Introduction: Authority
“I bow my knees,” writes St. Paul, “to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named” (Eph 3:14–15, DRA). With these words, the Apostle to the Nations speaks of the proper embodied religious expression of the believer before the mystery of earthly authority. For the authors of this present volume, authority—the unifying theme of our study—is properly understood as a manifestation within the created order of the eternal order of charity that the divine Being is: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). The earthly ruler manifests this divine order in his person, and enacts it through his governance. Far from being the capacity to manipulate others to do his will (whether or not that capacity is legitimately held, and however much the ruler’s will is aligned with what is objectively just), the ruler first and primarily is a sign or a kind of “sacramental” presence of a Fact that is prior to his rule: God has not created this world to be a wasteland, but has ordered it so that it may be inhabited (Is 45:18). God’s ordering of society through human authority is a reality that does not come about due to any particular ruler, nor is this divine ordering simply identical with him or his office. As Tolkien writes, there had been no king among the Dúnedain of the North for almost a thousand years. “Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.” Regardless of the complexities of a particular political situation, or regardless of the virtues or vices of a particular ruler, or any other factor that causes the sign-character of rulership to be a mirror through which we seek darkly (1 Cor 13:12), the ruler cannot but express by his presence in a political community the divine plan to order human society through and toward justice.