A New Kind of Monasticism: Friendship as a Spiritual Discipline

“The human heart is created in such a way that we seek not the many but the one particular other and rest there.” —Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Between the 4th and 15th centuries, particularly in the Eastern Orthodox and Byzantine Christian traditions, monks not only lived amidst a web of communal ties, where the entire brotherhood supported one another, but also paired off in dyadic friendships. The partners in these platonic couplings formed lifelong bonds, based on a commitment to helping each other pursue holiness. Some even underwent a rite called adelphopoiesis, which officially made the friends “spiritual brothers.”

Bonhoeffer doesn’t specifically discuss particular friendships in Life Together, concentrating his remarks on the bonds of fellowship in general. But that’s likely because the friendship that would transform his spirituality, and really make his whole life, was only in its early stages at the time of the book’s writing.

By the time Bonhoeffer had known his best friend, Eberhard Bethge, for almost a decade, he had clearly come to view friendship as the highest and most tangible expression of fellowship — a vital aspect of “a new kind of monasticism” and a spiritual discipline in its own right, one that deepened and crystallized the principles underlying community as a whole.