What is authority? Well, let us first say that Christ is King and that Christ is Authority, and that modernity is the attempt to do away with authority and replace it with power. All that is needed, modernity says, because all there is, is coercive power. And there never was authority, only power, power pretending to be authority. Authority is the mask that power once used effectively to coerce. It functioned well for a time, but since the Enlightenment, and especially after Foucault and what is called the Holocaust, its mask is off now, for we all know now that all there is is power. Victims now have all the power, or those who claim to be victims. It’s better that the mask is off and gone, because just the appearance of the mask might lead one to think that authority actually exists, exists apart from power, exists even above power, and this could threaten the exclusive hegemony of power.
Religion used to exert power, but it also claimed authority, but since authority has been shown to be only power, and since religion no longer coerces, even if it tries to, religion now has no power. If it has power, it’s because it no longer has authority. People do still believe in religion, but the vast majority do so no longer as an authority—that small remnant that still does is inconsequential and diminishing fast, and it will soon recognize that what it worshipped and always worshipped was power. If people still believe in the authority of religion, say, Christianity, they do so, even if they don’t think and say they do, as something that gives them personal power, either in this life or in the next, or so they believe. Death, it must be admitted, takes away all power, so some believe in religion because it seems to give them power even over death. As I say, some people still attribute authority to their religion, even saying “Christ is King!” But when it comes down to it, they don’t think or act much like this—or only an insignificant minority does, and they won’t for too much longer, especially when Antichrist comes, whose perfect power will finally annihilate authority for good —for these always obey power, and particularly power without authority, and they defend it as such.
A good example of these truths (of course, there is no truth, only power) was the plandemic, which was the apotheosis (so far) of power without authority. Most religious people believed in it, obeyed it, and defended it as if it were an authority, one that should be believed, obeyed, and defended. But here’s the thing. They knew it wasn’t an authority. Why? Because it was nothing but coercion, and everyone knows, if they could just think about what they know for a minute, that authority doesn’t coerce. For that’s what authority is: non-coercive power. That may seem like an oxymoron. More on that below. But they obeyed this totalitarian onslaught of coercion, and they did so without resisting it, or even questioning it. This is the crux. They treated the plandemic as an authority that should not be questioned, but they knew it was just power, because it coerced them, and coercive power should always be interrogated to see if it is authorized. They knew this, but they acted against what they knew. If power is authorized, then one should accept it and obey it. But they believed in and obeyed coercive power without questioning it, and they defended their belief and obedience as if they were defending a legitimate authority, as if they were defending authorized power. They didn’t just say, “I must believe and obey, but I don’t want to or think I should,” which is something one says when coerced by power without authority, but they said, “It is good that I believe and obey—and I want to,” which is something one says to an authority, and to authorized power. Jorge Bergoglio who is believed by billions to have the authority of the Pope, even said that love obligates one to inject oneself with the Covid injection. Religious people, the plandemic revealed, aren’t religious at all, for they worship power, power as authority, which is to say, they reject all authority other than power, their own power above all, including the authority of Truth and God. Now that’s a revelation.
So, what is authority? Well, authority, whatever it is, is not coercive. Only power is. This is difficult to grasp and must be unpacked. D.C. Schindler has done so already, and incomparably so, but I’ll add my thoughts on what I have learned from him, and what the past four years have taught me. When Jesus Christ informed Pilate that His kingdom was not of this world, what He meant was that His Kingdom is Authority, not power, but all authority, the authority, eternal authority for all the exercises of temporal power from the beginning of the world until its end. But what is authority? And how does it differ from power? I will make a claim, and then I will try to answer these questions. But I am not sure if I will be able to. My claim is that Jesus Christ crucified is absolute authority combined with absolute powerlessness. And that the Jews who crucified Him had absolute power—the power to murder God—combined with an absolute absence of authority. Does that help?
