Individualism Redux: Authority Part IV

I'm afraid I didn't do quite a good enough job painting a picture of the purely individualist view of the self, the view that rejects all authority other than its own. (Holders of this view would probably use different terminology.) So I can't resist adding a couple quotes from someone who does a much better job. I know there's endless material that would do as good a job or better than what follows, but since I've just shelved the book a week ago and it's fresh in my mind, I'm going to turn again to Cardinal Ratzinger (aka Benedict XVI). These are a couple of his takes on "tyranny of the self" in his book, Salt of the Earth.

"Man is conceived in purely individualistic terms; he is only himself. The relation that is an essential part of him and that is what really first enables him to become himself is taken away from him. This claim to be the ultimate and sole authority over oneself, and the claim to have the right to appropriate as much of life as possible, while no one has the right to stand in the way, is part and parcel of the sense of life on offer to man today." p. 167

"You are built for love, and therefore for giving, for renunciation, for the pruning of yourself. Only if you give yourself, if you lose yourself, as Christ puts it, will you be able to live. This basic option has to stand out in all its starkness. It is offered to man's freedom. But it should still really be made plain that to live by making one's own claims is a false recipe for life. The refusal of suffering and the refusal of creatureliness, hence, of being held to a standard, is ultimately the refusal of love itself, and that ruins man. For it is precisely his submitting himself to a claim and allowing himself to be pruned that enables him to mature and bear fruit. ... Somewhere deep down man knows: I have to be challenged, and I have to learn to form myself according to a higher standard and to give myself and to lose myself." p. 168

If the above descriptions don't hit the nail of 21st century American selfishness square on its proverbial head, then I don't know what would.

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Not Whether but Which: Authority Part III

Any debate on religious authority usually takes the form of those in favor of authority versus those against it. Thus conservatives will argue for obedience to authority (Catholics stressing hierarchy, Protestants the scriptures) while liberals or progressives argue against it. But it's never really a question of whether or not one obeys an authority, but rather which authority one respects. [1] The mistake then is made by both sides in this debate. Indeed, the mistake is to have the debate at all.

Authority in and of itself is not inherently bad, nor is it inherently good. Authority is good when it is properly oriented toward good ends. Thus the progressive side of the debate, couching its argument in terms of liberation and freedom, is to my way of thinking, just substituting the tyranny of the self for obedience to an external authority. (I think the way to view this is in how celebrities clearly seem to be enslaved to the image of themselves that they propagate in the culture - genuine celebrities being just an extreme version of the average self-centered American ego.)

The conservatives do the disservice of granting the terms of the debate instead of pointing out that there is no rejecting of authority but only a switching of allegiances. Conservatives thereby come across as being against freedom instead of more fruitfully stressing the classic distinction between freedom-from (negatively defined) and freedom-for (positively defined).

If what I've said so far seems to be taking the 'side of authority', reneging on my claim that the debate over authority is a false one, it is only because in our time and place, 21st century America, we exist at an apogee of individualism (blogs themselves being an interesting manifestation of ego-extension) and so we really are in no danger of accidentally becoming overly submissive to authority. (At least as a culture. It should be noted that some individuals, because of personal psychological makeup, can be more prone than others to the abuse of authority.)

So while on the one hand the extreme individualism of our society makes anti-authority tendencies stronger and thus more in need of counter argument, on the other hand I do think it is the case that recognizing no authority other than one's own self, what I've called the tyranny of the self, is the more pernicious of the traps to fall into. There are two basic reasons for this.

One is that, because one whose only master is oneself imagines that they are without a master, they mask from themselves the nature of their enslavement and are in far greater danger of never achieving true liberation.

And two, while one who seeks to submit to some kind of external authority will always have their inherent selfishness and pride to call into question abuses of authority, submission to the self is self-reinforcing, a kind of feedback loop that has nothing outside itself to break the vicious cycle of pure self-servitude. We need something other than ourselves to call us out of ourselves.

It goes without saying that authority can be easily abused, though it is important to keep in mind the afore-posted distinction between authority and power. We might say that the mistake those in authority make is to rely on the exercise of power while the anti-authority mistake is to throw out the need for authority because of the misuse of power.

There is a sense in which the complete jettisoning of authority in our culture because of abuses has the positive outcome of opening space for submission to the Church to be truly free. Finally, nothing I've said so far assumes a conclusion to the necessary discussion on what form Christian authority should take in terms of ecclesiology or family life, etc. However authority is manifested in the Church it is always through mutual submission and whoever is in a position of authority need always lead in terms of service above all.

Another picture to reflect the distinction between the question of which authority versus the false debate for and against authority is in Jesus' claim that his yolk is easy and his burden light. The first thing to note is that there is no question in this statement (let alone the rest of the New Testament) as to whether or not becoming a Christian involves submitting oneself to Christ. The Christian is nothing if not a follower in the way of one who has gone before.

The other thing I've often wondered about this statement of Jesus' is what burdens and what yolks are being held up for comparison. I think a common tendency would be to assume the heavier burden alluded to is the Law of Judaism, especially of those legalistic Pharisees. There may be something to this, but while I have no exegetical basis for it, I think it is more useful (again, in our context) to see the heavier burden, the harsher yolk as that of subservience to ourselves.

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1. This writing is a riff along generally Hauerwasian lines. It isn't based on any work in particular but after writing it, I realize that the basic idea isn't any new insight of mine. In addition to various Hauerwas essays, it is probably most indebted to Jamie Smith's reading of postmodern thinkers such as Foucault. (See especially his chapter on Foucault in Who's Afraid of Postmodernism.) The usual caveat applies: the above authors get credit for any useful insights and I get credit for any mistakes, oversimplifications etc. etc.

