AUTHORITY. - In a broad sense authority means any power existing in a superior over subjects, to direct, govern and, if need be, coerce. Authority can be of natural origin, as is that of domestic and civil society, voluntary, as in contractual society, and transcendent, as is that of the Supreme Pontiff in the Church, resting on a positive divine mandate. Each such authority has a different content and a specific note that distinguishes it from the others.
I. AUTHORITY IN CIVIL SOCIETY
With respect to social authority, five aspects must be considered separately, which represent as many problems of Catholic sociology: necessity, concept and essence, origin, primary subject, intrinsic limits. Other secondary questions, which are connected with those mentioned, will be touched upon incidentally, when the occasion presents itself.
1. Necessity of authority
No divergence exists among serious theorists on the necessity of authority in the social organism, if one excepts anarchist ideologies, which, being outside reality, do not merit consideration. The concordance noted derives from a simple observation of the social fact. Without any difference of time or place, as soon as rational subjects gather to attain a common end, there always emerges from their psychological union an active center, which directs, regulates, coordinates and, when necessary, constrains the members in the exercise of their activity. The constancy of the fact leads one to admit a natural law, which governs in a stable manner the becoming of human society, a necessity of an objective order. Every experience, in fact, that repeats itself in a stable and fixed manner, every effect that manifests itself universally in space and in duration, requires an adequate cause, which cannot be other than the nature of man, identical everywhere and in every time. From this it is therefore deduced that political authority is of natural origin, just as the origin of public society is natural, over which it is destined to preside.
It is peremptorily demanded by many reasons, which it is useful to mention summarily. Society is essentially an aggregate of several intelligent beings, who set out to reach a common goal through collaboration. In order for this to be vital, while each subject preserves within it a proper and ineliminable autonomy of judgment and will, a central force is required that always keeps firm a threefold unity: of ends, of intentions and of action.
The fundamental unity of the collective goal exists from the very first constitution of the social organism, since the cohesion of wills, which gives rise to the collective entity, is an effect of it. However, besides the universal common end, intermediate, contingent and historical ends present themselves to the evaluation of the individual intelligence, with respect to which divergences of opinion are possible, harmful to the harmonious collaboration of the members, if a higher reason and a preeminent will did not intervene to remove uncertainties and to mark out common directives.
What is said regarding the unity of ends and the consequent necessity of a supreme power holds for the unity of intentions. Society is sustained by virtue of an act of consent, which must be continually defended against the germs of disintegration, so that the insurgence of personal egoisms and partisan passions, not extinguished by the fact of association having occurred, may not weaken its force of cohesion. And this proves more necessary when it comes to the choice of means for obtaining the collective end, with respect to which psychological concordance ordinarily remains firm. Even in this field, the diversity of opinions and the consequent disarticulation of social life could not be avoided without the presence of a strong helmsman, who guides the social ship and impresses upon it the appropriate direction.
Finally, the unity of intentions, which social authority provides for, is already a presupposition to the unity of action, against which, however, the abuse of individual liberty, intrigue, crime, the violation of the laws of justice, and disobedience to the natural or positive norms of coexistence may arise. The health of social life therefore requires a power that spurs on the indolent, constrains the recalcitrant, punishes delinquents, and keeps order firm while protecting the law.
2. Concept and essence
On the necessity so far demonstrated there exist, as has been noted, no appreciable divergences. They become numerous and irreconcilable regarding the other aspects, which remain still to be considered. On the concept of authority are reflected all the theories elaborated by the different currents of thought concerning the very essence of collective life.
According to Rousseau, authority would be the arithmetical sum of individual rights which, concentrating on the same point of reference through the voluntary renunciation of the members, give rise to the directive power of the collectivity, so that it reduces itself, in the final analysis, to the force of the greater number.
Doctrines with a materialistic background: sociologism, organicism, racism and positivism in general, excluding from the production of the collective entity any conscious influence of the human person and attributing its origin, consequently, to physical, mechanical or biological forces, conceive authority as the sum of cosmic and vital forces, physical or biological energy concentrated in a single propelling point. Authority thus remains stripped of any moral and juridical note.
