‘One soul in two bodies’. On Christian friendship in Late Antiquity

‘Nothing can replace a faithful friend’, ‘nor is there any measure of his beauty’1. ‘A faithful friend is a strong refuge’2 and ‘a fortified city’3. A faithful friend is a living treasure, ‘more precious than gold and precious stones’4. A faithful friend is an ‘enclosed garden’ and a ‘sealed spring’5: opened and shared at the right time. The faithful friend is a haven of refreshment. And if he is also distinguished by the ‘gift’ of wisdom, how marvellous he is then! And if he excels in knowledge, or indeed in any knowledge—I am referring to our own knowledge and that which was once ours 6—how much more brilliant he is! And if he is also a ‘son of light’7, or a ‘man of God’8, or close to God 9, or a man ‘of good desires’10, or worthy of the name by which Scripture honours those who are deified and exalted in the heavenly abode, then it is a gift from God that surpasses any merit of our own. And if it comes to us from a friend who shares the same virtue and enjoys the same friendship from us, it is even more pleasant and more delightful and more fragrant than the myrrh that adorns the priest’s beard and his vestments’11. 12

Thus began Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, in 362, his sermon in the church of his father, Gregory the Elder, in the presence of Saint Gregory of Nyssa, the brother of his closest friend, Basil, Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia. The people had gathered to see and hear the new bishop, who had become famous for his eloquence, but also for his successive hesitations and retreats in the wake of the ‘tyranny’ that Gregory the Elder – the local bishop and his father by birth. This was the second time that Gregory the Younger had yielded to the will of others, even though he wished only to ‘philosophise’—that is, in the sense given to it by Christians, to lead a contemplative life, far from the world and its futile concerns 13. The only thing he could not give up was the word. But could he, who desired nothing more than to be an ‘instrument of the Logos’14, ever have renounced the logos? Gregory, precisely because of his exceptional gift for speaking about God, had been ‘coerced’ into accepting the priesthood and then the episcopate. ‘Two things overcame me,’ he said: ‘my father’s old age and friendship’15 The friendship of Basil the Great, of course, whom he had met in Athens during his studies (348–358)16 It is no coincidence that the 11th Homily 17, delivered after Saint Gregory’s ordination as bishop, begins with a eulogy to friendship inspired by the Wisdom of Jesus Sirach, for the entire life and work of the man whom the Eastern Church regarded as its second Theologian, after the Evangelist John, were inspired by the example embodied by a great friend, in whom, as he himself testified, he had received the greatest gift of his life.

‘We both pursued a single aim: virtue and the fulfilment of future hopes; that is to say, to live the life to come before we had left this one… I would say that each of us was for the other a standard and a guide, by which we judged what was good and what was not.’

More intensely than in the works of other Greek Fathers, and perhaps as extensively as in Augustine’s, the writings of Saint Gregory the Theologian bear witness to a friendship: it speaks explicitly of the meaning of friendship, of its human difficulties, and of the joy that no earthly good can bring to the soul more than a shared friendship. It is not only Saint Gregory’s letters that are an expression of friendship—sometimes exalted, sometimes wounded, but always present—but also a large part of his Homilies, which have left their mark on the history of Christianity, being the most widely copied texts, after the Bible, and subsequently translated into Syriac, Armenian and Georgian as a model of Christian oratory. If we go through the 44 homilies in the order in which they were copied from an early period, we shall encounter, more or less explicitly, numerous references to friendship in general and, in particular, to his relationship with Basil the Great. But it is only in Sermon 43, dedicated to the memory of Saint Basil, delivered in fact two years after his death and rewritten in the form we know today 18, do we learn the full story, which Saint Gregory recounts as if in a reverie, interrupting himself from time to time to ask his audience for forgiveness and paying the customary respects in keeping with the rhetoric of the time.

