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

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Spiritual Friendship

maintain. For friendship bears fruit in this life as well as in the life to come ( 1 Tim 4:8 ). 10. Friendship establishes all the virtues by means of its own charm, and it strikes down vices by its own excellence; it moderates difficulty and it imposes order upon prosperity. The result of friendship’s activity in these spheres is that it is impossible for mortal men to experience pleasure without at least one friend. A human being without a friend is like a beast: for he lacks someone with whom he can share his joy in prosperity and his sadness in adversity ( Rom 12:15 ), to whom he may unburden his mind when he is preoccupied, with whom he may talk whenever he has had a particularly sublime or illuminating insight. 11. “Woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up” (Eccl 4:10). That person is completely alone who has no friend. But what happiness, what security, what pleasure it is to have a friend “with whom you would dare to speak just as you would speak to yourself!” 3 You would not fear to confide to a friend about your failings, nor would you blush to reveal to him your spiritual progress; and will you not entrust your plans for the future to the one to whom you have committed all the secrets of your heart? What then can be more pleasant than to unite one mind with another, and “to make one from two”? 4 Among friends no boasting or suspicion need be feared, nor need one partner be saddened to receive correction from his

3 Cicero, On Friendship , 6.22. 4 In this paragraph Aelred quotes from both Cicero and Ambrose to show that a good friend doubles joys and halves sorrows.