“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 of the divine Being: “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 (however much that capacity is legitimately held, and however much the ruler’s will is aligned with what is actually 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 lived in (Is 45:18). A particular ruler does not bring this reality about, nor is this divine ordering simply identical with him or his office. There had been no king among the Dúnedain of the North for almost a thousand years, notes Tolkien. “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.”¹  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.

The fact that this sounds simplistically romantic today indicates the precise crisis of authority addressed in concert by our authors. We are far more sympathetic to the famous words of Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”²  Stated thus, the possession and exercise of power seems not simply a potential danger, but a certain one; and one wonders how the ancients could ever have been so naive as to pair divine omnipotence with divine omnibenevolence. The apparently obvious tension between those two divine attributes is certainly due to the apparently obvious truth of Acton’s claim, which harmonizes well with the principles of liberalism, particularly its understanding of the intellect and the will: one should accept nothing on the basis of authority, but rather live according to one’s own lights; and freedom is curtailed or taken away entirely to the extent to which another holds sway over one’s decisions, and maximized and supported by removing “external” influences so that one’s actions are determined by nothing other than oneself.

It is precisely this aversion to and rejection of “authority” that D.C. Schindler has in mind when he speaks of a “crisis” of authority in the first essay in our volume, “The Crisis of Authority.” We no longer instinctively see authority as a gift from God, a symbolic realization of his fatherly care for creation. Rather, authority has come to be seen simply as the exercise of power, conceived of as the ability to move others to do the will of the ruler—with perhaps the caveat that “authority” distinguishes itself from simple power by its “legitimacy.” This raises the difficulty, however, of what makes one exercise of power legitimate and not another, a quandary to which the only solutions that seem possible are procedural ones, since questions of truth have been ruled out from the beginning. At best, legitimacy is due to “consent”; but, as Schindler points out, this does not solve the problem but merely defers it, not only because consent can be manufactured through mass media, but also because the dividing line between justice and injustice cannot be reduced to agreement. Attempts to secure freedom by excluding authority leave us, not with freedom, but with power deprived of a transcendent foundation and horizon. As a result, a caricature of authority is introduced, which depends upon and furthers an immanentized and essentially competitive view of the human person and the cosmos.

This crisis of authority can only be overcome, Schindler says, by recovering an understanding of what authority is: an embodied mediation of the transcendent horizon within which human existence is carried out and of the presence of the Creator who has ordered the world for flourishing. Such, Schindler notes, was the view of Plato, whose philosopher-king is able to liberate those in bondage to falsehood precisely because he has seen the light of truth and is able, through his testimony and his rule, to bring this truth to those in darkness. After further considering the Christian synthesis of the Greek, Jewish, and Roman understandings of authority, Schindler offers us a view of authority as a symbolic—a kind of efficacious sign—of the truth that bestows genuine freedom.

If Schindler diagnoses the modern reduction of authority to power, Andrew Willard Jones, in “The Form of Power,” turns his attention to the concept of power itself, arguing that much contemporary political reflection proceeds with an impoverished and ultimately misleading account of what power is. Against the assumption that power is a single, neutral force, varying only in degree and therefore in need of external constraints, Jones retrieves the classical insight that power takes distinct forms according to the kind of political order in which it is exercised. Power ordered to the common good, he insists, is not simply a better-regulated version of tyrannical power, but a fundamentally different reality altogether. It works through free obedience rooted in shared virtue, friendship, and a genuinely common happiness, rather than through fear or compulsion.

This distinction allows Jones to recover the classical understanding of royal power, which arises not from domination but from a paternal relation oriented toward the flourishing of those who are ruled. Law, on this view, functions not primarily as an instrument of enforcement, but as a form of rational instruction ordered to the formation of virtue and the coordination of common life. A justly ordered society, then, is a society of “kings all the way down—or, in what amounts to the same thing, fathers all the way up.” The coercive power of the state has a role, but only to the extent that justice has not yet permeated the relational “gaps” that remain.

Coercion is therefore, in Jones’s view, not the essence of power, but a sign of its failure. For this reason, it is of the essence of tyrannical rule to expand the gaps between human beings, and to rely increasingly on bureaucracy, surveillance, and force, in order to undermine the very social bonds upon which authentic political order depends. In a parody of royal power, then, a corrupt society is one of “tyrants all the way down, which, in the end, is identical to a society of slaves all the way down.”

