“To know if someone is good, we do not ask what they believe or hope for, but rather what they love.”. One reads this phrase and it is almost inevitable to think that it is the typical self-help junk merchandise that fills feeds, mugs and WhatsApp statuses. But nothing could be further from the truth.
And not only because It was written more than 1,500 years ago by one of the most influential thinkers in history, but because (in addition) it has become one of the philosophical concepts of recent months.
So maybe the question is not what an old priest can teach us in this time full of haste, but also; The question is why that old priest has returned to the center of public debate exactly now.
What exactly did Saint Augustine mean? The phrase is very interesting because, beneath an apparent meaningless string (what do you believe? What do you expect?), it hides a very clear idea of what is important in life. In Christian thought, the three great traditional virtues are precisely faith, hope and love. What the philosopher from Hippo defended is that faith is important, of course; Hope is fundamental, of course it is: but at the center of everything is love.
In fact, Augustine himself has another famous phase (“Love and do what you will”) that goes much further in his master-centrism.
Nobody can be very surprised, really. Saint Augustine has great hits like: “Lord, grant me chastity and continence, but not now.” That “Do whatever you want” sounds suspicious, but (actually) it’s not so suspicious. We’ll see.
Why has all this become popular right now? For politics, of course. On January 29, 2025, US Vice President Vance defended in an interview that canceling most US foreign aid and mass deportations with that argument. That “there is a Christian concept old-school “where you love your family, then your neighbor, then your community, then your fellow citizens, and after that, you can prioritize the rest of the world.”
Later, at X.com, he spent the afternoon sending people to google “ordo amoris”. That is to say, Vance endorsed that idea of ”love and do what you want” in the most direct way possible.
But does it make sense? Translated into a more current language, the Augustinian idea simply tells us that the subject is defined by the direction of his desire, not by the correctness of his beliefs or his expectations. But, without getting into political questions, that doesn’t exactly mean that there is a clear order of obligations that tells us who we should love first and who we should love second. It is not a ranking.
Augustine’s idea is more complex because, deep down, he was convinced that love has a transformative power over people: it orders them from within. That is the order he claimed.
What we can learn from Saint Augustine without entering into politicking. That what is important are the things that really matter to us; not our ideas about the world, nor what we hope will happen. But, above all, because what we love will end up turning us into the type of person we want to be. In someone, as the Father of the Church would say, good.
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