Ordo Amoris — The Order of Loves

A life well lived consists of rightly ordered loves — and if anything but the most worthy thing conceivable sits at the top, everything below it is mis-ordered by that fact.

Love is treated here as a force rather than a feeling: infinite, omnidirectional, and requiring direction to do anything at all. Ordered well it carries a life toward what it was for; ordered badly it carries it with equal energy somewhere else (Love, The Logic Of Love, Vector, Alignment).

The argument for what goes at the top is short and does not depend on any tradition. Whatever is highest sets the order of everything under it; so if the thing at the top is not the most worthy that can be conceived, a person has guaranteed in advance that they will stand wrongly toward whatever actually is most worthy (One Purpose Above All, Worthy Goal, Commander's Intent).

The chapter then walks the candidates upward rather than asserting a conclusion. Direct love toward the most admirable person you could find — and ask what she came from. Toward the living world that sustains her — and ask what its source is. Toward the stars — and ask what made them, and what made the awareness that can wonder at them. Each step is the same move: what is behind this? The walk ends where the asking runs out (ØNE, Source, Mystery, The Ineffable, Awe).

What makes it practical rather than devotional is that a mis-ordered love is diagnosable from its effects. When something good is loved as though it were ultimate — a person, a body of work, a nation, a body of writing — it is asked to carry a weight it cannot, and it breaks, and so does the one who loved it that way (Idols Of The Pantheon, Institutional Idolatry, The Golden Calf, Do Not Concretize the Absolute).

The Latin is kept on purpose, because the phrase is older than this corpus and carrying it under its own name credits where it came from (Attribution, Lineage, ReHarvesting the Great Traditions).

It is one of a family: the ordering of loves sits beside the ordering of goals, responsibilities, intentions, rules and authorities — the same move applied wherever a plurality has to be navigated (The Orders, Order, Prioritizing).

Also called: the order of loves · rightly ordered loves Stands on: Love · ØNE · Order Opens onto: The Orders · One Purpose Above All · Worthy Goal · Idols Of The Pantheon · The Golden Calf · Do Not Concretize the Absolute · Awe · Prioritizing In play: the table — asked of a life, and of a Cell's attachments, at every deep review Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/The Book of LIØNSBERG/Chapter 11…/11.12 The Ordo Amoris - The Order of Loves.md (draft — the argument walked step by step; the corpus's audit instructs that the Latin name be kept) Open: The argument establishes that something most worthy belongs at the top; identifying it is done by elimination and not by demonstration. · Nothing says how a person would notice their own order is wrong before it breaks something.