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.