The order of love

Sometimes the whirlwind of U.S.-related news carries interesting topics. One such is the “order of love” (ordo amoris in Latin) that hit the news in February. The controversy itself is not worth revisiting, but it prompted knowledgeable people to write on the subject of love, explaining where the idea of an “order of love” really comes from and what it means.

From Plato to Augustine

The “order of love” is a concept that helps us understand how we may direct the love we experience from God. In our human reality, love needs to be directed because we cannot love everybody equally: those close to us (our spouse, children, parents and friends) have more of a claim on us than others do. We need to divide our time and attention, and this is what the idea of ordering of love helps us think through. The idea goes back to St. Augustine, and he apparently took it from Plato, long before the Christian era.

Some people use the image of concentric circles to explain the “order of love,” suggesting that we should love most those who are closest to us. That does not really work though: it easily leads to the fallacy that we can safely focus on our own and forget those far away. For love to be love it has to be, well, love: the honest desire for the good of the other, and a willingness to be personally committed to that good. That may well involve asking our country to be committed to the good of those far away.

Grant interpreting Strauss

I have recently become interested in the Canadian political philosopher George Grant (1918-1988), also an admirer of Plato. I find Grant’s thinking a useful bridge between the philosophy of Leo Strauss and recognizably Christian and democratic ideas. Strauss’s thought is inscrutable and almost comically backward-looking, but indispensable to understand the politics of our time. Which some people – by no means all – need to do, as Plato and Strauss would say.
George Grant has especially interesting things to say about the relationship between love and knowledge. Reading him helped me realize something about my days as a terrible political science student. I left with an MA but it was a disaster. (Strauss might have appreciated the many ironies of the situation, but my professors did not.)

Grant argues that the objectifying of a thing, as researchers do in scientific study, detaches it from love. Love of one’s research object has become a practical impossibility in science because love isn’t objective. The same applies in political science. But humans universally long for beauty and love, so what happens is that political scholars’ love and longing for beauty are misdirected to their experiments and methodologies. Which are admittedly beautiful sometimes, in the same way a chess puzzle can be beautiful. But if you deeply care about politics instead of experiments, you’re lost – as I was.

Recovering love

Far more interesting than the ordering of love is how we find it. We might think of love as a mountain we climb under the guidance of Jesus. Fatigue and exhaustion may hit us on the road, until at the top we hardly know where we are and who or what we see. But still, the vision remains with us when we descend, waiting until the proper time.

Love is and remains the greatest of all mysteries. Love may often be misdirected, but even so, it can always be recovered and led back to its source and summit. Love is the voice that says, “you are my beloved daughter, you are my beloved son.” May we all hear that soft voice in the present din of our confusion and pain, and be guided by it.