Nor is the attitude of immanentism different. Since the State, even in this theory, is an effect of the necessary evolution to which the absolute spirit is subject, the authority that arises by virtue of the same interior evolutionary law is a chain that binds the individual to the State. It reduces itself, therefore, to force, as in the theories that trace the origin of the State to subjugating struggle. According to modern juridical science, moreover, authority is either an original power of the State to impose its own will coercively, or a power of self-determination. The two conceptions coincide in holding authority to be a pre-juridical fact, which is produced by virtue of historical evolution, unfolding outside the law, and therefore the sovereignty of the State would be devoid of any ethical content, as a fact without any justification and a power free from every law and loosed from every bond.
From this summary exposition one may conclude that almost all the currents of contemporary thought, despite the diversity of the principles from which they take their start, arrive at the same deformation of the concept of authority, lowering it, some openly and some covertly, to the level of physical force, however this force may then be explained.
Catholic publicistic writing, on the other hand, customarily defines authority as the right to govern civil society for the attainment of its own end. Authority is, first of all, a right, whose nature can only be grasped by referring to the more general concept of subjective right, which, according to Catholic thought, must be understood as an absolute faculty, original or derived, of doing or of demanding something. Authority is therefore not a simple coercive power, although not infrequently it must make use of coercion to maintain order, but a power essentially and intrinsically moral. Nor can it be otherwise, if one keeps in mind the function that nature assigns to it in favor of the social body.
What makes authority necessary, as has been said, is a requirement of order and of internal unity, in the collaboration of the members toward the attainment of the common welfare. Now neither order nor unity can be obtained from rational subjects by a mechanical arrangement of norms or by the scarecrow of the coercive force of the State. Social order, being an essentially human and spiritual order, can only be the effect of a conscious adherence of man to certain rational principles of action and of a subjection of the free will to certain moral norms. If, therefore, authority is a superior principle of order, it cannot be other than a power that influences intelligences and free wills, that is, a moral power.
The internal unity, moreover, results from unity of purpose and of collaboration, which are in turn the effect of a prior rational evaluation, followed by the assent of the will and its command directed to practical action. Authority must, therefore, be a force that moves reason and will, and the consequence imposes itself once again that it cannot be conceived otherwise than as a moral power producing a true obligation. It will suffice to observe the fact in order to perceive the justice of this position. As soon as several rational subjects deliberately accept the same goal and propose to unite their activities in a stable collaboration, the goal becomes the common goal of the collectivity as such, to which, therefore, from that moment, belongs the right to require from each of its members the contributions necessary to realize it, while upon each one weighs the duty to submit to its demands and to follow them. Now this right of the collectivity is properly authority, which consequently takes shape as an original subjective right of the entire social body.
But in order to have the complete concept of authority it is necessary to establish the specific and proper content of this right. Such content is expressed by the above-mentioned definition, when in it it is specified that authority is the right to govern society. It is not an indeterminate faculty of acting, a discretionary power, as will be better seen later, but a faculty well individuated by the goal for which nature wills and imposes it, well circumscribed in its field of action. It would be superfluous to demonstrate that the function of authority consists positively in the direction, government and command of the social body. Rather it is better to add some further determination, which may serve to clarify better the concept explained.
Political authority differs especially both from domestic authority and from that of the master. Domestic authority concerns immediately the private good of the family and of its members, nor is it fully sufficient to itself, whereas political authority has as its goal the public good and possesses a full sufficiency, inasmuch as it is independent of any other authority of the natural order. The authority of the master, in turn, refers directly to the private good of a determined person and exercises its specific function in the administration of goods, concerning personal services only in an indirect way; political authority, on the other hand, occupies itself with the public and general good and provides for the government of persons and the search for the means that serve to integrate them in their needs. Of other notes that serve to characterize it, more will be said later.
3. Origin
Having established the concept of authority, it is now necessary to proceed to the discussion of the vital questions mentioned above. One of the problems of fundamental importance, in the construction of an organic social theory, is without doubt that concerning the origin of political power. It is clear in fact that, as long as it is not demonstrated to man, a rational being, why authority should command and he should obey, and as long as he is not made to grasp the moral essence of this power and of this subjection, everything in social life remains without support. This the ancient thought intuited, which took care, first of all, to set out in search of the proximate and remote source of the power to command men and to impose imperative precepts upon them, and for this reason often dwelt at length on the minute analysis of authority and of its causes.
