Ordo Amoris. To modern ears, the phrase sounds esoteric—like something unearthed from Augustine’s confessions and best left there. Yet at a time when moral confusion abounds and priorities are scrambled by outrage cycles, this ancient idea may offer a map back to sanity. It translates simply enough: the order of love. But its implications are anything but simple. What should we love first? What deserves our deepest loyalty? And what happens when we get that hierarchy wrong?
Ordo Amoris, or the “order of love,” is a philosophical and theological concept rooted in the writings of St Augustine. It suggests that moral clarity depends on loving things in their proper order—giving priority to what matters most, and not misplacing our affections.
The notion, popularised by St Augustine, rests on a stark observation: that moral collapse begins not with hatred, but with misplaced love. When power is prized above principle, when fame outranks truth, when loyalty to tribe overrides loyalty to justice, the result is not just error—it is disorder. Augustine argued that a life rightly lived must be governed by ordo amoris, the proper calibration of our affections. To love things out of proportion is to love them wrongly. And a disordered love, however sincere, produces disordered outcomes—individually, politically, even spiritually.
This insight may sound theological, but it resonates beyond theology. In ethical philosophy, it sits alongside Aristotle’s call for phronesis—practical wisdom that aligns moral action with the good life. In psychological terms, it overlaps with the idea of value hierarchy: that happiness and meaning depend on choosing what to value, and in what order. And in our everyday experience, it echoes whenever we wrestle with the trade-offs between local duty and global compassion, self-fulfilment and family obligation, principle and pragmatism.
To live well, then, is to know what matters most—and to act as if it does.
The relevance of Ordo Amoris becomes painfully clear in the culture wars of the present. We live in a time of moral inflation, where every cause competes for supremacy and every grievance demands front-row seating in our conscience. Universal compassion is championed from screens, even as loyalty to those closest to us—family, neighbours, communities—is framed as parochial, even regressive. Grand declarations of love for humanity are broadcast daily, while love in action—slow, local, sacrificial—is quietly neglected.
Dostoyevsky, with characteristic precision, saw this coming. “Love in dreams,” he wrote, “is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all.” But true love—love that heals and builds—is rarely theatrical. It is often silent, often unseen. It begins, always, with proximity. Not because distant lives don’t matter, but because meaningful love must begin somewhere. And if it begins everywhere at once, it begins nowhere at all.
This is not an argument for isolationism, nor a rebuke to internationalism. Ordo Amoris does not instruct us to choose one form of love over another, but to put them in proportion. To prioritise without excluding. To act with discernment rather than impulse. The parent who tends to their child before joining a protest is not selfish; the citizen who defends their country before saving the world is not small-minded. Love is not a zero-sum game—but it does demand sequencing.
Our failure to grasp this has real consequences. In ethics, we wrestle with competing demands—between climate justice and economic stability, between corporate duty and environmental care, between loyalty to kin and solidarity with strangers. The order of love is not fixed, but it is not arbitrary either. It requires reflection. It requires judgment. It requires a willingness to say: this matters more than that, here and now—and to live accordingly.
What Augustine offered was not a rigid hierarchy but a moral compass. He placed divine love at the apex, believing that once our love for God was right, all other loves would find their place. One need not share his theology to grasp the structure. Substitute “truth” or “the good” or “human dignity” in God’s stead, and the architecture holds. What you place at the top will shape everything beneath it. Misplace the apex, and the whole structure tilts.
It’s tempting, in an age of global interconnection, to speak of all lives with equal concern. And in theory, that is noble. But in practice, it can be paralysing. A love for humanity that ignores the neighbour next door is not virtue—it is abstraction. And abstraction, while rhetorically powerful, is ethically anaemic. We cannot meaningfully love seven billion people. But we can love one person rightly, and from there, the world.
There is, of course, no algorithm for moral prioritisation. No universal flowchart for love. But ordo amoris doesn’t promise certainty—it offers coherence. It challenges us to audit our values, to re-examine our loyalties, to ask whether the things we say we care about are the things we actually live for. It is not a commandment. It is a mirror.
And in an era where moral clarity is often drowned out by moral noise, that may be exactly what we need.
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Further reading
The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis.
A profound exploration of moral philosophy, where Lewis discusses the concept of Ordo Amoris—the “order of loves”—and how emotions should be rightly ordered in alignment with objective values.
The Essence of Happiness: A Tribute to Dietrich von Hildebrand edited by John Henry Crosby and Benedict XVI.
A collection of reflections on Dietrich von Hildebrand’s philosophy, including his views on love, value, and the right ordering of our affections.
Transformation in Christ by Dietrich von Hildebrand.
A deep spiritual and philosophical guide on the transformation of the soul, emphasizing the importance of properly ordering our loves and desires.
The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.
A beautiful meditation on different types of love—affection, friendship, eros, and charity—and how they fit into the proper ordering of human desires.
Josef Pieper: An Anthology by Josef Pieper.
A collection of works from Pieper, a philosopher who expanded on Ordo Amoris, discussing how virtue and love must be rightly ordered to achieve a good life.