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Bishop William Crean

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Coram Fratribus

Is Friendship Still Possible?

This year’s St Margaret of Scotland Lecture at St Andrews.
If you believe that the world is somehow intelligible, susceptible of articulation and explanation in such a way that the sense-content of words is significant, you may have been struck by Read More

Coram Fratribus

Seeking Truth

Homily given at a seminar day for Catholic academics, at a Mass offered as a votive Mass to St Thomas Aquinas.
3 John 5-8: We contribute our share to their work for the truth.
Luke 18.1-8: When the Son of Man comes, Read More

Coram Fratribus

Dignity

This homily was given in French on the final day of the retreat of the monks of Ligugé, who renewed their vows during the course of Mass. You can find an English version of the text by scrolling down.
En ce Read More

Coram Fratribus

32 Sunday A

This homily was given in French. You can find an English version by scrolling down a bit.
Sg 6.12-16: La Sagesse est resplendissante.
1 Th 4.13-18: Nous ne voulons pas vous laisser dans l’ignorance.
Mt 25.1-13: Nos lampes s’éteignent.
Nos trois lectures parlent du Read More

Coram Fratribus

Sanctificetur I was recently given this remarkable poem by Czeslaw Milosz, written a year or so before he died in 2004, at 93. Milosz once told a journalist, ‘There is a very dark vision of the world in my work’. There is soft light, too.
Sanctificetur
What is a man without Your name on his lips?
Your name is like the first breath
and first cry of the newborn.
I utter Your name and I know You are defenceless,
since the power belongs to the Prince of this world.
You rendered things created unto the rule of necessity,
saving for yourself Man’s heart.
A man who is good, hallows Your name,
whosoever desires You, hallows Your name.
High above this earth of indifference and pain,
Your name shines resplendent.

