The matched pair ‘love’ and ‘attention’ is familiar to most of us from the essays in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. Although she tells us in that book that there is, in her view, no God in the traditional sense of that term, she provides accounts of art, prayer and morality that are religious. ‘Morality’, she tells us, ‘has always been connected with religion and religion with mysticism’ (Murdoch, 1970, p. 74). The connection here is love and attention: ‘Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature’ (ibid. p. 41).

According to Cicero, the ‘one thing in human experience about whose advantage all men with one voice agree, is friendship …’. Some men hold virtue in contempt, others disdain riches or political honours, but ‘concerning friendship all, to a man, think the same thing … that without friendship life is not life at all’.

That friendship is one of life's greatest goods is as near a universal sentiment as one is likely to find, yet, as a topic for philosophy, friendship is nowadays neglected. It was not always so. Western Christian writings on friendship are heavily indebted to Cicero, who is himself already indebted to the Greeks. In the fourth century Ambrose and Augustine are wholehearted in their endorsement of Cicero – Augustine finds his definition of friendship cannot be bettered.Writing in the same vein in twelfth-century England, Aelred of Rievaulx cites Cicero almost word for word: ‘Friendship is mutual harmony in affairs human and divine coupled with benevolence and charity.’

Indeed, despite some fretful indications that one should be able to carve out a distinctly Christian position on friendship – Aelred insists, for instance, that ‘Tullius [Cicero] was unacquainted with the virtue of true friendship, since he was completely unaware of its beginning and end, Christ’ – Aelred rarely moves far in form or in substance from his pagan master. In this he and other Christian writers were no doubt encouraged by Cicero's own natural theology, notable in the way his definition continues.

I have become worried lately about the God of the attributes – the God of omnipotence, eternity, wisdom, immutability and unity – the God of these divine names. Reflection on this God, whether of a philosophical or a more contemplative nature, has been a uniting practice for Christians, Jews and Muslims. Yet lately this God, or this manner of speaking of God, has come under attack and it is not secular critics who are voicing criticisms but Christian preachers and theologians. ‘This God’, we hear, ‘is remote and unfeeling.’ … ‘This powerful, impassable and eternal God is far from us. This is a God “over and against” us’, and so on. Jürgen Moltmann (no mean critic) puts it this way:

Gertrude of Helfta opens her book of God's loving-kindness by addressing her God -Wisdom, Omnipotence, Goodness. In addressing the triune God, Gertrude places her book in a well-established Christian tradition. But this is more than a formulaic opening - reflection upon the doctrine of the Trinity has inspired some of the richest writings on love, gift, and grace, a significant part of it written by women, to be found in Christian literature. The doctrine of the Trinity, while by consent a difficult topic on which to preach, informs Christian liturgy and provides the basic frame for the ancient creeds - 'I believe in God, the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit.' It has a central place in the Christian doctrine of God classically conceived. The Christian doctrine of God holds in tension two convictions seemingly at odds - that God is One, and that there is diversity in the Godhead. A motive for its formulationwas the Christian insistence that their faith was monotheistic, even while praying to one God and to Jesus as the Lord.