October 6, 2024

Augustine and Rightly Ordered Love – Discourses on Minerva

Augustine is the great theologian and philosopher of love, of the will. He famously described the philosophy of love as a relationship of order – Augustine’s conception of rightly ordered love having a dramatic impact on the philosophy of love in the western world. But what, exactly, did Augustine mean when he described proper loving as rightly ordered love, ordo amoris? To understand this we must first begin with an understanding of Christian theology – God and the image of God in humans.

God, in Christianity, is not what many ignorant and stupid critics – like the New Atheists – proclaim God to be: a flying spaghetti monster or some big man in the sky. God is Love itself and Truth itself in Christianity. God is Love, as the author of the First Epistle of John writes. God is the Spirit of Truth, as Christ says in the Gospel of John. So God is Love itself and Truth itself, meaning that to be made in the image of God is to be made in the image of love and truth, love and rationality. As Augustine explains in De Trinitate, the heart is the epicenter of human love and the soul is the rational intellect. This is why, for instance, in many famous paintings of Augustine, you see him holding a flaming heart, a symbol of love, in a unified symmetry with his mind, the soul, united with Divine Light from above: God. As Augustine says, to be made in the image of God means to be made in love for love and in wisdom for wisdom.

The reality of love and truth are not antagonistic to each other. That God is Love and Truth, Will and Reason, means that they are properly meant to be united realities. God is understood through agency: will and love, and God is understood through conceptualization: truth and rationality. So too, then, are humans a symbiotic unity of will and idea, agency and conceptualization, desire and rationality.

This helps us begin to understand Augustine’s various declarations, like in the Confessions, when he proclaims “my weight is my love, where I go, my love is carrying me” and “I was in love with the idea of love” and “I desired to love and be loved.” Furthermore, as in De Trinitate, he explains that properly loving requires a knowledge of God in creaturely reality and nature:

This word is conceived in love of either the creature or the creator, that is of the changeable nature or unchangeable truth; which means either in covetousness or in charity. Not that the creature is not to be loved, but if that love is related to the creator it will be no longer covetousness but charity…the lower creature should be used to bring us to God, the creature on a par should be enjoyed, but in God.

Rightly ordered love is not merely some psychological mechanism or internal schema of ordered hierarchy. It is, instead, a coming to know the objects of your affection, of your gaze, of your attention.

To love something or someone is to know it deeply. When you claim to love history that implies you know a lot about it. When you claim to love someone, that implies you know a lot about them. When you care for someone you love, you do things they love. You do things they love precisely because you know what they love.

The problem of rightly ordered love, then, is the problem of knowing. Can I love best without knowing about what I am loving? Augustine argues that to not know properly about the objects of your affection is to suffer from a deficient love. It is not that the love itself is bad or wrong, for love can never be bad since love itself is God, as Augustine says in his commentaries on the First Epistle of John, being the first Christian theologian to invert the phrase God is Love to also mean “Love is God” (dilectio Deus est). It is that our knowledge of the object is incomplete, and in that incompleteness the satiation of our desire is left incomplete, leading to the “negative” feelings of deficiency.

Let us return, here, to Augustine’s statement of creaturely love in De Trinitate:

Note what Augustine importantly says, it is “[n]ot that the creature is not be loved, but if that love is related to the creator it will be no longer covetousness but charity…the lower creatures should be used to bring us to God, the creature on a par should be enjoyed, but in God.” This is what rightly ordered love is all about: a proper knowledge of what creaturely things, objects, represent. All material reality is a symbol, an image, of the beauty and love that is God. Therefore, to love a tree (properly) means to love God through the tree. This explains the Catholic (and Orthodox) aesthetic theology of images. Catholics do not love or worship images, as some claim, but they love God through the icon, through the beautiful statue, through the image and symbol that directs your heart and soul to the divine reality of God. To love another human properly means to see God in them, to recognize God in the other. When reciprocated, this produces the joyful passions of love. When God is stripped from the symbols and icons of material things, this becomes “idolatry” and when God is removed from the human being, this leads to abuse, misuse, and the feeling of being utilized for another’s self-satisfaction or empowerment and nothing more.

Rightly ordered love is really a loving with proper understanding of things. And what is the proper understanding of things? All things lead you to God, Love itself. When you know this soul and heart, mind and body, will and idea, are made complete. This is the restoration of wholeness that Augustine speaks of in De Trinitate. It is not the discovery of a missing puzzle piece or missing part of you as our language sometimes implies – similar to the myth of love offered by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium. Instead, wholeness, the restoration of wholeness, comes with knowledge. When Love and Rationality, Love and Reason, Love and the Truth, are finally together, that is what rightly ordered love is. As Augustine elsewhere explains, to know is to love, and to love is to know.

When we do not know what we love, we suffer from that deficient loving. The deficient loving is not because of any wrongness in love itself, but the result of our lack of knowledge of the object of our affection. The Tree, worshiped and love as God, instead of as a means to love God, means we have misunderstood the tree and therefore our love will never be satisfied. The human or the self, worshipped and love as God, instead of as a means to love God, means we have misunderstood the other person (and ourself) and therefore our love will never be satisfied. But when we come to know God through all things, for all things are a symbol of God’s beauty and love for Augustine – yes, even the maggot and fly as he confusedly mumbles in his treatise The Literal Meaning of Genesis (which, by the way, is about understanding creation as the expression of God’s love) – then we have rightly ordered love. We cannot have rightly ordered love without proper knowledge. And proper knowledge entails God in all things. For all things exist because of love, and all things exist for love. And Love is God.

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Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView. He is writer, classicist, and historian. He has written on the arts, culture, classics, literature, philosophy, religion, and history for numerous journals, magazines, and newspapers. He is the author of Muses of a Fire, Finding Arcadia, The Odyssey of Love and the Politics of Plato, and a contributor to the College Lecture Today and Making Sense of Diseases and Disasters. He holds master’s degrees in philosophy and religious studies (biblical studies & theology) from the University of Buckingham and Yale, and a bachelor’s degree in economics, history, and philosophy from Baldwin Wallace University.

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