Friends can help each other with tranquillity of mind, states Aelred. And such peace comes with the life of the virtues....For Aelred, part of reaching this state of virtue, is having good friends. But, before that, one must reach these goals as well; good Benedictine and, therefore, Cistercian goals. These may be found in the Rule and in commentaries of the Rule:
rejecting honour, pleasure and worldly goods;
breaking away from self-love, pride and comparison with others to the self;
realizing one can do no good without grace, and that one must fight evil;
being disciplined in speech and action;
being still both exteriorly and interiorly.
These Benedictine ideals are right out of Classical Education and must be part of a lay person's goals as well as those of the monk. Let us continue with friendship....
45. Now the spiritual, which we call true friendship, is desired
not with an eye to any worldly profit or for any extraneous reason,
but for its own natural worth and for the emotion of the human
heart, so that its fruit and reward is nothing but itself.
. Hence our Lord says in the Gospel, “I appointed you to go and
to bear fruit,” that is, to “love one another.”
For one goes by making
progress in this true friendship, and one bears fruit by savoring the
sweetness of its perfection. So spiritual friendship is begotten among
the righteous by likeness of life, habits, and interests,
46
that is, by
agreement in things human and divine, with good will and charity.
47. Now I think this definition adequately expresses friendship,
provided that by our mention of charity, as is our habit, we mean
to exclude every vice from friendship and provided that by good
will we mean the delightful awakening within us of the emotion
of love.
48. Where such friendship exists, wishing and not wishing the same
things, a wish that is the more pleasant as it is more sincere and
the sweeter as it is more holy, lovers can wish for nothing that is
unbecoming and fail to wish for nothing that is becoming.
49. Of course prudence guides, justice rules, strength protects,
and temperance moderates this friendship.
We will discuss these
four virtues in their proper place. But decide now whether in your
opinion we have given sufficient attention to what you thought
the first question should be, namely, what friendship is.
.....
57. Finally, when God fashioned the man, to recommend society
as a higher blessing, he said, “it is not good that the man should be alone;
let us make him a helper like himself.”
Indeed divine power fashioned
this helper not from similar or even from the same material. But
as a more specific motivation for charity and friendship, this power
created a woman from the very substance of the man. In a beautiful
way, then, from the side of the first human a second was produced,
so that nature might teach that all are equal or, as it were, collateral,
and that among human beings—and this is a property of friendship
—there exists neither superior nor inferior.