Coram Fratribus

Is Friendship Still Possible? This year’s St Margaret of Scotland Lecture at St Andrews.
If you believe that the world is somehow intelligible, susceptible of articulation and explanation in such a way that the sense-content of words is significant, you may have been struck by the fact that, over the past quarter-century, a number of nouns that earlier denoted concrete realities have morphed into metaphors for abstractions.
Take ‘memory’. ‘Memory’ used to stand for the specifically human faculty of storing information acquired through learning or experience in such a way that it would be accessible for instant recall. This store was considered to be uniquely personal. The judicious feeding of one’s memory in order to interiorise and own criteria for wise discernment was considered one of life’s chief tasks. Augustine saw memory as a constitutive element of personality and so, given God’s provision of his image in what is truly human, as a bridge to true perception of the divine.
These days, ‘memory’ is a commodity we purchase by the byte. We use it to preserve our data, less a collection of ‘given things’ than a pool of cud kept no-one-quite-knows-where, though we have in that unplaceable place limitless confidence.
Who on earth remembers anything anymore? There is no need, now that a hissed instruction to Siri provides us, in a flash, with the periodic table, Aunt Susan’s number, the Ode to a Greek Urn and the next train to leave from Leuchars to Dundee. School teachers have long since given up giving children anything memorable to learn; what matters more is that they get to grips with gadgetry.
Our ‘memory’ is kept alive in the ‘cloud’. Clouds, too, once had a nice sort of quiddity. So close to the things of earth were they that Christina Rossetti could write a cloud-poem starting, ‘White sheep/On a blue hill/When the wind stops/You all stand still’, without running the least risk of being misunderstood. As meteorological phenomena, clouds carried both menace and promise, but they were dependable. As the Good Book says, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say, ‘It’s going to rain,’ and it does’ (Luke 12.54). Today, the thought of cloud leakage is the stuff of nightmares. Wherever the ‘cloud’ of our ‘memory’ is, we want it to be watertight.
The semantic field of friendship has likewise been digitised. Friendship has been variously envisaged throughout the social and literary history of the West, but has always presupposed embodied encounter. Social media have released it from such constriction. A ‘friend’ is now pretty much the same as a ‘follower’: a digital ‘identity’ granted prerogatives in someone else’s virtual ‘space’. Back in the day when FaceBook was in its prime, still called FaceBook and not spurned as an oldies’ reservation, people used to brag about their range of ‘friends’, to be counted, like the victims of Saul and David, in their thousands and tens of thousands.
A person may still have lots of such ‘friends’, but who is to say they are persons? Recent advances, if that is the term, in artificial intelligence ensure that digital agents can now generate themselves at the drop of a hat without the initiative, or knowledge, of any woman, man, or child. It provides somewhat indigestible food for thought that many websites nowadays, when you try to access them, will first appraise you with the announcement: ‘Just verifying that you are human’. I find myself in throes of anxiety as I wait. What if I am weighed and found wanting?
The culture that in this way propagates ‘friends’ coincides with an epic spread of reported loneliness. In Britian this phenomenon was seen as a problem of wide-reaching consequence already in 2016 (before anyone had thought of Covid), when a cross-party ‘commission for loneliness’ was initiated under the leadership of Jo Cox shortly before she was shot dead by an internet-radicalised lone wolf. The work of the commission, formally established in January 2017, produced a ministerial lead for loneliness and a national ‘loneliness strategy’. These are laudable initiatives, but I am not sure they have occasioned drastic change. The onset of the pandemic in 2020 further inflamed what was already diagnosed as a deep societal wound.
The days of Covid now seem centuries away. We have done our best to purge them from our memories, neurological and cloud-based. The experience is still with us, though. Today’s undergraduates spent months, even years, during a crucial time of adolescence cooped up behind screens in their bedrooms, barred from physical interaction with peers. Many, of course, emerged from the experience strengthened, with a clear sense of social priorities. Others were left scarred.
Covid sharpened our sense of the value of being together. Beautiful things did happen during that time, which at some level made us more honest. Since everyone was feeling lonely, it seemed less of a defeat, then, to admit that I was. The possibility of online connection turned out to be a blessing that occasioned creative, often humorous development. We met for rosaries, drinks parties, book circles, workouts, even choir rehearsals before our laptops. Fellowship and friendship were fostered in this way. The internet does have this nice potential, which is worthy of celebration.
At the same time the internet can isolate terribly. Global porn traffic saw a steep global rise during lockdown. The trend has kept increasing since. Internet porn sites attract more visitors monthly than Netflix and Amazon combined. Some 35% of internet downloads are pornography-related. Consumption peaks in the three hours leading up to 1 a.m., which Bergman called the ‘hour of the wolf’, the hour when the night seems thickest, our nightmare most real, our hope least realisable. England’s Children’s Commissioner found last year that the exposure of minors to online pornography has kept growing even in the wake of the Online Safety Act of 2023. Over 70% of young people aged 16–21 said they had seen pornography before they turned 18, up from 64% in 2023. More than a quarter of respondents said they had come across porn by the age of 11, some that they had had their first exposure at the age of six.
Much has been written about this: about the impact of pornography on mental health and sexual performance, the risks of addiction, the porn industry’s role in trafficking. These are serious issues. There is a risk, though, that exclusive focus on infirmity and criminality blinds us to the broader implications of the pornographic explosion. Given that about half the adults in our society (mostly men, but with women catching up), watch pornography regularly, we are dealing with a trend that concerns not just a population subset marked by maladjustment or some set predisposition, but persons with families, regular jobs, apparently normal lives.
Readier recourse to pornography is linked, I believe, to the broader virtualisation of existence. The more our lives are conducted solitarily through screens, the more it seems acceptable that our relationships should be also. We are getting unused to spending appreciable amounts of time in others’ company. They, ‘the others’, seem to us increasingly just a darned nuisance. Why waste time being sociable among potentially disobliging people when you can curl up undisturbed at home, fed by Deliveroo, with a bingeable series or two, an X account where all channeled content is stuff you agree with, then, when the night wears on, a titillating, non-committal visit to some pixel-lit hub of pulsating bodies?
We find ourselves in the crux of two apparently contradictory developments. For decades, since the heady revolutions of the 60s, relationships in the West have been eroticised. The porn industry, not renowned for sentimental subtlety, displays one side of this coin. The other is seen in countless films and novels tracing innuendo among friends, as if no intimacy were complete without the interested parties ending up in bed. Now, though, many young people opt out of sex with others, retreating instead into solitary gratification. The body is for many a source of anxiety. It may be displayed at the gym, forced into shape like an artfully clipped prize poodle, but is kept out of anyone’s concrete reach, its vulnerabilities being too great. Having first submitted our interactions to Eros, we have locked Eros himself within a screened mirror image of ourselves.
