It is hard to say which is more remarkable: Patristic/Scholastic theological concepts being invoked by the Vice President of the United States of America, or the Pope feeling the need to put out the fire.

The ordo amoris… sure. Of course. There is an implicit ontological hierarchization of love; love is in the will, which reaches out beyond itself to the objects of its love according to their various dignities and capacities, like a drenching rain that collects most in lakes, then large basins, and even in small jars. Note that none of this involves putting a lid on anything, so that it doesn’t get a drop.

What the ordo amoris refers to, first and foremost, is the primacy of love for God. Secondarily, it orders the just claims of those drawing upon the love of an individual. Whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. Further, to neglect those nearest to us under the pretext of loving more broadly and generously, is not really to exercise love; it is specious. To skip over Lazarus on the doorstep to volunteer at the charity auction is at least to some degree a matter of self-satisfaction, rather than charity. The issue is not merely quantitative: the self-will and sin of omission actually degrades or depletes the graces that foster charity. There is less love being generated to pass along. It’s like spending your last cent on irresistible deals at Costco while you have nothing in the bank and no paycheck coming in for the rent. This much is all common sense; this shouldn’t prove too esoteric or controversial.

But trying to fit rules a priori to the manifold ethical dilemmata that surely arise as competing demands beat down on our finite affective resources (while cultivating receptivity to the grace of supernatural charity, no less) is trickier. To begin with, the dual commandments of love of God and love of neighbor are not, in fact, extricable one from the other. Here I quote from Deus Caritas Est, because it is one of my favorite documents; the sources of authority on this matter would be innumerable:

Love of God and love of neighbor are thus inseparable, they form a single commandment. But both live from the love of God who has loved us first. No longer is it a question, then, of a “commandment” imposed from without and calling for the impossible, but rather of a freely-bestowed experience of love from within, a love which by its very nature must then be shared with others. Love grows through love. Love is “divine” because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process it makes us a “we” which transcends our divisions and makes us one, until in the end God is “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).

Pope Francis contrasts this life of love with the indifference of the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan, who let their social roles in formal religion alienate them from their suffering fellow man, and from their own humanity as well:

An injured man lay on the roadside. The people walking by him did not heed their interior summons to act as neighbors; they were concerned with their duties, their social status, their professional position within society. They considered themselves important for the society of the time, and were anxious to play their proper part. The man on the roadside, bruised and abandoned, was a distraction, an interruption from all that; in any event, he was hardly important.

St. Thomas Aquinas shows us the pitfalls, even for the greatest of theological masters, of confining love to itemized a priori categories. The allocation of love by means of an exterior template leads to conclusions which we might find very harsh. As filtered through the rigors of a complex debt system, St. Thomas does indeed maintain that a man is to love his fellow citizen above the stranger… and his father above his mother; both parents above his wife and his children; and, above all non-kindred, his civic ruler. All this is surprisingly, peculiarly – and disturbingly – deontological.

Let’s look more closely at St. Thomas’s work here:

For father and mother are loved as principles of our natural origin. Now the father is principle in a more excellent way than the mother, because he is the active principle, while the mother is a passive and material principle.

While Thomas does raise the objection that a mother should be loved more, having served and suffered more in bearing and raising her child, he considers that objection so weak and its refutation so self-evident that he feels no need to reply to it. (Really? I’m lost.)

As for marriage, Thomas cites Aristotle in an objection, albeit not unapprovingly – an objection specifically as to whether a wife should have pride of place in a man’s heart: “…in this friendship there are the motives of utility [and] pleasure”. The Philosopher, and Thomas with him, generously admit the possibility (under ideal conditions) of virtue among a man’s motives: “… and also of virtue, if husband and wife are virtuous.” A woman, to the extent that she is loved, is loved on the basis that she is part and parcel of her husband, a good subordinated to him, valued insofar as it would be irrational and self-subverting for him to fail to esteem any of his wealth:

The words of the Apostle do not mean that a man ought to love his wife equally with himself, but that a man’s love for himself is the reason for his love of his wife, since she is one with him.

Furthermore, a man ought to love the recipients of his charity over his benefactor, because the display of his own virtue gives him pleasure.

There’s a reason why none of the modern popes have had recourse to the language of the ordo amoris. In the tomes and essays and lectures and homilies of Ratzinger, I cannot find even a passing reference. This is not Thomism at its best. It presumes, and is built up from, Aristotelian biology – an understanding in which a woman’s contribution to a new human life is likened to the wood which is acted on by a craftsman. Male preborns are ensouled at about forty days after conception, female at ninety. No one would want to stand by the entirety of the Summa’s content on this question, especially given its consequences for bioethics.

But here’s the thing: Isn’t Thomas, absent the privilege of modern science, simply adopting ancient error well-established since antiquity? After all, the secret chamber of the womb could not be known apart from the science of sonography, so only quickening could have afforded a posteriori evidence of the preborn’s presence. A few wrong data points do not discredit a sound logical framework, and to cherry-pick such to shame the Angelic Doctor is sophistry, bad faith. This is incontestably true, and I would stand corrected… but for two things:

1. The understanding of quickening is not at all accidental to Thomistic anthropology; and,
2. What is actually held by Thomas is in no way identical to the Aristotelian position.

