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Self-Knowledge and Friendship

It was one of the long golden summer evenings on Bere Island that made one forget the usual wind and drizzle. I was spending some weeks of solitude there. I had come down from my simple one-cold-tap cottage to give my cousin John a hand with putting a new roof on his barn. Though by nature, as I thought, more genuinely solitary than myself he had asked for some unskilled assistance in moving the timber beams. He was a couple of years older than me, healthy looking and handsome, extremely silent and reserved. Like his father he never stopped working. He had an Irish temper which could flash from his quiet depths like storms on the Sea of Galilee but he loved his chirpy ever-sociable wife and two boisterous little boys who all seemed to know how to handle his moods.

We were working on the roof and in my leisure moments I contemplated the slow gorgeous sunset over the sea. Evening was dying peacefully into night. I was gazing contentedly at the merging of the lines of sky and sea. Suddenly I realised John was calling me to help move some wood and I turned towards him. Our eyes met and there was an affectionate, amused look on his face as he caught my absent-mindedness. It was a fleeting personal connection but, for me at least, a moment of immense depth. As our two attentions met each other I saw our family likeness with a shocking, strange and impersonal kind of clarity. For a second I felt the presence of the bubbling soup of DNA that we all splash around in and from which our treasured individuality arises. It was quite different from any conceptual knowledge that could have been expressed as ‘he is my mother’s brother’s son’ or ‘there is the O’Sullivan look in us both’. The self-awareness was sharp and sudden; different from the way my self-absorbed ego usually tells me what I am feeling and what others think of me. It was not an emotional moment, not sentimental anyway, but it was painfully tender. It reassured me for an instant with a taste of the kind of human friendship that is deeper than we make merely as individuals. It takes longer to describe than it did to feel. It passed instantly and John pointed silently to the end of the piece of wood I was supposed to pick up and withdrew again into his hardworking solitude.

St Irenaeus and many others in the Christian tradition have said that ‘God became human in order that humans may become divine.’

Does nonduality and union mean that Jesus is really after all just me, my ‘true Self’, whatever that may be? Am I his true Self and is everything blurred into one like the sky and the sea at dusk?

Christian faith does not claim this. It is not the experience a person has of the risen Jesus. Yet non-duality was at the heart of his teaching and it is what he shares with us now. From the beginning Christian thinkers have reflected on the meaning of Jesus’ sayings about his union with the Father and their union with us. They have thought hard about the experience of faith which allows us to know him in his risen form. The great thinkers have seen how self-knowledge and the knowledge of God go hand in hand and dovetail in our knowledge of Jesus.

I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep and my sheep know me–as the Father knows me and I know the Father–and I lay down my life for the sheep.¹

St Augustine was fascinated by the question of self-knowledge, aware no doubt of how hard he had worked to gain it himself:

A person must first be restored to himself, that making of himself as it were a stepping-stone, he may rise thence to God.²

In his Confessions St Augustine was the first Western writer to define the sense of personal identity as intimately interior, self-conversing, seeking and anxious. He initiated the autobiographical narrative style that we take for granted as the way we think and talk about ourselves. Describing his search for himself as a search for God was not a mere literary device. His self-concern was given meaning because it pointed towards an ultimate self-transcendence. By self-analysis and writing he advanced towards self-knowledge in the telling (and invention) of his story and by the sharing of his hidden personality. This seems all quite familiar to us today, in the culture of the television chat show, as a means of understanding who we are. Yet there is a difference in motivation. However self-centred his autobiographical self-awareness might appear at times, it was led by a consuming passion to know God. This was the God he said was closer to him than he was to himself and who knew him better than he could know himself. He could therefore pray that he would come to know himself so that he could know God. It was a sublime kind of egotism waiting for an ecstatic release from the ego.