Is it any wonder that people feel lonely, and trapped?
How vital, then, to take this chance to reflect afresh on friendship. Little seems to me more vital in a time of outsourced memory, which has largely forgotten how friendship is configured, than to re-propose this form of intimacy-in-freedom. ‘There are friends who pretend to be friends’, we read in Proverbs, ‘but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother’ (18.24). To find such a one is to find a treasure.
With regional accents, the world’s ancient epics sing the praises of friendship. The names of certain pairs of friends resound with sweetness still: Gilgamesh and Enkidu [a name my word-processing programme would have me correct to ‘encode’], David and Jonathan, Arjuna and Krishna, Patroclus and Achilles.
The fact that all these names are male reveals the terms on which classical literature was written. To seek records of women’s friendship we must, beyond a few fragments in Sappho, move forward in time. We find what we seek not least in the annals of monasticism, which opened a fruitful arena for female self-expression. In Hilda, Hildegard, and the valiant nuns of Helfta, for instance, we encounter great-souled women whose joy in friendship sparkles in their writings and example.
But what is friendship? The question has concerned enquiring minds as far back as records go. If we turn to the Greek classics, we see what friendship looks like in Plato’s dialogues. In Aristotle’s treatises, we learn how it may be defined. Aristotle fixed terms by which we may judge whether a given affinity merits the name of friendship. Cicero continued this work of definition in Latin. His De amicitia, written in 44 BC, set the tone for further discussions for over a thousand years. When in the mid-twelfth century, up on the Yorkshire Moors, Aelred of Rievaulx sought to formulate friendship theologically, he found it quite natural to structure his text on Cicero’s, enabling a Christian apotheosis of the old statesman’s argument. The next watershed in friendship literature is probably the essay Michel de Montaigne wrote on the subject in about 1580, when France was riven by wars of religion. Montaigne, often referred to as a harbinger of modern subjectivity, used the first person singular pronoun ‘I’ as a measure of judgement with a brazen confidence that would not have occurred to a medieval writer. Taking the classical virtue-based treatment of friendship for granted, he introduced a new factor into the bargain. We might describe it as regard for the ‘chemistry’ which may manifest itself between persons even at a first, fleeting encounter. When Montaigne speaks of his own friendship with Étienne de la Boétie, he says it came about simply ‘because he was he, and because I was I’. This is how modernity perceives and speaks.
Many have since written in praise or explication of friendship with varying degrees of profundity. My purpose is not to give a digest of these writings. Neither my learning nor the time at our disposal is adequate. What I should like to do is simply to pinpoint three aspects of friendship that inherited wisdom allows us to individuate and name: friendship’s consensual foundation, its non-fusional character, and its fundamental uselessness. These traits form a rather useful counterpoint, I think, to contemporary expectations and mores.
To look at consensus in friendship, we shall have to set out from Cicero’s De amicitia. It takes the form of an amiable chat among friends: the consul Laelius, who had studied with Diogenes the Stoic, and his sons-in-law, Scaevola and Fannius. Cicero claims to have written up a conversation the three of them once had as it had been related to him by Scaevola, his teacher; and to have done so as a tribute to his own friend, Atticus: ‘ad amicum amicissimus scripsi de amicitia’ — ‘I have written as a superlative friend to a friend on the subject of friendship’. He makes it clear, though, that friendship is about more than a fond atmosphere. The source of friendship is perforce intellectual and moral. Those only can be friends who agree on what matters in life. Their agreement must be grounded in well-formed opinion. For friendship is ‘nothing other than consensus in all things, human and divine, conjoined with mutual goodwill and charity’. The key Latin terms in this definition are consensio, benevolentia, and caritas. It will be useful to consider them briefly in turn.
When we meet the word ‘consensus’ today, it smacks of compromise. For us, consensus is something that emerges from board rooms as a result of negotiations and even — who knows? — a few deals. For Cicero it denoted something different, something more akin to the tuning of instruments. The consensus he speaks of voices a unanimity that calls for continuous attentive listening. It is one thing for the violin and piano to agree, ahead of a performance, on what is a pure A; it is another for them to stay in tune throughout the Kreuzer Sonata. Ciceronian friendship supposes sympathy, but will only mature through constant exchanges of pondered views.
Such exchanges build on benevolence, which in this context is more than a resolve to think well of another. Cicero interprets benevolentia literally as ‘a will for good’. To will what is good, I must be, or at any rate strive to be, good. Friendship ‘cannot exist except among good men’. Must one be wise to be good? The Sophists thought so. Cicero quibbles. While wisdom is desirable in friends, it is a divine endowment, which the gods can distribute or withhold as they like. Goodness, by contrast, is furthered by a well-ordered will, so is within everyone’s reach. Those are called good who ‘give proof of loyalty and uprightness, of fairness and generosity; who are free from all passion, caprice, and insolence, and have great strength of character’. Genuine friends look for and further these qualities in one another.
Such reciprocal discernment and assistance can be qualified as charity. Caritas, in contrast to eros and affectus, has a rational, evaluative character. To say in Italian, ‘è caro’ can mean either, ‘he’s a dear fellow’, or, ‘it’s expensive’. In English, the adjective ‘dear’ has similar ambivalence, deriving from ‘teuer’, the German for ‘costly’. Charity is a response to something or someone we reckon worthy of love. It can be authentic even when it does not provoke the merest flicker of warm feeling. Indeed, effusions of warm feeling can make a profession of charity appear faintly suspect.
The narrator in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time explains the nature of caritas in this way, as objective goodness, when as an adult he finally comes to see the point of a figure of charity that had used to puzzle him. When he was a child, he had had on his bedroom wall a print of Giotto’s Charity from the Arena Chapel, but could not fathom what this ‘powerfully built housewife’ had to do with the tender virtue of love. She had matter-of-factly to have tumbled ‘all the treasures of the earth at her feet […] as if she were treading grapes in a wine-press’. At the same time she was holding out her flaming heart to God with apparent indifference, ‘quite the way a cook might hand up a corkscrew through the skylight of her underground kitchen’. The boy he once was had looked in vain for some display of kind emotion.
Later, though, when in the course of life he came to meet, in religious houses for example, saintly examples of practical charity, he ascertained that these generally shun coddling. They tend to have ‘the brisk, decided, undisturbed, and slightly brutal air of a busy surgeon, the face in which one can discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, and no fear of hurting it, the face devoid of gentleness or sympathy, the sublime face of true goodness.’