In fact, what happened? The two had met in their early youth in Athens, where they were completing their education under the guidance of the most famous teachers, both pagan and Christian. Their meeting took place against the backdrop of ‘the best thing on earth’: H19 culture. The way in which Saint Gregory approaches the meaning of education or culture in the formation of a Christian fully reflects the attitude that generally defined Late Antiquity and contributed to the creation of Christian culture: we find it in St Basil’s Letter to the Young, but also in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, with different emphases, yet fundamentally expressing the same phenomenon. In Saint Gregory, who acknowledges how much he loved ‘the letters’, we are faced with the clear intention to establish the corpus of a Christian culture. How was he to go about this? Firstly, without despising ancient culture—just as we could not despise nature, lest we deprive ourselves of the very foundation of life—and by utilising the elements or methods of ancient culture in a Christian sense. In fact, in his work, as in that of other Church Fathers, a dual phenomenon took place: the reinterpretation of the contextual culture—inherited and socially obligatory—as well as the formulation of a new culture, in which the ideal of the philosophical community found in the ancient schools played an important role.

But let us return to the meeting in Athens: the two men, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil, were seeking philosophy, which, as Christians, understood as ‘the art of detaching oneself from the world, of attaining the heavenly through the earthly, and of gaining the steadfast and enduring through the fleeting and ephemeral’20 This was to be the horizon of their friendship – a classical and, at the same time, Christian horizon, because the friendship of which both Gregory and Basil the Great had read in the Platonic dialogue Lysis 21 or in the Nicomachean Ethics 22, was defined in relation to virtue and the contemplative life. Their friendship came about as follows: aware of the virtues that Basil had embodied since his youth and wishing to spare him the rites of initiation into Athenian student life 23, Gregory persuaded his fellow students to welcome the young Basil differently, to show him the respect due to his virtue and early self-restraint, not to greet him noisily and unrestrainedly, not to lead him to the public baths amidst shouts and cheers, and, in short, to see in him a person of superior character. And so it came to pass: ‘Behold the beginning of our friendship. From here sprang the spark of our union; in this way we were struck by the arrow of love for one another’24

Their friendship was strengthened by several acts of kindness that Gregory performed for Basil, such as coming to his defence in a dispute with a group of Armenian students, comforting him when he was disappointed by Athenian society or by those in whom he had placed his trust, confiding in one another their “deepest aspirations” and ultimately leading a life together, in complete harmony, each deepening in love for the other. What Saint Gregory describes here, in his panegyric dedicated to Saint Basil, is, in fact, a friendship that an ancient writer would not hesitate to call ‘philosophical’. The expressions used undoubtedly allude to classical texts, particularly those of Aristotle, but the testimony possesses an intensity whose source lies elsewhere, and we may surmise that this source was the faith shared by the two friends and expressed in a ‘pure love pleasing to God’. The recollection of this friendship, following the death of one of the two, possesses the power of testimony and the flavour of a nostalgia that will never again find fulfilment: ‘How can I not shed tears when I remember? We were both driven by the same hopes towards learning, that is, towards what is most desired by people; and yet envy was far from us, as we were driven solely by zeal. We did not compete with one another for supremacy, but vied with one another over how to attribute it to the other, since each regarded the glory attained by the other as his own. It seemed as though we both possessed a single soul, which set two bodies in motion. Even if we were not to believe those who claim that everything is in everyone, in our case it is plausible to believe that each of us was in the other and through the other. We both pursued a single goal: virtue and the fulfilment of our hopes for the future—that is, to live the life to come before we had left this one behind. With our eyes fixed on this goal, and on achieving it alone, we guided all our actions and our entire lives, following the commandments of the law and inspiring courage in one another. And, if it were not too presumptuous of me, I would say that each of us was for the other a standard and a guide, by which we judged what was good and what was not. We, too, spent time with friends, but not with the dissolute, rather with the most temperate; not with the rowdy, but with the most well-behaved, and with whom our time together was beneficial, as we were well aware that it is easier to be infected by sin than to become accustomed to virtue’25

