So far in this brief series I have alluded to Aquinas’ discussion of the ordo amoris (order of love). It was by reading Thomas that I was sent back to Augustine but now we come to Aquinas’ own discussion of the order of love, which, as we might have expected, was far more extensive than Augustine’s. He discussed “thirteen points of enquiry.” For our purposes it must do to look at just some of these. When we do, we shall see that, as for Augustine, as in Aquinas, it was proximity, not ethnicity that affected the order or love.

The first question is whether there is an order in love (caritas)? The first objection says, “It would seem not,” since charity is a virtue and how can there be an order in virtue? Thomas’ response (sed contra) begins with an appeal to the Song of Solomon 2:4, which is not a promising beginning as he seems to depend on an expression from the Vulgate, “ordinavit in me caritatem” (“he set in order charity in me”), since it, in turn, seems to depend upon the LXX (the Greek translation of the Old Testament) rather than the Hebrew text, which says, “He brought me to the house of wine, and his banner over me was love.”¹

But in his elaboration (respondeo dicendum) he explained that the terms before and after have reference to some principle and whenever there is a principle, “there must always be some kind of order.”² Charity loves God “as the principle of eternal blessedness.”³ The sharing (communicatio) of that love is the foundation of “divine friendship between us.”⁴

It is true, he conceded that love is a virtue, but it is distinct from the other virtues (e.g., faith and hope) since it goes “out to the ultimate end,” which is not true of the other virtues.⁵ Further, as a virtue faith belongs to the “cognitive power” whereas charity “has its seat in the affective power, which reaches out to the things themselves as they exist in reality.”⁶ “Order,” he explained, pertains to reason, which is the faculty that does the ordering but it is the appetitive power which is ordered by reason.⁷

It will surprise no one to read that, according to Thomas, the order is that we love God first. What surprised me (and what might surprise you) is the way he argued this point. My first instinct would be to go to the first commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me” or perhaps even better to our Lord Jesus’ summary of the law: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt 22:37–40).

For his proof he drew from Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, he cannot be my disciple.”⁸ The “chief concern of any friendship (amicitia) is with the main source of that shared good on which it is based.”⁹ In “civic friendship” (amicitia politica) the source is the ruler since the good of the state depends on him and it is to him that the citizens owe “loyalty and obedience.”¹⁰

The friendship of charity (amicitia caritatis) is founded upon shared blessedness, “which consists essentially in God.” Thus, God is to be loved above all.¹¹ We love our neighbor (proximus) as one with whom we enjoy a shared blessedness in God.

Because God is the beginning of love, we love him more than ourselves.¹² His authority was Augustine, with whom he agreed over against Aristotle, who argued that friendship with others begins with “friendliness towards oneself.”¹³ For Augustine, we love our neighbor for God’s sake. God gives us both natural and supernatural goods. The natural goods are the basis of natural love, and the supernatural goods are the basis of supernatural love.

When it comes to neighbor, however, we do begin with the self since Scripture says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”¹⁴ In this case, the paradigm for our love of neighbor is our love of self.¹⁵ But that love of self has limits. We ought to love our neighbor more than we love our own body.¹⁶ Our neighbor’s soul is his “principal component” and the “most important part of him.”¹⁷

Love also requires us to discriminate among our neighbors, not on the basis of ethnicity but on the basis of proximity. For example, under the types and shadows, Leviticus required those who cursed their parents to be put to death. Thomas noted that the law did not impose that penalty for cursing others.¹⁸ In his explanation of the order of love, it was always proximity (to God or to us) that determined the order of love: “The nearer its object is,” either to God or to us, “the dearer it is.”¹⁹ The principle of proximity explains why Paul wrote to Timothy, “Timothy, If anyone does not take care of his own, and especially of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim 5:8)²⁰ Our “charity should be directed to those who are nearer to us.”²¹

The intensity of love is greater for those who are nearer, and “the reasons for loving them are more numerous.”²² This is because the intensity of love flows from “the union between loved and lover.”²³ In nature we love our relatives the most, but we also have strong ties to fellow citizens and to fellow soldiers “in the comradeship of war.” Friendship with companions is one thing, but friendship among relatives is another.²⁴ But we never put any creature before God, who, Ambrose said, “is to be loved first, parents second, then those of our household.”²⁵

He argued that the order of charity requires that, if we must choose, we are to love our father before our mother.²⁶ Parents are to be loved before one’s wife.²⁷ He split the difference regarding benefactors by speaking to it from two perspectives: from one, we ought to love benefactors above beneficiaries, but from the other perspective we may say that we ought to love beneficiaries above the givers of gifts.²⁸ On the question of whether there is an order of love in heaven, he argued “because grace does not destroy nature through glory but perfects it” and since the order of love is grounded in the nature of things, it follows that “this order of charity will remain in heaven.”²⁹

The question of the order of love once again demonstrates how utterly unreliable the kinist/racists among the Christian Nationalists are as guides to the Christian tradition. We have seen in Augustine and now in Thomas that ethnicity is never the principle by which love is ordered. It is proximity, beginning with God and flowing out to neighbor. I think we might take issue with Aquinas on a couple things (e.g., his argument regarding prioritizing parents over wives, he was a monk after all), but however we might quibble with him on this or that, at no point do we find him appealing to ethnicity as the organizing principle for ordering love.

Notes

1. The English translation of the Vulgate is from St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Blackfriars Edition, (New York : McGraw-Hill Book Company), 2a2ae 26.1. The translation of the Hebrew text is mine.
2. Aquinas, Ibid., 26., resp. dic. He cited Aristotles’ Metaphysics, which reference is found at V, II, 1018b9.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., ad primum.
6. Ibid., ad secundum.
7. Ibid., ad tertiam.
8. Ibid., 2a2ae 26.2, sed contra.
9. Ibid., resp. dic.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., art. 3, sed contra.
13. Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 1.22; Aristotle, Ethics, IX & X, 116aI and 1168b5.
14. Ibid., art. 4., resp. dic.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., art. 5, sed contra. He cited Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, 1,27.
17. Ibid., ad primum.
18. Ibid., art. 6, sed contra.
19. Ibid., art. 6, resp. dic.
20. As quoted in Ibid., art. 7, sed contra.
21. Ibid., art. 7, sed contra.
22. Ibid., art. 8, sed contra.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., art. 8, ad primum.
25. Ibid., art.9, sed contra. The editors of the Blackfriars edition attribute this quotation to Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, 2:4.
26. Ibid., art. 10, sed contra.
27. Ibid., art. 11, sed contra.
28. Ibid., art. 12, sed contra.
29. Ibid., art. 13, sed contra. Translation mine. “Sed contra est quia natura non tollitur per gloriam, sed perficitur: ordo autem charitatis supra positus ex ipsa natura procedit: omnia autem naturaliter plus se, quam alia amant; ergo iste ordo caritatis remanebit in patria.”

©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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