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Benedictine Authority Defined: Authority Part II

This is the second of a multi-installment 'series' on the idea of authority, both in general and as it relates specifically to theology and the Church. Call it, if you will, an attempt at conceptual rehabilitation.

Having begun to chew over a sense of religious authority, and reactions to it, in the last post by looking at the person of Pope Benedict XVI, I turn now to a reflection on authority as it is viewed within the community still responding to the authority of the first Benedict, the one called Saint, whose voice echoes down to us from the 6th century. In his book, Saint Benedict for the Laity, Eric Dean, a lay monastic associate writes that:

"Much of the domination we resent in our society is associated with power rather than authority. Clearly, we have largely lost our comprehension of the distinction, common to writers of the Middle Ages, that stands as one of the authentic achievements of the natural law tradition: the distinction between authority and power. Power is the simple exercise of force or the credible threat of force." (p. 14) Then, after some discussion of concrete examples of the exercise of authority vs power, Dean concludes, "It would seem that the authority persons have is inversely proportional to the amount of force they need to achieve compliance with their desires. Real authority needs no force." (p.16)

I'm not sure what the background to my thinking on the matter of authority is. Perhaps one could say that my interest in a rehabilitation of the concept is merely a psychological manifestation; a resurfacing of my relatively strict upbringing, especially as I am trying to stake out the right way to raise my own family. Be that as it may, two things have seemed relatively clear to me as long as I have been trying to wrap my head around the theological issues surrounding authority and obedience, freedom and submission.

One is that the path of a Christian life becomes almost unintelligible without some sense of both authority and its implicit companion, obedience. And two, that what people typically react to when they reject or repudiate these notions are at the very least caricatures of the concepts, or at most something different all together. It is on this second point that I find the above distinction helpful.

While Dean here doesn't provide us with a positive definition for what authority properly should be, by distinguishing authority from power, un-defining the former in terms of the latter, he does open up a lot of space, and brings us worlds closer to developing a proper positive sense of authority. (Dean further reflects on what the conflation of the two terms means in practice for everything from politics to parenting in a very illuminating fashion.) Registering the above distinction was kind of an "Aha!" moment for me. I always felt there was something missing from the conversation whenever the topic of authority reared its head. Dean puts his finger on precisely the problem. Sometimes a little argument over semantics isn't such a bad place to start.

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Prefect Turned Pope: Authority Part I

I recently completed a book-length interview with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, entitled Salt of the Earth. I've also read his Introduction to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and his first Papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). I first started browsing his books when he was elected Pope, out of an interest in Church current events, and then continued because I can't help picking up small, well written books of theology, especially the kind you can read in a handful of sittings, which is precisely Ratzinger's medium.

Philip Jenkins, in the title of a recent book, claims that Anti-Catholicism is the last acceptable prejudice. This might seem an extravagant claim, but also, on the face of it, bears a fair amount of credibility, depending on how you nuance "acceptable". (I'm assuming that this acceptability is determined, as usual in America, in very WASPy environs.) If this is the case, then certainly there is no element of Roman Catholicism that so rankles its detractors (anti-Catholic bigots?) as the office of the Pope. The Pope, it seems, is such a scandal, not only because as the symbolic unifier of Catholicism, he stands for everything thing else about Catholicism that one could object to, from crusades to confessionals, but also because of the intrinsic objectionable nature of someone, in this day and age, presuming to wield such an absolute authority. Indeed it seems like much of the Protestant reaction to Catholicism is basically anti-authoritarian in character.

With this as background, add to the mix the personal reputation of the current pontiff, Benedict XVI. The reactions to whose election, in the popular press at least, invariably employed words such as conservative or rigid, or included the obligatory reminder that in his most recent digs as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Ratzinger was heir to the tradition of the much maligned Holy Inquisition.

So it was pleasantly surprising-like a breath of fresh air really-to read the thoughts of this reputedly reactionary example of an already 'authoritarian' tradition, and finding a very human, very open voice, full of patience and charity for interlocutors, and characterized throughout by a depth of humility that would be a welcome change in your average academic theologian.

Here are just a few examples of Ratzinger's mode of discourse on the topics of faith & doubt, change, institutionalization, the Enlightenment, and world religions.

"Faith never cuts off questions. ... It could also become rigid if it no longer exposed itself to these questions." p. 88

"There needn't always be universal answers. We also have to realize our limits and forgo answers where they aren't possible ... we don't find answers by forcing everything into a system." p 101

"I agree with Cardinal Newman, who says that to live is to change and that the one who was capable of changing has lived much." p. 116

"The great Churches of the Christian countries are perhaps also suffocating on account of their own over-institutionalization, of their institutional power, of the pressure of their own history. The living simplicity of the faith has been lost to view in this situation." p. 123

"In this sense, the development of the Enlightenment, with which the model of the separation of Church and state appears, definitely has a positive side. ... Here are opportunities for a more vital, because more deeply and more freely grounded, faith, which, however, must fight against being subjectivized and which must continure to try to speak its message publicly." p. 240

"The dialogue with other religions is under way. We are, I think, all convinced that we can learn something, for example, from the mysticism of Asia and that precisely the great mystical traditions also open possibilities of encounter that are not so clearly present in positive theology." p. 263

Do these sound like the words of a doctrinally rigid church dictator to you? Pope Benedict XVI doubtless speaks with a degree of authority, even to the secular world. With the above as representative of his mode of thinking, I for one would welcome his type of authority having more of an influence.

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