163. Love of parents compared with love of children
163. LOVE OF PARENTS COMPARED WITH LOVE OF CHILDREN
Should we love our parents or our children more?
The degrees of love may be measured from two standpoints. First, from that of the object. In this respect, the better a thing is, and the more like to God, the more it is to be loved; and in this way a man ought to love his father more than his children, because he loves his father as his principle (origin), in which respect he is a more exalted good, and more like God.
Secondly, the degrees of love may be measured from the standpoint of the lover; and in this respect a man loves more that which is more closely connected to him, in which way a man’s children are more lovable to him than his father (II-II,26,10).
It is natural, and therefore right, to love your parents more in one way and your children more in another.
Your parents are more like God to you. They gave you life, time (“lifetime”), nourishment, education, etc. You can’t possibly pay them back; you can only “pay it forward” to your children. In fact your parents mediated God to you. God invented parents to do his work, beginning with “procreation”, then continuing in “pro-education,” “pro-nourishing”, “pro-loving”, and all the rest. It is God Who is the First Cause. Augustine begins the story of his life in his Confessions by confessing that it was not first of all his mother but God Who nourished him at the breast, using his mother’s breast as His medium. Everything is a means by which God comes to us or we come to Him. Everything.
On the other hand, your children are dearer to you than your parents are. Similarly, God loves us more than we love Him. You are united to your children in a way that is more intimate and more free than the way in which you are united to your parents. Similarly, God is united to us in a more intimate and free way—the Incarnation—than the way in which we are united to Him. He loves us more than we love Him—infinitely more.
It is much easier to fail to love your parents than to fail to love your children. That is why there is a commandment that commands love and respect to parents, but not to children. In an age of abortion, there ought to be an eleventh commandment against neglecting, harming, abusing, or even murdering your own children. The instinct to love your parents is strong but easily broken, especially at two times of life: by teenagers who are “feeling their oats” and naturally desiring their independence, and by middle-aged children of physically and especially mentally enfeebled aging parents who appear burdensome. The instinct to love your children is much stronger. It is one of the strongest instincts in nature. Our handicapped children are naturally loved more than our handicapped parents. It is astonishing that the abortion culture could override this deepest instinct so quickly and so easily and with so few apparent qualms of conscience. Our ancestors would not have believed it.
If human life becomes cheapened, it becomes cheapened at both ends. Parents are killed, by euthanasia, when they become a “burden” to their children; and children are killed, by abortion, when they become a “burden” to their parents. All societies in history would regard these two sins as two of the most heartless and inhuman possible sins. To kill your parents is to kill yourself, your own past; and to kill your children is to kill yourself, your own future. Poor, naïve St. Thomas had no idea that a “civilized” society could ever become so heartless. He only lived in a “violent” society where professional soldiers freely contracted to risk being killed by or killing each other for ostensibly just and honorable reasons. But of course we “civilized” people have “progressed” beyond such “primitive violence” today.
The most powerful way to combat this “culture of death” that we live in is to deliberately renew and strengthen and practice our own love for both our parents and our children. Love must begin at home. This is also one of the most effective paths to our own sanctification. For whatever we do to those who are ours, we do to ourselves, just as whatever we do to Christ’s brothers, we do to Him.