Up With Authority

This is a guest post by Victor Lee Austin, author of our new title Up With Authority. Fr Victor is Theologian-in-Residence at St Thomas Church, Fifth Ave, New York City. The book is available in the US and will publish in the UK in October. 

On the back cover of Up with Authority I am described as a “smiling contrarian.” That, my friends have since told me, is apt. Up with Authority is in no way a harsh book, as one might fear of an essay whose purpose is to show the inevitability and necessity of authority to human life. But it is definitely contrarian, in that it calls for the reexamination of many matters the reader might have thought of as settled.

An overview of the book

The point of Up with Authority is to show that we cannot succeed at being human beings—we cannot have a flourishing human life—without the functioning of authority in the multiple dimensions within which we live. I attempt to demonstrate this reality in four fundamental dimensions of human life that pertain to freedom, truth, power, and God. And I argue that this necessity of authority does not come upon us because of some tragic flaw in human beings. Rather, the necessity of authority is a manifestation of the glory of being human. Even “perfect” human beings need authority. In fact, my argument includes the claim that unsinful human beings need authority even more than sinners. Authority is built into what it means to be human, and we never will escape from needing it for our flourishing.

Chapters 2 through 5 make this argument with regard to society, epistemology, politics, and the church. In each case, the argument is both that we as flawed human beings need authority, and that as we become less flawed (what I call “more human,” on the assumption that we can grow or diminish in life and thus become more fully human, or less) we will need authority all the more. Thus I argue in chapter 2 that, contrary to what we might unthinkingly assume, authority is positively related to freedom: as we become more free, we need more authority. This claim correlates closely with the claim that human nature is ineluctably social. Then in chapter 3 I argue that authority is also positively related to knowledge of the truth. For it is the case that we always know more than we can say. And it is epistemic authority that accounts for how our knowledge is greater than what reason can deliver.

I turn to political authority in chapter 4. Many people would start (and end) their discussion of authority with politics. But politics involves, when we deal with sinful persons, the potential exercise of coercive force. And it is helpful to see that authority, in its social and epistemic modes, is quite distinct from coercive force; and that, even in politics, coercion comes with authority only because of sin and then only at the boundaries. In chapter 4 the reader will find a theological account of political authority as the coordination in a single agency of power, judgment, and the preservation of tradition. There is no political authority when there is no power to carry out judgment or to preserve and carry forward the identity of a people.

Authority in the church, the subject of chapter 5, is a different matter. Here I take up the question of the authority of Scripture and the authority of church structures and rites. When authority is discussed in ecumenical settings, Scripture, rites, and authority-persons (bishops, popes) are the neuralgic points. But the burden of the chapter is to show that authority in the church becomes actualized in the individual believer; the authorized person is the one who truly confesses Christ in word and deed, and it is to her that we should look to understand ecclesiastical authority, the relation of authority to God. From authority in the church, thus seen, we can return to the earlier chapters and see more clearly what was only obscure earlier: that, for instance, social authority fulfills itself in the free actions of persons in society, and that political authority can be embodied and carried in an individual who lacks authorization to judge and perpetuate tradition officially.

So authority is necessary in all these fundamental dimensions of human life. Nonetheless, it is no part of my argument to claim that authority is always right. Authorities can and do err, all the time, in all these dimensions: society, epistemology, politics, and the church. How can we live with this dual reality that we need authority in order to flourish and, nonetheless, there is no guarantee that authority is correct in any given instance? That is the subject of chapter 6. From chapter 2 onward this book argues that authority is a performative concept. By that I mean it is something that is real when it is in action, being “performed.” We may call Sandra an authority on the snakes of Louisiana, but she is truly such only when she engaged in scholarly-scientific activity related to the apprehension of herpetological truth. We may think of Antonio as a political authority even when he is asleep, but he is truly such when he is providing judgment. Or Bill, a baptized Christian, is an authority when he claims for himself the Christian profession and works accordingly in society. We speak of scholarly snake monographs, judicial institutions, and Christian creeds as having authority, but that authority really exists only in a person who is doing what authorities do. Which is, to provide something necessary for human beings to flourish. For this reason, I found I could not end Up with Authority without going to heaven. Following Dante, I suggest in chapter 7 that even in paradise we will not find ourselves beyond authority. Rather, since authority exists within God’s own being, redeemed humanity will be forever within authority.

What sort of book Up with Authority is

Up with Authority is theologically grounded. When I hang out my shingle, the word on it is “theologian.” But I am also a priest in the Episcopal Church, which has placed me in a variety of situations in which I have had pastoral and educational opportunities. I have taught college courses in ethics and theology in settings from small and rural to urban and sophisticated, and I have taught at seminary. So I have often had to face the question of how theology connects with everyday life, in lots of different kinds of everyday life. And I have often wondered about the connections of things—of math and theology, for instance, or symphony conductors and prime ministers.

Up with Authority is the product of me trying to think through the question of authority. It does not aim to smother the subject with a survey of what everyone has said, although certain writers on authority have helped me think, and I introduce them and their work to the reader. The book is more essay than dissertation, a “raid on the inarticulate” rather than a comprehensive treatment. My interlocutors come from various fields: philosophers, theologians, ecclesiastics, and even a poet. Principally they include Yves Simon, Michael Polanyi, Oliver O’Donovan, Richard Hooker, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and Dante Alighieri. But my purpose throughout has been not to give the definitive account of, say, Simon on social authority, but rather to learn from Simon more about social authority. Yes, this book will help acquaint the reader with Simon, Polanyi, O’Donovan, and others. But its purpose is to bring the reader to a better understanding of authority: that it is forever a part of human flourishing, and that that is good news. (Victor Lee Austin)

Comments

[John]

Which and whose authority?

Remember too that there are 4 billion living-breathing-feeling human beings on this planet who are not Christians. And many countless millions of Christians that do not subscribe to your brand of Christianity.

And how many millions were slaughtered in the post-Reformation religious wars over who and what was the source of authority.

Both exoteric religion and secular scientism are anti-ecstatic magic-paranoid traditions, rooted in fear of the magical power potential of human beings.

Both have, for many centuries been actively instructing, or propagandistically coercing, humankind to DISBELIEVE and to dissociate from all modes of association with magical, and metaphysical, and even Spiritual, and all ecstasy producing ideas and activities.

This process of negative indoctrination to which humankind (especially in the Western world) has long been subjected by its sacred and secular "authorities" has, actually, been a magic-paranoid political, social, economic, and cultural effort to enforce a grossly bound, or thoroughly materialist, and, altogether, anti-ecstatic, anti-magical, anti-metaphysical, and anti-Spiritual model of human life upon ALL individuals and collectives.

This entire effort to enforce a grossly bound model of existence has required the universal suppression of the INNATE urge to experience natural magical, metaphysical, and ultimately Spiritual modes or ways of being.

But profoundly more important, this anti ecstatic enterprise has deprived Humankind altogether of its NECESSARY access to Inherently egoless Truth Itself.

What would Happen if all of humankind were allowed complete unobstructed and Perfectly ecstatic access to Inherently egoless Truth Itself?

What would Happen if, instead of access to grossly reductionist pseudo "Truth" and pseudo Ultimacy, all of humankind were allowed complete and unobstructed and Perfectly ecstatic access to Inherently egoless Truth Itself?

What would Happen if the political, social, economic, and cultural totality of humankind were allowed to establish and perpetuate itself entirely and only on the Perfectly ecstatic basis of the Inherently ecstatic basis of the Inherently egoless Truth That IS Reality Itself?