Vice-president JD Vance highlighted the Thomist design of thethe order of love To justify President Trump’s policy vis-à-vis migrants: ” We must love his family, then his neighbor, then his community, his fellow citizens, and then, after all that, we can focus on the rest of the world ». If it is fair to say that our love must be primarily involved in those of which we have direct responsibility (and for a political official his fellow citizens), what love is it?
For Augustine as for Thomas, the only true love is the love of God (what is charity) and it is this love that invites you to love others. This is how for Thomas the Order of Love invites you to love God first, then to love yourself (his soul), then loved ones, then others, finally his own body (cf. STII-II, q.26). The preferential love for his loved ones which is perfectly legitimate must at the same time be judged in the light of the love of God which is the source and the criterion. It cannot therefore be the occasion for an action that undermines the dignity of other people, because we must want bliss for all.
If there is a practical ordering of love, this love must also be ordered. If loving my brother or my sister means lying so that he is not accused of the harm he did to another and which I have witnessed, this love is not ordered to good and truth. It is a clan love, the fruit of a tribe selfishness. It is the same if the love of relatives and fellow citizens leads to expeling people in the need that came to the country to flee extreme misery, oppression or persecution.
Unless it is a question of protecting oneself from a threat, this love of relatives would also be in contradiction with the preferential love for the poor whose social doctrine of the Church made one of its principles to judge to public life. Thomas said himself: “ In some cases, we must, for example, help a stranger in a situation of extreme necessity, rather than his own father, if he is not in such an urgent situation ». (ST, II-I-I-II, q.31 a.3)
A deviation of love
It is this selfish deviation of love for loved ones that the parable of the good Samaritan comes to uproot. Like thethe order of lovethis parable does not give a general principle which could apply automatically or simple or even serve to delimit a migration policy. She awakens consciousness and gaze, she shakes up and questions. The pope specifies it: ” The real Amoris Ordo that must be promoted is that which we discover by constantly meditating on the parable of ‘Bon Samaritan’ (cf. LC 10, 25-37), that is to say meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception ». What effect does the parable produce?
This is part of a meeting between Jesus and a legistist who wants to know what to do to have eternal life. Jesus’ first response refers him to the law that the legistist has read: it is a question of loving God and his neighbor. “Do so and you will live” says Jesus. But the question bounces: who is my neighbor? Jesus then left the register of the law to tell a story.
Like any parable, this story shifts the subject, and takes its interlocutor elsewhere than in the register of reason which would like a clear principle to apply directly. Faced with a man assaulted by bandits is left halfway on the road (we know neither his status, nor his religion, nor his ethnicity), a priest and a Levite see him and pass without stopping, but a Samaritan sees it, is seized with bowels and stops to take care of him. Much more he takes him to his mount and entrusts it to an innkeeper to whom he pays the stay. The question of Jesus surprises: “Which of the three showed himself the neighbor of the injured man?” “He who exercised mercy towards him” replies the legistist. “Go and you too do the same,” concludes Jesus.
Sleeve our diseases
The displacement operated is double. A first surprise comes from the fact that the hero of history is not a good Jew but a Samaritan, a heretical enemy. Whoever implements the law of love, one might say, is not the one we expect, but a stranger that could easily be dismissed. The second surprise is the reversal of the question: it is no longer a question of determining who is my neighbor as the legalist wished but to behave next.
The next one is no longer a category (a relative or a distant, a compatriot or a foreigner) but a way of being and acting, an invitation to go beyond our confinements to open up to fraternity. The story that Jesus tells to his interlocutor aroused in him a fundamental human attitude of compassion, that it is a question of implementing in the always changing circumstances of life. Doing “the same” does not say that you have to do the same thing but that it is a question of inventing what must be done by having this attitude. This compassion is the very attitude of God towards us, the love of which we have to love him. The Fathers of the Church have often assimilated the good Samaritan to Christ who came to save us.
Meditate on the good Samaritan to have a good understanding of thethe order of love Allows you to assess the quality of our love towards our loved ones and our fellow citizens. Does love our loved ones make us blind to the misery of men or does it exercise (individually and collectively) to awaken in us this mercy which for Saint Thomas is the sign par excellence of the presence of God?
(tagstotranslate) Social doctrine of the Church