Should We Love Unequally? (Some Notes on the Ordo Amoris)

I’m a sucker for Christian theological ideas that end up in cultural converstions. This recently happened with the “ordo amoris,” an idea tracing back to Augustine and developed by Thomas Aquinas about the ordering of our loves. For those that missed it, the debate started when Vice President Vance stated in a Fox News interview, “There is a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world.” Across the internet, a number of Christians pushed back, arguing that “ranking loves” is unbiblical or that Jesus’s teachings on things like family and the Good Samaritan should eliminate any such concept. In response, Vance tweeted: “Just google ‘ordo amoris.’”

I’m not going to weigh in on the specific political policy debates, but as an appreciator of both Augustine and Aquinas, I thought it might be helpful to talk through the idea in general and point out some ways I think both Vance and his critics are getting it wrong, or at least not entirely right.

First of all, we should place the specific idea under debate in context. The heart of the “ordo amoris” is not about love for groups of human beings at all. In the City of God, Augustine makes this argument:

“And thus beauty, which is indeed God’s handiwork, but only a temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good, is not fitly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and unchangeable good. When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing. For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately… But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if He Himself is loved and not another thing in His stead, He cannot be evilly loved; for love itself is to be ordinately loved, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously.”( XV.22)

While everything God has created is good and deserves a certain sort of affection, all of it must exist beneath our overarching love for God Himself. To love any created thing as equal to the Creator will inevitably lead to sin. In this sense, God must be our greatest love or all of our loves will go astray. He functions like the star at the center of a solar system, keeping each other love in its place. This is the idea behind some of the passages brought out to critique Vance, such as Jesus’s comments about hating mother, father, wife, and children (Luke 14:6). Jesus isn’t saying we have no love for those relations; He is simply saying that we must love God more, and that any prioritizing of them over God and His kingdom is in truth a failure to love God.

So we love God first. And then, within that context, Augustine would also see levels of love between different kinds of created things. For instance, we ought to love people more than money, in the sense of valuing them more highly. If we have a greater affection for money than human beings, our loves are disordered and we sin. 

After all of that, though, we come to the question at hand: differentiating between human loves. There are many general admonitions to love all people in Scripture, including love for strangers and even for enemies. However, there is also some differentiation between what is owed to different people, as we see in several places (1 Timothy 5:8, Galatians 6:10). So how do we think about this tension?

Thomas Aquinas discusses this dilemma in the Summa Theologia:

“Love can be unequal in two ways: first on the part of the good we wish our friend. On this respect we love all men equally out of charity: because we wish them all one same generic good, namely everlasting happiness. Secondly love is said to be greater through its action being more intense: and in this way we ought not to love all equally.

Or we may reply that we have unequal love for certain persons in two ways: first, through our loving some and not loving others. As regards beneficence we are bound to observe this inequality, because we cannot do good to all: but as regards benevolence, love ought not to be thus unequal.” (II.26.6)

Aquinas differentiates between love as an affection of the heart and love in terms of duties in action. We owe all people affection-love, regardless of who they are, as image-bearers of God. However, the duties we owe to people are not necessarily equal. They are differentiated in terms of specific relationships (for instance, a spouse or child) and general proximity (geography and space). Aquinas talks about this in terms of “nearness of connection.” So in one sense (our affections) we must love all people equally, but in another sense (our actions), we will necessarily be acting out love in more ways to some people than to others.

We can see this in play in the parable of the Good Samaritan. On one level, it is about the general call to love all. The question “who is my neighbor?” is answered by Jesus ultimately as “who would you want to be a neighbor to you?” And by having that character be from an excluded and hated social group, Jesus tears down a temptation to positionally love only certain people. But on another level, it is a story about loving the person in front of you. The failure of the priest and Levite is that they were presented with a person in proximity that they failed to love while hurrying on their way to do general religious duties.

Why does this matter? It warns against neglecting those closest to us in favor of those far off. I have known pastors who fail to uphold their duties of love to their families because they are over-invested in caring for other people. This is a disordering of love—as a wise older pastor said to me many times, “Your first priority is to care for your bride; Jesus can take care of His.” It also warns against a generalized love that fails to help the person in front of us, like the wealthy woman at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov who has a “great love for the poor” but cannot tolerate actual, individual poor people.

Part of why I suspect the online debate has been unproductive is that neither side is especially careful to draw these distinctions. That lack of care can be seen in Vance’s original comment that you “love your family, then you love your neighbor,” etc. Since love could have either meaning, it is both true and false depending how you want to view it.

That’s the theory, and as I said, I’m not going into the specific politics surrounding this debate. However, I do think the idea of ordering loves provides some important challenges to both sides of the political debate in terms of our general impulses surrounding the idea of love.

In terms of progressive impulses, Scripture warns against a generalized “love for humanity” that fails to prioritize love for those we have the most duty to care for. I’ve seen plenty of people who are passionate about issues like social justice in the world but struggle to actually love the people closest to them. It also recognizes that we are finite and unable to meet every need in the world, and so our duties are not equal to all. While I owe certain duties to the poor (more on that below), it isn’t a failure of my love that inequities still exist in society or that my family might be doing better than they are. Progressivism often veers towards a utopianism that rejects our God-given limits, and utopianism always ends up doing violence to our created humanity.

Contra more conservative impulses, there is a warning against shifting from “ordering love” to “only loving certain people.” While our duties to all are not equal, that does not mean we should fail to show compassion, care, and honor to all. If we fail to have hearts that feel love for the poor, the sojourner, or the enemy, we are failing to have the heart of Christ. 

One other concern I have in the current discourse is that there is sometimes an assumption that the only duties we owe are to the people at the top of the list. This isn’t how Scripture approaches these issues. I don’t owe a stranger or a poor person the same duties I do my own children, but I do owe them certain things. Old Testament Israel is a good case study here. The third-year tithe for the poor, the corners and gleanings of fields, and other welfare provisions for the poor aren’t viewed as charities but responsibilities for all Israelites. Indeed, both Aquinas and Augustine would see alms-giving as a Christian duty in no way removed by my obligation to care for my wife and kids.

And against both impulses, the “ordo amoris” reminds us that our love for God is paramount over any earthly love. Jesus wants to relativize all of our worldly loyalties; He must be at the center of our hearts, or regardless of how we order other things, we will end up in the wrong.