ST.

AUGUSTINE ON FRIENDSHIP
Friendship is at the core of human existence. John Donne tells us that “no person is an island.”

The Gospel relates that there is nothing better than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
Augustine’s life story is a story of evolving friendships and deepening his understanding of friendship.

Here in LCUP, as an Augustinian school, we value true friendship above all other core achievements
within the school. It is beyond academic excellence, above winning at sports or extra-curricular
activities, greater than administrative or disciplinary structures within our schools. To live friendship
is to live as one with each other in truth and love. It is Unitas, Veritas, Caritas. We value true
friendship.

In Augustine’s life there are many stories of friendship but his book Confessions is not a story of
those friendships – Confessions, his best known book, is a story of how he comes to understand the
mirror relationships of friendship with one another in terms of our relationship with God.

For while Augustine has many friends in his life story, be it in Confessions or in the book by
Saint Possidius on the life of St Augustine his friendships are not always the healthiest or most
productive. So that we can explore the ideas of friendship and all their implications.

About the age of 12:

Augustine and his friends nick someone else’s pears and then have a fruit fight. Not the worst of
activities but not acceptable behaviour then or now, but something anyone could get caught up in.

Augustine would ask later if his friends at that time were those he tried to impress rather people who
showed mutual concern for one another. Are your friends a group that get each other into trouble, or
who need to impress each other by their exploits?

About the age of 16:

Augustine and his friends set themselves up as an elite group, mocking outsiders and being experts
at all things they see as important. They do all the things that make you important in life at that time
– they talk a great line (Augustine will become a renowned orator), they love the theatre and one of
them becomes a fanatic of the gladiatorial sports. They see themselves as talented and going places.
They find the company of women fascinating, with the norms of the day being many adventures in
love. They practice the art of drinking; but leave the art out of it on occasions.

Augustine will eventually challenge himself and his friends at the time as to the values that they
exercised and the lack of calling each other into question. His own love affair is to have a relationship
with just one woman and to be faithful to her, even though she was below his rank in life and custom
did not demand any fidelity or any commitment – but while he expressed his value in actions he did
not address his values in words to his friends. He saw the weaknesses of others, and even some
within himself but these were not uttered for fear of damaging friendships.

Are your friendship groups mutual admiration societies or do they exercise common care for one
another and recognise both talents and flaws?

1|St. Augustine on Friendship

About the age of 25:

Augustine has abandoned any traces of his religion. Christianity doesn’t seem to answer any of his
questions and simply places restrictions on him, his friends and their lifestyle. He places intellectual
rigour at the forefront and attempts to come to better answers. He tries some of the offbeat sects
and the popular movements of the day, the equivalent of the Hare Krishnas or the extravagant
evangelical movements of today. The mind games he will write are of people who never look at the
realities of life and seek direct answers to complex relationships.

Are your friends knockers of the struggles that constitute life and of the strugglers?

About the age of 30:

Augustine has moved out of Africa to Italy lying to his mother about where he is going and what is
happening in his life. The customs of the day means he has to let go of his lover and begin the search
for a wife. Yet this creates a huge hole in his heart. He addresses the hole with another woman in
his life but she does not remain with him as long.

He addresses the aches in his heart by reading and waiting for someone to come along with all the
answers. Yet at the moment when he understands that God has been with him all his life he sees
that his friend Alypius has been with him yet has already been at this point of conversion waiting for
him to arrive.

Are your friends waiting for you to arrive at yourself and are they working to let you be
yourself.

This notion of Christian friendship is about being ultimately true to the God who resides within you
and calls you to be the best person you can be. Augustine struggles with friendship even while he
has friends around him. His life was dominated by friendships but in the end he begins to see what
makes true friendship as opposed to that which meets his immediate needs.

He loves the unnamed woman even after her departure as he sees beyond his need for gratification
to the gifts that she bore him within the relationship and what she brought out of him from that
relationship.

Augustine sees the friend as the one who stood by him in his years of need and who tried to
steer him in the direction of his own core goodness.

Augustine dismisses the ones who saw the sharing of good times as the epitome of friendship, and
will conclude that it was those who could celebrate moving beyond the hard times because they had
stuck together as the real friends. Augustine values those who challenged him; who were true to
themselves in the midst of crisis, change and opportunity. Augustine valued those who saw him with
his flaws, named the flaws yet still loved him as a human being.

Augustine will see friendship in terms of those who risked the friendship by being true to themselves
and seeking the truth in others. Can there be a greater way to be human, to be adult than to be a
true friend laying down one’s life for your friends? Is this not what we are all called to be?