Augustine’s self-description is a particular example of a universal Christian theme. Throughout its tradition Christian mysticism has acknowledged the connection between self-knowledge, pointing towards self-transcendence, and the knowledge of God. It has been the consistent testimony of the great masters. For St Bernard self-knowledge is a process that begins by discovering how difficult it is to be human:

When someone first discovers that he is in difficulty, he will cry out to the Lord who will hear him and say ‘I will deliver you and you shall glorify me.’ In this way your self-knowledge will be a step to the knowledge of God; God will become visible to you according as God’s image is being restored within you . . .³

St Catherine of Siena in the fourteenth century stubbornly remained outside the cloister but cajoled popes and emperors with an authority born of her self-knowledge in God. Her ‘cell’, she claimed, was self-knowledge. In the beautiful flowering of the English mystical tradition in the turbulent fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing stresses self-knowledge as the necessary pre-condition for all spiritual progress. It is the true meaning of humility, the Cloud says, distinguishing it from the many counterfeit forms which religious people are adept at confecting. Meister Eckhart in the same century preached on self-knowledge as the means for experiencing the divine likeness of the human person that is the truest reality of Selfhood.

Augustine, Catherine, the author of the Cloud, Eckhart are among the Christian teachers who affirm the spiritual significance of knowing oneself. Each person knows himself uniquely and so uniquely expresses his insight into the nondual, simple, nature of God and the Self. Union transfigures but does not destroy personal identity. A transformation of what we think we are, which at times however does feel like total annihilation, must take place in what St John of the Cross calls a dark night.

It is as if God is saying: You will never become humble while you are wearing your ornaments. When you see yourself naked you will learn who you are . . . Now that the soul is dressed in working clothes–dryness and the abandonment of human desires–and now that its previous enlightenment is dimmed into darkness, it has better lights in the form of self-knowledge. . . . From this arid type of clothing comes not only the source of self-knowledge, which we have already described, but also all the benefits which we shall now describe . . .⁴

It is this same insight gained in self-knowledge that illuminates the way we listen to his question and know Jesus. Self-knowledge introduces us into that quality of spiritual consciousness where knower and known are known (by whom?) to be one. By self-knowledge and in the Spirit, Jesus and we meet and know each other. We are changed by the meeting. And, while becoming more and more uniquely ourselves, we also become increasingly like him as this process unfolds.

What we shall be has not yet been disclosed, but we know that when it is disclosed we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.⁵

People in close relationship often grow to resemble each other, in the way they speak, their idiosyncrasies and mannerisms and attitudes, even in physical appearance. Just by living together union perceptibly happens even though it may be resisted and denied. In marriage or religious communities it can be amusing, mysterious, inspiring, sometimes slightly scary to see the signs of union at the level of personality. Spouses sometimes panic at the idea that they have merged or are losing their identity in marriage. All this simply shows that every healthy relationship entails a death of the ego. Co-dependence, domination or absorption by a stronger personality have quite different signs. What unites people is faithful love growing ever stronger through the recurrent deaths of the ego. Then human communion evolves into the vision of God. Two people can become one while each remains who they are as individuals. Perhaps this helps to understand the theology that describes the human and divine natures: united and yet distinct in Jesus. Light, quantum physics tells us, is neither wave nor particle but both. It depends how you look at it. Similarly, it depends how we look at Jesus. Who he is and who we are become, for the disciple, two intertwining experiences of self-knowledge. They are intertwined in time, the medium in which human relationship achieves full awareness. We can measure time. But there is also the dimension of spirit, the immeasurable medium in which time is transcended. The best way to see this in relation to Jesus is to situate it in the context of what happened in the early morning on the first day of the week after Jesus had been executed.

A lot happened on Easter Sunday.

As the day is described in the gospels, it seems more than could possibly have happened on one day. If the question of Jesus reveals the connection between self-knowledge and the knowledge of God, his Resurrection awakens us to the relationship of time and eternity. How long did Easter Sunday last? One day or all the days that have ever happened, before and since? In what way is the Jesus who died on the Cross the same person we encounter in the abyss of our self-knowledge today? What happened, the gospel suggests, is an absorption of space-time and matter into spirit. Historians, theologians and scripture scholars will not end their research and polemics about the Resurrection before we discover what that means. The attempt to understand it has value, however, because it sends us back to reread the gospel story and so to listen to the question the gospels contextualise for us.

