Ordo Amoris (I)
What really is the "way of love"?
There is a rhetorical habit, a curious inclination of the mind, to drape ordinary ideas in the solemnity of Latin, as if the old imperial language might adorn ordinary words with additional significance. Take, for instance, the American motto, e pluribus unum. The Latin adds gravitas to an otherwise unmemorable, “one out of many.” But by placing the English words in a tongue foreign to most of us, we make them seem more profound, as if by naming them thus we are invoking some well-developed and articulated tradition. To say that God created man and woman in his image is all very well; it’s entirely another matter to discuss the “imago Dei.” Do you see what the Latin does there?
In truth, this is the trick that J.D. Vance and others employ when they speak of "ordo amoris." Stripped of its scholarly robes, the phrase simply means that love has a proper order. It’s hardly a contentious claim, unless one wishes to argue that a soldier should abandon his post to dote upon his family, or that one might rightly place a love for ice cream above the duty to rescue a drowning child. But Latin lends an aura of complexity, an air of high philosophy, and soon enough, what ought to be a practical reflection on human responsibility becomes a signal for ideological alignment.
The Right Ordering of Love
Be that as it may, the ordering of love is no obscure doctrine, no mere invention of theologians with a preference for medieval phraseology. It lies at the heart of Christ’s teaching: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” and “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mk 12:30-31, Mt 22:37-39). Anyone familiar with the Book of Common Prayer will know this as the “Summary of the Law”, a distillation of all that was given to Israel in the Law and the Prophets. The first command directs love upward, toward the Creator, and the second outward, toward our fellow creatures with whom we share this world.
The summary itself wasn’t foreign to Israel. The people were bound by covenant to love the Lord their God, who had delivered them from Egypt, and to extend that love to their own people as laid out in the Law. Even strangers and sojourners among them were to be treated with dignity and justice, a remarkable command in an era of tribal enmities. But Jesus does what he so often does—he unsettles, expands, and overturns expectations.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Mt 5:43-45). And again, in his parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus makes it plain that neighbourliness is not a matter of proximity, nationality, or tribe. The parable redefines neighbour as anyone in need. Love, rightly ordered, is expansive, not restrictive. It moves beyond the borders we draw around our sympathies and allegiances.
Learning to Love Well
To love in this way doesn’t come naturally. Affection, preference, attachment—these things are instinctual, but love, in the sense Christ speaks of it, must be learned. Grace is necessary, of course—“God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rm 5:5)—but grace does not operate as a magic charm. It sets us on our way and gives us strength for the journey, but we must walk the road.
Augustine, in his Homilies on the First Epistle of John, provides a wealth of wisdom on the nature of love and what it truly means to love well. But it’s his On Christian Teaching that’s best known for expressing this rightly ordered love in terms of enjoyment: we are to love God for his own sake, and all else in relation to him. Bernard of Clairvaux, Aelred of Rievaulx, and Thomas Aquinas all took up the theme in turn, each adding his own reflections on what it means to love well. But it is Bonaventure who, perhaps, puts it most plainly:
Because God, the supreme God, is above; our soul, an intrinsic good, within; the neighbour, a kindred good, without; and our body, a lesser good, below: therefore the proper order of loving is to love God first, more than all else and for his own sake; our soul second, less than God but more than any temporal good; the neighbour third, as much as ourselves as a good of the same degree; our body fourth, less than our soul, as a good of lesser degree….Finally, love, which is the gravitational force of the soul and the origin of all spiritual attraction, tends toward self with ease, but reaches out to neighbour with effort, and to God with greater pain. Hence, while there are Four Objects of Love, there are but Two Commandments: The first concerns God, the second, the neighbour (Brev. 5.8.3-4).
Love must be directed rightly, toward the highest good, if it is to be love at all. This does not mean rejecting the love of family, place, or work. Rather, these loves only find their true form when they are rooted in the love of God and a generous love of neighbour. Left to itself, love folds inward and becomes possessive, seeking to claim rather than to give.
This is where we often misunderstand love. We treat it as sentiment, a feeling, rather than as a practice, a discipline. C.S. Lewis once wrote, "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." That’s the hard part. It’s easy to wish good for those we already love, but to wish it for an enemy, a stranger, someone who has wronged us—this is love as Christ commands it. And that love isn’t contained within the walls of a family or a nation. It moves outward, ever expanding.
If love is to be true, it must be disciplined. It must be bound to what is right. A soldier who abandons his post to protect his family does them no good if his desertion leaves them his land defenceless. People who love their country but disregard justice do not truly love their country, for they leave it to rot. These are not easy distinctions, but they must be made.
It’s easy to let ordo amoris become an abstraction, something to argue over rather than something to live. But the ordering of love is not an idea—it is a way of being in the world. It is a habit of seeing clearly, of knowing that all love must be directed toward the highest good. And that good is not our own comfort, nor our families, nor even our nation, but the One who made us, in whom all loves find their place.
The Church as a Community of Love
But this is not yet the whole picture. Wendell Berry once wrote, "No matter how much one may love the world as a whole, one can live fully in it only by living responsibly in some small part of it." We may speak of loving everyone, but love that remains abstract is no love at all. It must take root in community, where it can be practiced and sustained. Love isn’t self-made. It’s shared, embodied, learned. It grows in belonging, in bearing one another’s burdens, in abiding in a love greater than ourselves.
It’s tempting to think of love as an individual virtue, a matter of private feeling. But love is learned in community. We do not love well alone. The Church, the Body of Christ, is where love is shaped—not in theory but in the daily practice of singing, praying, eating, serving, and forgiving. Here, we learn what love requires of us. And in learning, we are prepared to love beyond it.
Vance and others say love moves outward in concentric circles—first to kin, then to neighbours, then to nation, then to the world. But history teaches us that love doesn’t work this way. If family, nation, or tribe is its centre, love turns inward and becomes self-serving. The true centre is Christ. When Jesus commands, "Love one another as I have loved you," He speaks not of a natural affection but of a love rooted in God. Such love does not remain enclosed but moves outward, to encompass even enemies and strangers.
This is a hard teaching. It means that my deepest kinship is not with those who share my blood or my homeland, but with those who share in the life of Christ. A Christian in another land, in a prison cell, across a political divide, is more truly my brother or sister than the neighbour with whom I share a fence but not a faith. And yet, this love doesn’t turn inward. Love, if it is true, must burn outward. A fire contained within itself dies in its own ash. The Church, if it is to be a community of love, must be a fire that beckons, a warmth that welcomes, a love that encompasses the world.
If we are to love rightly, we must first be set in a place where love can be learned. That place is the Body of Christ. Here, we practice a love that moves outward, not because of our own strength, but because love, rightly ordered, cannot help but spread. Like a bonfire on a winter night, it’s not content to warm only those nearest to it. Its nature is to glow, to beckon, to give itself away to a world lost in its own darkness.