How refreshing it was to have Vice President JD Vance inject an Augustinian/Thomistic concept into the national conversation recently! In an interview with Fox News, in the context of a discussion of immigration policy, Vance made the following statement:
“As an American leader, but also just as an American citizen, your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. That doesn’t mean you hate people from outside of your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Vance was, of course, articulating the concept of ordo amoris, the right or proper ordering of one’s love, although he did not use that term in the interview. As Jonah McKeown notes in a recent article, St. Augustine equated virtue with this proper ordering of one’s love (“Virtus est ordo amoris”) in his classic work City of God and elaborated upon this idea in his book On Christian Doctrine:
Now he is a man of just and holy life who forms an unprejudiced estimate of things, and keeps his affections also under strict control, so that he neither loves what he ought not to love, nor fails to love what he ought to love, nor loves that more which ought to be loved less, nor loves that equally which ought to be loved either less or more, nor loves that less or more which ought to be loved equally.
In alignment with Jesus’ statement of the two greatest commandments (i.e., that we are to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, and that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, as in Matt. 22:37–40), St. Thomas Aquinas argued that the right ordering of love consists in first loving God, and then ourselves (in a healthy, non-egocentric sort of way, of course), and then our neighbor.
The ordo amoris can be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles radiating outward from ourselves, beginning with loving God . . .
Unfortunately, some of the people who listened to Vice President Vance’s interview were seemingly unfamiliar with this “old-school” idea of the ordo amoris, including Rory Stewart, a former member of the British Parliament, who attacked Vance’s statement as “A bizarre take on John 15:12–13—less Christian and more pagan tribal. We should start worrying when politicians become theologians, assume to speak for Jesus, and tell us in which order to love . . .”
Vance’s response to Stewart was both pithy and persuasive: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’ Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?”
After apparently realizing the weakness of his first response to Vance’s argument, Stewart attempted a stronger rejoinder by invoking the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) and thereby the commandment to love one’s neighbor. However, James Orr raises an important criticism of Stewart’s application of the parable:
The message of the parable . . . is not that a person should help all victims wherever they may be, but that whatever differences may divide us from the suffering, we must care for those who fall within the compass of our practical concern. Suggestively, the Greek word for neighbor in the New Testament is πλησίον (plēsion), which is derived directly from πλησίος (plēsios), meaning “near” or “close by.” It is proximity that makes neighbors our objects of care and attention.
Orr’s contention is rooted in the thought of Aquinas, who wrote that “we ought in preference to bestow on each one such benefits as pertain to the matter in which, speaking simply, he is most closely connected with us [emphasis added].” The proper ordering of love is to be based on the closeness of the connection between ourselves and the potential recipient of our love, defined in such terms as the closeness of the relationship of that person to ourselves and their physical proximity to us (i.e., love of God, then self, then spouse and children, then extended family, then the neighbors who live closest to us, then our community, then fellow citizens, and then the rest of the world), as Vance had at least partly articulated in his interview. The ordo amoris can be conceptualized as a series of concentric circles radiating outward from ourselves, beginning with loving God, who is, as Augustine put it, “closer to us than we are to ourselves,” and ending with loving the rest of the world outside our own country. In other words, the right ordering of love generally requires that we “love locally” first.
Vance was also correct in lamenting that some of our fellow citizens “seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders,” in what constitutes an inversion of the right ordering of love. In some ways, this mistaken inversion of the ordo amoris is understandable. It is often easier to “love” people in the abstract—to “love” people who are some distance from us and who don’t seem to make any direct demands on our own lives—than it is to love those people with whom we actually have to interact and get along with on a daily basis: that difficult person in your family, that rather irritating guy who lives next door to you, etc.
Several people over the years have given rather blunt expression to this tendency. Edna St. Vincent Millay once said, “I love humanity, but I hate people.” Charles M. Schulz, in one of his Peanuts comic strips, had Linus exclaim, “I love mankind. . . . It’s people I can’t stand!” And in a more detailed (and presumably somewhat exaggerated!) description of this phenomenon, Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote the following in The Brothers Karamazov:
The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.
The difficulty that can be involved in first loving those who are closest to us is, of course, one of the reasons why the ordo amoris can sometimes be so challenging for us. But it is the ordering of love to which we are called nonetheless.
Photo by Gage Skidmore.