Spiritual Friendship

In his treatise On Spiritual Friendship, Aelred of Rievaulx, a 12th-century Cistercian abbot, insists that we need to test our beliefs about friendship with Scripture. The treatise is a series of dialogues in which three monks join Aelred to examine their ideas about friendship in light of their Christian faith.

One of the most important passages in the treatise is the discussion of the three kinds of friendship—carnal, worldly, and spiritual—found in Book I, paragraphs 33-49. (This division of different kinds of friendship is not original to Aelred: Aristotle drew similar distinctions in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8, chapters 2-6.)

We might think that Aelred is talking about kinds of friendship in the same way that we think of planes, trains, and automobiles as three different kinds of transport vehicles. Although a car is very different from a plane, and both are very different from a train, each is a legitimate kind of vehicle.

This is not Aelred’s idea, however. He thinks that only spiritual friendship represents a true form of friendship. Carnal and worldly friendship are not real friendship, although many think they are. In speaking of different kinds of friendship, then, Aelred means to distinguish between true friendship and two different kinds of false friendship.

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I realize that, at this blog, that’s a somewhat silly question. But over at Fare Forward, Jordan Monge raises the question with regard to the broader Christian culture:

Friendship often is given short shrift in our culture. As every child knows, the Disney movie ends with the princess marrying her prince charming and not by her forming a lifelong platonic friendship. Where marriage is so significant it demands a wedding ceremony more expensive than a car, friendship is mundane, meriting less deliberate investment and certainly no formal declarations of mutual love and admiration. You could buy a library’s worth of self-help books about cultivating a better marriage, but there is little formal thought devoted to becoming a better friend or what friendship ought to look like.

It hasn’t always been this way. Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero authored works on friendship. In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, there is a ceremony called adelphopoiesis, which is literally translated as “brother-making.” Norwegian, Chinese, and Native American cultures were known to have had ceremonies to honor blood brothers. It’s ironic that, among Christians, we’ve privileged marriage so much highly over friendship despite the fact that our founder Jesus Christ was a man who never married but did invest quite deliberately in 12 friends.

Check out the whole thing.

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In the June term this year at the seminary where I teach, Trinity School for Ministry, I’ll be the instructor for a week-long intensive class on a Christian theology of friendship. I’m excited about this opportunity not least because I’m working on a book about friendship, and teaching a class on that theme will give me a chance to try out many of my ideas in group discussions and receive helpful feedback and criticism. (And vice versa: because I’ve been reading and writing so much on the theme, I expect I’ll be of more benefit to the students than I otherwise might have been. As Mark Noll has said, “There can be no good teaching without good scholarship.”)

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