This paper will examine both textually and pedagogically how these two authors can instill a love for friendship into our students (and ourselves), as well as offering us a new understanding of it. By examining Augustine's feelings for his friends in Book 4 of the Confessions and the evolving relationship between Dante and Virgil in the course of The Divine Comedy, one can see how both think of friendship as a path to God or a manifestation of God's love, but still cling to the specificity of the friend, who is loved for his or her own sake, and not just as a means or instrument, as well as loved eternally, rather than discarded or overcome when the higher love of God is achieved.

In the context of describing his nearly insufferable grief at the death of a friend, Augustine describes in Book 4 of his Confessions the fellowship he shared with a group of friends in his young adulthood:

There were other things done in their company which more completely seized my mind:

to talk and to laugh with them; to do friendly acts of service for one another; to read

well-written books together; sometimes to tell jokes and sometimes to be serious;

to disagree at times, but without hard feelings, just as a man does with himself; and

to keep our many discussions pleasant by the very rarity of such differences; to teach

things to the others and to learn from them; to long impatiently for those who were

absent, and to receive with joy those joining us. These and similar expressions,

proceeding from the hearts of those who loved and repaid their comrades' love, by

way of countenance, tongue, eyes, and a thousand pleasing gestures, were like fuel

to set our minds ablaze and to make but one out of the many.⁽¹⁾

In the much more turgid City of God, Augustine will give a more succinct summary of the joys and risks of friendship: "[W]hat consolation have we in this human society, so replete with mistaken notions and distressing anxieties, except the unfeigned faith and mutual affections of genuine, loyal friends?"⁽²⁾ The pedagogical opportunities offered by Augustine's description of friendship are numerous. First, it offers us a theologian reflecting on the value, pleasure, and even the meaning of friendship, alerting our students and reminding us that one need not just have feelings, one can and should analyze and criticize those feelings. One of the most subjective experiences of life can be the legitimate and enlightening object of analysis. Conversely, at the same time as it legitimates the analysis of feelings, it also offers a legitimation of the analyst: our students, who may otherwise have thought of Augustine as a rather misanthropic, judgmental, and demanding curmudgeon, gain an insight into his character as a man of deep feelings and desires, a view that cannot help but make them more sympathetic to his colder and more ascetic moods. Second, it presents us with a view of friendship that is extremely intellectual: Augustine and his friends have intellectual interests in common, they read books together, they teach and learn from one another, they debate and disagree on substantive issues. Again, what a beautiful corrective to our students, who usually believe the only fit topics for conversation with their friends are sports, flirtation, or gossip. (And lest this discussion lapse into an Allan Bloom-like lambasting of the young, let us be honest with ourselves: how many of our conversations revolve around mortgages or cholesterol levels, topics every bit as mundane and considerably less fun than our students flirting and being silly?) Finally, Augustine's whole description of friendship is so remarkable and beautiful for the honesty of its bittersweetness: friends cause us anxiety by the level of trust we must put in them, and they multiply the number of people about whose welfare we must worry. If its value is measured by its cost, then friendship must be very valuable indeed. Augustine's description of friendship offers us a relationship that is both intellectual as well as emotional, but without abandoning the latter, and one that involves the whole person in the most intimate, risky, but potentially fulfilling surrender of his or her entire self to another person. Such a love would be ratified by God himself, and would include God as another partner: "But blessed is the [one] who loves you, and his friend in you. . . . For he alone loses no dear one to whom all are dear in him who is not lost."⁽³⁾

