Ordo amoris: What it is Not

Vice President J.D. Vance made a brief observation, which has elicited all manner of interesting responses. This is what he said in an interview with Sean Hannity, on Fox News, on January 30, 2025:

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.

A British politician (Rory Stewart) took him to task on X, and Vance responded with this rejoinder:

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?

Before long, people were indeed busy googling, and the majority view decided that since Vance had thrown out a Latin phrase, it had to be “medieval,” and therefore the closest correspondence was found—that he was summarizing Saints Augustine and Aquinas. Some said that Vance was wrong about what these two saints really say, or that he was spot on. It seems that the judgment depended on whether one supported Trump or not. There were also a few thoughtful responses.

The bigger issue with most of these reactions and explanations is that they veer into two contentious areas. First, thanks to google which has a tendency to allow people to repeat the same thing over and over again, those that say Augustine advocates a hierarchy of love are heavily tainted by the legacy of Etienne Gilson who ruined Augustine over the past many years (thankfully his influence is waning). Second, those who dragoon Aquinas into the mix and say that he really advocated a hierarchy of love, seem not to understand the very essence of his work. For both philosophers, love is not based upon proximity, as many of the commentators on this topic assume, which would simply defeat love—and turn it into nothing more than a demand for affection.

Strangely (no doubt, thanks to google), the people doing the explaining all naturally assume that Vance meant Augustine and Aquinas when he tossed out the phrase “ordo amoris” in an X post. There is even a Wiki on it.

Why is this a problem? Well, neither Augustine or Aquinas actually use the phrase “ordo amoris.” They both certainly speak of love, that is charity—but it is always others who have rendered what they say into an ordo amoris, which in proper discussions means “a ranking of virtues.” To be fair, Vance does not mention either of these saints—it is the commentators who have made the bad (hurried?) connection.

Obviously, ordo amoris is Latin. Ordo (a masculine noun, literally a “thread”) means a “line, row, rank or order,” or a “series,” “succession,” “class.” The word has fifteen meanings in Latin. Amoris (singular genitive of the masculine noun amor) primarily means, “sexual passion,” even “homosexual passion,” and only secondarily (and later) “love” as we understand it today; the process how this came to be is fascinating, but beyond the scope of our discussion here. So, ordo amoris primarily means: “the order or ranking of sexual passion,” that is, the distribution and arrangement of said passion. The more appropriate term is ordo caritatis.

If the term ordo amoris is foreign to both Augustine and Aquinas, how did Vance come to tweet about it? Which means we have to look for its source elsewhere—and not in medieval philosophy.

In fact, we only find this phrase in contemporary philosophical literature, especially in two rather famous works.

The first is an unfinished treatise by the greatest German phenomenologist and philosopher, Max Scheler (1874—1928), which he worked on from 1914—1915. It is entitled, Ordo amoris. It is a fascinating exploration of the true nature of love, which structures man’s moral life and character. One only wishes that Scheler had time to finish it, because the treatise is a rare, sustained study of love in Western philosophy. Only Saint Augustine has written about love in such detail; medieval philosophy, on the whole, entirely ignores the subject of love.

Scheler’s Ordo amoris lays out the rank, or order, of values, which all stem from love. For Scheler, love is not bottom up or top down; this notion of directionality is the unfortunate residue of Greek thinking, which saw love only as relational and therefore proximal (in the very way Vance describes it). Scheler calls such love as the love for a good and thus “pharisaical.”

Scheler firmly rejects this Greek notion because it has nothing to do with Christian love, and in this way he clarifies and defines Christian love itself: it is the love of God and then the love of all—the poor, the sinner, the enemy, the friend. If love is situational or proximal, then it is not love. Any explanation that runs counter to this broad embrace of love is pre-Christian (Aristotle and Plato).

Here, Scheler points out that a hierarchical description of love depends upon Plato (the ladder of love), and therefore it can never be Christian. Rather, Christian love is always inclusive; it does not establish barriers of any sort, where love is meted out according to conditions or relationships. Nor is Christian love hierarchical, whereby we rise to the love of God, by loving ourselves and those around us. For Scheler, this too is pre-Christian.

In effect, Christianity posits a different anthropology—one in which man is not a rational animal, but a loving human being, whose love is not confined or dictated, and humanity can fully be known by way of this love. For Scheler, the only and true description of Christian love is the Sermon on the Mount, which forces us to go and discover new values: “Whoever has the ordo amoris of a person has the person. He has for the person as a moral subject, what the crystal formula is for the crystal” (Scheler, Ordo amoris, p. 100). All of mankind must be looked upon with the gaze of love, because all are formed by love and for love. There are no borders to love, which means that there are no limits to love. If love is limited, then it is simply obligation or duty.

Therefore, Pope Francis in his Letter to the Bishops of the United States of America is perfectly correct when he says:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is the Sermon on the Mount in action, because we see how love weaves the individual into the world. Love is the glue of all humanity.

In other words, Vance is not getting his summary of proximal love from Scheler, even though Vance uses the title of his treatise. Again, for Scheler, the love that Vance describes is pharisaical.

As an aside, and this might be a cause of consternation, but the love that Vance describes is very liberal, wherein love is selfish and narrow—it is all about the individual. To use the apt language of Paul Tillich, Vance makes love a formal system of justice, which is typical of the liberal mindset. This is why Vance qualifies love in so many different and contrary ways: he says it is “compassion,” “love,” “hierarchy,” “obligations,” and “moral duties.” How such a love can enforce moral goodness, Vance fails to tell us—which would be the beginning of a Christian understanding.

