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

Chapter 1: The Definition and Origin of Spiritual Friendship (Book 1.1–30)

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strives to enjoy that object of its desire. Love also enables the mind to enjoy the object of its desire with a certain internal pleasure, and once it has attained the object of its desire it embraces it and preserves it. I have already explained the passionate and emotional nature of love as well as I can in my essay The Mirror of Charity , with which I believe you are already familiar. 20. Further, a friend is called, as it were, the guardian of love—or, as some prefer to say, the “guardian of the soul” itself. 9 And so my friend must be the guardian of our mutual love, or even of my very soul, so that he will preserve in faithful silence all its secrets, and whatever he sees in it that is flawed he will correct or endure with all his strength. When I rejoice, he will rejoice; when I grieve, he will grieve with me ( Rom 12:15 ); he will consider as his own everything that his friend experiences ( Acts 4:32 ). True Spiritual Friendship Is Eternal Friendship (1.21−24) 21. So friendship is that same virtue which joins minds in a bond of such esteem and pleasure, and they are made “one from many,” as Cicero said. 10 So even worldly philosophers have classified friendship among those virtues which are eternal, rather than those things attributable to chance and change. Solomon appears to agree with this when he says in the Proverbs, “A friend loves at all times” (Prov 17:17). In saying this he makes it quite clear that friendship is eternal, provided it is true 9 The definition of a friend as a “soul-keeper” or “guardian of one’s soul” ( animi custos ) has played an important role in Christian theology for many centuries. Gregory the Great (d. 604) used it in a sermon on John 15:12−16 ( Forty Gospel Homilies , 27.4) and it was later popularized in Isidore of Seville’s (d. 636) important dictionary, Etymologies , 10.4. 10 Cicero, On Friendship , 25.92.