US Vice-President JD Vance created a stir in Christian circles recently when he made a public reference to ' Ordo amoris ', which in English translates as ' Order of love '. The term, which is rarely heard today, was first used by Augustine of Hippo, later Saint Augustine in his 5th century CE book, The City of God.
According to Augustine, God should be the ultimate object of all love, followed by love of self, not in the sense of selfishness, but in being close to God. Then comes love for one's neighbour, followed by the community at large.
Eight hundred years later, Thomas Aquinas, who was later canonised elaborated on this concept in his unfinished work, Summa Theologiae, by enumerating a hierarchy of love with God as the fountainhead, followed by one's family and expanding outwards, like ripples in a pond.
In his use of the term, however, Vance politicised this theological idea to further the Trump administration 's anti-immigration policies by asserting that it is a Christian duty to favour one's own people over outsiders.
This earned him a rebuke from Pope Francis and other Christian authorities, who cited the exhortation of Jesus to love one's neighbour as oneself.
Christian doctrine apart, the genetic science of sociobiology which is predicated on the indomitable urge of the human gene to perpetuate itself has formulated a similar calculus of love, without however positing a divine being at its apex.
Our genes, in the inbuilt desire to propagate themselves, are predisposed to love our offspring and blood relations, then the extended family, and then progress through genetic closeness based on ethnicity, and other forms of common kinship by way of caste and creed.
Such evaluations of empathy, always problematic, have reached a crisis point in our current era of the sanctuary-seeking refugee, fleeing extreme economic hardship, murderous strife, or other existential threat.
Palestinian or Ukrainian, Bangladeshi or Rohingya, the refugee belongs to no community but the community of the dispossessed. It is a community that is tragically growing as the world raises more and more barriers of isolationism.
Such divisiveness is a fatal flaw in the Anthropocene epoch when man-made climate change threatens with extinction not just one country, or portion of the globe, but the whole of Planet Earth.
The Upanishads sum up the universal calculus of love in a single 2-word phrase: The world is one family.
The looming spectre of global extinction has turned that summation from a pious mantra to an urgent call for collective action, involving not only separate nations or entities, but the whole of humankind.
The word 'humankind' conjoins the essence of the human with the connotations of 'kind' in all senses of that word. Which necessarily includes all and excludes none as being children of a lesser Gaia, ancient and ageless Goddess of Earth.
Centuries ago John Donne wrote: "No man is an island/Entire of itself;/Every man is a piece of the continent,/A part of the main...any man's death diminishes me,.../And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;/It tolls for thee."
How long will we remain unhearing of the tolling of the bell?
Authored by: Jug Suraiya
According to Augustine, God should be the ultimate object of all love, followed by love of self, not in the sense of selfishness, but in being close to God. Then comes love for one's neighbour, followed by the community at large.
Eight hundred years later, Thomas Aquinas, who was later canonised elaborated on this concept in his unfinished work, Summa Theologiae, by enumerating a hierarchy of love with God as the fountainhead, followed by one's family and expanding outwards, like ripples in a pond.
In his use of the term, however, Vance politicised this theological idea to further the Trump administration 's anti-immigration policies by asserting that it is a Christian duty to favour one's own people over outsiders.
This earned him a rebuke from Pope Francis and other Christian authorities, who cited the exhortation of Jesus to love one's neighbour as oneself.
Christian doctrine apart, the genetic science of sociobiology which is predicated on the indomitable urge of the human gene to perpetuate itself has formulated a similar calculus of love, without however positing a divine being at its apex.
Our genes, in the inbuilt desire to propagate themselves, are predisposed to love our offspring and blood relations, then the extended family, and then progress through genetic closeness based on ethnicity, and other forms of common kinship by way of caste and creed.
Such evaluations of empathy, always problematic, have reached a crisis point in our current era of the sanctuary-seeking refugee, fleeing extreme economic hardship, murderous strife, or other existential threat.
Palestinian or Ukrainian, Bangladeshi or Rohingya, the refugee belongs to no community but the community of the dispossessed. It is a community that is tragically growing as the world raises more and more barriers of isolationism.
Such divisiveness is a fatal flaw in the Anthropocene epoch when man-made climate change threatens with extinction not just one country, or portion of the globe, but the whole of Planet Earth.
The Upanishads sum up the universal calculus of love in a single 2-word phrase: The world is one family.
The looming spectre of global extinction has turned that summation from a pious mantra to an urgent call for collective action, involving not only separate nations or entities, but the whole of humankind.
The word 'humankind' conjoins the essence of the human with the connotations of 'kind' in all senses of that word. Which necessarily includes all and excludes none as being children of a lesser Gaia, ancient and ageless Goddess of Earth.
Centuries ago John Donne wrote: "No man is an island/Entire of itself;/Every man is a piece of the continent,/A part of the main...any man's death diminishes me,.../And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;/It tolls for thee."
How long will we remain unhearing of the tolling of the bell?
Authored by: Jug Suraiya
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