Mary of Magdala had no doubts about the Resurrection she experienced. For her it was a reality in which she knew herself known:

So the disciples went home again; but Mary stood at the tomb outside, weeping. As she wept, she peered into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white sitting there, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had lain. They said to her, ‘Why are you weeping?’ She answered. ‘They have taken my Lord away, and I do not know where they have laid him.’ With these words, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but did not recognise him. Jesus said to her, ‘Why are you weeping? Who is it you are looking for?’ Thinking it was the gardener, she said, ‘If it is you, sir, who removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ She turned to him and said ‘Rabbuni!’ (which is Hebrew for ‘My Master’). Jesus said, ‘Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers, and tell them that I am now ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ Mary of Magdala went to the disciples with her news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ she said, and gave them his message.⁶

These words are so densely charged with meaning they constitute a supreme example, perhaps the greatest, of the form of poetry we call sacred scripture. Its level of reality can hardly be compared with the language of newspaper prose or scientific journals. Mary’s experience of the risen Jesus has the certain feel of reality but of reality undergone rather than observed, reality seen in and by its own light. ‘In your light I see light’, as the psalm puts it. The gospels and St Paul sometimes use the Greek verb ophthe (‘appeared to’ or ‘was revealed to’) to describe the encounters with Jesus that individuals and groups experienced after his death. St Paul, who never met the historical Jesus, said ‘He appeared to me.’⁷ Yet Mary’s experience of vision was also clear and personal. Afterwards she said simply ‘I have seen the Lord.’⁸

The Resurrection appearances do not conform to the usual sort of biblical ‘visions’. They are not associated with sleep and do not occur at night. They are sensory but different from sensual. The gospel accounts of these historical events do not aim at cinematic or scientific reality. (Cinematic realism is the result of high artifice.) They are events in which the usual constraints on the full experience of reality have been thrown off. Reality has been fully thrown open. It is disclosing itself in a dimension where there are no detached observers. At the same time it is wholly and literally down to earth.

Mary’s experience on Easter Sunday morning illustrates the role of self-knowledge in understanding who Jesus really is. She shows how we do not recognise him without knowing ourselves. She is brought to self-knowledge by the simple means of being known by another. He knew her and called her by name. Self-knowledge does not just mean knowing more about ourselves. It is generated by relationship. In such a relationship we feel ourselves known and loved. But the center of consciousness also unhooks from its usual egotistical moorings and relocates in the other. Mary suffered her way through total grief to self-realisation in her Resurrection experience. Maybe later, through the years in which that fresh morning’s experience was being understood and absorbed, she recalled how Jesus had warned them of his approaching death. Perhaps she then understood why he had taught that to discover the true Self they would, like him, have to suffer the loss of their old selves. She would have understood why she had not recognised him; why, in some sense, we must become unrecognisable to ourselves in order to see who he really is.

Overwhelmed by grief at losing him Mary is in search of his body, the familiar form of his presence. She suffers the human agony of bereavement and the desolation of irreversible absence. So absorbed is she in her stricken memory of Jesus that she fails to recognise him when he meets her in his spiritual body, his new way of being present to her. The nonrecognition, however, validates the experience. It is an element on every occasion that the disciples first saw him. If Resurrection meant only the resuscitation of a corpse or if it was no more than a subjective ‘psychological’ event, then those to whom he ‘appeared’ in those Easter days would have had no difficulty recognising him. They would have been seeing what they wanted to see. They would not have been surprised–as reality always surprises us.

