This lengthy page provides thirty-five excerpts from St Augustine on various aspects of friendship.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]
The blessings of friendship
2. 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]
3. 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
5. 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]
Love reaches out
6. 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
7. 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]
8. 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
9. 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]
10. 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]
11. 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]
12. 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]
13. [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]
14. 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]
15. 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]
16. 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]
17. 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]
18. 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 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.].
19. 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]
20. 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]
21. 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]
22. 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]
23. 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]
24. 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]
25. 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]
26. Whenever a person is without a friend, not a single thing in the world appears friendly to him.[Letter 130:2.4]
27. There is no greater consolation than the unfeigned loyalty and mutual affection of good and true friends. [City of God 19.8]
28. 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]
29. 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]
30. The first thing a baby sees are its parents, and life begins with their friendship. [Sermon 9.7]
31. 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]
32. 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]
33. 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.]
34. 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]
35. Talking about the group in which he stole the pears: What an exceedingly unfriendly form of friendship that was! [Confessions Bk II.9.17 AN2311