Dis-ordered

In a previous entry I quoted St. Thomas Aquinas on "disordered affections." I like to word "dis-order" because it suggests misusing or undoing one's divine design rather than simply breaking the rules of Another (autonomy vs. heteronomy). But it seems as though one cannot use the term without explaining: understandably, people do not like themselves or their behavior being called "disordered."

The Creator orders; the creature dis-orders. God designs, plans, programs all things for a good end or purpose (Greek telos). Human freedom is one of those things that God has ordered to a good end: "freedom exists to serve love," wrote John Paul the Great. This means that God ordered or designed freedom to make possible the human choice to love God. Without freedom to choose the Other there is no real love.

The dis-ordering of freedom, then, is the using of it for other ends -- to serve individual pleasure, for example. God has ordered freedom to serve love (of God or other persons), so its use to attain a personal end at the expense of another is dis-ordered. Hence the Christian (especially Catholic) grammar of dis-ordered sexual acts: a person uses freedom to attain personal pleasure at the expense of the other person's God-designed good.

The concept is related to the distinction between first and second things: God has ordered the person to first things. The pleasures of second things are ordered to first things; they are not an end in themselves (this goes against the Catholic idea of secondary ends, I believe). Practically this means that the pleasures a person experiences in a second thing are meant to point one to the first thing -- consider the sacramental value of marriage!

Dis-ordered lives seek second things rather than the first thing: the primary end of the person in God, an end that St. Paul expressed so beautifully: God "ordered" the person "to be conformed to the image of the Son" (Romans 8:29). The human temptation is to seek secondary ends in order to experience (secondary) pleasure. But the secondary cannot satisfy because the person has been ordered to unification in love with the Trinity. As CS Lewis notes in The Four Loves, "to let us down while legitimately attracting us is the very characteristic of a second thing which has been treated as a first thing." [8.10.08]