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

80

Spiritual Friendship

46. Moreover they believe that nothing is “harder than for a friendship to continue to the very end of life,” and that it would be exceedingly shameful, after a friendship has been initiated for that friendship to be turned into its opposite. 7 For these reasons they think it safer to love someone so as to be able to despise the person if one wishes; thus “the reins of friendship ought to be loosely held, so that one can tighten or loosen them as one wants.” 8 47. GRATIAN: But if we have so easily become indifferent to the natural appetite for friendship, we have all labored in vain—you in speaking and we in listening. You have commended friendship to us in so many ways as a thing whose fruit is so useful, so holy, so acceptable to God, so close to perfection. Let those people have their opinion—those who are happy to love today so that they can hate tomorrow, or to be friends to all such that they need to be faithful to none; let them praise today and disparage tomorrow, flatter today and attack tomorrow, be ready for kisses today but hasten to blame tomorrow. The love of such people costs very little, and at the smallest offense it fades away. 48. WALTER: And I used to think that doves had no guts! vii But tell us how these opinions, which have so displeased Gratian, can be refuted.

7 Ibid., 10.33. 8 Ibid., 13.45. This view could be summed up as, “the best way to the care-free life is simply not to care.”