The saying does not come from Voltaire, however often he is credited. It was spoken long before, in the Psalms: for it is not an enemy who taunts me — that I could bear; it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me — from that I could hide; but it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend, we used to hold sweet converse together, within God’s house we walked in the throng (Ps. 54:14-15). This is not a grandmother’s proverb — it is a prophetic cry. And it does not reduce to a perceptual error.
Here lies the article’s first mistake: it shifts the whole problem from the plane of the deed to the plane of interpretation. If we were wounded, it says, the mind’s constructed scenario is more often at fault than the betrayal itself. Sometimes that is true — the lie “something has broken between us,” conjured from a silence, is real, a sickness of mind Evagrius knew as an accusing logismos. But Scripture does not treat Judas’s betrayal this way. It does not tell Judas: “you built a story.” It says: one of you will betray Me (Jn. 13:21) — and it was true. Whoever turns every wound into “a narrative of the mind” risks disarming the very discernment that should have kept watch. It is naïveté dressed in the sophisticated garment of cognitive psychology.
Sirach, centuries before coaching, knew the distinction the article loses: there is a friend who is such at his own convenience, but will not be so in the day of your trouble (Sir. 6:8-10). Not every closeness is true friendship, and to call “a scenario of the mind” what is in fact the recognition of a false one is not maturity but cultivated blindness. The fair-weather friend, the table-friend who shares sweet converse but does not remain in the day of distress — these are not the anxious mind’s invention. Scripture names them precisely so that we are not caught unaware.
The root the article never touches is philautia — self-love — which St. Maximus the Confessor calls the mother of all the passions. Not only excessive suspicion springs from it, but naïve trust as well. Both are distortions of the same disease: the one who sees betrayal everywhere is protecting himself; the one who refuses to see it where it exists is sparing himself the pain of recognition. These are not two different people — one too cautious, one too open, as the article’s typology suggests — but the same philautia, playing two roles.
This is why “the view from the balcony” does not suffice. Evagrius warned that noticing a thought without fighting it is a subtler form of vainglory — you watch yourself watching, and quietly congratulate yourself on your clarity. The empty balcony, without repentance, without watchfulness (nepsis), becomes another refuge for the self, not a healing of it. St. Isaac the Syrian calls discernment — the distinguishing of spirits — the mother of the virtues, but insists it is not an introspective technique; it is a gift purified through ascesis, not through asking oneself “what do I know for certain.” You can question your certainties all you like and remain inside the same mind, asking it to judge itself.
Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, drew the distinction the proverb instinctively guards: friendships of utility and of pleasure are transient, ending when the utility or pleasure ends; only friendship grounded in virtue, seeking the other’s good for its own sake, endures — and it alone needs no guarding against. The grandmothers’ saying does not ask us to guard against friendship as such, but against friendship that is not what it claims to be. To conflate the two, as the article does when it treats every caution as symptom, is an error of discernment wearing a therapeutic coat.
And yet — Christ knew from the beginning who would betray Him (Jn. 6:64), and did not guard Himself from Judas. He washed his feet, gave him bread at the table. He was neither paranoid nor naïve. He loved without illusion and discerned without cruelty, because His trust was not placed in man but in the Father. This is the only place true discernment can begin: not in suspicion, not in technique, but in the place where hope no longer hangs on man. It is better to take refuge in the LORD than to trust in man (Ps. 117:8); cursed is the man who trusts in man (Jer. 17:5). From this ground, and only from it, friendship becomes safe again — not because we have learned to check our scenarios, but because we no longer ask of man what only God can give.
