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Of Friendship: Francis Bacon

The document discusses the nature of friendship and solitude. It explores how true friendship can alleviate loneliness and isolation, and how even large cities can feel solitary without friends. It also examines how kings have valued friendship so highly that they accept risks to maintain close companions.

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Amilcar Christian Ccoa
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314 views

Of Friendship: Francis Bacon

The document discusses the nature of friendship and solitude. It explores how true friendship can alleviate loneliness and isolation, and how even large cities can feel solitary without friends. It also examines how kings have valued friendship so highly that they accept risks to maintain close companions.

Uploaded by

Amilcar Christian Ccoa
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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OF FRIENDSHIP

FRANCIS BACON
OF FRIENDSHIP

• It had been hard for him that spake it to


have put more truth and untruth together
in few words, than in that speech.
Whatsoever is delighted in solitude, is
either a wild beast or a god.
OF FRIENDSHIP

• For it is most true, that a natural and secret


hatred, and aversation (archaic: Aversion)
towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of
the savage beast;
OF FRIENDSHIP

• but it is most untrue, that it should have


any character at all, of the divine nature;
except it proceed, not out of a pleasure in
solitude, but out of a love and desire to
sequester a man's self, for a higher
conversation:
OF FRIENDSHIP

• such as is found to have been falsely and


feignedly in some of the heathen; as
Epimenides the Candian, Numa the
Roman, Empedocles the Sicilian, and
Apollonius of Tyana; and truly and really,
in divers of the ancient hermits and holy
fathers of the church.
OF FRIENDSHIP

a) Epimenides was a Cretan who made one


immortal statement: “All Cretans are liars.”
b) Numa Pompilius (753–673 BC; reigned 715–
673 BC) was the legendary second king of
Rome, succeeding Romulus.
OF FRIENDSHIP

• c) Empedocles: Agrigento was, in


Empedocles time, a rich city containing
the finest Greek culture.
OF FRIENDSHIP

d) Apollonius of Tyana: a Greek


Neopythagorean philosopher from the town
of Tyana in the Roman province of
Cappadocia in Asia Minor (Turkey).
OF FRIENDSHIP

• Little is known about him with certainty.


Being a 1st-century orator and
philosopher around the time of Christ, he
was compared with Jesus of Nazareth by
Christians in the 4th century and by
various popular writers in modern times
OF FRIENDSHIP

But little do men perceive what solitude is,


and how far it extendeth. For a crowd is
not company; and faces are but a gallery of
pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal,
where there is no love.
OF FRIENDSHIP

• The Latin adage meeteth with it a little:


Magna civitas, magna solitudo (A great
city is a great solitude); because in a great
town friends are scattered; so that there is
not that fellowship, for the most part,
which is in less neighborhoods.
OF FRIENDSHIP

But we may go further, and affirm most truly,


that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want
true friends; without which the world is but a
wilderness;
OF FRIENDSHIP

• and even in this sense also of solitude,


whosoever in the frame of his nature and
affections, is unfit for friendship, he
taketh it of the beast, and not from
humanity.
OF FRIENDSHIP

But we may go further, and affirm most truly,


that it is a mere and miserable solitude to want
true friends; without which the world is but a
wilderness;
OF FRIENDSHIP

• and even in this sense also of solitude,


whosoever in the frame of his nature and
affections, is unfit for friendship, he taketh it
of the beast, and not from humanity.
OF FRIENDSHIP

• A principal fruit of friendship, is the ease


and discharge of the fulness and
swellings of the heart, which passions of
all kinds do cause and induce.
OF FRIENDSHIP

• We know diseases of stoppings, and


suffocations, are the most dangerous in
the body; and it is not much otherwise in
the mind;
OF FRIENDSHIP

• you may take sarza – salsa - to open the liver,


steel to open the spleen, flowers of sulphur
(minute crystals of sulphur obtained by
condensing sulphur vapour on a cold surface)
for the lungs, castoreum for the brain; but no
receipt openeth the heart,
OF FRIENDSHIP

• but a true friend; to whom you may


impart griefs, joys, fears, hopes,
suspicions, counsels, and whatsoever
lieth upon the heart to oppress it, in a
kind of civil shrift or confession.
OF FRIENDSHIP

It is a strange thing to observe, how high a


rate great kings and monarchs do set upon
this fruit of friendship, whereof we speak:
so great, as they purchase it, many times,
at the hazard of their own safety and
greatness.
OF FRIENDSHIP

For princes, in regard of the distance of their


fortune from that of their subjects and servants,
cannot gather this fruit, except (to make
themselves capable thereof) they raise some
persons to be, as it were, companions and
almost equals to themselves, which many times
sorteth to inconvenience.
OF FRIENDSHIP

• The modern languages give unto such


persons the name of favorites, or
privadoes; as if it were matter of grace, or
conversation. But the Roman name
attaineth the true use and cause thereof,
naming them participes curarum; for it is
that which tieth the knot.

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