In a small monastic cell in San Marco in Florence Fra Angelico painted a fresco of this scene which gives a commentary where words fail. On the far left of the painting is the black rectangle of the empty tomb contrasting almost eerily with the lush green of the Resurrection garden. Jesus, translucent and weightless, bearing the wounds of his death on his hands and feet, and carrying the gardener’s hoe turns towards Mary in the instant of her awakening. She, dressed in the red of this world is bathed in his light, her robes changing colour as she gazes in pure wonder at the beauty of his new form. They reach towards each other, never closer in spirit, but do not touch in the world of sense.

He is not invisible; not an insubstantial ghost or just a disembodied voice. If he were one of these, he would have been less complete in the Resurrection than he had been ‘in life’. He would have been less alive. His new body however is more alive; he is even more real. His new freedom to reach into human beings beyond the barriers imposed by the mind or senses testifies to this. He is real enough to Mary’s senses (she hears and sees him) but she just doesn’t recognise him. Even questioned by him, talking to him, obsessed with him, she cannot see. She mistakes him for the gardener, just like someone cutting the grass you might pass as you walk down the avenue of a cemetery, or someone you brush past in the street or stand beside on the subway. Would she ever have recognised him unless he had first revealed himself to her by showing her that he recognised her?

Once again he communicates this through a question, similar to the compassionate question by which the Fisher King is healed and freed. The process of healing and self-recognition is begun. Awakening starts when he speaks her name. Knowing that she is known, her self-knowledge clears the veil of illusion which had hidden him from her. Spontaneously she addresses him as her guru: rabbuni, teacher. He is the same teacher who started her journey to self-knowledge and taught her through their friendship over the years. Now he speaks to her from deep within herself. It is a new degree of friendship, a level of intimacy where the usual dualities of inner and outer, even of the visible and invisible, strangely seems to be suspended. What has happened to her now explains and authenticates everything he taught her. Being known and knowing that we are loved, is how human identity comes into its own. We fully exist only in relationship. Outside relationship (or thinking we are outside it) we are illusory beings, no more than impermanent individuals. As individuals we are sentenced to death. But knowing we are loved, boundlessly and uniquely, raises us to a new degree of life as risen persons capable of truly loving. What Mary now experiences she ‘sees’. What she sees is what she shares in.

There are three significant turnings in this scene after her encounter with the angels who also ask her why she is weeping. First she turns round and sees Jesus but does not recognise him. Then when he speaks her name she turns to him again. Had she turned away from him after asking him to take her to the body? Or is it an interior turn, a revolution of perception which has changed everything? The third turn is implicit in her leaving him. She lets go of the particular experience of this appearance and goes to the disciples with her news, ‘I have seen the Lord.’ He had told her not to cling to him because his return to the Father was not yet complete. There is no sense that she felt spurned. It had not been a passing experience. She knew he was with her. So, as the first Christian missionary, she ran to the disciples with nothing less than sheer joy. Mary’s third turn is towards others.

The new kind of life made possible by the Resurrection does not rely upon the forensic evidence of the empty tomb or even the circumstantial evidence of the apparitions. The evidence is found in daily living. In fact Mary is told not to cling to the experience. Faith in the Resurrection is not crazy but it rests on a particular kind of sense and rationality. Ideas of what constitutes reason are historically variable. Like love, faith in the Resurrection has its own reasonableness and cannot be argued away by logic alone. Its truth is attested in a new quality of being, a heightened degree of wholeness that is caught rather than taught. Experiences, even Resurrection appearances, come and go. They become memories. We, however, know the Resurrection, in what the early disciples called the ‘Day of Christ’. It is the present moment illuminated with faith’s ability to see the invisible, to recognise the too obvious. As Simone Weil wrote,

He comes to us hidden and salvation consists in our recognizing him.⁹

The question that Jesus asks is the rabbuni’s gift to us: its very asking bestows the ‘grace of the guru’.

