Dis-Ordo Amoris
Everybody wants to save the world; nobody wants to help mom with the dishes
In the tweet heard round X-world: “Google ordo amoris,” our newly minted Vice President, J.D. Vance, brought to the fore a neglected yet essential common-sense doctrine of the Christian faith. The “ordo amoris,” or, ordered loves, emerges from Scripture and was first articulated as such in the 5th century by Augustine in City of God.
Augustine addressed how love goes wrong—namely by giving an object or person affection or love that does not accord with what is due. He says “When the [cheapskate] 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…” Our loves should be ordered, that is, appropriate in degree, not just when relating to objects but also to people.
James R. Wood expounds on this in his excellent essay Ordering Our Social Loves,
Christian moral theology has emphasized this through exposition of the fifth commandment. We are commanded to honor our father and mother. This relationship is not a voluntary society, which is the preferred social mode of liberalism. No, you do not choose your parents—and the parent-child relationship is the most fundamental for one’s identity (apart from one’s relationship to God).
Augustine, in his exposition of the ordo amoris, describes other relations similarly. Though we are commanded to love everyone, priority in our loves should go to those “who are most closely bound to you by place, time, or opportunity, as if by lot.”
To Augustine, virtue was found in rightly ordered loves. And this encapsulates so much of what’s wrong with love in 21st-century America. We live in a time of dis-ordo amoris––many would rather virtue signal on social media, exercise charity by off-loading it to a governmental program delivering who-knows-what to who-knows-where, or love their neighbor with a theoretical love for anyone but their actual next-door neighbor.
This is where PJ O’Rourke’s pithy saying sums up disordered loves so well: “Everybody wants to save the world; nobody wants to help mom do the dishes.” You’ll have to forgive me for having never read his book that birthed that gem, but his quotable sentence found its way to me ages ago and lodged deeply into my psyche as a young mom battling guilt over all sorts of bizarre “obligations” that weren’t mine to bear. As many young mothers can attest, there is a temptation to be always thinking of the good you can’t do (but feel like you should do) somewhere out there rather than lean into the duties set before you by God in your own home.
The Lord gives us, by providence and circumstance, particular duties and obligations—when you’re a new mom or dad, these duties have a tiny face and a fresh name, they are not nebulous duties to be done by donating to some cause out there brought to you by the siren song of a sad Sarah McGlothlin, they are concrete tasks for the well-being of another small human.
This brings us to Vice President Vance’s statements on Fox News: “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. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that…”
I offer one addendum to the Vice President’s remarks: Ordered love starts with love for God.
Trying to order our loves without God at the center is like a wheel without a hub, a ladder without a frame, a house without a foundation, a tree without roots. It can’t be (rightly) done. And when it is tried, you end up with rank hypocrisy, which is precisely what the Vice President was criticizing the far left for. When you try to love the people and objects around you without first loving the God who made the world, who made fathers and mothers to have children, who made neighborhoods and nations, who made the Minnesota winters and the west Texas heat, who is himself the author of love, then you end up trying to be God—that is, redefining love on your own stupid terms. It is far easier to pretend that love is some sort of nebulous goodwill disseminated by pork bills pushed through Congress for the “common good” than to be loyal to the one true God and discipline yourself to do what he’s required of you day after day for the good of the people he’s put next to you day after day.
Mom says, “Hey, can I get some help with these dishes?” and too many are puffed up with their mini-god visions of grandeur, “Sorry mom, the smelt fish needs me!” or, more realistically, “Sorry real-life people, the internet needs me!” The people and tasks of our normal lives are largely unglamorous—which is why it’s incumbent upon us to care for these first and so prove ourselves able to do more (and God will certainly give us more). The Pharisees were condemned for ignoring the command to honor their father and mother as they tried to make themselves more spiritual than God. They took what would have gone to their parents and turned it into a pious offering (Mark 7:9–12). But God wasn’t pleased with that kind of hypocritical virtue-signaling.
My encouragement to the Vice President is to keep going. Remind the citizens of the United States that their loves should be rightly ordered, reject the false piety of the left, which, in the name of love and goodwill, transmits so much immorality to the ends of the earth. But we must be sure we are beginning with:
“one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible,”
“one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men and for our salvationcame down from heaven,”
“the Holy Ghost the Lord, and Giver of Life, who proceedeth from the Father and the Son…”
who with the Father and the Son together is worshiped and glorified…”
Image Credit: Unsplash