It is clear that we are dealing with a formative friendship, in which the classical ideal is lived out with new meaning, illustrating the relationship between nature and grace. In the Platonic dialogues, such as Lysis or The Symposium, the phenomenology of the relationship was defined in terms of familiarity, similarity and desire. In relation to the irresistible tendency of like to like, friendship could be understood philosophically as a confirmation of the myth of the lost half, or it could call for a deeper foundation: ‘friendship as familiarity with the good’26. Within this framework of ‘inner kinship with the good’, friends are like ‘communicating vessels’27—as Constantin Noica puts it in his interpretation—growing together in nobility, beauty, justice and wisdom. The Greek meaning of philia, which was also shared by educated Christians of late antiquity, lay precisely in the shared pursuit of the good towards which the deepest part of each person strives. Returning to Saint Gregory’s reflection, we find in it, alongside the inspiration drawn from the Platonic dialogues, the Aristotelian conditions for perfect friendship. According to Diogenes Laertius, Aristotle himself is said to have replied—in fact, echoing a common wisdom—that friendship means ‘one soul in two bodies’. More hesitantly, perhaps unwilling to quote exactly, Saint Gregory resorts to a hypothetical analogy: ‘it seemed as though we both had a single soul’ or ‘as though we had a single soul’. But he is no longer quite so cautious when he recalls their first parting – the metaphor shifts from the realm of the soul to that of the body – and, at the same time, the first disappointment caused, like almost all those that followed, by the firmness of Saint Basil the Great and by his own indecision: ‘I, on the other hand, remained in Athens, strictly speaking out of weakness, but also, on the other hand, betrayed by Basil, who took it upon himself to abandon the one who would never have abandoned him. Before it happened, this seemed unbelievable. It was exactly as if one were to split a body in two, killing both parts’28’.

Aristotle defined friendship primarily in terms of virtue (“friendship is a virtue, or it does not exist without virtue”)29, considering it indispensable to life. Among the various kinds of friendship, the most perfect was possible only between those ‘of spiritual nobility’30, as a form of equality or the capacity to wish each other well, as ‘men of virtue’. The dimension of reciprocity was to mark the history of conceptions of friendship forever, opening up Greek reflection on the relationship between kindred souls to the later, Christian, issue of communion 31. For his part, Saint Gregory wrote: ‘Each of us was in the other and through the other’. This subtle dynamic relationship between identity and otherness, in which the other becomes an alter ego, through whom the friend comes to know himself as in a mirror image, lies at the heart of the conception of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is, in fact, the very paradox of the friendship relationship, for the ancients. Echoing this view across the centuries, Montaigne expressed the essence of being together with a friend as follows: ‘parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi’32). Strictly speaking, in Aristotelian terms, friendship represents an extension of the relationship I have with myself into a relationship of intimacy, trust and harmony with the other. The meaning of this opening up of identity lies in the necessity of mediation in self-knowledge, through which human beings manifest their natural sociability. Consequently, wisdom itself cannot be attained without the mediation provided by the other, without the experience of a communion that results in the perfection of the self. From this perspective, being together with a friend means travelling the path towards the self and, together, towards wisdom. Structurally, we find the same vision in the text of Saint Gregory: the two friends are together, growing in virtue and, to use the imagery of the age, striving towards the same goal – the contemplative life and the knowledge of God. But it is not so much the similarity, at the level of personality, that confers upon them their indissoluble unity—33—more famous, according to Saint Gregory, than that between Orestes and Pylades or that of the Meleonids in Homer’s verses, but rather the love of virtue present in the other and the effortless adoption of a shared rhythm of life. A friend is and is not an alter ego, yet offers a gift: communion; the certainty of a shared faith, the source of perpetual encouragement, the support of a shared journey. The encounter takes place, in fact, within the horizon of the aspirations and faith that the two have the joy of sharing, each in the presence of the other. Friendship thus becomes a place of foretasting the eschaton. I do not believe we could deduce from Saint Gregory’s accounts—and even less so from Saint Basil’s more sober replies—the idea that each came to know himself through the other, but what emerges clearly from them is the significance of communion and, above all, the importance of being in the presence of the other. Their entire correspondence in later life constitutes both an echo of this formative experience and, at the same time, a longing for it. With the exception of a brief period of ascetic retreat at Annesi, when the extreme harshness of the conditions was endured by Gregory – and described, not without irony, as ‘34’ – solely so that he might be with Basil the Great, their friendship was to be lived out at a distance, weathering misunderstandings, but ultimately rediscovering ‘the power of love that is above us’.