In every era his question is the gift waiting to be received. Its power simply, subtly to awaken Self-knowledge in our own experience of the Resurrection is perennial. St Thomas uses the present tense when he speaks of the Resurrection. He can be understood to be saying that the Resurrection by the divine power transcends all categories of space and time. In a similar way icons of the Resurrection in the Orthodox tradition suggest the same transcendence and show that the power that raised Jesus is presently and continuously active.¹⁰

The essential work of a spiritual teacher is just this: not to tell us what to do but to help us see who we are. The Self we come to know through its grace is not a separate, isolated little ego-self clinging to its memories, desires and fears. It is a field of consciousness similar to and indivisible from the Consciousness that is the God of cosmic and biblical revelation alike: the one great ‘I AM’.

Jesus of Nazareth knew who he was within the limits of his mortal humanity. The risen Jesus is the Jesus of the Cosmos whose love of life was stronger than death and who knows himself in the boundlessness of the Spirit. This knowledge, not miraculous powers or supernatural experiences, is what he shares of himself liberally with humanity. This is what it was his nature and destiny to do:

My task is to bear witness to the truth. For this I was born; for this I came into the world.¹¹

His self-knowledge is the catalyst necessary to awaken his disciples’ self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is the fundamental therapy, that healing of the soul which is the meaning of salvation. Carl Jung said that the crucial element in the relationship between analyst and patient is the therapist’s own self-knowledge. This is a continuously evolving consciousness which derives much of its life from the therapist’s interaction with the patient. We benefit (‘receive grace’) from the self-knowledge of Jesus in a way analogous to any deep human relationship. Because it is human and therefore reciprocal, we can even say that Jesus benefits from his relationship with us. Through us, with us and in us, he also comes to fulfilment. In St Paul’s letters Jesus now lives in the ‘Body of Christ’ which is the whole of humanity and even co-extensive with the material universe. And so all individual human development, as in the growth of a community, contributes substantially to the building up, the completion of his Body.

God’s ‘need’ for humanity can be glimpsed in Christ’s love for us. It has been one of the great insights of Christian mystics down the centuries that if love is mutual, the love flowing between God and humanity somehow shares in the pain and joy, longing and fulfilment of the human condition. The more pedestrian theologians of the day were outraged by Meister Eckhart’s witty exploration of this insight. Playing with words and paradox best conveys it. Julian of Norwich has this same mystical sense of humour and lightness of thought. She shares the same sense of the profound delicacy of divine love. She speaks of God’s thirst for human well-being and the ‘courteous’ and joyful way that that thirst expressed itself in the suffering and resurrection of Jesus. It is ‘inevitable’, she says, that we will sin ‘because of our weakness and stupidity’¹² yet there can never be any anger in God towards us. She conveys the entirely unconditional nature of God’s love by describing God as Mother. She applies this to Jesus as well. As much as any mother ‘our Mother Jesus’ needs to feel loved by his children. In her great work, Revelations of Divine love, Mother Julian drew her response to his question and her experience of his continued life. Because of it she cheerfully accepted the sufferings of life.

Thus he is our Mother in nature, working by his grace in our lower part, for the sake of the higher. It is his will that we should know this, for he wants all our love to be fastened on himself . . . And this blessed love Christ himself produces in us.¹³

Everyone must work hard at coming to the self-knowledge necessary to know who Jesus is. The harder we work the more we are helped. Then our personal growth in turn builds up his Body. Individual spiritual practice is thus saved from the danger of spiritual egotism. It is never for the individual alone but through the greater Body of Christ that spiritual practice benefits the whole of humanity. Mother Julian knew that when she risked describing her experience and said that it had been given her for the cheering of others.

Self-knowledge, which can hurt like hell at times, is nevertheless essentially joyful. And it always has the element of surprise. It is never predictable because it is never going to happen. It is always here. To realise that it is, and has always been here, is like finding that the glasses you have been looking for everywhere have never left the top of your head. We are surprised at finding them and maybe feel a little foolish. But we laugh with others, in joy and relief, because it is so clear we were never really separated from them.

