Professor Turley: JD Vance Just Defended 'Ordo Amoris' and it's Profound (Christian) Vision for National and International Unity

 

Transcript of Professor Turley's post's video transcript:

Vice president JD van said something this week that turned a number of heads, including Christian heads, when he used classical Christian theology to defend nationalism and civilizationism:

From the interview with Vance, Vance says "There's this old school, and I think it's a very Christian concept by the way, that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world. Alot of the far-left has completely inverted that they seem to hate the citizens of their own country and care more about people outside their own borders. That is no way to run a society.

And I think the profound difference that Donald Trump brings to the leadership of this country is the the simple concept: America First. It doesn't mean you hate anybody else. It means that you have leadership, and president Trump has been very clear about this, that puts the interest of American citizens first in the same way that the British prime minister should care about Brits and the French should care about the French. We have an American president who cares primarily about Americans and that's a very welcome change.

Interviewer: Who is Xi is looking after? Who is Putin looking after?

Vance: Xi's looking after the Chinese. Putin is looking after the Russians. They're entitled to do that. Thank God we now have an American president who's looking after the citizens of his own country now .

JD went on to explicitly refer to Saint Augstine's biblical concept, in Latin "Ordo Amoris"-- which means the right ordering of our loves; Ordo Amoris.

Bellow is All Turley's Explanations/Commentary:

[Doug here with a reference definition: Ordo amoris, which translates to "order of love," refers to the idea that there is a hierarchy in how we should direct our affections, prioritizing love for family and close relationships before extending that love to others. This concept emphasizes that our obligations and responsibilities to those closest to us should take precedence over those who are farther away.]

And what I was so fascinated by was how so few contemporary Christians understood that. There are all these mocking comments after the interview--who are you Mr Vance, to claim to order my loves? How dare you define what I'm supposed to love? And it's so telling on the total failure of Contemporary American Christianity-- this radicalized and secularized faith, that we saw on despicable display at the National Cathedral a couple of weeks back.

JD is doing more to bring back classical Christianity and its relationship to civilization than any contemporary Christian leader that I can think of over the last two or three decades.

So what is he getting at here with this notion of the Ordo amoris, it's actually not very hard, but I've got to say it's one of the most profound, amazing truths imaginable. We have to remember that in the ancient world, everyone all throughout that world, believed in something called Cosmic Piety-- and this is the notion that the world was filled with Divine meaning and purpose and therefore we're all obligated to conform Our Lives in a harmonious relationship with that Divine meaning and purpose.

[Doug here: also refer to an article: "JD Vance and Thomas Aquinas on Ordo Amoris."]

And so two things were absolutely indispensable to that definition of what it meant to be truly human: 1) We had to know what that Divine meaning and purpose; which is me acquiring wisdom, Sophia, in Greek, and 2) we have to align our desires and our affections, ie., "our loves" with that Divine meaning and purpose--which meant acquiring virtue; wisdom and virtue! The right knowledge and right desire were the two essential elements of what it meant to be truly human in the ancient Greek and biblical world.

We could see this right away in the Bible. We learn in Genesis that God created a world that is good--"Tood" in the Hebrew or "Kolos" in the Greek. Every time God creates something he ascribes to that thing an objective value of goodness. And the key here is that goodness has an order to it. It's got a hierarchy to it. You got to get that. In other words all things are good as God created them and he created an "economy of goods," a hierarchy of "goods or goodness."

So you'll notice in Genesis that when God creates mankind it's the first time he uses the phrase: "and it was VERY good"--note the superlative there. That's essential. Everything else is good; the Sun, the moon, the stars, the Seas, the planets, the animals. All that is good, but when he creates Humanity it's the first time God says "and it was VERY good."

Now that orderly goodness in the world provides an objective model by which we're able to "order our affection." So this is what St Augustine, along with the Greek philosophers, referred to in their definition of virtue. Augustine defined virtue as Ordo Amoris; ie., the right ordering of our love.

So, for example it's good to love a baby and it's good to love a ham sandwich, but if both the baby and the ham sandwich were falling off a ledge, and I rush to save the ham sandwich-- that's a "bad!" Now why is that a "bad?" Is it bad because there's anything inherently bad about the baby or the ham sandwich? No, it's bad because something has gone wrong with my loves, the order or priority of my love, has been dislodged from the priority or economy of "goodness" as God's created them. Yes a ham sandwich is good but a baby is VERY good. A baby is infinitely more good than a ham sandwich.

And we could see this affectional disordering in the full Narrative of Genesis 3. Notice the ways in which Eve's inclinations are described here. "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was desirable-- to make one wise.

Note the emphasis on her desires and her affections and her inclinations--in relation to wisdom. Eve was attracted to the fruit. The fall came about through disordered loves; affections; inclinations dislodged from God's wisdom, from God's hierarchy of “good(s).”