Cicero would not have put it like that (and goodness knows what he would have made of Proust), yet I think he would have been in agreement. The goodness and charity he looked for in a friend, oriented by benevolence to become consensio, were untouched by sentimentality. A man schooled in Ciceronian friendship will not hesitate to wield the surgeon’s scalpel, should he find his friend smitten with tumours of vanity, delusion, or mendacity, puncturing these with prompt precision even at the cost of causing upset. For unless friends in consonance put goodness first, committed to the truth, their friendship would not, to Cicero, be worth preserving.
I have spoken of a tendency, in our day, to eroticise intimacy. Given the tempering of societal heteronormativity, the frisson that earlier attached to friendships between a woman and a man has become much more diffuse. Much popular culture — through advertising, media, and films — would have us think there is a potential erotic charge almost everywhere. I suppose this explains why the pornographic ruse has come to have such power. We have infused even casual closeness with a whiff of sex. Constant sexual entanglement is more than most people have time or energy for. Sublimated suspense is nonetheless lodged in their minds. The resulting tension needs to find an outlet somehow. Virtual voyeurism seems to offer such a lifeline, though its long-term practice is usually deadly, serving only to exacerbate aloneness.
In such a climate it is well to reflect on the non-fusional nature of friendship. By so doing we can air out an emotional space that has become stifling. Romantic love craves the union of hearts, minds, and bodies: ‘My beloved is mine, and I am his’. Lovers of every age have rhapsodised on this theme, so succinctly stated in the Song of Songs (2.16). Friendship works differently. For friends to practise the kind of vigilance Cicero speaks of, focused on fostering good, there must be a certain distance between them. My friend cannot be my sounding board if he is inextricably entangled in my life. Our true friends draw us out of ourselves. Sometimes, indeed, we need them to rescue us from ourselves and our futile navel-gazing.
I know of no more bracing account of this dimension of friendship than a book born of tragedy: Andrew Sullivan’s Love Undetectable from 1998. Published at the end of the AIDS plague, when new medication suddenly held out a prospect of survival to those who, like Sullivan, were HIV positive and had seen, in a cruelly short time, the decimation of their community, it deals with questions of life and death, hope and despair, sex and abstinence. Sullivan takes sex seriously. With clarity, courage, and critical sense he considers it from various angles, setting out from his own explicitly homosexual experience, but always looking towards what is universally human. His search is nurtured by a philosophical and Catholic outlook as well as by that fierce independence of mind that makes him to this day unclassifiable, the scourge equally of left and right when he finds either veering into bullshit or hypocrisy. While searching for the big picture, Sullivan is committed to speaking of what he knows, sure that there is ‘speciousness to the idea that what is true is somehow untrue because it isn’t everything’. Sometimes contrary, always intelligent and witty, he challenges us to connect absolute values to what is experientially real.
The theme of friendship is woven like fine gold thread through the three long essays that make up Love Undetectable. The fact of carrying a lethal virus made Sullivan think hard about the singular character of friendship. Evoking the time just after he had got his diagnosis, when he was living on a rising tide of anxiety, he tells of a friend who happened to come over one morning, ‘someone who had once been close’ but had drifted away. Sullivan shared his awful news. His visitor stayed silent for a while, then said, ‘quite simply, and quite clearly, “Andrew, Andrew”’. ‘In the timbre of his words’, writes Sullivan, ‘in the repetition of the name and in the mixture of concern and disappointment, shock and warmth, I recognised at once the voice, […], and I recognised the tone.’ Whose tone was it — and whose voice?
Sullivan realised a few days later when he sat down with the Bible. Hoping to find a word to live by, a substantially comforting word, he came upon the story of Jesus’s visit to Bethany, where Lazarus entertained, Mary listened, Martha fretted. Christ’s reproach, ‘Martha, Martha’, resonated with his recent encounter: ‘Andrew, Andrew’. In the name’s repetition, ‘exasperated but loving, admonitory but intimate’, he recognised the ‘address a real person once used for a real person, and a real person he loved, as much for her faults as in spite of them’. In it he heard a tone that ‘is not the tone simply of love; it is the tone of friendship, an unmistakable tone’.
The intonation belongs, in the Gospel story, to the Word made flesh. Is it too bold to root friendship in God? Perhaps not. God called Abraham his friend (Isaiah 41.8). With Moses he spoke ‘face to face, as a man speaks to his friend’ (Exodus 33.11). Both Abraham and Moses were bearers of a covenant. They knew epiphanies, glorious and fearful at once, appreciating better than anyone how different God is from a human being. Yet they knew God intimately. In John’s Gospel, Christ calls his disciples friends after instituting the new and eternal covenant (John 15.15) that manifests both his utter otherness and his presence to us.
God’s attribution of friendship is, in a way, paradigmatic. A friend’s being is separate from ours. He knows us from without, not from within. Our friend sees us the way we cannot see ourselves, as a whole and in a landscape. Distance enables him to see when we are, like the prodigal son, outside ourselves, needing to be called to return, even though we think we are home, and integral. The twice-repeated call is a mark of recognition, first, then a summons to truth.
Oh to have a friend who does call us like that, who sees us as we are without recoiling yet calls forth our best potential, which we may have accidentally forgotten.
Love pursues the siren call that promises a homecoming of primal security and naked exposure in another’s arms. Given how this call saturates our atmosphere, Sullivan posits that the ‘great modern enemy of friendship has turned out’, counter-intuitively, ‘to be love’. Love is forward. Friendship is reticent, offering space that allows the other ‘to remain safely another person’. Love erupts; friendship matures. Lovers love to talk about their love. Friends, ‘more often than not, deflect attention from their friendship’. Friendship thrives on equality. It is defined by the wish of each person to remain in it. It cannot be forced or claimed; the other’s alterity must be a free gift. That is why Sullivan, who is no prude, insists that sex between friends is ‘to be avoided at all costs’. For sex ultimately ‘signals the congress of two different beings, a resolution of the distinctness on which friendship relies.’ A sexual relationship, indeed a marriage, may over time mature into friendship; but a friendship risks perishing through the transgression of boundaries intrinsic to it.
The third aspect of friendship I would like to highlight is its uselessness. It would be more elegant to speak of its gratuity, yet I will stick with uselessness. It is a word that leaves no doubt that friendship cannot be utilitarian. Once I envisage my friend as a means to an end, I block our friendship’s wellspring. It will dry out. Friends are there for each other, glad to lend a helping hand. Yet if a friendship gets contractual, tied up in loans, flat lets, or job offers, stresses start to operate that can bring the bond to breaking point. Similar challenges arise when excessive affective demands are brought to bear on friendship, making me expect from my friend a degree of attention or affirmation that claims possession and constrains his liberty.
