Let us not replace Ordo Amoris with abstract notions of “humanity.”
Imagine waking up from a coma, or returning from your rest-cure after a nasty bout with Influenza B, and finding the entire media ecosystem caught up in an acrimonious debate over some obscure Christian doctrine like Preterism or Monophysitism. Surely you would think you were still in the grip of a somnolent hallucination or bizarre fever dream. Yet that is essentially our reality, as the flame war over Vice President JD Vance’s reference to the Augustinian doctrine of ordo amoris (“order of love” or “order of charity”) enters its third week with no sign of dying down. Turn on CNN and you might encounter an utterly wet Passionist priest chastising the vice president for his theological stances. Browse the pages of Newsweek and you might find lefty journalists eagerly citing bizarre fringe figures like Joash Thomas, a self-styled “Masala Chai theologian,” who has apparently determined that Vance’s interpretation of the ordo amoris is “not a Christian concept; it’s a Western individualistic one,” as if those were necessarily at odds. And turn on Fox News and you might just catch Border Czar Tom Homan announcing that he has “harsh words for the pope.” What a time to be alive. Incredible things are happening in the Year of Our Lord 2025!
So much ink has been spilled over Vance’s forty-eight-word-long tweet, with the debate drawing in conservatives and nationalists, woke Catholics and leftwing journalists, globalists and effective altruists, and even the Supreme Pontiff himself, that I almost hesitate to add to a veritable flood of commentary. What is more, abstruse theological speculation is not the sort of thing I am particularly immense at, though I would never begrudge the contributions of various theologians and ecclesiastics past and present. For my part, I have always preferred to cast my lot with the likes of Nachman of Breslov, who in his Likutey Moharan maintained that “the greatest wisdom of all wisdoms is not to be wise at all, rather to be pure and honest with simplicity,” for “philosophies and intellectual wisdoms are not needed at all. Only pure and simple faith. Because too much sophistication can greatly damage a person.” And then we have the First Epistle to the Corinthians, in which we are told how “it is written: I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the prudence of the prudent I will reject. Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” For this reason, I tread rather warily, but the very fact that an Augustinian theological construct has become a topic of contentious political debate all throughout the Western world is simply too delicious to pass up.
Continue reading at The American Spectator