Yet
I do not advise you to follow after or draw to yourself no one except a wise
man: for where will you find him whom for so many centuries we have sought in
vain? In the place of the best possible man take him who is least bad.
You
would hardly find any time that would have enabled you to make a happier choice
than if you could have sought for a good man from among the Platos and Xenophons
and the rest of the produce of the brood of Socrates, or if you had been
permitted to choose one from the age of Cato: an age which bore many men worthy
to be born in Cato's time (just as it also bore many men worse than were ever
known before, planners of the blackest crimes; for it needed both classes in
order to make Cato understood: it wanted both good men, that he might win their
approbation, and bad men, against whom he could prove his strength).
But
at the present day, when there is such a dearth of good men, you must be less
squeamish in your choice.
My parents first taught me about
finding the mean between extremes, and then I read about it in Aristotle, and
then the reality of daily living finally showed me how important it was to seek
a realistic balance in all things. To follow Goldilocks, it is important to not
have one’s porridge too hot, or too cold, but just right.
The principle applies to choosing
friends as much as it does to most anything else in life. Find companions who
can help you to be good, and who you can help to be good, and do not settle for
too little, or hold out in your expectations for too much.
To bind myself to people lacking in
a conscience will only bring me grief, though I will also hinder myself by
demanding that my company be absolutely flawless. Only a very few of us can
utterly perfect our virtues, and I will likely find myself quite alone if I
only dream of friends such as these. Let me follow such a person if I might
find him, but let me not shun the fellowship of those who might aspire to be
like him.
Not everyone can be a sage or a
saint right away, and so many of us will come together, despite all of our
flaws, in trying to become better, to perhaps one day be like those sages or saints.
A human being is, as long as he lives, going to be a work in progress, with
nothing settled for certain while he still has something left to make of
himself.
Good friends need to be good people,
because otherwise they will be unwilling to both give and receive the gifts of
friendship. But I should not be too narrow in who I consider a good person,
always recognizing that those who are still struggling in their journey
practice virtue in their own ways, as much as those who have come close to its
completion.
It is one thing to make a mistake,
quite another to insist on not improving from a mistake. It is one thing to be
ignorant, quite another to refuse to learn. It is one thing to fall down, quite
another to not get up again. Friends will work on these lessons together. The
good proceeds through an attitude of support and encouragement, not demanding
that others be without blemish from the very beginning. We grow in our
perfection, one tiny bit at a time.
If there is no Plato, or Xenophon,
or Cato around to lift us up, then those of us with lesser gifts can help life
one another up. I don’t know if those were really better times, but, as Seneca
says, Providence will make it so that the best of folks will always stand in
contrast to the worst of folks. Surely the hope can be that the worst still
have it within their power to become the best.
Where circumstances have made it so
that I am surrounded by others just as weak as myself, fighting with the same
sort of demons, then we will still have the opportunity to practice a
friendship of mutual assistance. The good can be in the purity of our
intentions, even as we work on the strengths of our habits.
Written in 8/2011
No comments:
Post a Comment