Let's tie it all together here. What is then the greatest commandment? What did Christ say is the greatest commandment? Answer: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart with all thy soul with all thy mind." That's the first, and greatest, commandment. And the second is "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." On these two Commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

What's the greatest commandment? At the heart of God's Commandments is the Divine call to love rightly. And we love rightly by ordering our loves in accordance with God's economy of "good(s)." And in the Christian world this was of course fulfilled on the Cross. For on the Cross we see love in its ultimate expression. This is why the cross, though an instrument of torture and execution, transforms into an image of beauty because it reveals the true nature of God as infinite love and thereby awakens a comparable love within us and thus transforms into a tree of life.

So how does this ordered love work itself out in terms of family and church and nation and the like? Well there's another key classical term here that you might want to write down. It's indispensable for how rightly ordered “loves” are lived out and that's the ancient Greek term "Paideia."

(It actually literally means "child," so we use it today when we take our kids for example to the pediatrician we're literally taking them to a Paideia-trician or Pediatrician)

But in the ancient world, a few centuries before Christ, Paideia became synonymous with the Latin term "Cultura" from which we derive "culture." -- This means that Paideia referred to those Values, Customs and Traditions that we pass down to our children.

And what's so interesting here is that St Paul in his letter to the Ephesians, chapter 6, He commands Ephesian fathers to raise their children what he calls the Paideia of the Lord. In other words the church was tasked with raising children of the church in a distinctively Christian culture. And what that meant, as we learn throughout Paul's letters, is that Christians were to transform their own cultures; ie., their Greek, their Jewish, their Roman cultures into unique "Paidudic" expressions of the Christian Gospel. And that's so key.

From St Paul and onwards, the church fulfills its mission to spread the gospel of the the good news of the Christian Gospel-- not by denying culture or despising culture-- (those were the gnostics; they were Heretics) Instead the church fulfills its mission to spread the good news of the Christian Gospel, not despising culture but rather THROUGH culture, through its transformation, through its Transfiguration.

That's exactly how it worked out in the ancient world. That's how it worked out historically. Paul's command was for churches to cultivate a distinctively Christian Paideia that would transfigure the whole of the Greco-Roman world.

And to fully close the loop here, the classical conception of Paideia, centered on cultivating two values. And I bet you can guess what those two values were! What are the two Central values that Paideia was supposed to cultivate in each child? Answer: wisdom and virtue; knowing rightly and loving rightly.

And so this is why when you see particularly Eastern Orthodox Theologies and Church and State today in the modern world (they're the most ancient part of this archo future world that's rising), those theologies center on what scholars call "civilizational nationalism."

So that's why we have Russian Orthodoxy, Greek Orthodoxy, Serbian, Roman Bulgarian, Armenian orthodoxies; The church's political theology is one of civilizational nationalism. In other words, the church fosters a transformative vision of the culture, in which that church is embedded, so wherever the church finds itself, it's called to create a distinctively Christian Paideia from that culture.

And that always involves a redeemed vision of State and politics--so there's no hard separation between church and state here. There's an Institutional separation between church and state; ie, the church is not the state, the state's not the church. There's an Institutional separation but not a cultural one. That's key.

The church fosters and enacts a transformative vision of culture and then, the idea here, is that is that's like a home base to take that transformative vision and reach out to more and more Nations. A Christian civilization is formed when more and more Nations join this like-minded Paideia of cultures. So an international fellowship, a Christian civilization is created of like-minded Nations--grounded in a common ethic of wisdom and virtue-- of knowing rightly and loving rightly.

So it's NEVER a matter of not loving the foreigner or the migrant or other countries-- they're swept into this vision as well--but through the love of One's own culture and nation!

This is the diametric opposite of what's advocated by the woke Left--which is to unreservedly love the migrant while hating and despising one's own culture! That's what we saw by the way at that National Cathedral Fiasco a couple of weeks back.

The Christian Vision involves love all the way through -- while the Secular Liberal Vision involves the love of one and the hate of the other.

So the Christian Mission is never at the expense of either one's own culture or populations outside that culture. The Christian Mission is realized through the love filled transformation of both. And the more cultures that you can transform, the more vast a Christian civilization becomes! That in effect is the classical Christian Theology of Ordo Amoris and how it relates to a Theology of nation and civilization.

Ordo Amoris is cultivated in and through a distinctively Christian Paideia--which cultivates a rightly ordered love that transforms your own National culture which then extends out with the same love to reach other nations. And the more National cultures that are thusly transformed ---a distinctively Christian civilization arises and then, in turn, Redeems the World! It transfigures the Cosmos!

THAT is the Ordo Amoris. And no one in modern political memory articulated that profound vision more vaithfully than our very own vice president himself; JD Vance.