“Beatific Friendship” was originally printed as a chapter in The Scholar-Gipsy. Upon Dr. Ron Dart’s retirement in 2023 from a long teaching career at the University of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford BC, Canada, friends suggested doing a Festschrift in his honor — not uncommon for a retiring academic. Ron wanted something different though: a “Liber Amicorum” — A Book of Friends. So, as if to a Banquet, we asked him to send out the invitations. But in this case, it was a potluck, with the guests providing all the main courses. And what a feast! Thus was this two-volume work born: a veritable smorgasbord of delectables for heart, mind, and soul.
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“No longer do I call you servants … but I have called you friends.”
John 15:15 (NKJV)
“The Divine Life is offered to those whose Home is clean on the Inside. Such people will know the very presence of God and see His Face.”
St. Matthew 5:8 (RSD)
The work of Ronald (Ron) Samuel Dart has touched many hearts and minds in the academy where he faithfully served the intellectual life of Canada and beyond for decades as a leading political and religious scholar. Nevertheless, it is Ron’s vocation of fostering spiritual friendship among men in the Body of Christ where we personally encountered this man of unusual depth, wisdom, and Christlikeness. The Contemplative Order of the Sons of the Holy Cross (founded in 2016) was the vision of Ron and others to draw together Anglican men into a “prayerful and contemplative vision and practice of faith.” The foundation of the life of the Order is “our journey into oneness with the risen Christ (Unio Mystica) and his mystical body (Corpus Christi).” A key text for those discerning entrance into the Order is Aelred of Rievaulx’s twelfth-century Ciceronian dialogue, De spirituali amicitia (Spiritual Friendship). It is here, in the cradle of spiritual friendship, that any contemplative order can hope to form a common journey into the life of God. It is here, we argue, where Ron’s life and work mark the real-world transfiguration of friendship from the Greek notion of Philia into the Aelredian notion of spiritual friendship. In spiritual friendship we find a mutual love that does not gaze at one another, but rather joins friends together to gaze into the face of God in Christ. Herein is found what we wish to term Beatific Friendship. To understand and depict this notion of friendship, we will explore common motifs in the work of C.S. Lewis, Aelred, Hans Boersma, Ron Dart, and Dante.
Love and Friendship
In his classic taxonomy of love, The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis lays out the four Greek notions of love as Storge (affection), Philia (friendship), Eros (romance), and Agape (charity). Lewis notes at the outset of his treatment of Philia that few moderns even consider friendship a true love, much less a love of comparable value to romantic love. This is in contrast to the Ancients, who saw friendship as the “happiest and most fully human” of all loves—“the crown of life and the school of virtue.” Calling Cicero and Aristotle to mind, Lewis notes that friendship was far from marginal in the ancient world and he attributes the modern shift to, variously, the fact that few moderns experience it, that it is deeply anti-democratic, and for the post-Freudian modern of Lewis’ day it suggested homosexuality (even before the advent of the Side B re-articulation of “spiritual friendship”). Lewis also notes the modern tendency to conflate friendship with companionship or “Clubbableness.” For Lewis, friendship emerges from companionship when two or more companions identify a common interest or insight that they do not share with the other companions. In this, friendship is born and “instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.” This solitude is not erotic solitude of lover and beloved, but rather the community of friends sharing the common solitude of insight and purpose. Lewis paints a vivid picture distinguishing Philia from Eros as “lovers face to face but Friends side by side; their eyes looking ahead.”
Lewis’s notion of friendship beyond mere companionship is a re-presentation of the ancient Ciceronian and Medieval articulation of friendship. Aelred of Rievaulx provides a dialogic of friendship modeled on Cicero’s first-century BC text, Laelius de amicitia. For Aelred, “spiritual friendship” is distinguished from the categories of carnal friendship and worldly friendship by a righteous “likeness of lifestyles and interests” (1.38 in the translation of Lawrence C. Braceland, SJ, quoted throughout).
Far from mere companionship or mutual benefit, spiritual friendship is for Aelred “that virtue by which spirits are bound by ties of love and sweetness and out of many are made one” (1.21). It is “the highest agreement in things divine and human with charity and good will” between friends of “one heart and one soul” (1.29). The essence of spiritual friendship, therefore, is both sacramental and beatific; it is “the way in which men and women may by loving one another embrace Christ in this life and enjoy eternal friendship with God in time to come.”[1] Earthly companionship may indeed bind hearts and souls together with mutual goodwill and affection, but spiritual friendship unites hearts and souls together in the deepest goodwill and heavenly affection of God himself.
Aelred recognizes many such friendships in Scripture: Adam and Eve (the first friends), David and Jonathan, Ruth and Boaz. Aelred recognizes the telltale unity of true spiritual friendship amongst the earliest church: “the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common” (Acts 4:32). In Christ the faithful had become of one heart and soul because spiritual friendship “begins with Christ, is advanced through Christ, and is perfected in Christ” (2.20).
We submit that Aelred’s transfiguration of Philia into spiritual friendship provides the portal into a deeper meaning of friendship for those sharing faith in Christ. In short, Aelredian spiritual friendship as highest agreement in things divine and human with charity and good will among Christians leads inexorably to consideration of the ultimate “lifestyle and interests” of such friends. What is the highest agreement between such friends if not agreement in their lives being fundamentally oriented to the goal of the Christian life—the beatific vision? This is Beatific Friendship.
