Vance on the ordo amoris

J.D. Vance decided to stick his nose into Christian theology the other day, summarizing his understanding of the ordo amoris (‘order of love’) thus:

‘There’s this old school – and I think it’s a very Christian concept by the way – that you love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.’ (interview on Fox News, 29 January)

I don’t have a problem with the idea that there is an order to love (ultimately, this comes from Augustine and Aquinas, though their treatment of love in this way owes more to Plato and Aristotle than it does to Scripture). But Vance and those Christians who have spoken up in his support have gone wrong in two important ways: they have made the ordo prescriptive, and they assume that love is finite and essentially static.

Misunderstood in this way, the order of love suggests that love of family takes priority over everything else (the old lie, ‘charity begins at home’). Next in importance comes love of one’s immediate neighbours, then love of the wider community, then love of one’s nation. Only then, might one consider loving people beyond the boundaries of our own ethne. Add to this the assumption that love is essentially finite and it suggests that those beyond our borders are only worthy of the dregs of love that may or may not be left over after we finished loving everyone closer at hand (and most like ourselves).

Against this, I would argue first that the order of love should be understood as descriptive. Yes, love begins with the family. That is where we first experience love and where we learn to love. But as we grow, our horizons expand – we go to school, join clubs, attend church, leave home, perhaps go to university, perhaps emigrate – and our experience of love expands with our expanding horizons.

But, more importantly for the Christian, love is not merely a finite human faculty. It is also a gift of God. And as we exercise that gift, God increases our capacity for love. Since God is utterly unbounded, there are literally no limits to this love. We see this quite clearly in Scripture where Jesus commands us to love our enemies. And in the Orthodox tradition, we find examples of love extending even beyond the limits of this world (e.g. St Isaac the Syrian speaking of the compassionate heart praying even for demons).