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

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

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63. Still, this faithfulness is invisible when all is going well, but it comes to the fore in adversity. As someone has said, “It is when times are hard that a friend can be properly proved.” 9 The wealthy man has many friends ( Prov 14:20 ), but a sudden decline into poverty shows whether they are true friends. “A friend loves at all times,” says Solomon, “and a brother is born for adversity” (Prov 17:17). And in another passage, blaming the faithless, he says, “Trusting in a treacherous man in time of trouble is like a bad tooth or a foot that slips” (Prov 25:19). 64. GRATIAN: But if no adversity ever alters our prosperity, how is a friend’s faithfulness tested? 65. AELRED: There are many other ways to test a friend’s faithfulness, although the best test is adversity. For as I said above, there is nothing which does more harm to friendship than betrayal of counsel. Indeed, this is the Gospel’s thought: “One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much” (Luke 16:10; 19:17 ). And so we ought not to entrust everything, and certainly not our deep secrets, to friends whom we think it still necessary to test; rather, we should entrust them with confidences that are small, not so deep, about which we need not exercise great caution, to see whether they keep these secrets or reveal them—but we should do this with as much care as would suggest that our friends would do us a grave disservice to reveal them, or a great favor to keep them. 66. If you find a friend who is faithful in these small matters, you should not hesitate to test him in more important things. But if by chance some unfavorable rumor about you spreads, or if someone maliciously attacks your

9 Ambrose, On the Duties of the Clergy, 3.130.