Self-knowledge is also like freedom. It cannot be forced or cajoled. Being complacent and denying problems do not facilitate it. Forgiveness and love, on the other hand, can make it flourish. Repressive power structures, social or psychological, slow down the process. True spiritual practice, like good art, enhances human freedom. It develops the taste for freedom and a passion to let others enjoy it. So eventually it overturns every egotistically driven power-structure whether internalised within us and institutionalised around us. The spiritual path will therefore cause conflict, or bring it to light, within and outside us; but it also resolves conflict and accelerates growth. The process of self-knowledge develops discipline, perseverance, patience, all of which are necessary for freedom and justice. Because it is a process rather than an event, we may not know the dates and times of our awakening any more than we know when we will die. But we can see it happening within us and we can see its influence on the world we inhabit.

We also learn soon enough how impatience slows us down. As soon as you begin to practice a serious spiritual path, to listen to the silence, you meet inner resistance. To continue to meditate is then to struggle with all the innumerable conditioned habits and patterns of the ego, our individual and collective narcissism. The East calls them the countless vasanas. Soon after the first turn on the spiritual journey, one that can be accompanied by feelings of bliss and many sweet consolations, it all seems to get blocked. It feels as if some inner negative force is complicating and spoiling what had felt so simple and delightful. A demonic curve seems to be thrown into the divine directness. This is where the grace of the teacher is indispensable.

And be assured, I am with you always, to the end of time.¹⁴

Even with the rabbuni so close–closer to us than we are to ourselves according to St Augustine–the power of self-deception and illusion can be overwhelming. Often the path disappears beneath us as we struggle with the demons of anger, fear, pride, greed and ignorance.

At times we may even glimpse embarrassingly the absurd envy of the ego towards the guru. Being jealous of Jesus is the Judas-reflex in the human psyche, the dark side of the luminous night of faith. It has shown itself in many powerful minds like Nietsche. The ego only slowly learns, like a difficult child, that there is no need to compete with Jesus. It is eventually stopped in its tracks when it discovers that there is no competition anyway. You cannot argue for long with someone who is silent when you expect them to retaliate. You cannot fight forever with someone who turns the other cheek. You cannot push someone over who gives way. Every predictable power-structure which the ego seeks to defend is overturned by the humility of the true Self. As our own experience of the Self awakens we see how we do not have to prove ourselves equal to Jesus. He has already renounced his superiority. He has called us his friends.

I call you servants no longer; a servant does not know what his master is about. I have called you friends, because I have disclosed to you everything that I heard from my Father.¹⁵

Friendship is perhaps the most evocative way of describing our relationship with Jesus.

Pilate asked Jesus if he was a king and Jesus did not deny it. But made it clear it was a different kind of kingship from any that Pilate had in mind. Every friend is a king in the sense Jesus used: a benevolent ruler, protector and educator in the life of the one befriended. Friendship expresses itself in precise acts of love, concern, and intimate thoughtfulness. Jesus performed one of these before the last meal that he was to share with his friends. He washed their feet. Peter, who thought he knew who Jesus was, recoiled at this offer of menial, humiliating service. Jesus insisted. And when he had finished the ritual he asked them if they had understood what he had done for them. Clearly they had not. History went on to show how often his later disciples would also miss the point.

You call me Master and Lord, and rightly so for that is what I am. Then if I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example: you are to do as I have done for you.¹⁶

Later during the meal, the first Eucharist, Jesus opened their minds further to the meaning of what he had done, of who he was for them. He told them they were not his servants, his devotees or acolytes, but his friends. Friendship needs to be expressed and grows through its signs. His sign of friendship was that he had disclosed to them everything he had heard from his Father. By word and deed. He had come to know who he was through his listening to the silence of the Father. It was this knowledge he shared with them. His friends are those who allow him to wash their feet with his self-knowledge. A profound new symbol of God entered humanity’s history at that moment. It is one we have still not fully understood because it so surprisingly confounds all earlier images of God. His friendship with humanity opens new depths of consciousness that reach into the abyss of the Creator’s love.

