Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition: Conflict and Dialogue

3 The Order of Love: The Love of Preference in Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition

67 three The Order of Love: The Love of Preference in Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition There is only one whom a person can with the truth of eternity love more than himself—that is God. Kierkegaard In considering where the ultimate difference between Kierkegaard and the Thomistic tradition in Catholicism lies on the question of the love of our fellow human beings, we begin with the Christian command to “love your neighbor as yourself.” When Jesus confirms it (Lk 10:25–37) to a “scholar of the law,” the scholar asks him a question, which Kier­ kegaard interprets as an attempt to pull the command apart from its concrete moral exigency (WL, 96–97). The question is simply, “who is my neighbor ?” The famous parable of the Good Samaritan that follows is clearly meant to deny this attempt at obfuscation, because the kindly Samaritan, we are to assume, does not know the robber’s victim whom he helps, and yet he is the one who is a “neighbor” to the abandoned man. Thus, loving one’s neighbor, it seems, takes no account of nationality (which, in an important sense, separated the two men), familial relationships (as there were none between the two in this case), ordinary (as opposed to immediate) geographical proximity, or preexisting bonds of friendship. Further, neighbor-love even seems to “trump” institutional religious obligations.1 This conforms to a widely shared moral intuition that the immediate needs of others override other ordinary obligations we might 68 · Nature and Grace have. Thus, a dying stranger in need of help takes precedence over the desire to make it to one’s child’s baseball game in time for the first pitch, even if one promised to do the latter. Both Kierkegaard and the Catholic tradition (in its Thomistic guise) can agree to this basic in­ tuition.2 There is, however, another widely shared moral intuition that, when also accentuated, has not always been thought consistent with the other intuition. This second moral intuition holds that, on the ordinary run of things, my family and friends take some amount of precedence over individuals who bear no such relationship to me. Consider a brief, and rather commonplace, example. Suppose that Jones’s income is modest, but that it can, with little or no remainder, take care of the needs of her family. Suppose next that winter has made an early start, and that Jones has scraped together enough money to purchase an inexpensive but suitable winter coat for her daughter, who has no such coat. Upon making this purchase, she walks back to her home and encounters a young girl, a stranger, who, she comes to find out, has need of such a coat. Jones, perceiving the need, gives the girl the coat, thus depriving her daughter of the coat that she also needs. In this case, a widely shared moral intuition would regard Jones as blameworthy. Not only is it permissible for Jones to reserve the coat for her daughter, but rather, Jones is morally obliged to reserve the coat for her daughter. This suggests that ordinary moral convictions testify to the fact that individuals in our family have a greater claim on the resources with which we might manifest our love than those whom we do not know at all. Often the Catholic tradition has taken an even further step and claimed that we are actually to love our family more than those who are strangers to us. This represents what the Catholic tradition, and especially Aquinas, has called the order of love. Although the Catholic tradition has not been univocal on this point, when magisterial documents register a view on such matters, they often echo the language of Aquinas on the order of love.3 Kierkegaard, however, appears to dispute at least some of Aquinas’s conclusions. By contrast, Kierkegaard clings to the first intuition, that we have an immediate obligation to our neighbor, who is a human being in need, without regard to such factors as might influence our preference. Kier­ kegaard articulated a radical view of love on the basis of biblical insights such as the parable of the Good Samaritan. To illustrate this, Kierke­ The Order of Love · 69 gaard writes of Christ’s own love that “his love made no distinction, not the tenderest distinction between his mother and other people, for he pointed to his disciples and said, ‘These are...