Spiritual Friendship

chapter 16 Spiritual Friendship

1. Almost all books that deal with friendship speak about the great friendship pairs of antiquity: Patroclius and Achilles, Orestes and Pylades, Euralys and Nisus, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Damon and Phintias. These are heroic and martial friendships one no longer finds in the modern epoch, and one gets the impression that today there no longer is true friendship, that it belongs irredeemably to the past. But this is an illusion. The forms in which friendship manifest change with time. Antiquity has left us the records of young warriors because war was then the most noble of male arts. We must also take into account that these recorded characters are invented literary figures. Patro- clius and Achilles are two characters from the Illiad, Orestes and Pylades from Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, Euralys and Nisus appear in the Aeneid, while Damon and Phintias are two legendary characters cited by Cicero. Thus one deals here with ideal images, with the transfiguration of a reality that was without doubt different. When in De Amicitia Cicero describes the Roman world of his time, we see that the lived experiences of that world were not substantially different from ours. However, when we look for exemplary types of friendship today we should not think of warriors. For us war is not a habitual activity and it certainly isn’t considered the most noble, virile of activities. In order to judge if there are exemplary forms of friendship in the modern world we must abandon any comparison with myths of the past and instead observe reality with our own eyes, without prejudice. Then we will notice that in our world too there exist noble figures of friendship, cases of friendship that lasted a lifetime and that have influenced history. The most obvious and important case is that of Marx and Engels. Their friendship dates back to 1844. Engels was then 24 years old, Marx 26. They briefly met at Cologne where they collaborated for the same journal. Although they knew each other, they did not have a reveal- ing encounter from which true friendship could grow. That happened later, in Paris, where they spent ten days together. It was an extraordinary period full of enthusiasm. They immediately began to work on a book that was to be published under the title The Holy Family. The following year Engels caught up with Marx in Brussels where they wrote The German Ideology, and in 1848 The Communist Manifesto, which was to influence world history. Marx and Engels complemented each other in character and thinking. Engels taught Marx the fundamental elements of economics and described the conditions

114 chapter 16 of the proletariat because he knew those directly. He gave him the economic tools to overturn Hegelian idealism. Marx, on the other hand, managed to give systematic form to his friend’s intuitions, to rigorously compile evidence of the things the other intuited. Marx himself wrote to Engels: “You know how slow I am at comprehending things, and how I always follow in your footsteps.” Engels, on the other hand, found in Marx his spiritual leader and loved to present himself always as the minor player, as his friend’s second fiddle. In 1850 Engels decided to return to Manchester to work in his father’s company, Ermer and Engels. As executive assistant he earned a hundred pound-sterling per year, and with that income he supported Marx and his family for nineteen years. Engels did not like his job but it allowed his friend to dedicate himself to his great task, the drafting of Das Kapital. When in 1859 Engels was finally able to leave work and return to his political activities and studies, he felt reborn. Engels was an enthusiastic hunter, an untiring hiker, a great drinker and always even-tempered. Even in periods in which he worked in his father’s company he managed to write div erse things that Marx admired deeply. He published noth- ing under his own name, however, in order not to enter into conflict with his father and thus risk no longer being able to help his friend. Marx, on the other hand, did everything not to burden his friend, worked like a madman and accepted the greatest deprivations. Only in exceptional circumstances would he ask for help and then, full of sadness, would lament his being a burden on the other. There was only one moment when it seemed their friendship would crack: when Mary Burns, with whom Engels had been living for twenty years, died, and Marx, completely absorbed in his economic problems, limited himself to sending a letter of condolence. Engels was offended and wrote as much to him. Marx then must ered the courage to tell him about all his anxieties in a sincere and straightforward manner, and Engels was glad to rediscover his friend. While Engels was calm, Marx was tormented. While Engels wrote flu- idly and constantly, Marx went through bursts of destruction and creativity. He trusted Engels completely with everything, from family issues to political problems. This trust was well placed. On the occasion of Marx’s death in 1883, Engels dedicated himself to putting in order the innumerable and chaotic papers for Das Kapital. The second volume was already quite advanced and Engels was able to write the introduction in 1885. For the third and fourth vol- umes, however, he needed to muster incredible strength and was finally able only to publish the third.1

1 On the friendship between Marx and Engels see Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: A Biography, Chapman and Hall, London, 1936; Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Lawrence and Wishart, Lon- don, 1972; Auguste Cornu, Marx e Engels, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1971.