The same exact intuition, on the other hand, was lacking in more recent juridical speculation. From the first half of the 19th century it relegated discussions concerning the origin of authority to the field of morals and politics, and claimed to construct the theory of sovereignty with exclusively juridical materials, without the extraneous interference of other elements. This rigid position is taken by virtue of a more general conception, which maintains that true science must content itself with analyzing the fact, the positive datum, without troubling to ascend to principles and first causes.
According to the common opinion of today's publicists, the State has no need of any justification, finding its full justification in the very fact of its existence, and since political power is an essential element of the State, as a juridical person, it too remains fully justified by the very fact that it exists and acts. Any search for its origin would therefore be superfluous.
The poverty of this conception is revealed by reflection from the doctrinal elaboration of previous epochs, when there was an acute sensitivity to the problem and several paths were attempted, with the aim of resting the authority of the State upon a foundation other than the State itself. The supports proposed were two: the divinity and the popular will.
A conception that goes far back in time placed the origin of authority in the supreme being, coloring itself differently, however, according to the particular religious vision by which the theorists were inspired. In Eastern paganism, and later also in Roman paganism, the head of the State was not only the legitimate holder of a divine power, but was considered himself a visible divinity. Against this idolatrous configuration of power, on which ancient absolutism was founded, Christian thought rose up. While preserving the idea of the divine origin of power, it purified it in conformity with the new concept of the divinity and of the relations that bind man to the creator, preserver and supreme legislator, excluding and combating every apotheosis of the creature.
The motto of St. Paul: non est potestas nisi a Deo (Rom. 13:1) and other explicit and implicit references in the same sense, contained in the deposit of revelation, served as a guide to the new conception of the origin of authority, which may be summarized as follows: political power, as the original right of the community to govern itself, derives from the author of nature himself, from the supreme will that has established its laws and in it finds its transcendent source and its justification. The legitimist theories of the divine investiture of the monarch, which gave Bellarmine and Suárez the occasion to refine the Catholic conception of power, rest on the same concept, but deform it to the point of legitimizing royal absolutism.
The principle of the transcendent origin of power continued to influence social conceptions until the appearance of agnostic rationalism. The theorist's gaze then, after having extinguished the light of divinity from the horizon of human speculation, shifts toward the earth, whence it will never rise again. According to Rousseau, political power is born by effect of an act of popular will, with which each individual freely renounces his own rights in favor of the collectivity, and these, summing up in the so-called general will, expression of the majority, are converted into sovereignty. Authority, therefore, is nothing other than the arithmetical sum of individual wills.
Positivism and idealism lose altogether the sense of the grave problem. In the various theories to which they give rise, authority is either a naturalistic fact, the effect of the biological and mechanical forces that preside over the formation of the social entity, or an inflexible empire exercised by the absolute spirit, which in the State reaches its highest manifestation. Identical to the preceding is the attitude of contemporary juridical theories, as has been set forth above.
The positions of Catholic thought regarding the origin of authority, already well defined in the preceding centuries, were reconfirmed by the voice of the recent Pontiffs. In the encyclical Diuturnum, Leo XIII writes: "Moreover, as regards the power of commanding, the Church rightly teaches that it comes from God; for this she finds openly attested in the sacred letters and in the monuments of Christian antiquity." Pius XI and Pius XII taught the same doctrine, both indirectly and directly.
In what sense, then, must the divine origin of power be understood? Not in the sense that God, in conferring power, intervenes in an extraordinary manner, with a gift that is gratuitous and not owed to the nature of the subject; but in the sense of an attribution connected in a necessary manner with the nature of the entity which, possessing that determinate essential constitution willed by God, postulates a special completion or faculty, without which it could not subsist. Political power, therefore, does not arise, according to Catholic thought, from a divine action that transcends nature, but through the effect of the very laws of the social being, which requires it in a necessary manner. And since these laws were determined by God, the author of nature, so too their effect depends in the last analysis on that same will. The human will, in this production, has no causal influence. The efficacy of its causality extends solely to the production of the collective entity, but not to the authority that is to govern it, which comes into being spontaneously at the very moment in which the subjects will society, and would come into being, as Vitoria and Suárez noted, even on the hypothetical supposition of an act to the contrary on their part.