This is generally not understood, but Thomas believes that life begins at conception. The point is that what is indicated by quickening is not life, but hominization. The biological act of the parents (well, mostly of the father) results in the generation of an animal being. Again, via the father exclusively as well, sin is transmitted in a lineage unbroken since Adam. So mom is gestating what is essentially (for all its sheer fetal adorableness) an irrational and corrupt little beast (i.e. a brute- or sensitive-souled animal). At some point down the road, when the small monster’s body is so disposed, God directly creates an immortal intellective soul, infuses it into the being, and overrides the previous form. (This tracks closely to the reconciliation of evolution to the divine origin of man derived in response to Ven. Pius XII’s opening to evolutionary biology in Humani Generis; it is as if the evolutionary leap needed to be accomplished anew in each human life individually.)

All of this, let it be known, occasions no end of logical knots; Ratzinger notes in his Eschatology that Thomas’s model of the body being made human only through delayed ensoulment casts into question the “genuineness of [human] parenthood.” Taken literally, it would also imply that any one person among the blessed would have had two different bodies, the quotidian lived body and the glorified body; worse still, only by a theological patch-over could the body that lay three days in the Holy Sepulcher be the Body of Christ at all. Aristotle, not needing to incorporate the concepts of immortality or ex nihilo creation, let alone such theological considerations as Ratzinger raises, holds something much more tenable and intuitable, though unraveling it would take us deep, deep into the territory of arcania, with complicated talk of entelechy and four-fold causalities.

None of this diminishes in any way the Angelic Doctor’s unique insight on soul and body, the genius of which I have lauded elsewhere. Yet suffice it to say that Thomas’s anthropology, which is also the anthropology underpinning the vision of the ordo amoris as handed down from him, is notably flawed. According to his system, parents (even fathers!) do not have the dignity of co-creative partnership with God. Human beings are not in fact equal one to another. Worse still, every human life, rather than having arisen from an act of love, begins not only less than human, but worse than the brute beasts which, while equally without rational souls, are at least spared the indignity of being steeped in sin besides.

Personhood and relationality in their full grandeur – as they are found both in Scripture and in contemporary Church teaching – are absent from the imperatives of the ordo amoris, as it is deduced from certain of the more deficient premises of the Thomistic model. In defense of the thesis that we should love others unequally, we find in the Summa justification by way of what is “becoming to the nature of that thing.” As Thomas explains it, “in earth the inclination of gravity is greater than in water, because it is becoming to earth to be beneath water.”

An everything-knows-its-place cosmos, wherein every good can be appraised to utmost precision within a predetermined calculus, a creation of betas fittingly beneath alphas, yields an oddly supernaturalized utilitarianism, and a psychology of disjointed enclosed selves, navigating a stiflingly closed system.

In the histories and parables of the Bible, we often find the order of a fixed justice utterly confounded. The erring sheep is preferred to the ninety-nine obedient; the worker who commences at the final hour is compensated in equal measure to the one who labored from daybreak; the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering Heaven; the last shall be first; God himself gives his only Son. In the Old Testament we encounter Jonathan, who loved friend more than father or kingdom; St. Aelred writes in his Treatise on Spiritual Friendship, as quoted in the Office of Readings:

Jonathan, outstanding among all young men, took no heed of his royal lineage or his hope of the throne, but allied himself with David the servant and made him his equal in friendship before the Lord.

Fast forward to our modern era, and documents such as Humanae Vitae of Pope St. Paul VI – an encyclical more often cited (by friend and foe alike) than actually read. Human beings are revealed as simultaneous collaborators with the divine, according to a fully unitive dimension of mutuality, in which each spouse loves the other “for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself” – inverting the reasoning put forth by Thomas. The Church now stands firm on the full, integral personhood of an individual from the moment of conception. In their import, these teachings are not principally ethical, but anthropological, and more, metaphysical. The alienation of God from the immediate transmission of life, the alienation of the sexes, the alienation of the individual from his or her natural heart are in the same move all overcome. By this is established the foundation of a matrix of relationality in which all persons are held. If sin is to be taken as lineal, communio is expansive and exponential. Bloodlines and nation-states give way to universal fraternity. To return to Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI states: “The Second Vatican Council rightly observed that “among the signs of our times, one particularly worthy of note is a growing, inescapable sense of solidarity between all peoples.” The ascending and descending passionate love of God for humanity found in the same encyclical of Benedict, the spontaneous affection of the Sacred Heart described by Francis in Dilexit nos, the defense of the dignity of women in Sts. John XXIII and John Paul II, culminating in the recognition of the perfect discipleship of the Blessed Mother – would it not be tragic to turn away from all of this beautiful and joyful development of doctrine to seek comfort in the past?

In closing, let us return to Fratelli tutti, and see the ultimate futility of founding our judgments of the value of others, and thus their claim on our love, on roles:

It is remarkable how the various characters in the story change, once confronted by the painful sight of the poor man on the roadside. The distinctions between Judean and Samaritan, priest and merchant, fade into insignificance. Now there are only two kinds of people: those who care for someone who is hurting and those who pass by; those who bend down to help and those who look the other way and hurry off. Here, all our distinctions, labels and masks fall away: it is the moment of truth. Will we bend down to touch and heal the wounds of others?

In addition to the works cited above, I found considerable guidance and clarification in Kathleen J. Austin, Aristotle, Aquinas, and the history of quickening, presented toward the degree of Master of Arts in Religious Studies at McGill University in 2003.

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Image: “J. D. Vance” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Gage Skidmore