Outside the divine friendship all other knowledge of God is tainted by the ego’s sense of separation. Without friendship the spiritual path is distorted by the religious roles we play: fear, formal reverence, self-conscious submission, bargaining, flattery, guilt, forced praise. All of these are substitutes for true ways to the knowledge of God. Sometimes, of course, as AA members know, you have to ‘fake it to make it’. But when we fail to see God in the light of friendship it is because our own role-playing deceives us. These roles give the ego a stage for self-exhibition, to dress up in religious garb as saint, sinner, priest or martyr, philosopher or mystic. The friendless part of us clings to these identities in compensation for its loneliness. We even begin to enjoy it. Friendship, however, permits no pretence or deception. Nothing more is needed in friendship than fidelity. Even self-justification is irrelevant because no one knows us better than a true friend. If we fool a friend we fool ourselves. And without being known by a friend who can come to self-knowledge? By this high standard we can see how few real friends we make in a lifetime. How many are the misjudgements of friends we call betrayals. And yet, when we do find God in the gift of friendship and glimpse God’s friendship towards humanity, we have reached the highest goal, the ‘end of love-longing’.

Friendship has been devalued in our culture. In other times however it was recognised as the noblest expression of relationship. A life without a friend was less than human. One of the essential goals of life for a civilised person was to find and cultivate a person suitable to be a true friend, ‘another one’s self’ as Plato called it. Friendship was understood to develop in the sharing of self-knowledge. You cannot be friends without knowing it and knowing it means you know you are known. This rich classical tradition of friendship entered into Christian thought and one of its greatest exponents was a twelfth-century English monk, Aelred of Rievaulx. He wrote the only complete treatise on friendship in medieval Christian literature, Amicitia Spirituale. It is a psychological and spiritual masterpiece combining both passion and prudence. In his work he drew into Christian thought the main classical themes: the dignity of friendship and its ennobling effect, the different types of friendship, from the utilitarian to the most selfless and the need to balance emotion and reason by not forcing the pace of growth in the friendship. His unique Christian contribution however was the insight that all human friendships are born and grow to fulfilment in Christ. When two friends truly love one another as Jesus instructed, they would experience the wonder of recognising him as being present with them.

And thus a friend praying to Christ on behalf of his friend and for his friend’s sake desiring to be heard by Christ, directs his attention with love and longing to Christ: then it sometimes happens that quickly and imperceptibly the one love passes over into the other and coming as it were into contact with the sweetness of Christ himself, the friend begins to taste his sweetness and to experience his charm . . . Thus ascending from that holy love with which he embraces a friend to that with which he embraces Christ, he will joyfully partake in abundance of the spiritual fruit of friendship, awaiting the fullness of all things in the life to come. Then with the dispelling of all anxiety by reason of which we now fear and are solicitous for one another, with the removal of all anxiety which it now behooves us to bear for one another, and above all, with the destruction of the sting of death together with death itself, whose pangs now often trouble us and force us to grieve for one another, with salvation secured, we shall rejoice in the eternal possession of Supreme Goodness; and this friendship, to which here we admit but few, will be outpoured upon all and by all outpoured upon God, and God shall be all in all.¹⁷

‘Eternal life’–life free of all constraints–becomes humanly accessible in this great incarnational vision of God.

As with any human relationship, friendship with Jesus proceeds by stages. One of the first things we do when a relationship begins to deepen is to remember the history of the friendship from the moment of first meeting. It becomes one of the irreplaceable stories within the story of our life. It is inconceivable that we could be friends with someone without wanting and needing to know the basic facts about their life and origins. Their past in some way needs to be appropriated into the shared story the friendship is creating. This is why it is natural to want to know what Jesus of Nazareth was like, what influences formed him, what he really taught and did. A lot of time has passed and his contemporaries had different ideas about biography from ours. There is a lot we will never know about him but the gospels give all we need to know.