On the So-Called "Ordo Amoris"

J.D. Vance's interpretation of later Catholic doctrine and what it means for the layman's understanding of the current administration

A few months ago, the Vice President of the United States tweeted out a Latin phrase unfamiliar to my ears. Though I have skimmed the works of St. Augustine in the past, it’s always been in English. The relatively modern interpretation of “ordo amoris” has eluded my study until now. Under regular circumstances it is considered distasteful to question the validity of someone’s religious beliefs, but this situation is an outlier because of its value as a teachable moment in regards to what the rich and powerful believe. As these types of personalities have grown in influence, the studies of the classics have fallen further into disrepair, and the key to bringing them back may be in the refutation of their anti-ethical worldview. This is hardly the first time a negative article has been targeted at someone’s public persona contrasting with their private behavior, but the target has never been so high and so specific. I tend to avoid talking about religious matters because refuting what’s in one’s heart can be difficult, but J.D. Vance has overstepped his bounds by delving into an aspect of ethics in the philosophical tradition of Christianity, which is within the scope of this blog. Indeed, the roots of St. Augustine’s beliefs go back much further into Greek philosophical discourses on Love, but Vance’s theory is a corrupted offshoot of something invented out of the modern world.

J.D. Vance began this controversy when he tweeted out the command “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’” Generally speaking, Google serves as a piss-poor citation when the topic at hand is more complex than something one would find in a dictionary. The person he’s arguing with, for example, uses lines from scripture to assert his beliefs as to why Vance is mistaken. It is Vance’s initial assertion on Fox News that some archaic Christian tradition says that one must first love their family, then their neighbors, then spread around whatever love is left to anyone else. Googling the term results in a handful of equally unhelpful links; some (now) link back to the impetus of this discussion, others sum up the concept in two or three short sentences, while others cite quotations from C.S. Lewis on his interpretation of Augustinian tradition. In the early hours of this story,¹ none quoted scripture nor quoted Augustine directly on the first page of Google results.

The “famous” passage in De Civitate Dei that emphasizes the phrase “ordo amoris” comes in book 15, chapter 22. One may be surprised to learn that this chapter deals not with anything regarding the love of community, but rather is geared towards idolatry, and the amount of love one ought to have towards God’s creations with respect to their love of God. It is plainly true that loving something more than God is heresy, as it breaks the first commandment: this is indisputable. If one loves a thing as a component of worship it cannot be an evil kind of love, but removing God from that love and loving it for itself opens them up to sin. Take, for example, the golden calf: love of gold in the form of an idol is explicitly condemned in the Bible.² Love of gold in its elemental form is a kind of greed. Still, many good Christians wear chains with gold crosses on them to represent their faith every day. This is because the metal has no inherent sin inside of it, but rather the way one treats it has changed. Matthew 22:36-40 provides the scope of the two orders by which Christians ought to love: first, their God; second, their neighbor as equal to themselves. In fact, contrary to Vance’s assertion in the original news clip, the Bible explicitly condemns³ using race or national identity as a method of discriminating against another person.

There are, however, other ways that Augustine talks about love in that book. For example, in book 14, chapter 7, he points out that the use of the words “amor,” “caritas,” and “dilectio” (love, dearness, and high regard) in the Latin vulgate come to mean love irrespective of labels of good and bad because what matters is how those emotions are directed. It has become a well known fact in pop culture that the Greeks had four distinct words for love to designate the relationship one shares with the subject of the discussion. This estimation makes no mention of the proper hierarchy of such loves; one could easily make a blood bond with a friend stronger than their obligations of love in an arranged marriage and none would call it strange. In the Platonic corpus, the Euthyphro dialogue begins because the eponymous character has agreed to testify against his father on behalf of a slave.⁴ Euthyphro claims to receive harsh criticism from his friends and family for his actions, but acts in such a way because justice is pleasing to the divine. It is unfortunate for our purposes that Socrates focuses his dialogue on his own suit before the court, but because he isn’t completely disgusted by Euthyphro’s actions, it can be accepted that this peculiarity in testimony isn’t wholly out of the realm of common sense. If not, Socrates wouldn’t have asked Euthyphro to discourse on matters of justice or holiness at all. Under Vance’s interpretation of the ordo amoris, would it be morally acceptable for one to testify against their father in the same way? It is impossible to make a definitive judgement without asking him, but consider that he wrote an autobiographical account of the world he grew up in at thirty-one.