NOVUS ORDO AMORIS (I) Jericho Road

What does J.D. Vance believe? Does it matter?

Ossip Zadkine, La Poete (1942)

On most days of our lives we go on a journey. We walk or run; we drive a car or board a plane; we go to work, or from work, to meet friends, to stay with family; to say goodbye to the dying; to greet someone who has just been born. And for the most part, our lives being different, our journeys are too.

But all of us, sooner or later, will find ourselves walking on the road to Jericho.

And we’ll notice, out of the corner of our eye, a body lying by the way.

The choice never presents itself to us exactly as it did in the parable – there are many kinds of journey, and as many ways those journeys can go wrong – but it’s always there, nevertheless, and it always has to be made. We can continue on our way, to the place we set out to, as we do most days, for most of our lives, putting what we’ve seen out of mind. Or we stop, change direction, turn aside. And then we no longer know where our journey is going to end.

I can’t say I was surprised by how J.D. Vance answered a question about deporting illegal migrants last month: “first you look after your family, then your neighbor, then your community, then the rest of the world”. I’d heard it, in different words, many times before: petit-esprit chauvinism unites the human race, and perhaps always has.

I was surprised by Vance’s attribution of those sentiments to a “very old and very Christian idea”: the ordo amoris. As a theological concept – loving the right things, in the right order – the ordo amoris is very old, and very familiar to me. But I’d never seen it cited as a political prescription before.

As it turns out, and in spite of many claims to the contrary, no-one else had either. Contrary to the defences made by, inter alios, Word on Fire, First Things, The Josias, and a claque of Catholics on social media, Vance’s interpretation of the ordo amoris dates all the way back to the repristinate era of 2022. At that year’s National Conservatism Conference, one speaker, William Wolfe, made what he called The Christian Case for America First Vance had given the closing address to the two previous NatCons; his novel interpretation of the ordo amoris is almost identical to Wolfe’s. The dots join themselves.

Wolfe is a “ten-year veteran of the conservative political movement”: for those of us not fluent in Republican, this means he’s a career bureaucrat. He’s also a Baptist: about as far from Catholicism as Protestants can get, and, at least historically, about as politically quietist as Christians can get. And this is obvious, I think, from his talk, which leaps directly from quietism to Trumpism as if no Christians prior to Wolfe had thought seriously about politics before.

This makes it easier to understand why his argument is gibberish and harder to understand why any educated Catholic might think it wasn’t. Even less explicable was the attempt by Wolfe and his Catholic amanuenses to enlist Saint Thomas Aquinas in defence of the ordo amoris. And this for several reasons.

The first, and most obvious, is that Aquinas never used that term. Tommaso d’Aquino, born 1225, died 1274, never mentions the “Ordo Amoris”; he speaks of the “Ordo Caritatis” instead. So begin, as Thomas often does, with a distinction: the order of charity, not the order of loves.

Love and charity are, of course, connected. They aren’t the same. Wolfe and Vance’s failure to grasp this distinction is one shared with the English language itself. Where English has one word for love, Ancient Greece had several; storge for familial affection, philia for friendship, eros for romantic passion. It’s a fourth type of love – agape, divine love; Latin caritas, English charity – that Aquinas infers an order to.

Charity, as Catholics understand it, is grace, a work of God in us – and, given God’s works are inseparable from God’s being, Charity is God. Which is why John 1 4:8 tells us: God is love. And God’s love is, the epistle continues, a perfect love¹. Perfect here means absolute, complete, without fault or failing: love that casts out all fear, that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres; love for friends and for enemies, love to the point of death . Love that never fails². In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells the multitude to be perfect as your Father in heaven is; later, in John 13:34, he tells the apostles, love one another as I have loved you. And these, you could say, are two ways of saying the same thing.

So charity isn’t to be confused with our affections as a whole. Birds exhibit filial piety. Dogs experience philia. Dolphins, as the Greeks knew and were troubled by, are prone to erotic fascination with handsome young men. Charity can only be found among human beings. And when we seek it – when we try to love as God loves, to love perfectly – we discover it’s not easily found. My ways, God tells Isaiah, are not your ways³. We’re bound by space and time as God is not, contingent where God is unchanging: creatures of dust beside the creator of the stars. The problem, at surface level, seems irresolvable. Not so, Aquinas says. Distiguendo est.