The transfer of the ancient conception of friendship into the Christian framework was achieved, perhaps, in a similar way to that seen in artistic representations. Classical language is adopted but rearranged into a new syntax, though it is not entirely detached from its own cultural context.

St Gregory’s sermons and letters do not contain a systematic reflection on friendship, but they express a personal experience that becomes a recurring theme, one that will resonate throughout the history of Christianity. The fact that it is so naturally present in the writings of Saint Gregory—who is, moreover, known for his style of doing theology in the first person—tells us that this experience was destined to become a paradigmatic theme in Late Antiquity. The transfer of the ancient conception of friendship into the Christian framework was achieved, perhaps, in a manner similar to that seen in artistic representations 35. Classical language is adopted but rearranged into a new syntax, although it is not entirely detached from its own cultural context. Insofar as it describes a human reality, it is kept within the bounds of its own phenomenology. But does the meaning remain the same? Certainly not, yet the Christian meaning of friendship—as love originating from God and ascending to God, or as a communion inspired by the Holy Spirit—does not always succeed in overturning the ancient perspective. At times we find the same vision, the elements of which possess a structuring force, almost untouched by the passage of time and changing contexts. In the epistles of Saint Gregory, Greek poets who convey practical wisdom regarding friendship are frequently quoted or alluded to: Theognis, for example, in Letter 13; Homer in Letters 30, 71 and 230; Hesiod—though he is subsequently rejected in Letter 195—all of whom, as Caroline White observes, are also found in the writings on the same theme by the pagan orator Themistius, himself a correspondent of Saint Gregory 36. Yet the specifically Christian nature of friendship is not long in appearing within this framework populated by shared references. The broad scope of brotherhood in the faith and the choice of friendship are placed, in the same collection of letters, in a relationship of perfect compatibility: To Gregory of Nyssa, probably, Gregory the Theologian confesses that all who follow God and His Gospel must be regarded as friends and kin (Letter 11), whilst to Nicoboulos, his nephew, he teaches that if friendship is a choice, which binds us more closely to some than to others, then a friend does nothing other than imitate God who, though the creator of the world, has nevertheless chosen a people of His own (Letter 147).

It should come as no surprise that, more often than not, the letters convey reflections—albeit fragmentary ones—on friendship. In this regard, Christian authors adopt the classical meaning of the epistolary form, namely that it is the quintessential expression of friendly affection and a trustworthy substitute for the physical presence of the other. St Basil himself wrote to a certain Jovinus as follows: ‘I have seen your soul in your letter, for no painter can capture the features of the body as well as words can portray the mysteries of the soul’ (Letter 163). Offering consolation, advice and joy to those who received it, and regarded as a gift from God for this very reason, correspondence therefore remains the principal source if we are to understand the role played by friendship in Christian life in Late Antiquity. Rufinus and Jerome, whose relationship broke down and turned into a dispute that was hard to bear, for example for Augustine, Paulinus of Nola and his friends, and Augustine himself, throughout his entire life, extolled the benefits of friendship just as Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca had done before them, the latter two making an essential contribution, through their writings, to shaping the Christian perspective on friendship in the Latin West.