Awareness that certain demands are unreasonable in friendship is widespread enough. It can assume the form of old-bachelor gruffness, as when, in My Fair Lady, Higgins, exasperated at Eliza’s inexplicable wish for a degree of human regard, sings to Colonel Pickering in praise of manly matiness. A little dialogue takes place:
—Would you be slighted if I didn’t speak for hours?
—Of course not!
—Would you be wounded if I never sent you flowers?
—Never!
—If I forgot your silly birthday, would you fuss?
—Nonsense!
When I speak of the uselessness of friendship, this is not what I mean. Friendship has a covenant-character. It is not about the passage of ships in the night. The ambiance of friendship is one of confidentiality, not that of men who, having sat next to each other nightly in the same leather chairs for decades, still converse as if they had not been introduced. Yet friendship’s mark is determination that my friend must be fully himself. Enforced compromise in this respect, be it of use to me, is unacceptable.
This insight is beautifully, starkly stated in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay on friendship published in 1841. Emerson, by then married for the second time and expecting his third child, is frank about the thrill he finds in friendship: ‘A new person is to me a great event, and hinders me from sleep.’ He recognises, though, that such transport, for being pleasant, is unproductive: ‘the joy ends in the day; it yields no fruit’. The ripe fruit he learned to look for is rare. Altruism is called for in a friend. He must be magnanimous to the point of sacrificing even his own affection on friendship’s altar. I remember the puzzlement with which, in my twenties, I first read these lines by Emerson, which the years since passed have persuaded me are true:
Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. […] The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it.
Not for a moment does Emerson suggest he is indifferent to whether his friend stays or goes. He sets high standards of loyalty, even suggesting that friends ‘belong’ to each other. Yet he qualifies himself: ‘The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine.’ The thought of proprietorialness in friendship is abhorrent to him.
Regarding this point, too, we can pick up Biblical resonance. On the eve of his sacred Passion, after celebrating the first Eucharist, having ennobled his disciples by proclaiming them friends, having told them, ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lays down his life for his friends’ (John 15.13), Jesus goes up to the Mount of Olives, into the garden of Gethsemani. Judas comes and finds him there, at the head of a mob with murderous intent. Instead of drawing back from him, Jesus steps forward, greets him, and says: ‘Friend, why are you here?’ (Matthew 26.50). To invoke friendship at this point would seem, in a lesser protagonist, sarcastic. Sarcasm, though, is a mode of speech in which Christ does not indulge. Calling Judas ‘friend’, he affirms him in his freedom. He says: ‘Here we stand, you and I. We have walked together for a long time. I have tried to warn you of this moment: remember the dipped morsel at supper. I have tried to recall you to my love, yet you have chosen your stance and decided to act on it. My soul is very sorrowful, but your freedom is sacred. You must do what you must do. The Father will bring good out of it, somehow. But your choice is yours. I cannot stand with you in it’. Here, too, we hear the tone of friendship. It has grandeur, pathos, and great earnestness.
The stakes in this scenario are extreme. They will not be seen again before the end of the world. But we can find them reflected in our lives. Sometimes we must let a friend go. He may have to accomplish, for good or ill, a task in which we can have no part. We can reason with him, plead, try to understand; but we cannot compel him. To admit a friend’s freedom to the utmost consequence, forfeiting our need to be comforted and reassured, is a tremendous thing. At such times we can but watch and patiently pray, keeping our door open, a candle burning in our window, hoping our departed friend may one day return to sit down once again and break bread.
Offering these reflections, I have given no exhaustive account of friendship, which in any case, if you accept my hypothesis that its origin is of God, opens onto infinity. I have principally wanted to intimate that friendship is a pedagogy that humanises us, purifies our affections, orients our minds, teaches us to be, and to help others be, free. Friendship can teach us, over time, to love divinely. To have a friend is joy; to be a friend is a blessing. Friendship tries us. But would we rather live untried?
Our sense of friendship’s depth and breadth should make us determined to hold its banner high and to resist its vulgarisation. The tendency of social media to quantify and digitise friendship is patently absurd. We should be wary, too, of attempts to politicise friendship, as when one speaks casually of ‘friendship’ among nations or institutions, given that such ties are rarely disinterested; or when one crooked politician says of another crooked politician, ‘He is my friend’, and on that account pretends that wholly irresponsible transactions are somehow justified. In such cases, the name of friendship is taken in vain unworthily, invoked as subterfuge.
The discipline of cultivating friendship is a precious gift we can offer times marked by loneliness and craving. Such discipline makes us better able, too, to see ourselves in perspective. Our thoroughgoing sentimentalisation of intimacy is quite a newfangled fad, when you come to think of it, an expression of our contemporary, specific complexes and needs. As long as we remain bloodymindedly determined to project these complexes and needs onto every other period of history in every cultural sphere, we are ill prepared to discover that the social contract has often tended to work on different terms, that the primacy we currently give the romantic and erotic would, in many a different civilisation, appear adolescent and immature.
Augustine, for one, would find it so, though he made no secret of his susceptibility in matters of the heart and senses. Not long after his conversion he wrote, Nemo nisi per amicitiam cognoscitur, ‘You must be a friend to a man before you understand him’. He did not thereby indicate a friendship-crush or bromance, but rather the elements we have considered of respect, distance, freedom, and disinterestedness.
When Owen Chadwick succeeded Herbert Butterfield as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1968, he cited Augustine’s phrase to draw from it a hermeneutic principle for historians, specialists in a task that concerns us all: that of working out how to live well in society, conditioned by the past, turned towards the future. To understand yourself in relation to people of the past, said Chadwick,
You need no white paint, you need to try to see things as they were. But you need to be inside their minds, and to forget the future which they could not know, and to come towards them with the openness of mind, the readiness to listen, which a man gives to a friend. Trevelyan had this among his strengths. He was the kind of man, as well as the kind of historian, who understood what St Augustine meant, that the human race is known in friendship.
By practising being friends, by learning to know in friendship, we stand a chance of seeing the world as it has come to be freed from fears, passions, and illusions, apt to construct it together into a better, more reverent, friendlier place. Given the state of it at the moment, such a thought is not wistful fantasy. It constitutes a mission.