2|St. Augustine on Friendship

In a dictionary friendship is described as "a relationship of mutual regard." That definition is concise
and without emotion, and does not convey the rich reality of friendship. True friendship is not just a
"relationship", but generous love. Augustine saw friendship as a spiritual relationship between two
people. It was based on love, leading each friend to work for the happiness of the other.

Friendship is an image of the love of God for us, according to Augustine, since authentic and
generous friendship mirrors the love that Christ showed for us on the Cross, and which He described
when teaching that "no greater love can one have than to lay down your life for a friend."
(John 15:13). It is a love that does not look for anything in return for the love given, and finds
happiness in promoting the interests and happiness of the other. Such a love warms the heart, thrills
the mind, and urges the friend to give everything for the other--just as Christ does for us--and leads
to happiness in this world while pointing to God, who, Himself, is Love.

Augustine regarded friendship so important and so valuable because he even believed that, of
everything that exists in the created world, only true friendship could lead a person to God. As for
his assertion that there was no true friendship between him and his concubine of thirteen years, it is
worth remembering that educated women were rare in Augustine's milieu of North Africa. For a
brilliant and highly educated man like Augustine, true friendship would have required an intellectual
aspect that would have been difficult to find with most women of his time.

In the culture of North Africa in the time of Augustine, as was also the case in classical culture before
his time, spiritual friendship of this kind would have been restricted to his close male friends. God is
at the core of friendship for Augustine. This is evident in his many letters that still exist. In them he
openly discussed issues of faith and life with so many people - men and women, young and old -
with sincere affection (Confessions, 4, 4, 7; Letters 10, 73; Rule of Augustine 1, 2).

The importance of friendship to Augustine

Few people in human history have lived friendship as intensely as Augustine did. Throughout his life
he was a person who could not live without friends: to "love and to be loved was the sweetest thing
to me" (Confessions, 3, 1, 1). Augustine stated that there are two things necessary for "life in this
world: health and a friend" (Sermon 229, D, 1).

Friendships were for him of supreme importance. He always lived with an attitude of openness to
others. Among other things, his Confessions is a history of his friendships, some bad (Confessions,
2, 4, 7-9, 17) and others good although simply human (Confessions, 6, 7, 11-16, 26). Death cut one
of these friendships short, leading him to make some of the most acute and subtle observations that
have ever been written about the loss of a friend (Confessions, 4, 4, 7-9, 14).

Some of his friendships - like that with Alypius - matured and acquired a different character; they
acquired an eternal quality that was founded in his Christian faith. In as far as Augustine came closer
to God, his concept and practice of friendship became deeper and deeper. This was especially so
even at the point of his converting to the Christian faith, when he thought that the ideal Christian
living would be to dwell with his friends in community, having everything in common, and in calm
leisure to the study the Bible. (Confessions, 6, 14, 24).

When newly baptised, Augustine came to regard friendship as an intimate and necessary part of his
Christian formation and growth. (Even in preparing for baptism, he had done so in the company of
his family and friends.) He thought of friendship as a fraternal sharing of life, and now having the

3|St. Augustine on Friendship

goals of seeking God and searching for the knowledge of God and of the innermost soul of an
individual. (Monologues, 1, 2, 7; 1, 12, 20)

Later in his life, Augustine continued living this vision of friendship with those who shared community
life in the monasteries he founded, and with those who, like himself, were called to be church leaders
in North Africa: Alypius, Possidius and Evodius. He maintained to the end of his life his natural
clanishness as an African. As a number of his close frriends at Hippo were called by the Church to
become bishops of other dioceses, his circle of face-to-face friends grew smaller, and this was one
of the great trials of his life.

In Letter 84, he reflected, "But when you yourself begin to have to surrender some of the very dearest
and sweetest of those whom you have reared to the needs of churches located far away from you,
then you will understand the pangs of longing that stab me on losing the physical presence of friends
united to me in the most close and sweet friendship."

Writing at the age of seventy, Augustine echoed the words that the Roman orator, Cicero, had said
four centuries earlier about the great happiness and support associated with human friendship:
"There is no greater consolation than the sincere loyalty and mutual love of ... true friends" (City of
God, 447). God was at the core of friendship for Augustine. This is evident in many of his letters, in
which he openly discussed issues of faith and life with so many people - men and women, young
and old - with sincere affection (Confessions, 4, 4, 7; Letters 10, 73; Rule 1, 2).