In describing the friendships he had prior to his conversion in 386, Augustine presents a Ciceronian-inspired community, whose shared interests and joys fostered an intense spiritual unity. The very phrases used to express this unity (ex pluribus unum facere) unhesitatingly refer to passages from Laelius (25, 29: ut unus quasi fiat ex pluribus) or from De officiis (I, 17, 56: ut unus fiat ex pluribus)37. For Augustine, who is said to have been the first Christian author to develop a theory of friendship 38, Cicero remains the classical reference point, from whom he draws, in Contra Academicos (III, 6, 13) or in his letter to Martianus (258, 1), the very definition of friendship: ‘agreement (consensus) on all things divine and human, to which are added goodwill and love (affection)’39. Elsewhere (q. 31 of De diversis quaestionibus 3), addressing young monks, Augustine begins with another definition also provided by Cicero, but inspired by Aristotle’s Rhetoric (1380 b 35 – 1381 a 1): ‘friendship consists in desiring the good of another, for the sake of that beloved person who, in turn, possesses a similar disposition of the soul’. Just as Saint Basil, like many other Christian authors, outlined a typology of friendship, placing spiritual friendship 40 in the highest regard, Augustine discusses criteria such as self-interest, the pure pleasure of friendship, or the combination of the pleasure of being with the other person and the benefits of friendship, whilst, of course, taking into account the intention behind the friendship (wishing one’s friend well), reciprocity, and the type of relationship that friendship entails. If this depends on something else, then ‘you do not love your friend, but love something else in him’41 In Letter 155, 1, to Macedonius, Augustine introduces the very gratuitousness of affection as an essential element of the authenticity of friendship. Pre-eminence belongs to the other person, regarded as an alter ego: ‘I was even more astonished that, after his death, I remained alive, I who was nothing but another version of himself. How well the poet put it when, speaking of a friend, he called him ‘the half of his soul’42. I felt that his soul and my soul were but a single soul, living in two bodies 43; and, for that reason, my life was filled with dread, for I did not wish to live with my soul halved.”44

“He who always protects us is not always a friend. Wounds inflicted by a friend are preferable to the kiss of an enemy. Better to receive a severe judgement than the deceit of a gentle kindness.”

If, before his conversion, friendship had this immanent, fusional dimension, after embracing the faith Augustine understands the love that friendship entails as leading the other towards the common good, which is God, the only one in whom the fidelity of love can no longer be lost, as appears in the Confessions, but also in Contra duas epistolas Pelagianorum: ‘Blessed is he, O Lord, who loves You and loves his friend in You, and loves his enemy out of love for You. For one does not lose the beloved except he who loves all people in Him who cannot be lost. And who is He, if not our Lord (...)?’45

The essential quality of friendship is fidelity (which is why it can be imbued with a meaning that transcends natural human affection). Fidelity is akin to faith, in the Augustinian interpretation, because both relate to the unseen: “You cannot see or hear your friend’s feelings, but you believe in them (...). You have no choice but to trust in them without seeing, hearing or observing them, if you do not wish your life to be spent in solitude, without a single friend”.

Thus, a friend offers you a love in which you are invited to believe, to which you must respond if you wish to cross the threshold of friendship. Without faith, friendship is not possible. Neither in human relationships nor in the divine. Moreover, what brings fidelity close to the act of faith is a certain spontaneity: the two meet and open up to one another, without exerting power over one another. Friendship arises as a gift, yet one that does not eliminate the realms of the unknown. There are passages in Augustine according to which the ‘circle of identity’ in the Aristotelian view of friendship is broken: ‘I do not know myself; would it then be unjust and inappropriate to say of my friend that he remains unknown to me, knowing for certain that he, too, does not know himself?’46 This does not mean that the encounter between friends remains dominated by this element of the unknown; yet the irreducible shadow to which Augustine’s question refers expresses the unfathomable mystery of the person and, at the same time, sheds even more light on the gift of friendship that causes a new kind of knowledge to spring forth between two strangers.

Friendship has another quality that enhances its personal dimension: authenticity, by which Augustine understands freedom, the expression of truth in friendship: ‘He who always protects us is not always a friend. Wounds inflicted by a friend are preferable to the kiss of an enemy. Better to receive a harsh judgement than the deceit of gentleness’47 Although friendship means harmony, goodwill and affection, it cannot under any circumstances tolerate falsification through idealisation: ‘I do not like my dearest friends to think of me as more than I am; for if they do not love what I am, but what I am not, then they do not love me, but another who bears my name. But if they love me on the basis of what they know about me or on the basis of what they believe to be true about me, then their friendship is genuine for me’48”.