We have to distinguish, he says, between the different ways in which a person can be said to love. To comprehend this, I think it’s actually helpful not to look at the Summa, at least to start. Instead begin with one of his sermons; directed, as the Summa is not, at a general audience. In On the Two Commandments of Charity and The Ten Commandments, sermons given in the last year of the angelic doctor’s life, he lays out how, for the ordinary person, the ordo caritatis can be lived. Love, Thomas says, is said in two ways⁴.

One way (modus) is general, applying to all, without exclusion. The other is specific: and this, Thomas says, applies to amicus vel socius, to friends and companions. In the first sense, Aquinas in, we can love everyone as God loves them, and as we love God: for their sake, and not our own. In the second sense, we love according to the order of those affections we already bear; our families, then our friends, then those with whom we share our lives. Caritas fulfils storge, philia, and so on. We perfect our love⁵.

So the ordo caritatis is a variation on a classic Thomistic theme: gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit. Grace perfects nature. Our ‘natural’ affections, - given to us, as Augustine said, as by the casting of lots - aren’t undone by divine love. This doesn’t mean the two loves are one and the same. Nature isn’t grace. There’s a reason why love is addressed in the Summa first as a passion and that here Thomas is careful to make a distinction: charity, he writes, is “a certain perfection of love⁶”. One mark of this perfection is that it applies to everyone, everywhere, and all times.

The most troubling aspect of l’affair Vance, theologically speaking, was how many Christians seem to see the ordo caritatis as an admonition against universal love. In Matthew 5, Christ contrasts the love of the children of heaven with that of the ethnikoi, the nations; the heathen who salute their brethren only⁷. If we love our neighbour because we share an interest with him, Thomas says in his sermon on the Ten Commandments, our love is not true. “No one is meritorious except by charity, which is the love by which someone is loved on account of God,” Aquinas comments on Matthew 5:46; and so we have to make a distinction in our loves, because charity is exactly what the heathens do not have⁸

Beyond amicus vel socius, friends and family, Aquinas never gives us an order for the ordo caritatis, and certainly never one, like Vance’s, that’s fixed. The reason for this is simple. Aquinas recognises, across his writings, ties of many different kinds: to our extended family, clan or house; your gens, those who share your native tongue; to your political community, your leader, or king. These other loves are fulfilled by charity. But they’re also, in the process, transformed.

And this was a lesson Aquinas had learned firsthand. Thomas was noble born; a relative of the Emperor, expected from birth to fulfil the obligations of his class and house and birthright. At nineteen, he took his first steps on a very different road: one of childlessness, poverty and servitude, a mendicant-preacher in the imitation and service of Christ. It was a betrayal of everything Aquinas had been raised to be.

Unable to break Thomas’ resolution, his family tried to divert it: offered an abbacy, landed and influential, as an exception to St Dominic's Rule, a friar ruling monks. But Aquinas refused to turn aside from the road God had set him on. He didn’t know, then, aged nineteen, where it would take him. He knew that this was no small part of the point. Nature sets our affections, Augustine once said, as if by the casting of lots. Grace casts those lots anew.

When we love as God loves, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange writes in The Three Ages of the Interior Life, our natural affections are “ennobled, purified, rendered more generous”⁹. God’s grace liberates us from “individual or collective narrowness”; Charity frees us from the “collective egoism” characteristic of “certain narrow patriots”. When we make God’s ways our ways, the limits of our affections expand. “There are not two virtues of charity,” Garrigou-Lagrange writes, to truly love God is to love like God.

And so the ordo caritatis is defined, in a way, by being beyond our power to define. “Charity, Thomas writes, “binds us to be prepared to do good to anyone if we have time to spare”¹⁰. It may “vary according to the various requirements of time, place and matter in hand” Thomas writes, “because in certain causes one ought, for instance, to succor a stranger, in extreme necessity, rather than one's own father, if he is not in such urgent need.” Charity, Garrigou-Lagrange says, knows “no limits: it cannot exclude anyone on earth, in purgatory, or in heaven. It stops only before hell.” All men are our neighbours. We take the Jericho road every day of our lives.

Return to Vance’s novus ordo amoris: “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, the rest of the world…I think the profound interest that Donald Trump brings…is the simple concept: America First. It doesn’t mean you hate anyone. It means you have leadership that puts the interests of American citizens first." True charity, Garrigou-Lagrange notes, is only rarely found. Most men seek “their own interests” instead.

