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

Introduction

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and Eve. Marital friendship is an important biblical theme that Aelred asks us to carefully consider, and he also draws our attention to friendships between Ruth and Boaz and between the married lovers in the Song of Solomon. Aelred also encourages us to consider the famous friendship between David and Jonathan, the friendship of Job and his companions, the friendships between Christ and his disciples, and the various friendships between members of the early church in Acts. Second, Aelred considers wisdom on friendship gleaned from human reason’s careful study of creation. For these insights into friendship from the natural world Aelred turns to a Roman writer named Cicero, who wrote a book called On Friendship (44 BC). Cicero collected wisdom from those who had carefully and intentionally studied human friendship in previous centuries (e.g. Plato and Aristotle). He summarizes this “creation wisdom” and put it into an interesting story in which two famous friends, Laelius and Scipio, talk about their personal friendship as an example of true friendship. Aelred listens carefully to Cicero’s insights on friendship, but he brings those insights into service of his Christian worldview. 8 If Aelred was writing today, in this subject area of “reason” he might also consider the Grant Study from Harvard Medical School. This study, begun in 1938, is one of the longest longitudinal studies of adult development ever done (over seventy-five years long). Its current director, 8 Marsha Dutton identifies some ninety-six citations or allusions to Cicero in Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship . Aelred of Rievaulx, Aelred of Rievaulx: Spiritual Friendship , ed. Marsha L. Dutton, trans. Lawrence C. Braceland, Cistercian Fathers 5 (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian, 2010), 148. Where there are direct quotations, the Cicero reference is in the notes, and allusions are not always noted. See Dutton’s text for additional discussion.