Friendship and Eschatology

This is that extraordinary and great happiness which we await, with God himself acting and diffusing…among the individual souls whom he has chosen, so much friendship and charity, that thus each loves another as he does himself; and that, by this means, just as each one rejoices in his own, so does he rejoice in the good fortune of another, and thus the happiness of each one individually is the happiness of all, and the universality of all happiness is the possession of each individual….This is true and eternal friendship, which begins in this life and is perfected in the next…

—Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship 3.79, 1160.