The signs of good friendship

Friendship can be a key human component in our growth towards God. Of everything that exists in
the natural world, Augustine held that only true friendship could lead one to God. He saw friendship
as a relationship between two people, one that was based on love, leading each friend to work for
the other's happiness. Friendship is an image of the love of God for us, according to Augustine, since
authentic and generous friendship mirrors the love that Christ showed for us on the Cross, and which
He described teaching that "no greater love can one have than to lay down one's life for one's friend"
(John 15:13).

"For what else is friendship but this? It gets its name from love alone, is faithful only in Christ, and in
him alone can it be eternal and happy." (Against Two Pelagian Letters 1, 1). "I know that I can safely
entrust my thoughts and considerations to those who are aflame with Christian love and have
become faithful friends to me. For I am entrusting them not to another human, but to God in whom
they dwell and by whom they are who they are." (Letter 73, 3).

Reflections of St. Augustine on Friendship in different contexts

Friendship is essential in life

1. In this world two things are essential: life and friendship. Both should be highly prized and
we must not undervalue them. Life and friendship are nature’s gifts. God created us that
we might exist and live: this is life. But if we are not to remain solitary, there must be
friendship.

[Sermon Denis 16,1]

4|St. Augustine on Friendship

The blessings of friendship

1. Good human beings seem even in this life to provide no small consolation. For, if poverty
pinches, if grief saddens, if bodily pain disturbs, if exile discourages, if any other disaster
torments, provided there are present human beings who not only know how to rejoice with
those in joy, but also to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15) and can speak and
converse in a helpful way, those rough spots are smoothed, the heavy burdens are lightened,
and adversity is overcome. But he who by his Spirit makes them good does all this in them
and through them. If, on the one hand, riches abound, no death occurs, bodily health is
present, and one lives in a country safe from attack, but evil beings also dwell there among
whom there is no one who can be trusted, no one from whom one does not suffer and fear
deceit, fraud, anger, quarrels and attacks, are not those former things bitter and hard without
anything joyful or pleasant in them? Thus in no human affairs is anything dear to a human
being without a friend.

[Letter 130 to Proba]

2. Particularly when I am worn out by the upsets of the world, I cast myself without reservation
on the love of those who are especially close to me. I know I can safely entrust my thoughts
and considerations to those who are aflame with Christian love and have become faithful
friends to me. For I am entrusting them not to another human, but to God in Whom they dwell
and by Whom they are who they are.

[Letter 73,3]

A friend is to be loved for his/her own sake

1. “Hold faith with a neighbour in his poverty. So that you may also enjoy his good times.” You
must stand by him, and not change friendship just because his circumstances have changed
for the worse; you must keep faith with determined constancy. After all, if my friend was a
friend when he was rich but is not a friend when he's poor, then it wasn't him that was my
friend, but his money..... But the second part [of this maxim], I must confess to you, I find
objectionable. If the reason you stick by your friend in his poverty is in order, when he's rich
again, to enjoy his riches, then it's still the case that it's not the friend you love, but something
else in the friend.

[Sermon 41]

2. The first thing, you see, that your graces should observe, is how the love involved in friendship
ought to be gratuitous. I mean, the reason you have a friend, or love one, ought not to be so
that he can do something for you; if that's why you love him, so that he can get you some
money, or some temporal advantage, then you aren't really loving him, but the thing he gets
for you. A friend is to be loved freely, for his own sake, not for the sake of something else.

[Sermon 385]

5|St. Augustine on Friendship

Love reaches out

1. Moreover, this is the rule of love: the good that we desire for ourselves we desire for our
neighbour also; and the evil that we are unwilling to undergo we wish to prevent from
happening to our neighbour. All who love God have such a desire toward everybody.

[On True Religion 87]

Friendship involves a search for truth

1. So to these two things that are so necessary in this world, well-being and a friend, along came
Wisdom as a visitor.

[Letter 130 to Proba]

2. I am delighted because I see that your mind is drawing near to it [wisdom] and is ablaze with
the desire to attain it. From it, of course, there also flows true friendship that is not to be
judged by temporal advantages but it to be valued as gratuitous love. For no one can be
truly a friend unless he is first a friend of the truth, and if that is not done gratuitously it cannot
be done at all.

[Letter 155]

God is in all true friendship

1. The philosophers have also said much on this topic, but they do not have the true piety, that
is, the true worship of the true God, from which all the duties of leading a good life must be
drawn. The reason for this, to the extent I understand it, is that they themselves wanted to
construct a happy life for themselves and thought that they should procure it rather than pray
for it, though only God can give it.