The Latin is auctoritas, from auctor (which also gives us English "author"), which is derived from Latin augeō ("to augment", "to enlarge", "to enrich"). If you look at any modern English definition of authority, it will define it in terms of power, always describing authority as a kind of power, namely, that power which is “justified” or “legitimate.” But this is wrong, for authority is not power. And power is not authority. Authority per se is powerless. Really? Yes. Jesus’ authority was not recognized when He was on the cross precisely because of the profound error of thinking that any true authority always possesses and exercises power. Since Jesus was, by His own choice but also by the inexorable logic of love, powerless on the cross, it must be that He had no authority, it would seem. And this wasn’t just the error of the Jews that hated Him, but even of those who loved Him, including Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, who denied knowing Him precisely because he could no longer recognize His authority when He was arrested and beaten and judged by the masses and the Roman and Jewish leaders to be guilty of evil. Since they had power, all the power at that moment, and Jesus did not, had no power at all (it seemed), it must be that they also had at least some authority, and that Jesus had none. Peter did not recognize Jesus’ authority, let alone his Absolute Divine Authority as God, because Jesus at that point had no power. If He had power, He would have not allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified. How could this be denied? Whether John and the two Marys, who didn’t deny knowing Jesus and remained with Him under the cross, fully recognized His authority at that moment is not clear. But they did stay with Him. They remained in the agony of knowing and not knowing, which is all they could have done. God was pleased with that.
If authority is powerless, then what is it, and how does it relate to power? For these do seem inextricably related. Allow me to make another claim. God, the Omnipotent One is powerless to achieve what He wants the most. What He wants most is for rational creatures to obey Him, for if they did, they would love Him for His own sake, which is what He commands, which is all He commands, with every other command being ordered to and a means to this one. For Him to achieve this, however, rational creatures must freely, without coercion, recognize His authority. He can certainly make them recognize and obey Him out of fear of punishment or desire for reward, and this was the Old Testament “classroom management” training, but this is only to recognize and obey His power, not His authority, for we are only doing so to gain some personal power of our own, the way the pagans worshipped Zeus. What He wants is something no Pagan god wanted, for us to love Him for His own sake, not for what we can get from loving Him, and this would be to recognize His authority, not His power. God has no power to make us do this, the thing He wants the most. The most He could do was to allow Himself to suffer and die for us, but as Luisa Picarretta tells us, the greatest suffering He felt was in Garden of Gethsemane, when he saw all the people in Hell that He was powerless to save because they wouldn’t recognize His authority, and He couldn’t make them.
As I try to say exactly what authority is and how it differs from power, I keep coming back to examples. I have been taking courses in a credential program so I can keep my teaching job at a public charter high school. It occurred to me recently that the methods of teaching they promote, and the only ones they recognize as authoritative, are those of power, not authority. Oh, they talk a lot about asserting your “authority” in the classroom, but what they really mean is asserting your power. This is “class management.” Management is about power. The manager is a modern character, as Alasdair MacIntyre taught us, because his job is to manage power, and modernity, as we have said, is the replacement of authority with power. If things aren’t managed well, the manager has failed, and he didn’t have to fail because if he used his power effectively, things—or people—would have been managed well, and he could have managed his power more effectively. He just needed more training. For the State of California’s educational “authority,” it’s the same with students. There are strategies for managing a classroom, and if you follow them, the students will be well-managed. And if you are observed for a teaching evaluation, and the students aren’t all “engaged” and “on task,” it means that you failed as a classroom manager, which is pretty much your only task as a teacher.
I was observed once, and the evaluation report indicated that I needed to improve in classroom management. This got me thinking about authority and power in the classroom. I could easily have used my power to force the students, through threat of punishment and seduction of reward, to appear engaged and on task to the observer, or even to actually be engaged and on task (if the task was directly related to threat or seduction), but that is not what my power as a teacher is for. The power I have as a teacher is no different than the power I have as a human being, and it is for the same ultimate purpose, to help my neighbor get to Heaven, thus to know and love God and love his neighbor as himself, thus to become virtuous. In the classroom, I exert power mostly by the use of my words, supplemented by grades and behavioral punishments, if necessary. But like God, the one thing I want the most for my students I am unable to effect by employing my power.
