Hierarchical Priority Lists and Order of Love

There is a popular Christian school of thought that one's priorities and duty should reflect the importance of the persons or things involved in a correct order.  For example, a hierarchy of priority would be:

1. God
2. One's children
3. Spouse 
4. Home 
5. Job 
6. Extended family and friends

I would like to explore this idea, its strengths and weaknesses as a helpful model and tool, and what other thinkers have written about this subject. First off, for this process, I’m going to talk about priority and love interchangeably.  One’s priority is where one’s heart is, and is an expression of one’s love/care/responsibility/duty

A hierarchical priority list model makes me think about St. Augustine’s “ordo amoris”, “order of love”, and of the recent public disagreement between J.D. Vance and Pope Francis on how to interpret it.  This made me want to do some research about “order of love” and the debate to see if it would enlighten me on how to view and implement something like a priority list.

Augustine’s key idea was that virtue consisted in loving things in the right order.  This to him was:

• God is loved highest
• Human beings are loved as persons made in God’s image
• Material things are loved as lesser goods

The “order” is not mainly about who gets loved first, but about what is ultimately more important and how intensely or appropriately we love different things. He was not talking so much about “circles of people”, as much as a hierarchy of goods and relationships.

Vance, I read, based his interpretation on a simplified version of St. Augustine’s teaching which consists of a “concentric circle” model of love/care/responsibility/obligation;  (family → neighbor → city → nation → world).  Vance used this model to argue that one’s compassion “belongs first” to one’s own group.  According to him, the United States should therefore love citizens first over immigrants and refugees for which they have a lesser obligation.  He takes this to the point of denying immigrants and refugees completely.  Under Augustinian thought we do have stronger responsibilities to those closer to us.  Augustine wrote that we should give “special regard” to those closer by circumstance. However, Augustine never reduced love to a moral priority system that justifies neglecting distant others.

Pope Francis corrected Vance saying, “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests…”.  Pointing to the Good Samaritan, Francis explained that, the true model consists of a form of love that creates a “fraternity open to all, without exception”.  Love, and with it our establishment of priority, according to Francis, is not a widening circle of partiality.

I find Jesus’ teaching on the idea of priorities of love or obligation as different in degree from Augustine.  Where Augustine talks of giving “special regard” to those who by circumstances are closer, Jesus consistently widens the circle of who we should define as close, who should be shown no lesser love than family, tribe, religious group, or due to status, wealth, or nationality.  

Jesus’s teaching points to expanding non-preferential love.

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’

But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you…

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?

Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others?

Do not even pagans do that?” (Matthew 5:43–47)

“even sinners love those who love them.” Luke 6:32–34

I explored some of these ideas a number of years ago in the blog, I Like Rules and Jesus Scares Me.  I wrote about how when I was in High School, the staff advisor for our Interschool Christian Fellowship group taught us the hierarchy of Christian duty he had learned at his Church.  Our first duty and allegiance is to God, then one's spouse and family, then one's job, employer, and nation.  I argued that this would make the difficult choices between competing concerns much easier, but it is not the teaching of Jesus.  

Often our most difficult moral choices involve two legitimate demands from different people or groups that are mutually exclusive.  To show your love and give your assistance to one means withholding them from the other.  Whichever side you pick, someone is going to get hurt or neglected.  A system like the one above allows you to make some of these choices in a way that absolves you from responsibility and guilt for your harm or neglect of the side not chosen and see yourself as "in the right".  One can appeal to the authority of, "family comes first", to justify a decision and still appear righteous.  Again, this does not follow Jesus' teaching.

… Without absolute law and authority to make our decisions for us, how do we decide when to put the interest and needs of ourselves over others and to what extent?  The Gospels tells us that Jesus has sent us his spirit to guide us.  This is the spirit behind the principles of the Law, "justice, mercy and faithfulness" (Matt. 23:23).  It is also the spirit of love, compassion, and inclusion demonstrated in the Gospel stories of Jesus and his parables.  We are called to make the best and most balanced decisions we can by the prompting of this spirit with grace both for others and ourselves. It is messy and filled with uncertainty and lacks the assurance, self justification and lack of moral responsibility one can find in Law and authoritative directives.  However, it is a path of maturity, of accountability, of truth and integrity, the path of the Way of Jesus.

Leo Tolstoy, in his book, “The Kingdom of God Is within You”, argues that Jesus’s teaching about expanding love of the other is realized through movement towards an ideal, that we will never be fully there, but it is in through the ongoing expansion that we become Christ like.  He also stresses that this expanding love comes not through adherence to rules and systems, but through the personal growth and expansion of love in our own hearts.

Life, according to the Christian teaching, is a motion toward divine perfection. No condition, according to this teaching, can be higher or lower than another.

It is natural for any one to love himself, and every person loves himself without any special incitement; to love my tribe, which supports and defends me, to love my wife, the joy and helpmate of my life, my children, the pleasure and hope of my life, and my parents, who have given me life and an education, is natural: and this kind of love, though far from being as strong as the love of self, is met with quite frequently.

...the recognition of self as this son of God, whose chief quality is love, satisfies also all those demands for the widening of the sphere of love, to which the man of the social conception of life was brought.

