All Our Loves Must Be Ordered to a Greater Love
I don’t know what fiction was available in the thirteenth century, but I have to imagine Thomas Aquinas would have enjoyed it. The man had a passion for engaging the why of life, and few mediums capture that essence better than well-written fiction. Would he delve into Middle-earth and the world of Tolkien? Would he like the structure and logic of a mystery? Lately I have been wondering what he would think of science fiction, and of one novel in particular: Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. I think he would have found in it a problem his own order of charity was built to solve.
His first reaction would likely be one of familiarity. The novel follows a desert monastery across centuries of a post-nuclear dark age, where the monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz copy and preserve fragments of scientific knowledge that the surviving world has learned to fear. He would have felt at home in the second section especially, where the monks are the knowledge keepers of the fallen world, much as the real Christian monasteries of history had done after Rome fell. The third section might have astonished him. A rebuilt pseudo-twentieth century, full of innovation in technology and innovation in vice, building toward the same destruction that opened the book.
But would he agree with the premise? Miller’s argument is bleak, though not nihilistic. Man is doomed to repeat his mistakes. The selfish nature of humanity will lead society to ruin as soon as its capacity to ruin itself becomes available again. I think Aquinas would have felt conflicted, and the reason lies in one of his own ideas.
He famously treats the order of charity in the Summa, asking how love should be rightly ordered: God above all, and then our loves arranged according to the real bonds by which others are entrusted to us. To Aquinas, if I love my family more than God, my love is disordered. You cannot neglect your children because you are “serving humanity.” Our love is ordered by our relation to its recipient. The order can be misused as a system of exclusions, but rightly understood, it gives charity a form in which it can grow.
The order can be abused into a stingy localism or even xenophobia, but in its true sense it directs our love and attention to their proper place. And that is exactly the question the Canticle forces on its reader. The monk’s proper attention should be paid to the man in the next pew. But what about the man in that same pew two hundred years from now? What about two thousand years from now? What responsibility do I have toward him?
Recently, this type of thinking has been given a name: longtermism, the claim that future people matter morally and that positively shaping the long-term future should be one of our serious moral concerns. I have found myself thinking that it is both painfully obvious and untenable. Of course we need to care for future generations. We have the power and the ability. Medicine we make now can save future lives, well-built buildings will benefit generations, and peace made now will flourish long after we are gone. The idea makes sense but, like everything, gets complicated when you add resource requirements and organizational demands. Why should money be spent on future generations when there are suffering people now? Elected officials aren’t elected by or representative of future citizens but current ones. And in the same sense that I might be more inclined to help the homeless man down the road than one on the other end of the earth, even more so I might be inclined to serve someone alive today than one who could be alive tomorrow.
But this is exactly the thinking the Canticle indicts. The type of thinking that disregards humanity’s future opens the door to its future destruction. So where would Aquinas land?
I suspect his first move would surprise the longtermists. Future generations do not stand before us with the same immediacy as the neighbor in the next pew. I cannot will the good of a man who does not exist the same way I can will the good of the man beside me. But Thomas is not left empty-handed. He has other resources for the future within his own system. The first is the common good, which for Aquinas reaches across generations. Nobody builds a cathedral for the current parish alone. The second is hope, the theological virtue aimed at what is not yet. And behind both of these stands the stewardship that God gave us over the earth. We cannot neglect what we were given to keep.
Still, I think his deepest answer comes from inside the order of charity itself, and it is the answer I have come to believe. The secret of the ordo caritatis is not that it opens the door for justified exclusion. In reality it fulfills our responsibility to love by aligning it with a greater love. I know that statement borders on being too flowery to be useful, but think about it. When I love Jesus first and most, I gain the ability to love my family better. If I love my family and have built them up, supported them, and protected them, I have a higher capacity to transmit this to my neighborhood, and the neighborhood to the town. It is both well-ordered love and also just more love. We don’t need to dwell on the exclusions the order allows. We should notice its ability to compound and multiply because it is well-ordered. I have noticed avenues to love in my own life that would not have existed had I not prioritized areas of my life first. My contention is that if we order our love properly, the people at the far edge of the order, including the ones not yet born, can fall within its range.
I have to be honest about the counterargument, because Miller wrote it into the book. His monks, on the surface, look like they did exactly this. They stayed faithful for centuries, ordered their lives around God, and preserved what the world abandoned, and the world burned anyway. The dark irony of the Canticle is not that love failed to compound. It is that preserving knowledge without converting hearts only re-arms the fallen. But notice where that leaves us: on Aquinas’s home turf. Grace does not coerce. The monks could not force the world to receive what they kept, because the will is free to refuse what love offers it. The chain of compounding love holds only where each link consents to be held.
So let me write some fan fiction on Thomas’s behalf. Say Aquinas put down A Canticle for Leibowitz and decided to sketch an alternate ending. I can picture a beautiful story where the care of the Leibowitzian monks was not solely focused on preserving knowledge but on radiating God’s love. A love that focused on God but transformed their abbey. The abbey transforms the city. The city becomes a shining light that touches higher leadership. The love that the world’s leaders carry then breaks into the future, and decisions are made that preserve humanity rather than destroy it. If that chain is broken anywhere, it becomes misaligned all the way down, and Miller has already shown us how that ending reads.
Aquinas could have written an ending where the earth survives. I hope that is the version we end up with.
