The Christian Nationalists have discovered a new toy: Augustine’s language about the “order of love” or the “order of charity” (ordo amoris), and some of them are putting it to the service of racism and kinism.¹ This calls for some explanation and clarification. Augustine’s discussion (more below) of the “order of charity” is seminal, and Thomas Aquinas expanded on it at some length in his Summa Theologica in the thirteenth century. Among Reformed writers, as far as I can see, though the idea is present, the expression ordo amoris does not occur frequently. For example, an electronic search of a large database of Protestant texts produced very few results among the European Reformed writers. The Cocceian theologian Abraham Heidanus (1597–1678) discussed it in two different volumes.² William Tyndale (c.1495–1536) referred to it briefly.³ Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) discussed it briefly, as did John Jewel and a few other English theologians of the period. But it does not seem to have been a major topic/locus per se of the Reformed.

For our purposes we will focus first on Augustine, who discussed it in his treatise, On The Good of Marriage (De bono coniugali), written c. 401, about fourteen years after he came to faith and was baptized, and between four and six years after he left the monastery to be made Bishop of Hippo Regius (now Annaba), a small town in what today is Algeria, on the Mediterranean Coast.

This is a small work, barely mentioned in the several standard resources and secondary works I reviewed, but fortunately Augustine himself commented on this work in his Retractiones (AD 427).⁴ He wrote On The Good of Marriage against “the heresy of Jovinian” († c. 405), who denied that “virginity as such was better than thankful eating” and who “attacked the tendency to associate differences of reward in heaven with different earthly states (virgins, widows, wives; monks, priests, laymen), and shared the disbelief of Helvidius in the perpetual virginity of Mary.”⁵ Augustine was unhappy that Jovinian’s teaching, which anticipated the Reformation in this regard, was leading nuns to leave the convent for marriage.⁶ Augustine also blamed Jovinian for shattering “the holy celibacy of holy men by reminding them of and comparing them with fathers and husbands.”⁷ He was so offended he denounced Jovinian as a “monster.”⁸ He wrote On The Good of Marriage to “oppose the secretly spreading poisons with all the power which the Lord gave me.”⁹ Those who opposed Jovinian in Rome thought it best to praise celibacy, but Augustine, perhaps counterintuitively, opposed him by praising marriage.¹⁰ The translators of a modern edition of this work explain, “By calling marriage a good, St. Augustine immediately refuted the chief charge of Manichaeism. For him, the good of marriage was threefold: offspring (proles), fidelity (fides), sacrament (sacramentum).”¹¹ The latter signifies the mystery of Christ and his church (Eph 5:32).¹²

On The Good of Marriage is composed of twenty-six chapters and each chapter is composed of sections.¹³ The expression in question, “order of love” (or order of charity; ordo amoris), occurs in chapter 3. In chapter 1, he described human nature as “social” and as possessing “the capacity for friendship as a great and natural good.”¹⁴ This is why we were all created from one man, to hold humans together “in their society, not only by the similarity of race, but also by the bond of blood relationship.”¹⁵ Contra the racists and kinists, the “race” to which Augustine referred here is not ethnicity or skin color but the human race. Blood does refer to natural, familial relations. He explained, “And so it is that the first natural tie of human society is man and wife.”¹⁶ Even these, he observed, were not created separately but rather, “in both sexes,”¹⁷ God made “one from the other.”¹⁸ We are meant to be in “the union of society.”¹⁹ Children are the “only worthy fruit . . . of sexual intercourse.” This notion that society begins with the closest relations and expands outward in concentric circles will become basic to the Christian way of thinking about social relations. For example, this notion of society as concentric circles forms the basis of Johannes Althusius’ Politica, which was influential upon the American founders, who had read it.²⁰

To our ears, chapter 2 of On The Good of Marriage might seem odd, since Augustine reflected on worries about how, had Adam and Eve not sinned, they would have procreated. One of the reasons he had to wrestle with this was his assumption that sexual intercourse is inherently corrupt and corrupting.²¹ Augustine himself, however, concluded that God might have brought it about that bodies produced through sexual intercourse could have been granted a state of blessedness.²²

In the chapter that interests us the most, Augustine refused to take a firm position on the question of procreation in the absence of the fall. What concerned him was “the present condition of birth and death, which we know and in which we were created, the marriage of male and female is something good.”²³ He outlined an account of marriage and divorce (e.g., the divorced spouse may not remarry until the first spouse dies).²⁴

Augustine affirmed the goodness of marriage on the basis of “The Gospel,” not only because he forbade illegitimate divorce (Matt 19:9), but also because our Lord himself attended the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–12).²⁵ Therefore, according to Augustine, for us, the question is not whether marriage is good but why. First, it is good because of procreation. Second, it is good because it provides for companionship between the two sexes.²⁶ There are, after all marriages between “old people” who have lost children or perhaps had no children at all.²⁷ This brings us to the expression under discussion, “ordo amoris“:

But, in a good marriage, although one of many years, even if the ardor of youths has cooled between man and woman, the order of charity still flourishes between husband and wife.²⁸

Over time the ardor, that is, the flame, the heat, the passion, may cool (emarcuit), but the ordo flourishes (viget) between husband and wife.²⁹ One senses Augustine’s discomfort with sex as he wrote,

