Spiritual Friendship: Learning to Be Friends with God and One Another

Chapter 6: Testing Spiritual Friends (Book 3.39–75)

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41. But if this proves to be impossible, I do not think that the friendship should be immediately broken or surrendered, but rather, as someone in Cicero’s dialogue cleverly says, a friendship “should be unstitched little by little, unless by chance some intolerable injury has come to light, such that it is neither right nor honorable for there not to be an immediate estrangement or parting of the ways.” 3 For if a friend does something either against his father, or against his homeland, which cries out for immediate and hurried correction, the law of friendship is not harmed if he is given up as a traitor and an enemy. 42. But there are other vices for which friendship ought not to be broken, as I just said, but rather ought to be dissolved little by little, in my opinion. However, this ought to be done carefully so that it doesn’t end up “in enmity, from which come disputes, curses and insults.” 4 For it is excessively “shameful to carry on a dispute with someone” of this sort, “with whom you have lived very closely.” 5 43. For even if you are attacked for all these reasons by the one you have taken into friendship, it will be because it is the custom of some to cast the blame back upon their friends if they have themselves lived in such a way that they are no longer worthy to be loved; and if some adversity comes to them, they say that their friends have done harm to their friendship, and they hold in suspicion every counsel offered to them by their friends; and when they are revealed, and their crimes have come into the open, and they have nothing else to do, they redouble their

3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 21.76. 5 Ibid., 21.77.