The Order Of Love (Ordo Amoris): Proximity, Not Ethnicity (Part 1)

 By Dr. R. Scott Clark - Posted at The Heidelblog:

Published February 10, 2025

The Christian Nationalists have discovered a new toy: Augustine’s language about the “order of love” or the “order of charity” (ordo amoris), and some of them are putting it to the service of racism and kinism.1 This calls for some explanation and clarification. Augustine’s discussion (more below) of the “order of charity” is seminal, and Thomas Aquinas expanded on it at some length in his Summa Theologica in the thirteenth century. Among Reformed writers, as far as I can see, though the idea is present, the expression ordo amoris does not occur frequently. For example, an electronic search of a large database of Protestant texts produced very few results among the European Reformed writers. The Cocceian theologian Abraham Heidanus (1597–1678) discussed it in two different volumes.2 William Tyndale (c.1495–1536) referred to it briefly.3 Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) discussed it briefly, as did John Jewel and a few other English theologians of the period. But it does not seem to have been a major topic/locus per se of the Reformed.

For our purposes we will focus first on Augustine, who discussed it in his treatise, On The Good of Marriage (De bono coniugali), written c. 401, about fourteen years after he came to faith and was baptized, and between four and six years after he left the monastery to be made Bishop of Hippo Regius (now Annaba), a small town in what today is Algeria, on the Mediterranean Coast.

This is a small work, barely mentioned in the several standard resources and secondary works I reviewed, but fortunately Augustine himself commented on this work in his Retractiones (AD 427).4 He wrote On The Good of Marriage against “the heresy of Jovinian” († c. 405), who denied that “virginity as such was better than thankful eating” and who “attacked the tendency to associate differences of reward in heaven with different earthly states (virgins, widows, wives; monks, priests, laymen), and shared the disbelief of Helvidius in the perpetual virginity of Mary.”5 Augustine was unhappy that Jovinian’s teaching, which anticipated the Reformation in this regard, was leading nuns to leave the convent for marriage.6 Augustine also blamed Jovinian for shattering “the holy celibacy of holy men by reminding them of and comparing them with fathers and husbands.”7 He was so offended he denounced Jovinian as a “monster.”8 He wrote On The Good of Marriage to “oppose the secretly spreading poisons with all the power which the Lord gave me.”9 Those who opposed Jovinian in Rome thought it best to praise celibacy, but Augustine, perhaps counterintuitively, opposed him by praising marriage.10 The translators of a modern edition of this work explain, “By calling marriage a good, St. Augustine immediately refuted the chief charge of Manichaeism. For him, the good of marriage was threefold: offspring (proles), fidelity (fides), sacrament (sacramentum).”11 The latter signifies the mystery of Christ and his church (Eph 5:32).12

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See also:

• The Order Of Love (Ordo Amoris): Proximity, Not Ethnicity (Part 2) | The Heidelblog

Series Link:

• Ordo Amoris | The Heidelblog