in a more philosophical (and less theological vein) but nonetheless defined it as one of the bonds that help to create a strong society based on the pursuance of the Ideals—the one, the good, and true. Montaigne viewed friendship from a political perspective, showing how Aristotle pointed out that “good legislators had more respect to friendship than to justice” (1) in order to show that there is a great deal of good to be said for the charity that is often associated with friendship. This paper will discuss the meaning of friendship as defined by Plato, Augustine and Montaigne and show their different orientations and how, ultimately, they are mainly like-minded.
The characteristic of friendship that links the three perspectives together is the quality of affection or charity that goes together with friendship. A friend is one who wants the other to do well, to be whole, and to succeed in life. A friend is supportive rather than hurtful and is a source of good will rather than ill will. For Augustine, the ultimate or true friend was one who wanted to see the other save his soul. Thus, a seeming friend may have a pleasant demeanor and positive feeling towards one, but unless that friend is able to assist one in moving closer to God, he cannot be counted as a true friend. That is why Augustine writes, “friendship is genuine only when you bind fast together people who cleave to you through the charity poured abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us” (4,7). In other words, true friendship for Augustine comes from God and has its origins in the charity which flows as a gift through and from the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity.
To support his definition of friendship, Augustine describes how he lured a friend away from the true faith to follow in superstition. He describes his friendship as being rooted in a kind of love (i.e., in misplaced affection rather than in the holy love that leads souls to God) that nonetheless had some of the defining characteristics of genuine friendship: Augustine cared for the person but was blinded himself by superstition so could not be the kind of true friend to the person that God wants all to be. Thus, Augustine described how God took the friend away from Augustine: “You were pursuing close behind us, O God of vengeance who are the fount of all mercy and turn us back to yourself in wondrous ways. You took him from this life after barely a year’s friendship, a friendship sweeter to me than any sweetness I had known in all my life” (4,7). While the friend was sick and unconscious, he was baptized—and as he begin to recover a bit he was told as much. Augustine mocked the ceremony to his recovering friend, but the friend now viewed Augustine as his spiritual enemy, which he was—and so Augustine plotted to win the friend back once he was in better health, but God save the friend from Augustine’s “mad designs” as himself called them. Thus, love can bloom—but unless it is ultimately rooted in Christ, it is but misplaced love. And love, being the basis of friendship, has to root itself therefore to God or else it is faulty friendship by design. Such is Augustine’s perspective.
The perspective of Plato on friendship is naturally a bit different, as Plato was writing during the pre-Christian era. However, Plato did have a clear conception of the nature of love and how love, as the essence of friendship, is connected to the Transcendental. Diotima in the Symposium asserts that the characteristic of love is being in the possession of the good unendingly—i.e., in being united to the Transcendental good and never being separated from it. This is essentially the same as Augustine’s conception except that Augustine identifies the ultimate source of the Good as the Triune God and has a name for the Second Person in that Trinity—Christ. The Platonic idea of friendship is like Augustine’s just without a sense of the supernatural gifts that flow through the Trinity when true friendship, based on love based on union with the Good, is established. As Augustine showed with his story of the friend who was baptized and recoiled from Augustine’s mockery of the faith afterwards, that union with the Good is really all that matters in life—and a friend who would lead one away from that Good is not a friend at all.
Diotima in the Symposium suggests as much when she characterizes love as the quality of being in perfect possession of the Good. She also indicates that love produces fruit—and so too must friendship produce fruit. The reason Socrates is put to death is that the Athenian jury does not like the fruit he is producing: they want it to stop; in effect, they do not want true friendship in their city-state because it is leading to too much desire among men to be better than the state wants them to be. In the case of Athens, it was a question of state control vs. friendship with the Good.
Montaigne’s view of friendship was colored both by Christianity and by the Reformation which was well underway by the time Montaigne set himself to philosophizing. Europe was tearing itself apart as princes, kings, and clerics all went to war with one another over religious matters ostensibly but almost certainly also after quests for regional power. Montaigne thus represented the foreshadowing of the Peace of Westphalia, which was the political peace that ended the Thirty Years War and instituted a new kind of politics in Europe—one based on secular peace and an agree-to-disagree type of respect. At best it always proved to be an unstable peace, but because of the disruption in Europe and the shattering of the faith that had united the various nations, it was viewed by many as the best option at the time. Montaigne was a statesman and thus he appreciated the role that a political truce could play in a secular friendship.
Montaigne notes that “friendship is nourished by communication” (2), which would play into the conception of friendship as a secular respect that fosters peace among parties that might otherwise engage in war. In Montaigne’s depiction of friendship, the concept is based upon a kind of tolerance: parents tolerate their children’s behavior though they may not approve of it at all times—patience pays off in the long run and children come around to respect the wishes of their parents. Patience among various people and parties can lead to a working environment in which there is minimal conflict, which can lead to peace and prosperity among nations. It is better to be friends and to tolerate one another, even if there is some questionable conduct on one side or another. Friendship in Montaigne’s view is about bringing stability and not judging the other or seeking to cause offense.
Montaigne took a much less theological and philosophical approach to friendship, viewing it in grounded and practical terms, general and without extremes. He noted that most of what passes for friendships “are nothing but acquaintance and familiarities, either occasionally contracted, or upon some design, by means of which there happens some little intercourse betwixt our souls” (4), meaning that people are able to enjoy a kind of familiarity with others that they even find to be enjoyable, yet it need not run so deep that it leads one to God or to the Good, nor necessarily away from either.
However, there are other kinds of friendship, Montaigne observes, that are so rich and full and vital to life that they create obligations and duties from one person to the other, so that one cannot think of oneself anymore but must only think of the other out of the affections and bonds of friendship. There is in this kind of a friendship a deep feeling of loyalty and trust that cannot be violate, broken or betrayed. To betray such a friendship would be worse than death because it would be the betrayal of something sacred, holy and profound. It is this conception of friendship that could be taken as the extreme of friendship in Montaigne’s writings: it is this type of friendship that best represents the ideal that both Plato and Augustine describe in their own unique ways with reference to the Good or to God.
Though the three differ in the particulars about what is friendship, there is a common theme or thread among them all that gets to the heart of what true friendship is or should be, and why lesser friendships or false friendship pales in comparison. For Augustine, the best friendship is that which moves one towards God; yet even a lesser friendship can seed the way towards, God, as Augustine’s early friendship did indirectly by exposing to him the reality of the religious world that he was missing. For Plato, everything is in degrees, and shades of friendship may exist in this world, but perfect friendship is rooted in the perfect love—i.e., the perfect union with or possession of the Good. For Montaigne, there are many different types of friendship and circumstances in which friendship can occur. There are friendships between parents and children, friendships between lovers, friendships at the political level. Montaigne’s practical view of friendship is thus most different from Augustine’s and Plato’s, though he does not deny the ideal either.

Works Cited
Augustine. Confessions. Translated by Maria Boulding. Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City
Press, 2003. 978-15654808344
Montaigne. “On Friendship.” Digital File.
Plato. Symposium. Translated by Paul Woodruff and Alexander Nehamas. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1989. 087220076