In Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers find various references to an order of love or charity (ordo amoris, ordo caritatis). One is Song of Songs 2:4. More important still is Christ’s teaching that all the law and the prophets depend on two commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbour as yourself.” Jesus thereby teaches that one should love God first and above all else, then oneself, and third one’s neighbour as oneself. However, just like the lawyer to whom Jesus imparts this teaching (Luke 10:29), people have always had many questions about the exact implications of these two commandments.
Here then are some books from the Church's tradition that introduce the concept of the order of love, develop it, and spell out its implications.
Five Books for Catholics may receive a commission from qualifyng purchases made using the affliate links in this post.
Recently, there has been a debate among Christians and the chattering classes over the order of love and its bearing on public policy. Surprisingly, this debate was not set off by the Pope, a pastor, or a professor, but by a politician: a remark made by US Vice-President J.D. Vance in an interview with Fox News at the end of January.
During the interview, Vance referenced the order of love in all but name when justifying the current administration’s clampdown on illegal immigration.
“But there’s this old-school [concept] — and I think 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 went on to accuse the far left of adopting policies that invert this order.
In the ensuing X-storm (formerly twitterstorm), quite a few posts contested the biblical pedigree of the notion. Some did so quite vociferously For example, Joash Thomas stated, “I am a theologian trained at one of America’s top conservative evangelical theological seminaries. This is not a Christian concept; it’s a Western individualistic one.”
Now that the flurry of commentary on Vance’s remarks has passed, it is worth asking whether the order of love is a biblical teaching and, if so, what bearing it has on our lives. For those who want to study the matter more closely, here are five books on the order of charity.
1.
The great third-century biblical scholar and theologian, Origen of Alexandria, was the first to bring many Christian doctrines into focus. The order of love is a case in point. He does so in his Commentary on the Song of Songs(III, 7). Specifically, he finds a reference to the order of love in Song 2:4.
It is difficult to find any such reference in a modern translation of the Bible. Take the RSVCE. It translates Song 2:4 as: “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.” However, the Greek and Latin translations used by the Church Fathers render the verse somewhat differently (and bear in mind that the authors of the New Testament used the Septuagint). In the version of the Septuagint that Origen references, the verse is “order love in me” (taksate en’eme agapēn). In the Latin translation that Augustine uses, it is rendered as, “he set in order charity in me” (ordinavit in me caritatem). Accordingly, both Origen and Augustine speak of the order of love or charity.
Arguably, this is still not sufficient proof of the concept’s biblical pedigree. It could be objected that Origen and Augustine rely on a questionable translation of Song 2:4. However, they rely on the available translations for the term, ‘order of love’, not the substance of the concept. For the concept, they rely on the whole sweep of Sacred Scripture.
In explaining rightly ordered love, Origen refers principally to the two commandments on which the law and the prophets hang (see Matthew 22:35-40; Mark 12:28-34; Luke 10:25-28). He also appeals to the way in which God has “arranged all things by measure and number and weight” (Wisdom 11:10). In other words, Origen is arguing that order in which we should love things is determined by the way God forms, governs, and sanctifies creation.
While, ‘order of love’ is not a direct quote from the Bible, and the way in which the Church Fathers draw the term from Song of Songs 2:4 is questionable, the concept is deeply biblical. It refers to an order that is described in Scripture as a whole. That order is rooted in the nature of things and God’s ordering of creation. It is implicit in the two commandments on which “all the law and prophets depend.”
Only because there is an order in which we should love things, can we distinguish between ordered and disordered loves: between a love that is directed to the right things and in the right order as opposed to loving things in the wrong order or even loving the wrong things.
“We say that charity is out of order in a person, when he either loves what he ought not to love, or else loves what he ought to love either more or less than it is right for him to do. In people of the latter kind charity is said to be inordinate; but in the former—and they are very few, I think—those, namely, who go forward on the way of life and turn not aside to the right hand nor to the left, in those and those alone charity is ordinate, and keeps the order proper to itself”
Origen goes on to offer various considerations about of whom we ought to love most. For example, he argues that one should have a special love for spouse, parent, or sibling. Still, his considerations on the order of love do not have the systematicity of, say, St. Thomas Aquinas. Moreover, the spiritual life, not social teaching, is the main focus of his Commentary on the Song of Songs.
Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, which has come down to us in Rufinus of Aquileia’s Latin translation, coins the term ‘order of love.” This is one way in which this highly influential work has shaped Christian doctrine and spirituality over the centuries. As St. Jerome wrote to Pope Damasus,
“While Origen surpassed all writers in other books, in his Song of Songs he surpassed himself.”
However, the Western Church’s reflection on the order of love was shaped more decisively by St. Augustine.
This post is for paying subscribers only
Sign up now and upgrade your account to read the post and get access to the full library of posts for paying subscribers only.
