De spiritali amicitia: Spiritual Friendship

Description

*Spiritual Friendship* is today the best known and perhaps most influential of the thirteen surviving works of Aelred, abbot of the great English Cistercian abbey of Rievaulx from 1147 '1167. During his abbacy he built Rievaulx into a place of spiritual welcome and physical prosperity, desiring to make it a mother of mercy" to those in need. In a three-book Ciceronian dialogue Aelred defines human friendship as sacramental, beginning in creation, as God sought to place his own love of society in all his creatures, linking friends to Christ in this life and culminating in friendship with God in beatitude. This fresh new translation makes the work crisply readable, allowing the intellectual and Christian insight of this great Cistercian teacher and writer to speak clearly to today's seekers of love, wisdom, and truth.[Latin original from Brepolis](http://clt.brepolis.net/LLTA/pages/TextSearch.aspx?key=MAERICM01E)* * *cites St. Ambrose's [*On the Duties of the Clergy* bk. 3 ch. 22](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/34013.htm#note340751)p. 69 (PDF p. 71): > Should I say of friendship what John, the friend of Jesus, said of charity, “God is friendship”? […] *the one who remains in* friendship *remains in God, and God in him.* [1 Jn. 4:16]pp. 81-2 (PDF pp. 83-4), remniscent of today's hyper-indvidualism, "don't-bother-me" attitude; we must take risks and make friends (friends "encourage one another, help one another, and lead one another on to good", St. Francis de Sales, [*Intro. to the Devout Life*](https://isidore.co/calibre#panel=book_details&book_id=6312)); society is necessary!:> What kind of wisdom is it to loathe friendship in order to avoid anxiety and to be carefree and absolved of fear? As if any virtue could be acquired or kept without anxiety! [cf. [*Civ Dei* 19.8](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120119.htm#note121272)] […] Was it folly for Paul to be unwilling to live without care and solicitude for others? […] *Great was his sadness and continuous his grief of heart for his brothers according to the flesh.* [Rom. 9:2-3] […] Those who claim that their lives should be such as to console no one and to be a burden or the occasion of grief to no one, who derive no joy from others’ success and inflict no bitterness on others with their own perversity, I would call not human beings but beasts. They have only one goal: neither to love nor to be loved by anyone.cf. C.S. Lewis [*Four Loves*](https://isidore.co/calibre/#panel=book_details&book_id=8561) quote, [Hiebert 2013](https://isidore.co/calibre/#panel=book_details&book_id=8538) ref:13.58cf. Mt. 24:12: "…because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold."p. 125 (PDF p. 127): prayers for friends: "[Jb 42:8-10](http://drbo.org/cgi-bin/d?b=drl&bk=20&ch=42&l=8-#x); cf. Augustine, [Ep 145](https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102145.htm).7; cf. Anselm, “[Prayer for Friends](https://isidore.co/calibre#panel=book_details&book_id=3270),” Oratio 18