Tractatus duo

A true and Christian friend looks to none of these. Instead, he looks primarily to this: that in that friendship of theirs, God may be worshipped and one’s neighbor loved. For this is the one thing the pious care for and seek most in the whole course of their lives. But several ends and goals can be brought forward for contracting friendship, of which, however, one is as it were proper and chief. It is this: that we may join ourselves to him whom God himself has adorned with his gifts, and has shown and rendered admirable to us. Therefore, the first conciliator of minds is the will of God, which impels our minds toward this. Then, afterwards, is the admiration of another’s virtue, to which we greatly desire to adhere and to be dear. And because we usually admire those virtues with which we are delighted, and to which we feel small sparks have been planted in us by God—that is, to which we believe ourselves to be more apt—it happens that a similarity of character and affections is recognized between those who contract friendship; and the friends themselves, by a certain tacit testimony and secret judgment, hold the same consensus regarding those same things.

Therefore, this third cause is most valid and intervenes for entering into friendship: a similarity of character and of the same pursuit. For to want the same thing and to reject the same thing—that, finally, is firm friendship; and friends are usually delighted by the same things, and especially, with nature as a guide, they generally apply themselves to the pursuit of the same virtue.

For that parity of pursuit lays the first foundations of friendship. For the fact that we hope to be protected by our friends, and that we are admirable for our good continues to next page