The phrase ordo amoris is also found in another very interesting work by Remo Bodei (1938—2019), the Italian-American philosopher. It is Ordo amoris. Conflitti terreni e felicità celeste (Ordo amoris: Earthly Conflicts and Heavenly Happiness) which was published in 1991. This book has not yet been translated into English, but it has nothing to do with what Vance speaks about. In fact, in it, Bodei undertakes a very moving exploration of the binding of man to God with love:

…the “order” that love establishes, and which bridges the gap between time and eternity, sublimating earthly virtues, belongs to conscience and institutions, to individuals and to the Church (as an authority that brings together sacred and profane history, that binds and unbinds, condemns and forgives). Inventive and disciplined, open and hierarchical, the ordo amoris is, in Augustinian terms, the result of human freedom and obedience to a divine precept.

So, we can eliminate this book as well, as not having instructed Vance in his conviction about love. The love Bodei speaks of is about eternal freedom, not containment.

But before moving on, it is important to address what others say about Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

First, let us turn to Augustine. The various commentators referring to Augustine’s order of love as a hierarchy, as noted, are simply repeating Etienne Gilson, who, in The Christian Philosophy of St. Augustine, corrupted the saint’s ideas. It is Gilson who says Augustine creates a hierarchy of the inner man and the world outside and then God beyond.

When we turn to Augustine, without Gilson, we encounter a different understanding of love—not concentric, but one that increases because of others: “ab exterioribus ad interior, ab inferioribus ad superior—from the exterior to the interior, from the inferior to the superior” (Enarrationnes in psalmos 145). This is Augustine’s “order of love”—it is not hierarchy—but an endless expansion of love, from the inner to the outer, from the outer to God, for it is the world in its entirety that leads to God: “Undique pulchritudo operis, quae tibi commendat artificem—all around is the beauty of His work, which speaks of its Creator” (Enarrationnes in psalmos 145, 404).

Then, there is Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose ideas are again misrepresented by various commentators, so that the saint comes to say what Vance says—that there is an order in which we are to love. First we must love this, and only then we must love that. Saint Aquinas never says this.

Here, it is worth quoting Stephen J. Pope, who in his excellent study of Aquinas makes this fundamental clarification:

Thomas did not view the order of charity as a simple system of concentric circles (somewhat like the system of concentric spheres that marked the medieval cosmos), in which family and members of one’s own household come first, next close friends, neighbors and associates, and finally others in an outwardly radiating gradation of various relations to the self (though this scheme is often adopted by philosophers, moralists, and, of late, sociobiologists). This simple scheme would only be appropriate if Thomas recognized one ultimate good and one basis for friendship, whereas in fact he had a more realistic sense of the pluralism of human goods and friendships. His interpretation of the order of charity recognized the importance of different spheres of life and acknowledged the need for different schemes of priority, depending on the various matters that are the basis of the different connections people share. Claims of kinship for Thomas were not assigned absolute priority, and only “trump” other claims in the arena of basic material well-being—and even here they have priority only when the degree of need is roughly comparable (The Evolution of Altruism and the Ordering of Love, 64).

For Aquinas, the Christian must love all people, including enemies—and thus love must never be determined by connections. Because of Christ’s command that we must even lay down our lives for others (John 15:13; I John 3:16), Aquinas explicitly says that we must love our neighbor more than we love our own body (Summa, II.11.44.8ad2). Pope Francis precisely makes this connection clear in his Letter.

With all that said, just who is it that is actually saying what Vance says—and calling it “Christian?”

Here is another quotation:

Christian Nationalism is loving your neighbor. Who is our neighbor? Our fellow citizens and especially our brothers and sisters in Christ. Loving them means protecting them from foreign interests, alien worldviews, and hostile invaders. Christian Nationalism means placing the interests of your neighbor and your home above the interests of foreigners in foreign nations. This doesn’t mean we neglect foreign nations or do not extend love to them, but rather that we place the interests and worldview of our home above foreign ones. 1 Timothy 5:8 tells us that “if anyone does not provide for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an unbeliever.” Nationalism is about taking care of our neighbors, our families and fellow citizens, lest we deny the faith and be worse than an unbeliever. While we recognize that Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, we also realize the fact remains that He has all authority on earth as well and has commanded us to disciple all nations.

This is from Christian Nationalism: A Biblical Guide for Taking Dominion and Discipling Nations (2022), written by Andrew Torba and Andrew Isker.

Another seminal text in Christian nationalist circles has this to say on the subject:

In reality, much of what takes place in political life is motivated by concerns arising from our membership in collectives such as families, tribes, and nations. Human beings are born into such collectives or adopt them later in life, and are tied to them by powerful bonds of mutual loyalty among their members. In fact, we come to regard these collectives as an integral part of ourselves. Many, if not most, political aims are derived from responsibilities or duties that we feel we have, not to ourselves as individuals, but to an extended “self” that incorporates our family, tribe, or nation. These include a concern for the lives and property of members of the collective to which we are loyal. But we are also powerfully motivated by shared concerns that are not physical in this way: the need to maintain the internal cohesiveness of the family, tribe, or nation, and the need to strengthen its unique cultural inheritance and pass it on to the next generation.

This is from The Virtue of Nationalism (2018), by the “philosopher” of the nationalists, the Zionist, Yoram Hazony.

Such is the “ordo amoris” that Vance advocates. It has nothing to do with Saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, let alone Christian philosophy (Scheler and Bodei). Its source lies elsewhere—in Zionism and Christian nationalism.

The antidote to what Vance is selling is a greater adherence to the Sermon on the Mount, for it is love alone that unites all humanity and leads us into the perfection that is God. To render love as a process of politics, a hierarchy of relations, a circle of associations is to deny God, for God is love.