Whilst in the letters and writings of Gregory and Basil the Great, as well as in the various texts (dialogues, sermons, Confessions) of Augustine, friendship—described in the terms of classical culture—derived its meaning from the perspective of a contemplative yet communal life, proto-monastic life—often referred to as the ‘philosophical life’—even in the fifth century, with the spread of monasticism throughout the West, friendship did not disappear as a theme from the horizon of contemplative life. The Sixteenth Conversation with Father Joseph from Saint John Cassian’s series Collationes 49 offers us a systematic treatment in which we can observe the classical elements of the theory—particularly those of Aristotle—woven into a new fabric.

Father Joseph begins with the human reality of friendship amongst monks, and, in order to reach the most substantial part (the conditions of true friendship and how to counter the traps set by the enemy who cannot bear spiritual unity), he presents an Aristotelian account, with Stoic insertions, on the plurality of forms of friendship. There is, therefore, a contractual friendship, one based on similarity and a shared purpose or ideal, and another founded and sustained on kinship ties. But true friendship is called ‘true love’ and consists in the similarity of virtues. It is endless because ‘not even death can break it’, as the Song of Songs says (‘Love is as strong as death’). Yet the truth of friendship is determined by the one in whom communion is established, without the Aristotelian criteria losing their validity. The monk Gherman learns from Father Joseph that, in order to endure, the virtue of friends must be equal. Saint John Cassian invokes Psalm LXVII, 7 (‘The Lord causes those of one mind to dwell together’), interpreting ‘one mind’ in the sense of an equality of virtue, sustained by the same mind and the same will. Perfect friendship requires such a likeness, which is the guarantee of its solidity. From this point, the figure of spiritual authority sets out a veritable methodology of monastic friendship, supplementing the philosophical structure of the classical ideal with an analysis of the dangers that threaten the unity between friends. Just a preliminary remark: the formal Aristotelian definition (equality of virtue) is equated with a Christian and monastic definition: ‘the attainment of the good of patience and peace’50, or ‘the good of love and peace’51 Thus, the meaning of the communion implied by friendship is derived from something higher, since to be a perfect friend means to achieve, together with the other, a unity in the Spirit—the peace which is a gift of the Spirit, but which also requires effort.

The first step on the path to friendship consists in detaching oneself from passions and even in despising worldly things. Few things thus remain as obstacles to harmony with the other. Next comes self-examination and the renunciation of the tendency to regard one’s own thoughts or will as superior: ‘the annihilation of one’s own will’, so that attention may be focused on the common ground. Even so, the relationship would not be possible without a shared set of concerns and aspirations, but here a shift occurs in relation to the Aristotelian treatment of the subject, Saint John Cassian being concerned with the ever-present possibility of friendship being undermined by a rebellious subjectivity. This is why, as one advances along the path to perfection—which also entails progress in friendship—precedence is given to the good of love and peace, rather than to one’s own sense of justice, even when justice truly exists on one side alone. The most important thing for maintaining and enhancing the bond of togetherness is to avoid causing distress to oneself or to the other. Not causing offence and not taking offence, not breaking fidelity through suspicion or by imposing one’s own will, are seen as the key to friendship in monastic life. One’s attention must be directed towards not allowing the ‘poison of sadness’ to creep in and take root in the soul: ‘It will be of no use to you if you say that you do not get angry and if you believe that you are fulfilling the commandment which tells you: “Do not let the sun go down upon your anger, and whoever is angry with his brother who has wronged him will stand before the judgement seat’; yet, on the other hand, you despise another’s sadness with a haughty heart, even though you could have soothed it through your kindness. For, in the same way, you will be accused of betraying the Lord’52

In essence, at the end of a journey of assimilating and adapting classical perspectives, friendship becomes a school of communal life, in which the friend is the brother par excellence, a brother who, though perhaps chosen out of a natural affinity, becomes a brother in spirit within the truth of a relationship nourished by divine love.

• 1

  The text of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus’s homily follows the Wisdom of Jesus Sirach (VI, 15) as found in the Septuagint. In a recent Romanian translation, which is closer to the original, we have: ‘A faithful friend cannot be exchanged / Nor can any scales measure his worth’ (vol. 4, II, Polirom, 2007, p. 290). In the 1688 Bible: “The faithful friend is not to be exchanged, nor can his virtues be weighed on a balance.”

