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The Order of Love

The Order of Love

Last updated on: August 12, 2026 at 10:54 am by Edwin Woodruff Tait

The Order of Love 2026-08-12T10:54:08-05:00 Edwin Woodruff Tait

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Vance vs. the Pope

Vice President J. D. Vance, a convert to Catholicism, kicked off a debate last year when he invoked the classic Catholic principle of the “order of love” to defend Trump administration policies toward immigrants. As Vance explained it: “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 Catholics, from Fr. James Martin to (eventually) Pope Francis himself, chastised Vance for ranking love in this way, arguing that the Parable of the Good Samaritan shows that we should, in fact, love everyone as our neighbors, including people who do not appear to be particularly closely related to us: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. . . The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf.Lk10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception..

So what is the order of love?

A year into the Trump administration, it’s obvious that (as many of us recognized at the time, not least the Pope) Vance was clearly abusing the concept of the “order of love” to justify, effectively, not loving immigrants at all. At the same time, with all respect to the late Pope, simply dismissing Vance’s invocation of the “order of love” is inadequate. Given how many Catholics are involved in supporting this administration and its demonic policies, it is worthwhile to revisit this debate and unpack the nature of the concept of the “order of love.”

The medieval understanding of the “order of love” worked like this:

1. God is the ultimate good, simply in himself.

2. Humans should love God above all things.

3. Humans should, and naturally do, desire union with God for themselves, which is the ultimate good.

4. As a consequence of that, humans should desire union with God for all other humans as well (love your neighbor as yourself). I.e., love of neighbor is logically subsequent to a proper “love of self” which consists in a desire for God as the supreme Good.

The desire for happiness

Underlying this framework is Aristotle’s “eudaimonistic” account of ethics. All human beings fundamentally desire happiness, and all human motivations can be reduced ultimately to that. Boethius, in the Consolation of Philosophy, built on this (and on Augustine’s account of human desire and its proper end in God) to construct a systematic argument that no “earthly” good can give real happiness. Only virtue, which makes us like God, can give true happiness, and a virtuous person will be happy under the most adverse circumstances. This is not because a virtuous person no longer desires his own good, but because he recognizes that the true goods are eternal.

So at this point we aren’t talking about political/economic goods at all. The concept of “order of charity” does apply to them too, but that is a subset of the fourth step in the order I laid out above, from God as the ultimate good to the love by which I desire the same goods for my neighbor that I desire for myself.

Before I get into that, though, I want to talk about the roots of the position Vance is arguing against, and which at times Catholic critics of Vance seem to be embracing (though I’m not sure they actually are). And as a Reformation scholar, I naturally tend to see the roots of this alternative modern ethic in the Protestant Reformation, though the Reformers of course continued to be very traditional in many respects and, as always, there were late medieval roots to their critique of the Thomist/Aristotelian view.

The Protestant alternative

One can make a case, in fact, that the “order of love” was one of the most fundamental issues in the Reformation. Underlying Luther’s 95 Theses and his revulsion at indulgence theology was a radicalization of Augustinian theology in which the desire for salvation was actually an expression of egotism and hence something that hindered salvation.

In early theological writings from the years preceding the publication of the Theses (the lectures on Romans, for instance), Luther suggested that Purgatory would actually take the form of apparent damnation. The soul, faced with the apparent failure of all its efforts after salvation, would have a choice: to accept damnation or rail against God’s apparent injustice. The acceptance of God’s judgment, even if it took the form of damnation, would be the thing that unlocked the doors of “hell” and revealed hell to be in fact Purgatory–the final test of whether one was truly pure in one’s love for God.

This was a transitional phase in Luther’s theology on the way to his developed doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone. But Luther continued to build into his theology the basic principle that truly good works must be done without any regard for reward, even the reward of eternal life. (This is one of the many reasons to reject the idea that Luther was simply recovering the message of the New Testament.) Luther saw himself as restoring “true” good works by stripping away from them any causal role in one’s wn salvation. Only when assured of forgiveness through Jesus could a Christian practice true love of neighbor without self-regard.

Living for others

Martin Bucer, on whom I wrote my dissertation, picked up on this idea of Luther’s and made it central to his own theology, even though the details of how his doctrine of justification worked were a bit different. In his 1523 sermon “That No One Should Live for Himself but for Others,” Bucer provides an alternative account of the order of charity:

1. God is good because God pours good out on creatures.

2. We should love and imitate God.

3. So goodness means most fundamentally desiring the good of the other, above our own good.

This sounds very beautiful, but a Thomist friend of mine pointed out the problem with it years ago. If goodness is defined by desiring good for the other, you have an infinite loop. You never get to an actual concept of goodness. Goodness is love and love is desiring good for the other. So I should desire that the other desires good for others, and that means desiring that those others desire good for others, and so on ad infinitum. It actually makes no sense. You have to start with the apparently “selfish” love of God as the ultimate good for yourself in order for love of neighbor to have a concrete meaning.