They are better in proportion as they begin the earlier to refrain by mutual consent from sexual intercourse, not that it would afterwards happen of necessity that they would not be able to do what they wished, but that it would be a matter of praise that they had refused beforehand what they were able to do. If, then, there is observed that promise of respect and of services due to each other by either sex, even though both members weaken in health and become almost corpse-like, the chastity of souls rightly joined together continues the purer, the more it has been proved, and the more secure, the more it has been calmed.³⁰

Marriage, he wrote, has a good insofar as it turns “carnal . . . incontinence” (inability to control oneself) into a good, since that youthful lust is “turned to the honorable task of begetting children.”³¹

Over time, the “concupiscence of the flesh” is tempered by parenthood (Augustine had raised a son, Adeotus, who was baptized when Augustine was baptized) so that lust “is repressed” and “becomes inflamed more modestly.”³² Dignity “prevails when, as husband and wife they unite in the marriage act, they think of themselves as mother and father.”³³

Clearly, when Augustine thought of the “order of charity” he thought of an ordered duty. It is a creational order determined by proximity that one should love his spouse, then his children, then, by implication, his neighbor. Never, however, does ethnicity (the Roman empire was multi-lingual and multi-cultural), or what we have come to think of (perhaps incorrectly) as race or ethnicity enter into the question.

Notes

1. R. Scott Clark, “The Law Exposes Racism As Sin.” See resources on Kinism on the Heidelblog.
2. See e.g., Abraham Heidanus, Corpus theologiae Christianae in quindecim locos digestum. (Leiden: Johannes du Vivié Publisher, 1686), 520.
3. William Tyndale, Expositions and Notes on Sundry Portions of the Holy Scriptures, Together with the Practice of Prelates, ed. Henry Walter, vol. 1, The Works of William Tyndale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849), 36–38.
4. E.g., Peter Brown mentions it only in passing in his wonderful biography, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 249. The Retractiones are not retractions in the modern sense of the word (as I once assumed). The title might be better translated, Retracings. In the Retractiones, he is going over his work again, sometimes indicating a change of mind, but sometimes explaining and defending his work.
5. F. L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), s.v., Jovinian. His “errors” were condemned at Rome in 390 in an encyclical published by the Bishop of Rome, Siricius. They were also condemned at a synod in Milan by Ambrose in 393. Augustine also wrote against Jovinian in another treatise (Contra Jovinianum). Augustine of Hippo, The Retractations, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Mary Inez Bogan, vol. 60, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1968), 166. The Reformers and their orthodox successors rejected the superiority of virginity and rewards but incorrectly agreed with Jerome regarding the Blessed Virgin. Fortunately, most Reformed theologians and pastors have come to agree with Jovinian and Helvidius on this question.
6. Augustine, The Retractations, 48.1 (p.164).
7. Augustine, The Retractations, 164.
8. Augustine, The Retractations, 164.
9. Augustine, The Retractations, 164.
10. Augustine, The Retractations, 164
11. Augustine of Hippo, The Good of Marriage, in Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, ed. Roy Joseph Deferrari, trans. Charles T. Wilcox, vol. 27, The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1955), 3–4. Though the translator’s choice of fidelity for fides is a semantic possibility and the likely choice in this context, the same noun is often translated faith.
12. Augustine, The Good of Marriage, 5.
13. The standard citations are, e.g., De Bono Coniug. 1.1.
14. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 1.1.
15. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 1.1.
16. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 1.1.
17. “in utroque sexu” (De bono coniugiali, 1.1). The Fathers of the Church edition also uses “sexes.” This is worth noting in view of the claim by some that the distinction between sex and gender is a modern (second wave) feminist construct. I doubt this claim. Those who work in classical languages have long observed the distinction between biological sex and grammatical gender.
18. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 1.1.
19. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 1.1.
20. See R. Scott Clark, “Johannes Althusius (1557–1638): A Brief Introduction To A Pioneering Reformed Social Theorist.”
21. “St. Augustine views the command to increase and multiply as a blessing, inextricably linked to the blessed institution of marriage (De civ. Dei 14.22). While, because of humanity’s fallen nature, marriage and procreation inevitably contain the potential for lustful activities, they do produce children, ‘something good out of the evil of lust’ (De bono coniugali, 3.3). Marriage also promotes the order of charity through the subduing of that lust, a mastery which is figured in the command to rule the beasts of the earth (Gen 1:28).” David L. Jeffrey, A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1992), s.v., “Be Fruitful, And Multiply.”
22. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 2.2.
23. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3.
24. For an alternative and superior account of marriage and divorce see John Murray, Divorce (Philadelphia: Committee on Christian Education, Orthodox Presbyterian Church, 1953).
25. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3.
26. “in diverso sexu societatem.”
27. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3.
28. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3.
29. Augustine writes, “emarcuit ardor.” Given that flames produce heat and heat cools, that seems the best rendering.
30. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3.
31. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3.
32. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3.
33. Augustine, On The Good of Marriage, 3.3. One wonders what Augustine would make of the cottage industry of evangelical sex manuals.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• R. Scott Clark

  

  R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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