Spiritual Friendship

Follows and completes Aelred's earlier treatise on love, "The Mirror of Charity". In it he reflects on the theories of friendship propunded by the great stoic philosophic Cicero. A humanist and a Christian monk, Aelred advocated friendship on both the natural and the supernatural plane. Frankness and not flattery, generosity and not gain, patience in correction and constancy in affection he saw as the marks of a genuine friendship.