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

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Spiritual Friendship

reason; rather it follows the impetus of emotion and is carried away through life’s highways and byways. It follows no mean, nor does it aim at what is honorable; it does not distinguish between what is useful and useless, but in everything it follows a course that is thoughtless, indiscriminating, flighty, and excessive. For this reason this sort of friendship consumes itself as though urged on by furies, or else it is dissolved with the same flightiness with which it was initiated. 42. Worldly friendship, on the other hand, is created by desire for temporal goods and things. It is always full of deceit and deception; in it there is nothing certain, nothing constant, nothing secure. For this reason it is the sort of friendship that changes with fortune, and follows money ( Eccl 9:11–12 ). 43. Thus it is written: For there are friends who are such when it suits them, but they will not stand by you in time of trouble (Sir 6:8, NRSV). 5 Take away the hope of gain, and immediately he will cease to be a friend. This sort of friendship one of the poets mocks in this elegant couplet: 5 Aelred is quoting from the Wisdom of Sirach, called Ecclesiasticus in the Latin Bible that Aelred used. As part of the Apocrypha, Sirach is considered canonical by Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Ethiopian Orthodox, and Syriac church traditions. Evangelicals follow Martin Luther in viewing the book not as Scripture but as a helpful spiritual classic. Sirach places a major emphasis on friendship, and Aelred quotes from it thirteen times in Spiritual Friendship . “Worldly Friendship” Is the Second of the Three Kinds of Friendship (1.42−44)