There, with a greater and ever greater widening of the sphere of love for the salvation of the personality, love was a necessity and was applied to certain objects,—self, the family, society, humanity; with the Christian conception of life, love is not a necessity and is not adapted to anything, but is an essential quality of man's soul. Man does not love because it is advantageous for him to love this man or these men, but because love is the essence of his soul,—because he cannot help loving.

The Christian teaching consists in pointing out to man that the essence of his soul is love, that his good is derived not from the fact that he will love this or that man, but from the fact that he will love the beginning of everything, God, whom he recognizes in himself through love, and so will love everybody and everything.

This brings me to another concern I have with the hierarchical priority/love model, and that’s the definition of what it means to love or prioritize God and how it screws up the order below.  I think of the Shema Jesus quoted saying, 

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.  And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  

The two commandments are linked and synonymous.  To love and prioritize God is to love and prioritize your neighbour, as defined in the story of the Good Samaritan as including those of different tribes and religions.  Not your family first, your employer, your tribe, your nation.  There are no levels in Jesus story. Their is no hierarchy in 'my neighbour'.  I explored this theme in the blog Jesus Was Not "Pro-Family" Or "Pro-Nation".  

The problem that I mentioned earlier about prioritizing loving God over family is that, by the definition above, loving or prioritizing God means loving and prioritizing the rest of humanity and by making a hierarchy of priority where God is above family and others you are then saying that you should make humanity as a whole a higher priority than your family, job, or friends.

Another concern with this specific hierarchical model is that it doesn’t have a place for self.  “love your neighbor as yourself” implies that you can’t love others any more than the love you put into yourself.  And that’s where I think the hierarchical model is only useful if you follow it loosely and allow the priorities to change and ebb and flow with need.  There are times when you have to surrender your obligations to others, even family members, to look after yourself.  Sometimes the good of the few outweigh the good for the many.  Sometimes the interests of someone “lower on the list” needs to take precedent over someone higher” Family may be more important than your job/employer, but neglecting your obligations to your employment over family can lead to you not advancing in your job and affect your ability to meet your families needs.  In extreme cases it could mean losing your job and forcing your family into unpleasant circumstances.  In this way meeting the interests of your job, while maybe not to all the short term immediate interests of family, gives precedence to their greater interests.

Now that I’ve explored these different viewpoints, what do I think about how to apply a hierarchical priority model?  First, I have to say that as I respect Jesus’ teaching as foundational to Western thought and my cultural heritage, I see the deification of him and his teaching as metaphorical, not literal, so that Jesus can be wrong or too extreme in some circumstances and questioning him is valid.  And who knows if his words around family were hyperbole, meant less as a literal guide, but as a shock statement to turn the thinking of the times on its head and make people question.  As well, the figure of Jesus is portrayed as a young single man with no wife or children, and no teaching or example on how those relationships should figure into the lives of those who follow his teachings.  Those who wrote the Gospels were also not in a position to give guidance on family relationships except to encourage those who joined their communities to break with families that did not support them.  There was also a stream of apocalyptic thinking that removed priority from establishing families. 

Although there is a stream of thought in the Gospel that interprets the Jewish contemporary idea of the “age to come” in a metaphorical sense, where “the Kingdom of God is within you” and is where/when God’s will is done, there is also what seems to be a more literal stream where it was expected in the writer’s lifetime that Jesus would return to usher in the new age where creation would be renewed with heaven and earth re-born and the resurrection of the dead.  All three synoptic Gospels have Jesus stating, “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven.”  (Matthew 22:30; Mark 12:25; Luke 20:34–36).  The views on marriage and family relationships and priority/duty of a people who thought these institutions would soon pass away and were a distraction to preparing for that time should be taken with a more than generous helping of salt.
 
That said, I would have to find most honest and useful a modified model based on Pope Francis’ interpretation of St. Augustus.  That model would give precedence to the interests of those “who by circumstances are closer” including spouse and family.  However, this is not a rigid hierarchy and ebbs and flows with the need of those close to us including our own needs.  Making those judgement calls relies on our understanding and gut feel for “"justice, mercy and faithfulness".  It also means there is no easy or “right” answer and that accepting that is part of maturity and a measure of grace for our inevitable mistakes or the hurt feelings of those who do not feel rightly prioritized.
 
In figuring out how to balance the love given to those close to those remote I also need to acknowledge that love involves change and effort and that the extreme of preferring those furthest away over those closest risks a more superficial kind of love.  It is easier to love the child of Ethiopia or Gaza who’s need is obvious and great where what is asked for is limited and remote.  Loving the child near at hand is messier, calls for more intimate contact and getting one’s hands dirty.  It means loving not only those you find deserving whether close at hand or further away.
 
I also have a hard time with a hierarchical model of love/priority in that it would seem to imply that these are a limited resource that must be carefully metered out following strict rules, a scarcity mindset rather than one of abundance.  The hierarchical model also would suggest that love/priority is a zero sum game, where one person’s gain is exactly balanced by another person’s loss.  Instead I see it not as a competition but as more synergistic and a positive sum experience where the total increases so that everyone benefits.