Coram Fratribus

Seeking Truth Homily given at a seminar day for Catholic academics, at a Mass offered as a votive Mass to St Thomas Aquinas.
3 John 5-8: We contribute our share to their work for the truth.
Luke 18.1-8: When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?
When we engage with Sacred Scripture, generalisations are risky. We easily end up simplifying, even caricaturing, complex realities. We reduce the Biblical authors to manufacturers of platitudes: ‘Mark’s like this, Matthew’s like this’, forgetting the immense task they all confronted: that of giving coherent, intelligible expression to the fact that eternity has entered time, that the world and our grasp of it are made new.
Still, we can discern particular characteristics. In Paul’s letters, the principal tension is that between sin and grace, the law and freedom — we see Paul riven by it. In the Johannine writings, the question of the truth is primary.
Towards the end of his Gospel, John cites Pilate, the pragmatic Roman bureaucrate, who asks: ‘What is truth?’ The answer has already been provided.
The truth is spirit (16.13). It comes from the Father (17.7). It enlightens and liberates, is one with the light (8.32, 3.21). The truth is Jesus himself, the incarnate Word of the Father (1.14, 14.6). Born of the Virgin Mary, he has deposited truth essentially in our nature. For a Christian, truth is more than the object of intellectual enquiry; truth stands for a mode of being. That is why John says truth is something we must ‘do’ (1 John 1.6). It constitutes a universe in which we ‘walk’ (3 John 1.14).
All these aspects are presupposed in the exhortation we have just heard from the third letter of John, addressed to ‘the beloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth’ (1.1). Gaius stands for each of us. John says it is our duty to contribute to the ‘work for the truth’. That message will galvanise a gathering of Catholic academics.
The search for truth is not reducible, for us, to a career choice or subjective preference.
We are conscious of being consecrated to the truth. To become fully ourselves, we must pursue the truth with zeal. We’re not content with fragments of truth here and there. We thirst for the fullness of truth, to live by it. We know that truth is not ultimately abstract but personal. We don’t just want to know the truth. We long to encounter it, to become one with it.
In the Gospel, Jesus asks: ‘When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ That question conveys a challenge to us.
The faith in question is not a matter of sentiment. Faith stands for confidence in the truth the Son of Man brings and is. For people to come to faith, they must first strive for truth.
This is where the task of Catholic academics unfolds. They are to ensure that the truth, as a category, remains vibrantly present in society and in public discourse. By their work they are to show, and prove, that truth is not mythological nonsense, but concrete reality, a reality whose attractiveness and beauty far surpass the dull suppositions of relativism. They are to do this by communicating reasonably and understandably, by teaching and by writing learned tracts. Yet this is more essential still: they must make sure their own lives are constantly shaped by truth, enabling truth-seeking fellowship.
Relativism disperses. The truth, expounded and acknowledged in freedom, unites. In such unity faith finds soil in which it can grow. May faith find favourable conditions of growth and thriving among us here, now.
Amen.
Detail from a painting by an unnamed artist from 1608 showing the genealogical tree of the Guzman family, in the Dominican museum in Kraków.

Coram Fratribus

Dignity This homily was given in French on the final day of the retreat of the monks of Ligugé, who renewed their vows during the course of Mass. You can find an English version of the text by scrolling down.
En ce temps-là, Jésus disait: «Lequel d’entre vous, quand son serviteur aura labouré ou gardé les bêtes, lui dira à son retour des champs: “Viens vite prendre place à table”? Ne lui dira-t-il pas plutôt: “Prépare-moi à dîner, mets-toi en tenue pour me servir, le temps que je mange et boive. Ensuite tu mangeras et boiras à ton tour”? Va-t-il être reconnaissant envers ce serviteur d’avoir exécuté ses ordres? De même vous aussi, quand vous aurez exécuté tout ce qui vous a été ordonné, dites: “Nous sommes de simples serviteurs: nous n’avons fait que notre devoir”» (Luc 17.7-10).
L’attente d’une juste reconnaissance pour un travail bien fait est très humaine. C’est d’ailleurs une marque de courtoisie de ne pas prendre pour acquis le travail d’un autre. Dans le contexte de la vie monastique, où nous vivons étroitement ensemble, nous constatons combien un simple ‘Merci’ peut illuminer et réjouir la vie commune.
Mais la vie est faite aussi de devoirs librement assumés ou imposés par des circonstances incontournables. Une jeune maman, ou un jeune papa, ne désire pas s’élever dix fois chaque nuit parce que son nouveau-né pleure; ça fait partie, simplement, de ce qu’une mère, qu’un père fait.
Aujourd’hui, nous parlons moins qu’autrefois de nos ‘devoirs’; et nous sommes souvent susceptibles quand d’autres nous les rappellent. Les paroles du Seigneur que nous venons d’entendre sont donc utiles. Elles nous rappellent que la vie chrétienne n’est pas un jeu de loisir.
Dire Oui au Seigneur veut dire accepter de prendre part à son grande oeuvre en cours: la rédemption du monde. Dieu compte sur la disponibilité que nous lui avons promise. Il ne verra pas nous jeter des fleur à chaque fois que nous suivons ses consignes; sa confiance est déjà une récompense. Il nous traite comme des adultes.
Un moine est quelqu’un qui a donné sa vie au Seigneur définitivement. Avec quelle joie n’avons-nous pas prononcé nos voeux le jour de notre profession solennelle! Nous souvenons-nous encore de l’engagement radical assumé ce jour-là?
Le signe qu’une amnésie s’insinue en nous est la tendance à murmurer. A juste titre St Benoît condamne cette tendance comme le pire vice du moine, car le murmure vise la rétractation d’un don fait une fois pour toutes. Le murmure est une forme d’aggression passive égocentrique. Fuyons donc le murmure comme la peste!
Demandons au Seigneur plutôt la grâce d’un coeur généreux et allègre, fidèle au bel engagement que nous avons contracté par amour.
Agnosce, o christiane, dignitatem tuam, s’écria le pape Saint Léon le Grand, dont l’Église fait mémoire ce jour, une nuit de Noël à Rome: ‘Chrétien, reconnais ta dignité!’ Nous donnons preuve de cette dignité en consacrant notre vie à un but qui lui est approprié et en construisant ensuite notre existence autour de notre parole donnée.
***
To expect some kind of recognition for a job well done is human. Further, it’s a mark of courtesy not to take the efforts of others for granted. In monastic life, where we live so closely together, we ascertain how a simple ‘Thank you’ can brighten the common life and make it joyful.
Still, life is made up, too, of obligations freely contracted or imposed by circumstance. A young mother or father doesn’t want to rise ten times every night to comfort a crying infant; that is simply what mothers and fathers do.
We speak less now than we used to about our obligations; we get prickly when others recall us to them. The words of Christ read to us are useful, therefore. They remind us that the Christian life is no parlour game.
To say Yes to the Lord means accepting a part in his great ongoing work: the world’s salvation. God counts on the availability we have pledged. He isn’t going to come and incense us every time we do what he tells us; his confidence in us is recompense great enough. The Lord treats us as adults. We should see ourselves as such.
A monk is a one who has given his life to the Lord for good. With what joy we made our vows on the day of our profession! Do we still remember the radical commitment we then undertook?
A sign that forgetfulness is getting hold of us is a tendency to murmur. Rightly Saint Benedict condemned murmuring as the monk’s worst vice. By murmuring I retract the gift of myself I made once for all. Murmuring is a form of self-centred passive aggression. Let’s shun it as pestilence, asking the Lord instead for the grace for a glad, generous heart faithful to the gift of ourselves we have made in love’s name.
Agnosce, o christiane, dignitatem tuam, St Leo the Great, whom the Church commemorates today, once cried out during a Christmas service in Rome: ‘Christian, remember your dignity!’ We give proof of that dignity in so far as we consecrate our life to a purpose worthy of it, then by constructing our existence on our given word.