Beatific Friendship
What is the beatific vision and how does it relate to friendship? In his encyclopaedical work, Seeing God: The Beatific Vision in Christian Tradition, Hans Boersma describes the beatific vision as the telos which “lies embedded in our human nature.” For Boersma, the beatific vision is both an eschatological state at the end of our lives, but also present now, imperfectly, in the lived experience and ultimate desires of humanity. For those who are incorporated into what the Prayer Book calls the “mystical body” of Christ there are glimpses of the beatific vision, even in this mortal life, through the sacramental means ordained by Christ: “When Christ is made present to us, both in Word and in sacrament, we experience the future present—the theophanic brilliance of the glory of God—a genuine anticipation of the beatific vision itself.”[2] Thus, when Christians join together in spiritual friendship and partake of the sacraments, they step into a genuine anticipation of the beatific vision as spiritual friends.
Traditionally understood, the beatific vision as a doctrine also goes hand in hand with the theology of deification and participation in God, according to Boersma. Similarly, in the theological work of Ron Dart blessedness and deification are, in some sense, synonymous. Channeling Athanasius’ famous third-century text De incarnatione verbi dei, Dart exegetes the “Beatitudes” in St. Matthew’s Gospel through the ancient Greek meaning of “blessed”: makarios, or, the vision of the gods.[3] For Dart, those who “internalize and embody the teachings of the Beatitudes in thought, word, and deed will know what it means to live the Divine Life.” In this way of blessedness, the Beatitudes are not primarily about ethical principles; rather, they “are about becoming of the same being, nature, and substance as God.” Such is the shocking truth of Christian orthodoxy for Dart and for Athanasius.
A Picture of Beatific Friendship
Boersma presents an image of how the doctrine of deification is bound up with the doctrine of the beatific vision in his presentation of Dante’s Paradiso. For Dante, coming into the presence of God in paradise is a “transhumanizing” experience—one that takes him into the divine life. Boersma explains, “Dante is so transformed—’transhumanized’ into the divine life—that the sacramental gifts of language and memory yield to the reality of the vision of God.” In other words, the transformation into the divine life moves the believer from signs (sacramentum) into the ontological reality (res).
Lewis also sees in this “transhumanizing” picture of Dante’s Paradiso a parallel transformation of loves in Dante. Dante’s ideal lover, Beatrice, inspires many a soliloquy from Dante throughout the Comedia as he seeks to draw near to her beatitude. When Dante encounters Beatrice in paradise the Eros with which he loves Beatrice is superseded, disclosing something which could perhaps be called Beatific Friendship between lovers. Near the end of Paradiso Dante’s direct desire for Beatrice is transformed as they together orient their gaze to the Divine. Lewis speaks of this turn in his letter to a grieving husband, Sheldon Vanauken, who had confided in Lewis his realization that his romantic love for his deceased wife must, in one sense, be “killed” and “God must do it.”[4] Lewis counselled the widower thus:
You’d better read the Paradiso hadn’t you? Note the moment at wh. Beatrice turns her eyes away from Dante ‘to the eternal Fountain’, and D. is quite content. But of course it’s all in the text ‘Seek ye first the Kingdom … and all these other things shall be added unto you.’ Infinite comfort in the second part; inexorable demand in the first.
Lewis points to Dante’s contentment with Beatrice turning her face to the eternal Fountain precisely because Dante’s love has been transformed from Eros into what could be called a beatific Philia. Dante releases his desire for a face to face love shared with Beatrice in favour of “Friends side by side; their eyes looking ahead” into the Divine Essence. In so doing Dante not only enters into a deeper unity with Beatrice, but also into unity with the whole mystical Corpus Christi. Beatific Friendship is, thus, not two individuals face to face in non-sexual Eros, but rather a company of friends. Again, Lewis: “true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’” Such is the capaciousness of Beatific Friendship.
The Eastern Orthodox theologian Andrew Louth in his foreword to Seeing God summarizes his reading of Boersma on the beatific vision with the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, contemporary of Lewis and highly suggestive of Aelred: “Linked to our brothers [and sisters] by a common goal which is situated outside ourselves, only then do we breathe and experience shows to us that to love is not to gaze at one another, but rather to look together in the same direction.”
Thus, to practice the virtue of spiritual friendship is to participate in the very love of God in Christ towards us, his friends, and to anticipate the heavenly consummation of this divine love in the age to come. Such is the sacramental and beatific vision of spiritual friendship cast by Ron’s life and work in and beyond the life of the Order of the Sons of the Holy Cross. It is in that Beatific Friendship in which we seek to join “with all the company of heaven” where we receive on our lips the eternal Cherubic Hymn: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory.”
About the Authors:
The Rev. W. Creighton Friedrich serves as Rector of New Song Church (Anglican Network in Canada). He has been a vowed member of the Order of the Sons of the Holy Cross since February 2022. He and his wife Rachel live in Port Perry, Ontario.
J.H. Reinhardt, J.D. is a vowed member of the Order of the Sons of the Holy Cross. He practices law in the Province of Ontario where he lives with his wife and children.
Notes
- Marsha L. Dutton, “Introduction” in Aelred of Rievaulx: Spiritual Friendship (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2010), 22-23. ↑
- Hans Boersma, “The Beatific Vision: Contemplating Christ as the Future Present” in Coe & Strobel (eds), Embracing Contemplation: Reclaiming a Christian Spiritual Practice (Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press, 2019), 223. ↑
- Ron Dart, The Beatitudes: When Mountain Meets Valley (True North Publishing Company, 2021), 33. ↑
- Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1977), 205. ↑
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