Newman on Friendships

An Article on Mercatornet that delves in deeper into Cardinal Newman's understanding of Freindships, something lost today

Being 15 years Newman's junior, when he died suddenly aged 60, Newman was devastated. "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or awife's," he wrote, "but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine." Some 15 centuries earlier, St Augustine in his Confessions wrote in the same way about thedeath not of his mistress, but of his best friend. "My eyes sought him everywhere, but they did not see him; and I hated all places because he was not in them, because they could not say to me, 'Look, he is coming,'as they did when he was alive and absent."

Newman's desire to share a tomb with St John may seem unusual to the modern eye. Yet Alan Bray in his seminal work The Friend (2003) cites many such examples of friends sharing tombs in previous centuries. Such public commitments to "marriages of the soul" were common in pre-modern times. Bray's conclusion is striking: "Newman's burial with St John cannot be detached from Newman's understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its longhistory."

Reading the final page of Newman's Apologia – lyrically dedicated to all his Oratorian brothers and especially to "Ambrose St John, whom God gave me, when He took everyone else away; who are the link between my old life and my new; who have now for 21 years been so devoted to me, so patient, so zealous, so tender" – the writer George Eliot was impressed. "Pray mark that beautiful passage in which he thanks his friend Ambrose St John," she wrote to a friend. "I know hardly anything that delights me more than such evidences of sweet brotherly love being a reality in the world."

Do we – can we – today applaud such friendship? Do we – can we – make room, now, for such"evidences of sweet brotherly love"? Men and women often have intense friendships with members of their own sex, friendships that have no sexual component; yet we are losing the vocabulary to speak about them, or we are embarrassed to do so. A "friend" is one you add to a social networking profile on the web; or it is a euphemism for a sexual partneroutside marriage. Can a man nowadays own up with pride to having a dearand close friend, another man to whom he is devoted? Can he, without itbeing suspected as repressed homosexuality? I fear the answer to both may be "no". And it is hard to know which is the sadder.