• 2

  “A faithful friend is a safe haven” (The Wisdom of Jesus Sirach 6:14).

• 3

  Or ‘a well-founded palace’. Proverbs 18:19 (Septuagint, vol. 4, I, 2006, p. 460): ‘A brother who helps his brother is like a fortified city on high / and as strong as a well-founded palace’.

• 4

  Psalm 18:11, cf. Proverbs 8:19.

• 5

  See Song of Songs 4:12: ‘A garden enclosed, my sister, my bride, / a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain’.

• 6

  Rhetoric.

• 7

  cf. John 12:36; Ephesians 5:8.

• 8

  Deuteronomy 33:1; 1 Kings 9.

• 9

  Exodus 24:2.

• 10

  Daniel 9:23.

• 11

  See Psalm 132:2.

• 12

  * A paper first presented as part of the lecture series organised by the Institute of the History of Religions of the Romanian Academy and published in 2011 in the volume Communion and Contemplation: On Patristic and Byzantine Christianity, Zetabooks, Bucharest.

• 13

  According to Saint Gregory, the philosophical life to which he aspires is an anachoresis: a withdrawal from the world, an escape from transient conflicts and human glory in order to devote oneself entirely to contemplation, beginning with dialogue with oneself and ascending to conversation with God (cf. Saying 10, 1). See, amongst others, Sermon 2, 6; Sermon 10, 1 (on the relationship between the philosophical life and the search for tranquillity), Sermon 12, 4 (a description of contemplation). The meaning that Saint Gregory gives to Christian ‘philosophy’ is developed in Homilies 25 and 26, in which a balance is established between contemplation and action, between silence and speech, between withdrawal and solidarity, cf. H. Alfeyev, Le chantre de la lumière. Introduction à la spiritualité de Saint Grégoire de Nazianze, Cerf, Paris, 2006, pp. 101–108; see also Brian E. Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, Routledge, 2006, pp. 34–41. For a comparison with ancient spiritual exercises, see P. Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, Albin Michel, 2002, second edition, pp. 75–98.

• 14

  Sermon 12, ed. Marie-Ange Calvet-Sebasti, Sources Chrétiennes series no. 405, 1995; translated by Simona Rodina, revised by Dan Slușanschi and Bogdan Tătaru-Cazaban, with an introduction and notes by Bogdan Tătaru-Cazaban, in Studii teologice 3, 2009, pp. 197–207: ‘I am an instrument of God, an instrument of the Word, an instrument which the Spirit, like a great craftsman, tunes and through which He sings.’

• 15

  Sermon 10 (Discours 10, 2, ed. Marie-Ange Calvet-Sebasti, Sources Chrétiennes series 405, 1995, pp. 318–319).

• 16

  See J. Bernardi, Gregory of Nazianzus: The Theologian and His Age, trans. by C. Pop, Deisis, Sibiu, 2002, pp. 87–91; J. A. McGuckin, St Gregory of Nazianzus: An Intellectual Biography, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001, pp. 54 ff.

• 17

  Discourse 11, ed. Marie-Ange Calvet-Sebasti, Sources Chrétiennes series, no. 405, 1995. Our translation differs in a few places from the version due to appear in the volume St Gregory the Theologian, Sermons, translation coordinated by Dan Slușanschi, edited by Bogdan Tătaru-Cazaban and Octavian Gordon (forthcoming).

• 18

  Discourses 42–43, ed. J. Bernardi, Sources Chrétiennes series, no. 384, 1992.

• 19

  See Bernardi, Gregory of Nazianzus, p. 226.

• 20

  Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Panegyric on Saint Basil the Great, trans. by N. Donos (1931), reprinted in 2009, published by Orthodox Biblical and Missionary Institute, pp. 82–83.

• 21

  Plato, Lysis, translated and annotated by Alexandru Cizek, with an essay on the Greek meaning of love of humanity by Constantin Noica, Humanitas, 1996.

• 22

  Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Books VII and IX, 1155a ff., trans. by Stella Petecel, IRI Editions, p. 165 ff.

