His Friend in Thee

A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity. PROVERBS 17:17

Augustine was never alone if he could help it. The Confessions is crowded with friends — Alypius, who followed him from Thagaste to Carthage to Milan and into the garden; Nebridius, who left home and fortune to seek wisdom with him; the circle who talked through the winter at Cassiciacum; the clergy who lived with him in common at Hippo. He needed friends the way some people need solitude. And it was through a friend that he first learned how dangerous a gift love can be, and through God that he learned how to love a friend rightly.

A friend lost

In Book IV he tells of a young man from his home town, a friend since boyhood, who had become dearer to him than anyone in the year after Augustine returned to teach at Thagaste. Augustine had drawn him into the Manichees. The friend fell gravely ill with fever, and while he lay unconscious his family had him baptised. When he recovered a little, Augustine tried to joke with him about the baptism he had received without knowing it. The friend drew back from him as from an enemy, and told him that if he wanted to remain his friend he must stop talking that way. Augustine was astonished, and decided to wait until his friend was well again. A few days later, in Augustine’s absence, the fever returned, and the young man died.

What follows is one of the most piercing descriptions of grief ever written. “At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death.” His home town became a torment, his father’s house a strange unhappiness. His eyes looked for his friend everywhere, and every place was hateful because it did not contain him. “I became a great riddle to myself,” he says, and he asked his soul why it was so sad and so disquieted, and it had no answer.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. PSALM 42:5

He quotes an old poet who called his friend half of his soul, and says that he felt his soul and his friend’s had been one soul in two bodies. Years later, in the Retractations, he judged that line more a piece of rhetoric than a sober confession. But the grief was real, and anyone who has lost someone they loved will recognise every sentence.

Loving the mortal as if immortal

What Augustine learned from this grief is the heart of the chapter. Why, he asks, had the sorrow gone so deep? Because, he says, “I had poured out my soul upon the dust, in loving one that must die, as if he would never die.” The fault was not in loving his friend. The fault was in loving him as if he were God — as if he could not be lost, as if he could bear the whole weight of Augustine’s heart.

Jesus wept. JOHN 11:35

Augustine is not saying that we should love our friends less, or protect ourselves from grief by holding people at arm’s length. The Lord Himself wept at the grave of His friend, knowing He was about to raise him. Augustine is saying that there is only one love that cannot be lost, and every other love is safe only when it rests in that one. And so he writes one of his most beautiful sentences: “Blessed whoso loveth Thee, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thee. For he alone loses none dear to him, to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost.”

The joys of friendship

It would be quite wrong to read Augustine as suspicious of friendship. Few ancient writers describe its pleasures so tenderly. In the same book he lists what drew him to his friends: “to talk and jest together, to do kind offices by turns; to read together honied books; to play the fool or be earnest together; to dissent at times without discontent, as a man might with his own self.” He goes on — to teach and to learn from one another, to long for the absent and welcome them home with joy. These are not the pleasures of a man who thought people were distractions from God. They are the pleasures of a man who knew friendship to be one of God’s best gifts.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. ECCLESIASTES 4:9–10

After his conversion, friendship did not end; it was baptised. Alypius was converted in the same hour in the garden, taking the next verse of Romans for himself. They were baptised together. Alypius became bishop of their home town, Thagaste, and the two laboured together for the African church for decades. At Hippo, Augustine lived with his clergy in a common household, sharing meals, prayer and possessions. The Rule that bears his name, a short guide to common life, begins with the command that those who live together should be of one mind and one heart in God.

And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul. ACTS 4:32

Grieving as a Christian

Augustine’s grief at his mother’s death, told in Book IX, is very different from his grief for his friend. He held back his tears at her funeral, thinking it unfitting to weep for one who had died so well. But later, alone, remembering her, he let the tears come, and his heart found rest in them, he says, because they were poured out in God’s hearing. He had learned not to grieve less, but to grieve with hope.

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. 1 THESSALONIANS 4:13

Christian grief is still grief. It still darkens the heart and makes familiar places strange. But it is grief that has somewhere to go. It is poured out in the ears of the One who cannot be lost, in whom all who are His are kept.

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. JOHN 15:13

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Thank God this week, by name, for three friends who have been His gift to you. Tell one of them so.

2. Is there someone you are loving as if they could never be lost? Ask God to help you love them in Him, more safely and more freely.

3. If you are grieving, let yourself weep before God, as Augustine finally did for his mother. Do not pretend.

4. Consider whether your friendships include reading, praying and speaking of God together. Suggest it to one friend this month.

5. Pray for an enemy, loving them for God’s sake, as Augustine’s sentence commands.

A PRAYER

Lord, You have given me friends, and I thank You for every one of them.

Forgive me where I have loved them as if they were You, and asked them to carry what only You can carry.

Teach me to love my friends in You and my enemies for You, so that I lose none dear to me, because all are dear in You who cannot be lost.

When I grieve, let me grieve with hope, pouring out my tears in Your hearing. Amen.