Coram Fratribus

32 Sunday A This homily was given in French. You can find an English version by scrolling down a bit.
Sg 6.12-16: La Sagesse est resplendissante.
1 Th 4.13-18: Nous ne voulons pas vous laisser dans l’ignorance.
Mt 25.1-13: Nos lampes s’éteignent.
Nos trois lectures parlent du contraste entre lumière et ténèbres.
La première présente la Sagesse divine comme resplendissante. Le monde des hommes est envisagé par implication comme crépusculaire. La splendeur de la Sagesse y est immédiatement perceptible, tout comme, par un soir d’hiver, nous remarquons, même à 250 mètres de distance, la lumière d’une torche qui de jour ne se verrait pas. L’Écriture parle de l’aisance avec laquelle la Sagesse se révèle à qui a des yeux pour regarder. Cette affirmation devrait nous frapper. La Sagesse se laisse ‘facilement contempler’ et ‘trouver’. Ayant le désir positif de se manifester, elle devance le désir des chercheurs et se fait ‘connaître la première’.
Souvent nous envisageons la vie spirituelle come très ardue, marquée par de grandes sécheresses. Combien de livres pieux idéalisent la peine de ce qu’on appelle, en vulgarisant un peu trop Saint Jean de la Croix, la ‘nuit obscure’. La révélation biblique, par contre, indique un sentier bien illuminé. La Bible ne se fait aucune illusion par rapport à notre vertu ou force. Elle affirme simplement que Dieu, qui est tout-puissant, veut se faire connaître. Il faut juste accepter d’être des noctambules discernant l’étoile du matin. Le seul vrai obstacle sur l’itinéraire vers Dieu, c’est l’idée qui peut s’insinuer en nous d’être déjà, sans lui, illuminés, d’être déjà, nous-mêmes, lumière. Si nous sommes dupes de telles absurdités, un petit passage par une vraie nuit pourra se montrer libérateur et rédempteur.
Saint Paul parle aux Thessaloniciens, dans une lettre qui est probablement le texte le plus ancien du Nouveau Testament, des ténèbres intellectuelles où sont emprisonnés ceux qui ne reconnaissent pas la sainte résurrection de Jésus Christ d’entre les morts. La victoire de Dieu sur la mort est en effet d’une importance catégorique. Elle impacte la compréhension de toute réalité métaphysique et concrète. Vivre sans réaliser que la mort a perdu son aiguille équivaut à exister dans le monde moderne sans se rendre compte de l’électricité. Si c’est mon cas, je pourrai me débrouiller plus ou moins, certes, mais je resterai entouré par de phénomènes inexplicables, en proie aux peurs inutiles. Seul en admettant qu’un courant vital réunit désormais le temps et l’éternité, l’univers visible et l’univers invisible (mais parfois audible) pouvons-nous affronter l’existence sans trouble aucun, avec courage et sérénité. L’illumination qu’apporte la foi est vraiment une lampe pour nos pas, une lumière pour notre sentier (cf. Ps 118.105).
Quand, dans l’évangile, le Seigneur nous parle des vierges sans huile pour leurs luire leurs lampes, les considérations sur la lumière que nous venons de faire sont implicites. Mais le Christ indique autre chose aussi: une insuffisance de sagesse ou d’intelligence ne nous exclue pas, Dieu merci, de la vie éternelle.
Saint Séraphim de Sarov, un grand moine si étroitement uni au Christ qu’il brillait parfois de lumière taborique, propose une interprétation de la parabole qui garde toute sa pertinence. Le marché où l’huile pour les lampes s’achète, dit-il, est notre vie dans ce monde. Les portes fermées de la chambre nuptiale, empêchant l’accès vers le Fiancé, sont une image de notre mort. Les vierges symbolisent les âmes chrétiennes.
L’huile ne symbolise pas nos actions, mais bien la grâce du Saint-Esprit qui peut divinement transformer une chose en une autre chose: le corruptible en incorruptible, la mort psychique en vie spirituelle, les ténèbres en lumière, notre étable existentielle, où les passions sont enchaînées comme des bêtes, en temple de Dieu, en chambre nuptiale de la joie ineffable en le Christ Jésus notre Seigneur, Créateur, Rédempteur, éternel Fiancé de nos âmes.
Songeons-nous assez à cette dimension de la foi? Croyons-nous vraiment que l’état de notre âme peut changer, que Dieu peut transformer notre être pour le configurer au sien? Pour Saint Séraphim, la parabole nous pousse à découvrir combien l’ouverture à l’Esprit nous est vitale. Le Paraclet est l’Esprit Créateur. Il nous prépare à vivre divinement.
L’Esprit façonne nos âmes selon l’intention première du Père. Il rend éternel ce qui par nature est périssable, il nous élève de la mort à la vie, fait resplendir la poussière avec un éclat d’éternité. D’elle-même, notre âme s’abaisse parfois à l’état d’une ménagerie mal tenue. Par grâce, elle peut devenir un tabernacle.
Il faut apprendre à être réceptifs, purs d’esprit et de corps. Quand l’Esprit descend, accueillons-Le avec humilité, dans un profond silence, pour en brûler. Ainsi nous ne serons pas étrangers, au terme de notre parcours terrestre, à la vie des séraphin dont le chant ardent résonne devant la face de Dieu éternellement.
