I loved it then because of the companionship of my accomplices with whom I did it. What he also realizes, upon reflection, moreover, is that he would not have done it if he had not been with these “friends.” “By myself alone,” he writes, “I would not have done it. It was simply an act of senseless cruelty. And they ended up throwing the pears to the hogs. It was not especially beautiful or delicious.
What especially troubled him in retrospect about what might have seemed a relatively harmless bit of adolescent tomfoolery was that there was no reason for what they did. One of the most famous of Augustine’s stories about the dangers of fallen friendship is his account in book 2 of the Confessions of the time he and some friends stole pears from his neighbor’s pear tree. Augustine discerned more perceptively than his classical predecessors (and from his own experiences) were the ways in which we fallen creatures can take the good things of creation (things like education and learning and great rhetorical skill and even friendship) and make of them something hellish, something contrary to human flourishing. And why would they? It was obvious to them that friendship was a good thing. Both shared the conviction that virtue was the root and source of friendship and that without virtue there could be no true friendship.Īlthough they generally held that friendships among “bad” people were not “true” friendships, these classical authors failed to examine in any depth were the evils to which friendship could lead.
Two of the most well-known were Cicero’s On Friendship and books 8 and 9 of Aristotle’s Ethics, works that praised friendship as necessary to the good life and to developing virtue. Praises of friendship abounded in the ancient world.
0 kommentar(er)