My institutional authority as a teacher allows me to employ power, but the one thing I want most to do with my power is for them to recognize my authority freely, absent the use of my power, my authority, that is, as someone who uses his power to dispose them to recognize and love and obey the authority of Truth. This “outcome” I cannot “manage” effectively because ultimately it is a free choice of each student. The most I can do is to point to this authority and try to make it attractive to them. The paradox here is that the more students recognize that this is my aim, the less effective my use of the strategies of classroom management is because they know that I can’t coerce them to achieve this aim, which is really the aim that they have for themselves if they knew themselves the way I know them. Those students who recognize this and choose to make God and Truth their authority don’t need classroom management strategies because they have become independently motivated for the right end and under the right authority, God, and so respecting my authority, which is ordered to His, and listening attentively and with docility to my words, mostly Socratic questions, and obeying the few, gentle “management” directives I give from time-to-time to help them achieve their good as students, that is, my employment of power, is something they genuinely want to do freely and without the need of any coercion.
On the other hand, those students who have not chosen to obey the higher authority that I miserably try to represent will find being on task and engaged difficult, as for them, I am just another power broker, which is dehumanizing to them. They are right to rebel against this. But as long as they are not preventing the other students from obtaining the good they have chosen to obtain, I can’t do any more for them, and I need to allow them some leeway. This means that I must tolerate them being uninterested and sometimes a bit distracted and even distracting to others. If I were to exert coercive power to make sure that they were on task and engaged, for the sake of an “effectively managed classroom,” it would hurt the common good of the class, for the classroom atmosphere would become bureaucratic, cold, and authoritarian (like those movies that show classrooms in China or in Ireland in the 50s with mean nuns with rulers), and the content would need to be essentially busy work with clear “objectives.” I could easily exert the exact amount of coercive power to make these power-oriented students “behave,” but this would hurt not only the more mature, authority-oriented students, but also them because what they need is to be (relatively) free to reject my authority, and deal with the natural and supernatural consequences of their rejection, not just my stupid punishments.
If the consequences of my power wielding is the only consequence they experience of their rejection of true authority, such as scolding, detention, moving their seat, sending them out, getting a bad grade, then they might be inclined to think that power is all there is, and this may very well be the reason they are rejecting my authority in the first place, because perhaps in the past the authority figures they had to deal with were actually just power figures, and they rightfully rebelled against these loveless frauds. They are right to think of me as the same as these frauds and traitors, at least at first, and so I need to be patient with them and not use my power willy-nilly. After all, I was one of these students, and I only was able to recognize my foolishness by experiencing someone who loved me enough to use his authority and power to help me to realize what authority really is.
Consider Jesus the Teacher. What did He want? He wanted everyone He spoke to to recognize the authority of the Father, which was, of course, also His own authority, but they needed to see His own power-rejecting obedience to the Father to understand the difference between power and authority. Such was the sole purpose of His employment of power, sometimes miracles of healing, sometimes violence—overturning the temples and whipping people—sometimes just the heart-melting power of His loving words and actions. At a certain point, after His resurrection, He destroyed the Jewish Temple, but this was for the same purpose, to show the Jews that power wasn’t authority. Most of them did not listen.
He didn’t use “management techniques.” “Philip saith to him: ‘Lord, shew us the Father, and it is enough for us.’ Jesus saith to him: ‘Have I been so long a time with you; and have you not known me? Philip, he that seeth me seeth the Father also. How sayest thou, shew us the Father?’” This was all Jesus could say and do, for He was literally powerless to “manage” their ability and decision to see the Father in Him. It is the same for all teachers. Teachers are powerless in the very thing they want the most, that students recognize in their teacher and their teacher’s words nothing but a pointer to Reality, to Authority, to the Father, and that they learn to see in all words and all events and all that they experience that same pointer. This is the essence and purpose of classical education.
So, what is authority? We’ll try again in Part II.
Thanks, Thaddeus, I crossposted this piece. Looking forward to part 2
This put precisely into words something I had been thinking about for a while now— thank you!