Disinterested benevolence

This Protestant inversion of the order of charity coexisted with many habits of mind and speech rooted in the older view, particularly with the reassertion of Aristotelian scholasticism among Protestants in the decades after the Reformation. But the radicalism of early Protestantism continued to percolate. The 17th-century Reformed mystic Samuel Rutherford agonized over the possibility that he might love “Christ’s love” more than he did Christ himself. The reappropriation of late medieval “Rhineland mysticism” and its idea of “gelassenheit” by the Pietists gave a further boost to the idea that true holiness consisted of renunciation of the “self” at every level, even the most spiritual.

Jonathan Edwards provided the most influential restatement of the idea of “unselfish” love in the 18th century. In his Dissertation concerning the Nature of True Virtue, Edwards argued that the only true virtue consisted in “benevolence toward being in general” which meant, primarily, love of God. Any “particular” love of one’s own family or nation or one’s own well-being, while imperfectly good, was potentially at odds with true virtue and thus not inherently, truly good. Among Edwards’ followers, this led to the catchphrase “disinterested benevolence.” Abolitionism and other 19th-century reform movements took their inspiration from this Edwardsean principle that true, virtuous love would have no regard to the closeness of the beloved to oneself.

The greatest good for the greatest number

A secular counterpart to Edwardsean “disinterested benevolence” was the utilitarian ethic of “the greatest good for the greatest number” promoted by Jeremy Bentham. But secular accounts of disinterested virtue faced a difficulty that Edwards and his followers did not. Edwards, as a Calvinist Christian, was quite sure that God had revealed what true virtue looked like. For Edwards, as for Aquinas, to love one’s neighbor was first and foremost to desire their union with God. (That for both Aquinas and Edwards–as for Luther and Bucer–there was a sense in which God himself did not desire this for all people is one of the reasons why many heirs of Edwards eventually turned toward Arminianism, which would have horrified Edwards.)

In the secular versions of disinterested benevolence, the problem my Thomist friend pointed out in Bucer recurs with a vengeance. What is the good that we will for our neighbor? Various versions of utilitarianism (and other secular ethical systems) have given different accounts of what it is that we want to maximize and whom it is we want to maximize it for. Is it the presence of pleasure or satisfaction? Are some pleasures worthier than others? Is it the absence of pain or suffering? How does one weigh pleasure against suffering? When is a life full of suffering worth living, and when isn’t it?

View from nowhere

Perhaps the most influential version of modern utilitarianism, championed by Peter Singer for much of his career, is “preference utilitarianism.” In this view, a morally good action is one that maximizes the ability of other beings to carry out their own preferences or desires. This grasps the nettle pointed out by my Thomist friend. Goodness is, in fact, a respect for the preferences and desires of others. This is an ethic that can coexist with a plurality of concepts of the good. But it still requires some system for deciding whose preferences count in a conflict. And, notoriously, it led Singer in particular to argue that not only unborn fetuses but newborn infants had very little moral claim because they were not yet capable of conscious preferences.

In Singer’s ethic, our relationship to a being has no bearing on the effort we should make to do good to that being. In an interview, Singer admitted that he didn’t carry out his principles consistently in practice, because he spent thousands of dollars on care for his mother in a nursing home. In principle, he thought he owed her no more than anyone else. But his practice was different. I agree with Richard John Neuhaus that Singer’s practice is more admirable than his theory. As Neuhaus puts it, Singer’s ethic is a “view from nowhere.” It assumes a complete impersonality that belies what it means actually to be a human being embodied in a set of relationships.

A Thomist response to Vance (to be continued)

Vance is talking nonsense when he claims that “the left” actually treats strangers as worthy of more consideration than those close to us. It’s a perspective bias–if you actually try to treat everyone equally, it will look like you are preferring those farther off to those closer to you. But it’s true that many (not all) progressives do have an ethic that is fundamentally a “view from nowhere,” whether or not they agree with all the particulars of Singer’s version. And I agree with Vance and Neuhaus that this kind of ethic is mistaken. It leads to conclusions (such as that I should spend no more money on my own parents or children than on anyone else) that are either impossible or monstrous or both.

But I also believe that Vance is perverting the concept of the “order of charity” in order to justify not treating “outsiders” with justice, let alone charity. In a second blog post, I’ll unpack a Thomist response to Vance. I’ll explain why Vance’s interpretation of the “order of charity” is mistaken and indeed profoundly evil.

Domenico di Michelino – Dante Illuminating Florence with his Poem (detail) 1465

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