165. Order and hierarchy of loves in Heaven
165. ORDER AND HIERARCHY OF LOVES IN HEAVEN
All love has some order, including the highest love, charity, the divine and Heavenly love. On earth it is natural and therefore right to love some people more than others, and this preferential treatment is true of all forms of love, including charity. We should give our family more of all kinds of love than we give strangers. Will this order remain in Heaven, or will we love all with equal charity?
Nature is not done away, but perfected, by glory. Now the order of charity (self, spouse, children, parents, family, friends, strangers, and good men more than bad men) . . . is derived from nature. . . . Therefore this order of charity will endure in heaven. . . .
The degree of love may be distinguished either in respect of the good which a man desires for another, or according to the intensity of love itself. In the first way, a man will love better men more than himself, and those who are less good, less than himself; because by reason of the perfect conformity of the human to the divine will, each of the blessed will desire everyone to have what is due to him according to divine justice. . . . But in the second way a man will love himself more than even his better neighbors, because the intensity of the act of love arises on the part of the person who loves (II-II,26,13).
Nothing good in nature will be destroyed in Heaven, but preserved, transformed, and perfected. “Grace perfects nature.” Therefore not only the existence of charity but also its order will be preserved in Heaven. Nature is the starting point for grace; therefore natural love of self is the starting point for supernatural charity, which is self-forgetful, self-sacrificing, and self-giving. If you don’t have a self, you can’t give it away. If it’s not worthy to be loved, it’s not worthy to be given to another. We are not commanded to love others instead of ourselves but to love others as we love ourselves. Self-love is the seed, other-love is the plant. The seed is preserved and transformed and perfected and multiplied in the plant.
How will we love some more than others in Heaven? We will love everyone maximally, i.e., we will love everything lovable in all of them. But not all will have the same amounts or kinds of lovability and intimacy with us. We will maintain these differences in Heaven, both objective (lovability, goodness) and subjective (personal passion). Therefore we will love some (the more lovable and the more intimately related) more than others. Like God, we will love the better more because there is more for us to love in them. The flood of love will fill all the containers to the fullest, but some containers will be larger than others. We will love the Blessed Virgin Mary more than Mary Smith because Mary Smith, however saintly and beautiful she is in Heaven, is not the immaculately conceived Mother of God; and this will cause absolutely no envy or resentment on the part of Mary Smith, who will also love the Mother of God more than any other woman. Part of Heaven’s joy will be having heroes and heroines to look up to.
Hierarchy is natural, and will remain in Heaven. Hierarchy means superiority in something, but not necessarily in everything. Each of us has more of some good and lovable quality than others have, and each is therefore unique and irreplaceable. This will certainly remain in Heaven. The number of different value-hierarchies will be not just one but many, in fact perhaps literally innumerable. Everyone will be the very best at one thing: being his or her unique self, a goal no one else can ever achieve.
St. Thomas again distinguishes love’s objective and subjective dimensions. The objective dimension is who is loved and how much value (lovability) there is in this person. The subjective dimension is the personal subjective passion (intensity) of the love. We love more intensely those who are closer to us, starting with ourselves. This hierarchy too will remain in Heaven, since it is natural. We naturally love ourselves most passionately because we feel ourselves, our own pleasures and pains, most intensely. This will remain in Heaven. It is an essential part of human nature. It is not evil, or selfish, or competitive by nature, only by perversion. We will be wholly human in Heaven, as Christ was wholly human on earth. In fact we will succeed there for the first time in being wholly human, more human than we ever were before.