And so there is a basic distinction between the Catholic understanding of ordered love and Vance’s novus ordo amoris is. For Aquinas, to love someone is to will their good; to love someone perfectly is to will the highest good possible, their beatitude. For Vance, the good willed in loving another is their material self-interest. That such an interest pertains exclusively to what Aquinas calls temporal goods – wealth, power, security – accounts for God’s disappearance from the order of our loves. Our earthly household – even the novelty of the modern nation-state – eclipses entirely the preference scripture and tradition attributes to “the household of the faith,” Christ’s body on earth.

“France looks out for the French, Germany the Germans, and American should put the interests of Americans first.” In the world of the novus ordo amoris, there is no general good; only the interests of our particular nation. And these interests are irreconcilable with each other; irreconcilable, even, with those in your community who grow your food and build your cities, who raise their children alongside your own, but who lack the unum necessarium; an approval slip from the bureaucracy we call a state. In such a world as this, all we can do is “seek what is our own.” In such a world, Aquinas warned, there is no peace¹¹

Such a world is the Silicon Valley libertarianism which formed Vance as the Catholic tradition has not; such a world is the endless competition for advancement in the D.C. sinecures which formed Wolfe. In this world, the only bonds which last are those of mutual advantage; we can only trust our own kind, and these little. The family is a sanctuary: and also a prison cell. Every night before we go to sleep we make sure to lock the door. Every morning, we find ourselves walking the Jericho road again, and steel ourselves against the bodies we glimpse on the way.

We know, at the back of our minds, that someday, one of the bodies will be our own.

It’s a world in which to love another – to love a stranger – is to invite total annihilation. And this, I think, is the point. Vance and Wolfe outline an Ordo Amoris which is not the Ordo Caritatis: a love like that of the heathen; an order of nature which does not need grace. An order of what we know, and have, and can control. Where we can set out to go from one place to another most days, for most of our lives, and yet always be certain where our journey will end.

And the reason why this matters lies in one distinction Aquinas, in a lifetime of subdivisions, never made. That religion and politics are separable is so basic a principle in how we think about either that most of us, Vance included, never think about it at all. Were such a division proposed to Aquinas, it's not one he would have understood. We are saved, or not, as social beings; we know God, or fail to, as the political animals He created us to be. If you don't meet God on the way to Jericho, you'll never meet him on any other road.

The two great commandments are fulfilled together or not at all. If we do not love our neighbour, we cannot love Christ; to love only those like to yourself is the mark of those who do not truly know God. When he opined that all human conflict was ultimately theological, Cardinal Manning misspoke. The political is the theological. To misunderstand what we owe other human beings is to misunderstand who the God of the Bible, the God of Galilee and Golgotha and the Jericho road, really is.

And so those who called the Pope's intervention political were entirely right; that they meant this as a criticism was itself a witness to how necessary his action was. In reiterating the unity of Thomas’ two modes of charity – the universal with and in the particular, theology and politics, faith and life – Francis was correcting an error being presented as truth.

As Papal interventions go, it was nothing new. And neither is the novus ordo amoris. In some ways - a collapse of the distinction between nature and grace; a confusion of nation with church; an equation of temporal wealth with the ultimate ends of life – it bears the marks of a certain kind of Protestantism. But it began, as many bad ideas do, with a Catholic who lost faith.

And it began, not coincidentally, with the Thomistic political tradition’s greatest defeat; with the fall of the republic of angels, six centuries ago. It was in the aftermath of this defeat that the Catholics began to forget the second reason why Vance’s citation of the ordo amoris made no sense at all. The virtue which orders political and social life is not concerned with our affections, Thomas thinks, but with our acts.

When we avert our eyes from the body we see on the road to Jericho, we fail in charity. But we sin against the order of justice.

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Novus Ordo Amoris will be completed in two further parts.

1. 1 John 4:18

2. 1 John 4:18, 1 Corinthians 13:4-8, Luke 6:27 and Matthew 5:44, John 15:13, 1 Corinthians 13:8

3. Isaiah 55:8-9

4. Aquinas, Exposition on the Two Commandments of Charity and the Ten Commandments of the Law, Book I. C 6. IX.

5. Aquinas, in Commentary on Galatians, Chap. 6, lec. 2, 364

6. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia-IIae q. 26 a. 3 co.

7. Matthew 5:46

8. Aquinas, In Commentary on Matthew, Chap 5, lec. 12, 552.

9. All quotes from Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life (Herder, 1948), Part. 3, Chapter 20: Fraternal Charity

10. Aquinas, IIa-IIae 31.2 ad. 1

11. Aquinas, IIa-IIae 183. 2. ad. 3