One of the reasons is that we have come a very long way from the world view of traditional English Christianity, a world where such blessed friendships corresponded to liturgical practice. The kiss depicted on the tomb of Sir William Neville and Sir John Clanvowe, in this setting, points to a ritual act that would have been familiar in any fourteenth-century Latin church, including that of the Dominican friars in Galata: the exchange of the kiss of peace - the osculum pacis - which preceded Holy Communion or stood in its place and which for the majority of those present represented the climax of the ritual of the Mass.
The liturgical form used in England and France on the present evidence appears to have been for the two friends to receive Holy Communion together after they had exchanged their promises to each other outside the church: a careful distance which points to a reserve about the promises being exchanged. While they were awesome in their scope, lifelong and indissoluble, the vows exchanged were strictly personal, not intrinsically contractual or to do with property: that the two would live together and stand by each other, and if necessary die together. The vows did not - at least in the Latin West - create expectations of inheritance; nor did they preclude marriage. For this reason, the person taking them had a freedom of choice that would have been problematic in terms of other forms of ritual kinship. But the relation allowed one of the friends to stand in the other?s place in the event of a death, caring for children and family.
Why did people take such vows? Clearly - as for those friends who were buried to-gether in the same tomb - it represented a heartfelt commitment. But some historians have interpreted it as a means of social self-advancement (or a reconciliation). The truth lies somewhere in between. The fam-ily was a far more open entity than it is today. It referred not just to those tied by blood or marriage but included voluntary kinship, created not by blood but by a promise or by ritual. As the historian John Bossy has argued, the Eucharist celebrated by traditional Christians before and after the Reformation was recognised as restoring defective human relations in the society about it. The theology of the Eucharist was that the grace imparted could, with human co-operation, lead the promises towards the ideal to which they pointed.
One of the last sights of this eucharistic practice was on Easter Day 1834 when Anne Lister (the mistress of Shibden Hall in Yorkshire) and her friend Ann Walker solemnised their friendship - described in Anne Lister?s diary as a marriage - by receiving Holy Communion together in Holy Trinity Church in Goodramgate, York. But the last of the known monuments is of far greater interest, because it is a simple stone cross in the burial ground of the fathers of the Oratory of St Philip Neri on the Lickey Hills south of Birmingham. In the upper part is the name, still clearly legible, of the first of the two friends who were laid there together: Ambrose St John, who died on 24 May 1875. The friend whose remains were laid in his grave in 1890 was none other than John Henry Cardinal Newman.
Their burial in the same tomb was Newman?s emphatic wish. In a note written on 23 July 1876, the year following the death of Ambrose St John, he declared: I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John?s grave - and I give this as my last, my imperative will.
Newman seems to have first met Ambrose St John in the spring of 1841. From the first he loved me with an intensity of love, which was unaccountable, Newman later wrote. As far as this world was concerned I was his first and last. After that first meeting in 1841, they would be received into the Catholic Church at almost the same time: St John on 2 October 1845, Newman only a week later on 9 October. Newman?s loss of countless Anglican friends as a result of his being received by Rome created an enduring bond between Newman and St John, which would never be broken. St John?s death devastated Newman; he called the loss the greatest affliction I have had in my life. I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband?s or a wife?s, he wrote, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one?s sorrow greater, than mine.
If evidence were needed that the bond between them was an entirely spiritual one, Newman provided it in the days following St John?s death, recounting a conversation between them before St John lost his speech in those final days. He expressed his hope, Newman wrote, that during his whole priestly life he had not committed one mortal sin. For men of their time and culture that statement is definitive: but they were not afraid to touch and draw close. Remembering their last moments together, Newman wrote: Then he put his arm tenderly round my neck, and drew me close to him, and so kept me a considerable time. I little dreamed, he later wrote, he meant to say that he was going. When I rose to go. . . it was our parting. Their love was no less intense for being spiritual; perhaps more so.
Newman?s burial with Ambrose St John cannot be detached from his understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its long history. In a letter that Pope John Paul II sent to Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Birmingham in January 2001 to mark the second centenary of Newman?s birth, Pope John Paul asked for prayers that the time could soon come when the Church can officially and publicly proclaim the exemplary holiness of Cardinal John Henry Newman. It is likely that his relics will then be brought into the Oratory Church in Birmingham to lie by the altar, and the inheritors of Newman?s faith should not separate them now from his final gesture. That gesture was Newman?s last, imperative command: his last wish as a man, but also something more. It was his last sermon.
You’ve mistaken quantity for quality.