Seen in this light, the modern identification of freedom with the limitation of power paradoxically undermines the freedom it seeks while further entrenching the tyranny it opposes. Genuine power is ordered to the common good, and operates through free obedience and shared virtue, while coercive power marks the breakdown of political community. By recovering a classical account of power as intrinsically ordered to truth, virtue, and the common good, Jones shows that political power need not be opposed to freedom, but is in fact one of its necessary conditions.

The sovereignty of the individual, and his ability to judge for himself the truth or falsity of a proposition with the use of his own reason, were among the decisive principles of the Enlightenment. Any entity outside of the person was seen to have authority over him only by way of imposition, not nature. In this issue exploring the meaning and manifestations of authority, then, it is fitting that Jacob Sherman, in “The Authority and Eccentricity of Reason,” considers the particular authority belonging to reason. It is noteworthy that one might be tempted to express this authority as something that reason has “over” the person, only to be confronted by the fact that reason is a faculty “of” the person, and so not really (or not exactly) something over or “outside” of the person. In fact, this language suggesting a tension between the “outside of us” and the “within us” of reason stems from the epistemological challenge of articulating how (or whether) our reason connects us with the “external” world; and since the Enlightenment there has increasingly been a resigned reduction of reason to a purely instrumental and procedural faculty. Sherman, by drawing on figures such as Plato, Horkheimer, McGilchrist, and Benedict XVI, traces this move from seeing reason as an objective orientation toward truth, goodness, and beauty, to a subjective capacity for calculation, coordination, and control. On the basis of their thought, Sherman defends the classical experience of reason as “eccentric” or “ecstatic”: reason not as closed in upon itself, but as constituted by its openness to being. The phenomenology or experience of assent, he argues, reveals that truth does not coerce the mind from without, but liberates it from within: “this very event of reasonable assent unsettles the language of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ since finite reason discovers its own deeper identity in the greater reason spread abroad.” This contemplative dimension of reason, variously named nous, intellectus, or noesis, grounds reason’s genuine authority, allowing us once again to live as intellectual beings ordered to wonder, contemplation, and communion with reality, in which reason receives its true authority by participating in the intelligibility of being.

In “‘No Authority Except from God’ (Rom 13:1): A Defense of Christian Political Hellenism from Plato and Ecphantus to (St.) Constantine,” Matthew J. Dal Santo addresses the question of political authority by retrieving a Christian political imagination almost wholly supplanted by modern assumptions about sovereignty, secularization, and the proper relation between Church and state. He argues that much contemporary Christian reflection, both Catholic and Orthodox, treats the historical alliance between Christianity and political authority as either a regrettable compromise or a merely pragmatic arrangement, often explained away as an instance of oikonomia. Against this tendency, Dal Santo contends that the Christian tradition, especially in its Eastern and patristic forms, understood political authority as possessing genuine theological significance, not as an accidental or extrinsic feature of Christian history.

Beginning from St. Paul’s claim that “there is no authority except from God,” Dal Santo shows that early Christian political thought did not regard political rule as religiously neutral or morally indifferent. Drawing on Platonic political philosophy, Hellenistic sources such as Ecphantus, and patristic witnesses including Athanasius and Gregory of Nazianzus, he argues that political authority was understood analogically as a participation in the Logos’s unifying and ordering activity in the cosmos. The ruler, most fully exemplified in the Byzantine basileus, was seen as neither divine nor autonomous. Rather, he exercised a form of authority within creation that imaged the Logos, by gathering multiplicity into order and rendering visible the intelligibility of the world.

Dal Santo emphasizes that this vision neither confused Church and state nor sacralized political power, since political authority was neither priestly nor salvific. Yet neither was political order reduced to a merely functional arrangement for managing social life. Instead, the political realm was understood as one dimension of a world that is itself a theophany, a created order already bearing the imprint of divine reason. From this perspective, secularization is not simply a differentiation of the two spheres of Church and state, but is in fact a refusal to regard the political order as an act of sacred representation.