[Letter 155 to Macedonius]

2. You only love your friend truly, after all, when you love God in your friend, either because he
is in him, or in order that he may be in him. That is true love and respect. There is no true
friendship unless You weld it between souls that cling together by the charity poured forth in
their hearts by the Holy Spirit.

[Confessions Bk. V.19]

3. Whenever I feel that a person burning with Christian charity and love for me has become my
friend, when I entrust any of my plans and thoughts to my friend, I am entrusting them not to
a human person, but to God in whom they abide, so as to be like Him, ‘for God is love, and
the one who live in love lives in God’.

[Letter 73]

6|St. Augustine on Friendship

4. They love their friends truly who love God in them, either because God is already in them, or
in order that God might be in them.

[Sermon 361.1]

5. [Reason]: Why do you want the men you love to live or dwell in your company?

[Augustine]: So that we can all at the same time and in unity of heart seek our souls and
God. In this way the one who first makes the discovery easily leads the others.

[Reason]: Therefore, you wish this life to continue, not for its own sake, but for the sake of
wisdom.

[Augustine]: That is right.

[Soliloquies, ch.12]

6. The friendship which draws human beings together in a tender bond is sweet to us because
out of many minds it forges a unity.

[Confessions Bk II.5.10]

7. What agonizing birth-pangs tore my heart, what groans it uttered, O my God! And there.
Unknown to me, were your hearkening ears, for as I laboured had in my silent search the
mute sufferings of my mind reached your mercy as loud cries. You alone knew my pain, no
one else, for little of it could I express in words to my closest friends! Could their ears have
caught all the tumult that raged in my soul, when even I had neither time enough nor
eloquence to articulate it?

[Confessions Bk VII.7.11]

8. The sincerity of our friendship should ensure that this thing should not belong to one person
and that to another; there would be one single property formed out of many; the whole would
belong to each of us, and all things would belong to all.

[Confessions Bk VI.14.24]

9. Friendship is genuine only when you bind fast together people who cleave to you through the
charity poured abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us.

[Confessions Bk IV.4.7]

10. After the loss of his friend: I was miserable, and miserable too is everyone whose mind is
chained by friendship with mortal things, and is torn apart by their loss, and then becomes
aware of the misery that it was in even before it lost them.... Look upon my heart, O my God,
look deep within it. See, O my hope, who cleanse me from the uncleanness of such affections,
who draw my eyes to yourself and pull my feet free from the snare, see that this is indeed
what I remember. I was amazed that other mortals went on living when he was dead whom I
had loved as though he would never die, and still more amazed that I could go on living myself
when he was dead – I, who had been like another self to him. It was well said that a friend is

7|St. Augustine on Friendship

 half one’s own soul. I felt that my soul and his had been but one soul in two bodies, and I
shrank from life with loathing because I could not bear to be only half alive; and perhaps I
was so afraid of death because I did not want the whole of him to die, whom I had love so
dearly.

[Confessions Bk IV.6.11 In his Retractions (‘Revisions’) written 30 years later, Augustine

distanced himself from the rhetorical vehemence of this statement, but the tone may well
represent his mood at twenty-one years of age.].

11. By means of my inner sense I coordinated my sensible impressions, and in my little thoughts
about little things I delighted in truth. I was unwilling to be deceived, I had a lively memory, I
was being trained in the use of words, I was comforted by friendship, and I shrank form pain,
grovelling and ignorance.

[Confessions Bk I.10.31]

12. Let us love, let us love freely and for nothing. It is God, after all, whom we love, than whom
we can find nothing better. Let us love him for his own sake, and ourselves and each other in
him, but still for his sake. You only love your friend truly, after all, when you love God in your
friend, either because he is in him, or in order that he may be I him. That is true love and
respect; if we love ourselves for another reason, we are in fact hating rather than loving.

[Sermon 336.2]

13. There is another, higher kind of friendship, arising not from habit but from reason, by which
we love a person because of mutual trust and benevolence in this mortal life. Any love or
friendship we find which is superior to this is divine. Let people start loving God, and the only
thing they will love in other human beings is God.

[Sermon 385.3]

14. The first thing that you should observe is how the love involved in friendship ought to be
gratuitous. I mean, the reason you have a friend, or love one, ought not to be so that he can
do something for you; if that’s why you love him, so that he can get you some money, or some
temporal advantage, then you aren’t really loving him, but the thing he gets for you. A friend
is to be loved freely, for his own sake, not for the sake of something else. If the rule of
friendship urges you to love human beings freely for their own sake, how much more freely
is God to be loved, who bids you love other people! There can be nothing more delightful
than God. I mean, in people there are always things that cause offence; still, through
friendship you force yourself to put up with things that offend you in a person, for the sake of
friendship. So if you ought not to break the ties of friendship with a human being just because
of some things in him you have to put up with, what things should ever force you to break the
ties of friendship with God? You can find nothing more delightful than God. God is not
something that can ever offend you, if you don’t offend him; there is nothing more beautiful,
and full of light than he is.