En attendant, nous apporterons de la joie consolatrice sur cette terre qui, abandonnée à elle-même, sombre dans la tristesse.
Amen.
* * *
All our three readings today speak of the contrast between darkness and light.
The first presents God’s Wisdom as ‘bright’. The world of men is envisaged, by contrast, as being crepuscular, for Wisdom’s splendour is at once perceptible in it, the way on a winter’s evening we see, even at a distance of a quarter-mile, a torchlight that by day we’d stand no chance of noticing. Scripture speaks of the ease with which Wisdom is revealed to those who have seeing eyes. The point is striking. Wisdom is ‘readily seen’, ‘found by those who look for her.’ Having a positive wish to make herself known, she even ‘anticipates those who desire her’.
Often we think of the spiritual life as being terribly hard, marked by inward drought. How many pious books idealise what they refer to (by an easy vulgarisation of St John of the Cross) as ‘the dark night’. Scripture, meanwhile, traces a well-lit path. Not that the Bible has illusions about our virtue or strength. It affirms, quite simply, that God, who is omnipotent after all, wants to make himself known. We must simply accept to be night-watchers looking out for the star of dawn. The only real obstacle on our path to God is the idea that might insinuate itself in us that we’re enlightened without God — or even, in extreme cases of delusions, that we are light. Should we fall for such absurdities, passage through a genuine night might be a heaven-sent blessing.
Writing to the Thessalonians in what is probably the New Testament’s oldest text, St Paul speaks of the intellectual darkness that imprisons those who do not recognise Christ’s holy resurrection from the dead. God’s victory over death has categorical importance. It impacts on all metaphysical and concrete reality.
To live without realising this is a bit like living in our modern world without being aware of electricity. Were we to do so, we’d get by somehow, of course, but we’d constantly be surrounded by the inexplicable, delivered up to useless fears. Only by admitting that there is, now, a live current uniting time and eternity, the visible world of earth and the invisible (but sometime audible) world of heaven can we confront existence with courage and serenity. The enlightenment that faith brings is truly a lamp for our steps, a light for our path (cf. Ps. 118.105).
When in the Gospel the Lord speaks of the virgins who had not acquired enough oil to make their lamps shine, the aspects of light we’ve already considered are implicit. Still, more is at stake. An insufficiency of wisdom or understanding does not exclude us, thank God, from eternal life.
St Seraphim of Sarov, a great monk so closely united with Christ that he sometimes reflected the light of Tabor, put forward an interpretation of this parable that is worth thinking about. The market where the oil is bought symbolises, says Seraphim, our life. The shut door of the bridechamber, barring the way to the Bridegroom, is human death. The wise and foolish virgins stand for Christian souls. ‘The oil does not symbolise deeds, but the grace of the most holy Spirit of God, which changes things from one state to another: what is corruptible into something incorruptible; the death of the soul into spiritual life; darkness into light; the stable of our being (where the passions are tied up like dumb beasts) into a temple of God, a bridechamber of unspeakable joy in Christ our Lord, the Creator, Redeemer, and eternal Bridegroom of our souls.’
Do we think enough about this dimension of our faith? Do we believe that the state of our soul can really change, that God can conform our being to his? This parable, as Seraphim reads it, lets us see how vital the Spirit is for us. The Paraclete is Creator Spiritus. He makes us ready to live divinely.
The Spirit refashions our souls according to the Father’s first intention. He makes what is perishable eternal. He raises us from death to life. He renders dust resplendent with a sheen of eternity. Of itself, our soul tends, as Seraphim points out, to descend to the state of an ill-kept zoo. By grace, it can become God’s sanctuary.
Our misfortune, our only true misery, is ‘our inattention to his care for us’, our ignorance of his gifts. We must learn to be receptive, pure of mind and body. When the Spirit descends, we must welcome him attentively, in profound silence, to burn with his light. In so far as we do, we shall not be strangers, when our earthly pilgrimage ends, to the life of the seraphim whose ardent praise resounds before God in all eternity.
While we wait we may bring consoling joy to this earth which, left to its own devices, only too easily sinks into paralysing sadness.
Amen.
St Seraphim was famous for his friendship with a bear. Seeing uncreated Light shining in him, the bear knew it had nothing to fear, and could therefore relinquish its own hostility.

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