Dal Santo therefore proposes a recovery of what he calls a Christian political Hellenism: an account of political authority that affirms its legitimacy and dignity, while at the same time not absolutizing it. In this way, Dal Santo rejects both modern secularism and confessionalism, both of which presuppose the same “flat” ontology. By restoring an analogical understanding of political authority as an image of the Logos governing the world, he argues, Christianity can once again articulate a public vision of authority that neither competes with the Church nor relegates faith to the private sphere, but bears witness to the Word made flesh, who orders creation from within its natural and historical forms.

In “Episcopal Authority and Communio Ecclesiology: Some Lessons from History,” Nicholas J. Healy considers the contemporary call for greater shared responsibility in the life of the Church, today commonly gathered under the heading of “synodality,” within a longer theological and ecclesiological history that goes back at least to the early Church, and which took concrete historical form institutionally in regional and diocesan synods, as well as spiritually in moments when the faith was preserved through the consensus fidelium. These precedents indicate that authority in the Church has never been exercised in isolation from communion, but always within the living faith of the whole body.

Healy therefore seeks to clarify episcopal authority in light of the ecclesiology of communion articulated by Vatican II. He notes that the Council was not convened to resolve a doctrinal crisis, but to address the modern situation pastorally, with Christ and the human person revealed in Christ as the hermeneutical key to the Council. From this perspective, the Church is understood first as a sacrament, or “real symbol,” of God’s plan to recapitulate all things in Christ. In this light, the Church is understood as a mystery of love and communion grounded in the Eucharist, which establishes the Church’s “vertical” communion with the Trinity and gives rise to the “horizontal” communion of the human race gathered into Christ’s body.

This Eucharistic ecclesiology makes it possible to see episcopal authority as much more than juridical or administrative power. Rather, the episcopacy is a sacramental reality ordered to communion and mission. While the bishop’s authority is exercised collegially with and under the pope, it is not given to him by the Successor of Peter, but directly by Christ through the plenitude of the sacrament of Holy Orders. The episcopacy, therefore, is not a delegated function, but a participation in apostolic responsibility for the Church. The implications for this communio ecclesiology extend to the laity, as well: genuine co-responsibility, Healy argues, does not consist in extending governance to all, but in honoring the distinct vocations of clergy and laity within the Church’s mission. Synodality, if it is to renew the Church, must therefore not be reduced to the extension of bureaucratic processes, but lived as Eucharistic communion and holiness, through which authority truly “causes to grow” the life of the Church.

In “The Church as Political Authority in Dignitatis humanae and Centesimus annus,” Michael Joseph Higgins examines the Church’s role in the political order by attending closely to the internal logic of Vatican II’s “Declaration on Religious Freedom” and its subsequent development in John Paul II’s social teaching. Against liberal readings, which restrict the Church’s role to the purely private sphere or that of civil society, and integralist proposals, which collapse ecclesial authority into political governance, Higgins argues that the Church exercises a genuine political authority precisely by proclaiming the truth according to which political life is to be ordered, without directly managing or administering the political order itself.

Higgins begins with Dignitatis humanae, emphasizing that while the document affirms a real right to religious freedom, it also insists that this right is not absolute. The state may regulate external expressions of religion when required by just public order, which includes not only peace and the settlement of competing rights, but also public morality. Crucially, Dignitatis humanae teaches that such regulation must conform to the “objective moral order,” the principles of which the Church is divinely tasked to “declare and confirm with her authority.” Although these principles flow from human nature and are in principle accessible to reason, Higgins argues that the document implies that only the Church can guarantee full and certain access to the moral order as a whole.

This implication becomes explicit when Dignitatis humanae is read in light of Gaudium et spes, which teaches that the truth of human nature is fully revealed only in Christ. Since the Church is the authoritative teacher of the truth that is Christ, the Church alone can disclose the fullness of the moral order by which political authority must be guided. The state, therefore, can fulfill its responsibility to regulate religious freedom justly only insofar as it receives this truth from the Church.

Higgins then turns to Centesimus annus, where John Paul II extends this logic to democracy and the economy. Authentic democracy, the pope argues, is possible only when political life is guided by a true conception of the human person, a conception revealed in the mystery of the Incarnate Word and entrusted to the Church. The Church thus contributes not merely to civil society, but to the political order itself, by offering the truth that makes freedom, justice, and authentic political forms possible. In this way, Higgins concludes, both conciliar and post-conciliar teaching point toward an understanding of the Church as a political authority: not one that governs by force, but one that governs by truth.                                                                                  

—The Editors