Have done my bit to claim something of John Henry Newman, the man to be beatified by the Pope in the autumn, by writing on his theology of friendship, and friendship with Ambrose St John, in The Tablet. I fear that most of the piece is behind a pay wall - way to go these days online. But here's a key bit:

This element of risk in friendship raises another issue when thinking about Newman’s appreciation of friendship – this time not his defence of it, but his actual friendships in life. The most memorable was with Ambrose St John, a man of whom he wrote, ‘From the first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable.’ The two were buried together in a shared grave, following Newman’s ‘imperative will.’ In his book The Friend, the historian Alan Bray also notes that the language with which Newman spoke of St John echoes the language of John’s gospel. Bray then pursues the meaning of that shared grave, drawing arresting conclusions.

He believes that Newman was deliberately participating in a ritual of friendship that can be traced back to the medieval period. Historians today refer to it as ‘sworn brotherhood’, a voluntary form of kinship based upon an exchanged promise of committed friendship. The commitment was made in a religious context: Bray’s research suggests that it was sealed by exchanging the sign of the peace during a mass. It was a gesture full of theological significance.

The conviction was that, in friendship, two intimate friends gain a glimpse of the life that awaits them in God. Friendship provides a foretaste of heaven. The thought finds its roots in the classical world. Cicero had written that when a friend dies, the experience of the surviving friend is such that ‘Even when he is dead, he is still alive.’ That powerful experience was something Newman knew well, as St John died over a decade before him. For the Christian Newman, the implication was that friendship’s greatest gift is in lifting the veil between this world and the next. It provides an intimation of everlasting love. Perhaps the fullest expression of this spirituality of friendship is found in the writings of Aelred of Rievaulx. Aelred goes so far as to speculate that God is friendship, because in the same way that close friends become ‘one soul in two bodies’, so the multitude of believers in heaven come together as ‘one heart and one soul.’ The link with the peace during mass is that the ritual kiss anticipates the celestial conviviality.

Bray has shown that shared graves were another expression of this hope. Two people would be buried together, below inscriptions such as ‘in life united, in death not divided,’ not just as a touching gesture but because the individuals were demonstrating that in their friendship they had perceived a profound truth. Cardinal Basil Hume caught the sentiment well when he wrote: ‘When two persons love, whether of the same sex or of a different sex… they experience in a limited manner in this world what will be their unending delight when one with God in the next.’ Newman himself brings all these elements together in the inscription he gave for the tombstone he shared with St John. It reads ‘Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem’, or from shadows and images into truth. It’s a direct allusion to Aelred’s theology, that the love of friendship in this world, for all its shadows – not least when the friend dies – is no less a taste of the delight to come.

John, Aquinas, Aelred, Newman. There are rich resources for thinking about friendship within the Christian tradition, and yet the negative associations still seem to have the upper hand. I remember, in 2006, turning to the Papal encyclical, God Is Love, hoping to read something on friendship. I came away disappointed. Friendship is mentioned only twice and in passing. I’m reading between the lines here, but it seems that to give friendship a place in the theology of love would be to compete with the supposed primacy of eros and agape, the themes for which the encyclical was much celebrated. Affirming that friendship might be an instance of divine love is to run the risks of friendship. Further, it might suggest that marriage is not the exclusive ideal of God’s love. And once you admit that, you are headed towards the choppy waters of affirming same sex love – perhaps too sensitive an issue these days.

So I don’t hold out much hope that Newman’s championing of friendship will be celebrated this year too. Though, in 2001 – the second centenary of Newman’s birth – Pope John Paul II sent a letter to Archbishop Vincent Nichols, then in Birmingham. In it, he cited the inscription Newman chose for his gravestone, drawing attention to its importance for understanding Newman’s thought. Perhaps his theology of friendship will be celebrated yet.