• 23

  Bernardi, ‘A Look at Student Life in Athens in the Mid-4th Century AD’, Revue des Etudes Grecques, 1990, pp. 79–94.

• 24

  Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Panegyric on Saint Basil the Great …, pp. 86–87.

• 25

  Ibid., pp. 90–91.

• 26

  C. Noica, in Plato, Lysis, p. 110.

• 27

  Ibid., p. 118.

• 28

  Ibid., p. 96.

• 29

  Eudemian Ethics 1234b 18.

• 30

  Nicomachean Ethics, Romanian translation, p. 169.

• 31

  On the subject of Christian friendship, see Caroline White, Christian Friendship in the Fourth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 61–72.

• 32

  Montaigne, Essays I, Gallimard, 1965, p. 269.

• 33

  The term ‘symphyia’ expresses, in Letter 1.1 to Saint Basil the Great (dated 361), the deep bond of friendship between the two (Lettres, ed. P. Gallay, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, vol. I): ‘I admit, I have not fulfilled my promise: to be with you and to live together with you as a philosopher. I had committed myself to this during our stay in Athens, at the time of our friendship which began there and of our profound union with one another.’ The same term appears in Saint Gregory to suggest the unity of nature of the three Persons of the Trinity in Homily 12, in a Trinitarian context in Homilies 40 and 41 (“an infinite unity of three infinities”, ed. Moreschini, trans. Gallay, SC 358, 1990, p. 294, n. 1), but also in a Christological context in Letter 101, 31 (SC 208, 1998, second ed.), where it is formulated as the ‘principle’ of the unity of the two natures in Christ and of the communication of attributes.

• 34

  Letter 4–5 (Lettres, ed. P. Gallay, p. 3); see also Bernardi, ‘Grégoire de Nazianze et le poète comique Anaxilas’, in Pallas 31, 1984, pp. 157–161.

• 35

  A. Grabar, Les voies de la création en iconographie chrétienne, Flammarion, Paris, 1979 (2009 ed.).

• 36

  Caroline White, op. cit., p. 72.

• 37

  See Caroline White, op. cit., p. 188.

• 38

  On the theme of friendship in Augustine: M.A. McNamara, L’Amitié chez saint Augustin, Lethielleux, Paris, 1961; J. F. Monagle, ‘Friendship in St Augustine’s Biography: Classical Notion of Friendship’, in Augustinian Studies, 2, 1971, pp. 81–92; J.T. Lienhard, ‘Friendship with God, friendship in God: Traces in St Augustine’, in Collectanea Augustiniana, 1994, pp. 207–229; I. Hadot, ‘Amicitia’, Augustinus Lexicon I, col. 287–293; R. Piccolomini, Sant’Agostino, l’amicizia, Città Nuova, Rome, 2000.

• 39

  Cicero, Laelius 6, 20.

• 40

  St Basil the Great, Letter 197 to St Ambrose of Milan.

• 41

  See Tarcisius J. van Bavel, La communauté selon Augustin. Une grâce pour notre temps, French translation, Éditions Lessius, Brussels, 2003, p. 56.

• 42

  Augustine, Sermon 41, 1, 3.

• 43

  See Caroline White, op. cit., p. 192.

• 44

  Augustine, Confessions, Book IV, Chapter IX, trans. by Eugen Munteanu, Nemira, 2010 (1st ed., 2003), p. 130.

• 45

  See Tarcisius J. van Bavel, op. cit., pp. 59–60, 62.

• 46

  Augustine, Soliloquies, 1, 3, 8.

• 47

  Augustine, Sermon 93, 4.

• 48

  Augustine, Letter 143, 3.

• 49

  St John Cassian, Spiritual Conversations, translated by David Popescu, published by Biblical and Missionary Institute of the Romanian Orthodox Church, 2004 edition (Coll. XVI, in Jean Cassien, Conférences, VIII–XVII, ed. Dom E. Pichery, SC 54, 1958, pp. 221–247).

• 50

  Ibid., p. 382.

• 51

  Ibid., p. 384.

• 52

  Ibid., p. 386.