Bless me, Reader, for I have sinned. When Vice President JD Vance met Pope Leo XIV in May, he gave the pope a copy of St. Augustine’s book “City of God,” and I confess — I thought he was trolling him.
In an interview a few months earlier, Vance had invoked the Catholic theological concept of ordo amoris — the ranking of our loves — to defend a worldview that prioritizes commitments to family and nation over more distant entities, like migrants and people in other countries.
This position, while consistent with the Trump administration’s approach to foreign aid, immigration and border security, earned the highest-ranking Catholic politician in America an admonishing response from Pope Francis and an indirect rebuke from Cardinal Robert Prevost, the future first American pope. Taking to X, Prevost shared an article headlined “JD Vance is wrong; Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others.”
Ordo amoris first appeared explicitly in “City of God” — as the pope would have certainly known. You can see why I thought there was something a little barbed in the vice president’s gift choice. But this fifth-century text, written to address criticisms that Christianity had brought disaster upon Rome, meant much more to Vance than a chance to stick it to the pope; the vice president has credited it with significantly informing his values, calling Augustine’s analysis of elite Roman decadence “the best criticism of our modern age I’d ever read.”
Leo is most likely the last person who would have needed the introduction. A member of a religious order inspired by Augustine, the pope has drawn on “City of God” repeatedly, including in a recent Vatican document on the poor. “The city of God,” Leo writes, “impels us to improve the cities of men and women. Our own cities must begin to resemble his.”
In other words, the two most prominent American Catholics have each been profoundly influenced by a 1,600-year-old book about why the Roman Empire was falling apart. What makes it so convincing, and why are powerful people still turning to it for guidance and insight?
Rome was sacked by Alaric and his Visigoths in 410. Afterward, some argued that the city had fallen because it had abandoned its devotion to powerful ancient gods to follow a meek and humble new one. By then Christianity had evolved from an eccentric, first-century offshoot of Judaism into a fast-spreading, often-persecuted religion of the masses, before it was adopted and endorsed by Roman emperors.
A couple of years after Christianized Rome was invaded, Augustine, a well-known bishop and writer, was asked to rebut the accusations against the faith. He agreed and, more than a decade later, produced a 22-volume masterwork about religion, power and politics.
“City of God” stands alongside classical works like Plato’s “Republic” and Aristotle’s “Politics.” Scholars contend it was second only to the Bible in influence during the Middle Ages, informing writings by Thomas Aquinas and others, who in turn gave way to Machiavelli and the moderns.
But Augustine’s relevance today extends beyond syllabi and scholarship. Both Vance and Leo have abiding interests in “City of God” because, I think, Augustine speaks to a political moment marked by high-profile exertions of raw power and dominance, by promises of a return to past national glories, and by the imperfectly concealed pursuit of personal benefits through public office.
Augustine criticizes those who seek and use power in this world absent any genuine Christian sense of what to do with it. He also challenges anyone righteous enough to consider themselves living and leading others according to Christian mores without acknowledging the impossibility of getting that right (and also, the responsibility to try anyway).
These are the two fundamental components of “City of God.” In the first half, Augustine defends Christianity by revealing, contrary to many selective memories, how fallen Rome had always been. He chronicles the civil wars, murderous factionalizing, political instability and perpetual immiseration of the masses in the time before Christianity took hold in the empire.
There’s no making Rome great again, he argues, because Rome was never great in the first place — never just or peaceful, never genuinely what some might claim it once was. Instead, Rome was driven by “lusts to dominate the world, and … though nations bend to its yoke, is itself dominated by its passion for domination.”
Leaders of the pre-eminent nation-state of the ancient world abused their untrammeled power, Augustine observes, by seeking public acclaim and private gain while claiming it was all about gods and national greatness. It’s clear why Vance thought Augustine had something exposing to say about colluding elites centuries later.
Indeed, in one of the book’s best passages, Augustine relates a captured pirate’s answer when Alexander the Great asks him to account for his actions: “Because I do it with one tiny ship, I am called a robber; and because you do it with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.” The former Cardinal Prevost cited this same exchange in 2012, observing that Augustine uses it “to ironize the supposed moral legitimacy of the Roman Empire.”
Out of a Christian vision of purpose, free will and fallibility, Augustine establishes what it means to be a citizen of the City of God, as opposed to a citizen of the City of Man: being motivated by love of God and others, rather than by love of self. That said, Christians can never fully be the citizens they are created to be until they reach the actual City of God, heaven. In the meantime, they live in the City of Man — meaning both society and their nation-state — where they are subject to its tribulations and temptations like everyone else.
Augustine argues that those who believe life ends here want to maximize the goods available to them while also avoiding harm whenever possible. The most successful become self-destructively addicted to domination for its own sake, inevitably at the cost of others, but even they will fail to get all that they seek, whether it’s security, success, health or pleasure.
Christianity discourages domination for its own sake and encourages a more detached disposition while living in the City of Man. This doesn’t come from a simplistic acceptance of present-day suffering for future reward; rather, Christians understand that they are always-ready pilgrims who must journey toward an eternal end and citizens who must respond to the immediate demands of a messy, fallen world.
The question of how to privilege these commitments is where Vance’s and Leo’s views diverge. In its most discussed volume, Book 19, Augustine establishes a “hierarchy of human associations” for carrying out Christianity’s foundational imperative: to love others. “First,” he writes, “we have the home; then the city; finally, the globe.” Herein lies the controversy of ordo amoris.
Vance is more drawn to Augustine’s realism. As much as you can be committed to the City of God, you are living and, in his case, leading others in the City of Man. Doing so, in Vance’s application of Augustine’s thought, requires the practical prioritizing of the first two types of human association — home and citizenry — to the diminishment, if not exclusion, of the third.
Pope Leo would certainly appreciate the importance of immediate and local needs, not least given his extensive work with Peruvian communities before he came to Rome. But this spiritual leader of a global flock responds more to the aspirational than the realist dimensions of Augustine’s text, reminding Christians that they are hoping to become permanent citizens of heaven rather than just temporary citizens of one flawed country. Thus, their love, demonstrated through practical aids and supports, should not be strictly constrained by national borders.
Catholic or otherwise, most citizens in a divided America will no doubt prefer one of these responses to the other. That’s because Vance and Leo focus on Augustine’s work with clear differences in both personal sensibility and public office, and such is the capaciousness and suppleness of “City of God” that it sustains opposing applications of the same concepts.
The nation’s two most prominent Catholics and readers of St. Augustine will probably meet again. Will Leo return the favor and give Vance a copy of “City of God”? If so, I’d do a lot of penance to find out if he underlines any passages for the vice president’s reading.
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