[Sermon 385:4]

8|St. Augustine on Friendship

15. What restored and re-created me above all was the consolation of other friends, in whose
company I loved what I was loving as a substitute for you (Before his conversion). There were
other joys to be found in their (friends’) company which still more powerfully captivated my
mind – the charms of talking and laughing together and kindly giving way to each other’s
wishes, reading elegantly written books together, sharing jokes and delighting to honour one
another, disagreeing occasionally but without rancour, as a person might disagree with
himself, and lending piquancy by that rare disagreement to our much more frequent accord.
We would teach and learn from each other, sadly missing any who were absent and blithely
welcoming them when they returned. Such signs of friendship sprang from the hearts of
friends who loved and knew their love returned, signs to be read in smiles, word, glances and
a thousand gracious gestures. Se were sparks kindled and our minds were fused inseparably,
out of many becoming one.

[Confessions Bk IV.8.13]

16. In Christ, friendship achieves a certain permanence. Friendship is faithful in Christ, in whom
alone it can become eternal, attaining happiness.

[Against the Pelagians 1.1]

17. What restored and re-created me above all was the consolation of friends, in whose company
I loved what I was loving as a substitute for you.

[Confessions Bk. IV 8.11]

18. Whenever a person is without a friend, not a single thing in the world appears friendly to him.

[Letter 130:2.4]

19. There is no greater consolation than the unfeigned loyalty and mutual affection of good and
true friends.

[City of God 19.8]

20. I confess that I cast myself without reservation on the love of those who are especially close
to me, particularly when worn out by the upsets of the world. In their love I rest without the
slightest worry, because I perceive that God is present there. In this security I am undisturbed
my fear of the uncertainty of the morrow. …. For when I see that a person is aflame with
Christian love and has therefore become a faithful friend to me, I know that whatever thoughts
or considerations I entrust to him, I entrust not to another human being, but to God in whom
that person dwells, and by whom he is who he is.

[Letter 73: 3.10]

21. When many rejoice together, there is a richer joy in each individual since they enkindle
themselves and inflame one another.

[Confessions Bk. VIII 4.9]

22. The first thing a baby sees are its parents, and life begins with their friendship.

9|St. Augustine on Friendship

 [Sermon 9.7]

23. We should esteem highly health and friendship, and we may never despise these. Health and
friendship are natural goods. God created the human being so that he or she could exist and
live a life that is healthy. But in order that the human being should not be alone, he or she
desires friendship. Now, friendship begins with wife end children, and then reaches out to
strangers.

[Sermon 299D.16.1]

24. If together we hold firm to the two precepts of love, our friendship will be true and everlasting,
and it will unite us not only to one another, but to the Lord Himself.

[Letter 258.4]

25. When we are weighed down by poverty and grief makes us sad, when bodily pain makes us
restless and exile despondent, or when any grievance afflicts us; if there be good people at
hand who understand the art of rejoicing with the joyful and weeping with the sorrowful, who
know how to speak a cheerful word and uplift us with their conversation, then we shall nearly
always find the rough made smoother, the burden lightened, and our troubles overcome.

[Letter 130:2.4. Another translation of this text follows hereunder.]

26. These good people (friends) seem to spread no small comfort about them; even in this life.
For, if poverty pinches, if grief saddens, if physical pain unnerves them, if exile darkens their
life, if any other misfortune fill them with foreboding, let there be good people at hand who
know how to ‘rejoice with them that rejoice’, as well as to ‘weep with them that weep’ (Rom
12.15), who are skilled in helpful words and conversation, then in large measure those bitter
trials are lessened, the heavy burdens are lightened, the obstacles are met and overcome.
But He who makes them good by His Spirit effects this in and through them.

[Letter 130.2,4]

27. Talking about the group in which he stole the pears: What an exceedingly unfriendly form of
friendship that was!

[Confessions Bk II.9.17]

References:
Reflections of Rev. Fr. Michael Morahan, OSA
City of God
Monologues
Confessions
Letters
Soliloquies
Rules
Sermons

10 | S t . A u g u s t i n e o n F r i e n d s h i p