Among the philosophers who praise the joys of friendship are the stoics and Cicero. The tradition passed through St Ambrose into Christian writings and was strongly taken up both in the middle ages and in the Renaissance, when friendship came to be considered as essentially disinterested, a union of wills divorced from desire and sensual inclination. The neoplatonist context of so much Renaissance writing on the affections made friendship non-instinctive and, in spite of earlier gropings, it was not until the late-sixteenth century that morally elevating friendship came to be considered even to be compatible with instinctively based affection.