Friendship and Love, Ethics and Politics: Studies in Mediaeval and Early Modern History

Chapter 5 - Close Relationships—Then and Now

Close Relationships—Then and Now Ethics and politics In the previous chapters I set out to show how premodern love and friendship, both as ideals and in the full diversity of reality, were not only important in private life, but also in public life. The focus of my analysis has been the ways that philosophers, writers, and State and Church thought and spoke about close relationships, and the great changes in these discourses over time. But I have also been able to shed light on specific variations in actual relationships by using diaries, correspondence, and autobiographical material. It goes without saying that I have only been able to touch upon a fraction of the cultural variations according to gender, class, generation, ethnicity , and so on that in all likelihood distinguished love and friendship in their authentic historical expression . 187 Chapter 5 Both love and friendship were a part of what the classical philosophers termed philia (in Greek) or amicitia (in Latin). Friendship was defined by reciprocity, trust, voluntariness, and at the very least a stab at equality. Love comprised much the same ingredients, above all trust and reciprocity. But it was also based upon sexuality or the “natural” ties between parents and children or siblings. Close relationships such as friendship and love could at their best give comfort and joy; they were, and are, existentially indispensable . Yet for the classical authorities there was more: philia could also bring tangible benefits. Ultimately, the perfect friendship between two good men would lead to increased self-knowledge and a degree of virtue and integrity that could only enrich society, according to Aristotle. As later philosophers would emphasize in turn, friendship in classical philosophy was less a matter of emotion and psychology than of ethics and justice—and thus of politics. Classical philosophies of friendship thus saw both the ideal of philia and actual close relationships as intruding on the spheres of public life, politics, ethics, and subject-formation. The language and narratives of friendship have consequently played an important role both in political speech and in autobiographical accounts of individual development in the older pe188 riod. I have touched on this with the example of Swedish political rhetoric from the seventeenth century , and an analysis of a number of significant autobiographies from the mediaeval and early modern period (Augustine, Petrarch, Montaigne, Vico, Rousseau). The autobiographies show that friends have always played a role in individual development, but also that friendship’s province and function is construed differently according to the writer’s historical context and the purpose of the narrative. Because in the older period close relationships were held to be part of a larger ethical and political sphere, friendship and love–sexuality have had a tendency to appear dangerous to the authorities in some periods, so much so that they often think them best controlled, regulated, or restricted. I have discussed this by drawing on examples of ambivalent mediaeval views on monastic friendship, of state intervention against cronyism in the early modern period, and of the Church and State’s combined control of love and sexuality in seventeenth-century, post-Reformation Sweden. * * * 189 What then are the general conclusions to be drawn? Even if the existential need for close relationships transcends time, the contours of friendship and sexuality in the real world, and accepted notions of their nature, are culturally determined and are thus subject to a variation. But there are some things that have changed dramatically, while others seem to remain relatively unaltered despite centuries of Western culture. Take the fact that I have yet to find an example of friendship, in thought or deed, that deviates from certain fundamental elements of the classical definition of philia. Be it Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne , Queen Christina, an English priest, or an early modern merchant, they all to some degree argue that you choose your own friends, and expect loyalty, mutual kindness, and trust in return. In this respect, the ethical demands of good friendship have altered little in the periods I have considered. Other elements have changed over time, however. In the old philosophy of friendship, there was also an idea that ideal friendship could best be realized if the parties were equal, or at any rate almost on a par with each other. On this point there has been a considerable difference of opinion ever since. In the Middle Ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the language and gestures...