“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
These famous words, written by St. Augustine in the 4th century, express a longing that is at the core of every human life. We are restless, searching for something greater than ourselves—something good, something true, something permanent. But in a world that insists all things are equal, that no belief is better than another, that virtue and vice are just different “perspectives,” what happens to the soul’s longing for order?
The modern world preaches egalitarianism not only in politics but in thought itself. There is no hierarchy of truth, no right way to live—only an endless, shallow plurality. But the great thinkers of the classical and Christian traditions knew better. Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine saw the world as structured, ordered, ascending toward the highest good. Freedom, for them, was not found in the absence of restraint but in the presence of virtue. And this is the vision of freedom America’s founders understood—one that we have nearly lost.
The Great Chain of Being: The Ancient Vision of Order
Plotinus, the last great philosopher of the Platonic tradition, described reality as a hierarchy. At the top was the One—pure goodness, pure truth, the source of all things. Below the One were descending levels of reality: the realm of intellect, the realm of soul, and finally, the material world. The lower one went, the more fragmented and shadowed things became.
This structure was not oppressive but natural. Just as the sun casts light in different degrees—brighter at the center, dimmer at the edges—so too does the good radiate through reality. To live well was to ascend, to seek the higher things, to order one’s life toward the truth rather than being dragged downward by base desires.
Contrast this with the modern insistence that all ideas, all lifestyles, all perspectives are equally valid. We are taught that to judge between them—to say that one thing is truly better than another—is oppressive. But this rejection of hierarchy does not free us. It disorients us. When all choices are equal, nothing has meaning. The human soul, made for order, becomes lost.
Augustine’s Hierarchy of Goods: Why We Are Restless
St. Augustine of Hippo, a hugely influential writer of the 4th century, took this vision of order and gave it flesh and spirit. He saw that human life itself is structured by a hierarchy of loves. We long for goodness, but our desires are disordered—we place lesser goods above greater ones, seeking fulfillment in things that cannot actually satisfy us.
Instead of seeking the greatest good (God, or a higher power), we chase after shadows: power, pleasure, status, comfort. These things are not necessarily evil, but they are lesser goods, and when we place them above what is highest, we become restless. We wonder why wealth does not bring contentment, why indulgence leads to emptiness. The answer is simple: we were made for something higher.
Modern society encourages this disorder. It tells us to chase whatever we desire, to follow every impulse, to reject the idea that some things are objectively better than others. And so we remain restless, not because we seek too much, but because we seek too little.
The goal of education, then, should not be viewpoint neutrality—a cold indifference to truth—but the pursuit of wisdom. It is good to understand different worldviews, to engage with different perspectives. But the purpose of this engagement is not to flatten all ideas into equivalence. It is to discern—to understand the hierarchy of goods and orient oneself rightly.
The Modern War Against Hierarchy
The rejection of hierarchy is not just philosophical; it is political. The American experiment was built on an ordered vision of liberty. The Founders understood that freedom does not mean the abolition of all restraint but the presence of virtue. A nation without order is not free—it is chaotic, and chaos always leads to tyranny.
Yet today, we see the systematic dismantling of this order:
- In law, where justice is no longer rooted in objective principles but in shifting ideologies.
- In education, where students are not taught to seek truth but to question whether truth exists at all.
- In culture, where self-expression has replaced self-discipline, and where the highest good is the indulgence of desire.
We are told that hierarchy is oppressive. But what is more oppressive than disorder? What is more tyrannical than a society that refuses to distinguish between wisdom and folly, between virtue and vice?
The Founders understood that liberty could not exist without virtue, that virtue could not exist without order, and that order could not exist without truth. We must recover this vision before it is too late.
Restoring Ordered Liberty: The Path Forward
If the soul is to find rest, it must be rightly ordered. If society is to be free, it must recover the hierarchy of truth. This means rejecting the lie of absolute equality—not equality before the law, which is just, but the false equality of ideas, the refusal to acknowledge that some things are truly better than others.
To restore ordered liberty, we must:
- Recover the classical vision of education – Teaching students not just to analyze ideas but to discern between them, to seek wisdom rather than neutrality.
- Uphold moral and spiritual hierarchy – Recognizing that freedom is not found in the absence of restraint but in the pursuit of the highest good.
- Defend constitutional order – Understanding that checks and balances, federalism, and the rule of law were necessary to preserve true liberty.
- Reorient culture toward the good – Encouraging the pursuit of virtue rather than the indulgence of base desires.
We are restless, Augustine tells us, because we were made for something higher. If we do not restore order—within ourselves and within our Republic—we will remain lost. But if we seek what is highest, we may yet find the peace that both the soul and the nation so desperately need.