Nine hundred years later, when choosing what person would serve as his guide to save him from sin and death and lead him into God's light, whom did Dante pick? In many ways, of course, his choice was as predictable as Captain Kirk's in the Star Trek episode with a similar premise, in which the heroes of the Enterprise's main characters are assembled to do battle against a rogue's gallery of inter-galactic villains: his guide should be the same race, the same nationality, the same gender, the same vocation as he. So of course Dante picks Virgil, the greatest Latin poet. But although Virgil might have been picked as Dante's other self, his narcissistic ratification of his race and talent, it is also true that a friend is often described as another self, and in the dynamics of the poem, a friend is just what Virgil becomes. Although, exactly like Beatrice, Virgil fulfills many roles in the poem and in Dante's life - father figure, teacher, mentor, personification of Reason - my students always focus on the familiarity and trust between the two men: indeed, it was a student here in the Program of Liberal Studies who first described the poem as a "Medieval buddy movie."⁽⁴⁾ From the very first, Dante joins his will to Virgil's: "Let us start, for both our wills, joined now, are one."⁽⁵⁾ I don't think it would make as much sense to surrender one's will to an allegorical figure of Reason, nor even to a great hero from antiquity, but rather to a living person with whom one has a real, human relationship. Certainly the poignancy with which the suffering of the virtuous pagans is described by Dante bespeaks something much deeper than professional or national admiration. And exactly as a friend both takes our will from us and gives it back to us completed and fulfilled, so Virgil does for Dante with his last words to him: "Expect no longer words or signs from me. / Now is your will upright, wholesome and free, / and not to heed its pleasure would be wrong: / I crown and miter you lord of yourself!"⁽⁶⁾ As with Augustine's description of friendship, the intellectual depth and foundation of this friendship should be striking to us and to our students: Dante is challenging us to be on intimate, personal terms with someone who died centuries before, but with whom we can have an intellectual bond so strong that it transcends time, culture, and religion. And as with Augustine, the friendship is deeply bittersweet with its sense of loss: Virgil is Dante's savior, though he himself remains forever damned. If we were to ask our students whom they would choose as their own spiritual guide, I really doubt many would choose Eminem. And, while I would hardly flatter myself by thinking that they would choose me or one of my own dour and depressing choices such as Dostoevsky or Pascal, I think we might plant in them the seeds of some abiding affection and admiration for the more humane and humorous authors of Great Books - Euripides, Chaucer, Dante, and Shakespeare come to mind - and so lead them to appreciate, treasure, and ruminate on the spiritual values and insights such authors have given them.

What could be more antithetical to our materialist and consumerist culture than real, true friendship (except perhaps the equally spiritual experiences of romantic love or religious fervor)? It offers no tangible pay-off, and it does not change or become new with each passing fad or fancy. It is neither material nor consumable: if anything, it owns us, though not in the frightening and debasing way that our possessions threaten to enslave us, but in the ennobling way that a vocation, a calling, demands us to be more and give more than we would have otherwise. A purpose or goal outside of itself is antithetical to true friendship, and as Augustine and Dante intuited, its lasting charms lie precisely in its familiarity and permanence, not in any novelty or excitement. Although the cultural Jeremiahs of our time often bemoan the debasing of romance by easy sex, and the debasing of religion by easy gentility and morality, I wonder if real friendship as we see it in these great authors has not been damaged or forgotten even more. How many of us or our students have a friend to whom we can tell anything without fear of condemnation or betrayal, on whom we can count as if he or she was another self? As another great theoretician and practitioner of friendship observed, it demands an almost mystical loss and subordination of the self, but one that offers a shared life that is greater than that of either of the individuals: "There is no one particular consideration . . . but rather some inexplicable quintessence of them all mixed up together which, having captured my will, brought it to plunge itself into his and lose itself and which, having captured his will, brought it to plunge itself and lose itself in mine with an equal hunger and emulation. I say 'lose itself' in very truth; we kept nothing back for ourselves: nothing was his or mine."⁽⁷⁾ Augustine experienced this loss and sharing with his group of friends, while Dante experienced it with his teacher and master Virgil. The language and experience are deeply religious, echoing Jesus' words, "He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it" (Matt 10:39). Perhaps by showing our students these beautiful and meaningful experiences of loss and fulfillment, we can plant in them the desire for something other than a series of pleasant, superficial acquaintances, as well as reminding ourselves of something we may have forgotten, or perhaps worse, taken for granted.

Notes

1. Augustine, Confessions 4.8.13 (trans. J. K. Ryan; New York, et. al.: Doubleday, 1960).

2. Augustine, City of God 19.8 (trans. J. O'Meara; New York, et. al.: Penguin, 1972).

3. Augustine, Confessions 4.9.14.

4. Bryce Seki, in my Junior Seminar, Fall 1996.

5. Dante, Inferno 2.139 (trans. M. Musa; New York, et. al.: Penguin, 1971).

6. Dante, Purgatory, 27.139-42 (trans. M. Musa; New York, et. al.: Penguin, 1981).

7. Montaigne, "On affectionate relationships," in Complete Essays (trans. and ed. by M. A. Screech; New York, et. al.: Penguin, 1987) 212.