Fundamentally, the solution that Catholic thought gives to the problem of the origin of authority is not substantially different from the one it gives to the more general problem concerning the origin of every natural right, of which the present one is a particular aspect. All natural and original rights, precisely because they are connected with the essence of the physical or moral person or with its intrinsic end, derive from God as the author of nature, and find in him their ultimate reason and their adequate foundation. Authority, on the other hand, is nothing but a natural and original right of the political body; it therefore, like every other right, derives from God. From this it appears how improperly the Catholic theory of the divine origin of authority is, in a disparaging sense, called theological, by those who like to rid themselves of it more conveniently, erroneously supposing that it rests upon an act of faith, to which science cannot resort without renouncing its own principles.
A few simple deductions now suffice, resting on two facts, to demonstrate the thesis whose meaning has been clarified. First of all, it is universally admitted, now that contractualist theories have set, that social life is an effect of natural forces. By a legitimate passage from effect to cause, from this incontrovertible datum of experience reason concludes that the ultimate source of society must be sought in the very author of nature, who, having made man social, also willed society. The conclusion, then, at which reason arrives by means of this simple syllogism, extends also to all the essential properties that spring from the same source of the natural laws, of which the most principal is authority. For this too, therefore, the preceding conclusion imposes itself, namely that it also derives from God.
Furthermore, it is beyond controversy that public authority is required by a natural exigency of the social body, in such a way that it arises and is determined independently of the will of the components. Now if political power in its genesis does not depend on the free act of men gathered into a collective organism, but instead is produced by virtue of a natural and unavoidable exigency, one must once again ascend to the very author of nature, in order to find its source and adequate reason.
To this double deduction, of which only the atheist can doubt, another can be added, resting on the very nature of political power. This power, as has been demonstrated, is a true subjective right to govern the members of the collectivity for the attainment of the social end. Such a right, however, has a content entirely its own, essentially different from that of individual rights, and grants a faculty of action over the subjects, capable of binding the will with its precepts, laws and prescriptions, by a moral bond that cannot be declined, called obligation. Given these particular properties of its, it would be an error, pardonable only to the imagination of Rousseau, to consider it as a resultant of individual wills or a sum of private rights. Logic, on the contrary, demands that in it one recognize an original and natural public right of the social body and that one conclude once again to its transcendent origin.
Connected with the preceding question is the one debated among Catholic authors themselves, whether authority must be regarded as the substantial form of the social organism or only as one of its essential properties. Granted the probability of the two opinions, the second is to be held as better founded, since the social entity emerges on the plane of reality when several rational subjects have adhered to the same collective end and dispose themselves to coordinate their activity, in order to attain it through a stable collaboration. As soon as this fusion of wills takes place, the matter, represented by the human mass, is informed by a new spiritual principle, the psychological union of the subjects, by which these are compacted into a single social organism. Authority is required in order that such a union may endure and the collaboration may unfold in an ordered manner, not because it exists. Without doubt the birth of the social being and of authority must be called simultaneous, and yet, although between the one and the other no priority of time can be assigned, one must admit a priority of nature of the social being over authority.
4. Primary subject
On the question concerning the immediate subject in which authority resides, there exists a strong divergence of opinions within Catholic doctrine. Contemporary juridical doctrine is by now in agreement in holding that sovereignty must be considered an original faculty, of which the State is the immediate subject and holder. Sovereignty, according to the most common opinion, is so connected with the State that it is impossible to conceive it without a corresponding power of command. Since the State is an original juridical person, it possesses an equally original power of empire, by virtue of which it can impose precepts, dictate norms, constitute its own juridical order and furnish it with a coercive apparatus.
This conception agrees with one of the major currents of Catholic thought. The Catholic doctrinal tradition, in fact, of which its great theorists, such as Vitoria, Suárez, Soto, Molina, Bellarmine, are the expression, found itself perfectly unanimous until the 18th century in upholding a double principle. The primary subject, in which, by immediate communication of nature and of the Creator, authority resides, is the people, the collectivity, the social organism. The monarch, the prince, the physical or moral person who exercises the right, receives it immediately from the people. That is, there exists a substantial difference in the value of the titles on which the possession of authority rests. While the political body possesses it as a natural endowment, connected with its very being as a unitary organization, the monarch or the moral person holds it by a derived title, inasmuch as its real possession and legitimate exercise presuppose a conferral on the part of the people: auctoritas est a Deo per populum.
To grasp the exact meaning of this conception, it is necessary to compare it with the democratic and demagogic conception of Rousseau and to note their differences. Agnostic thought, of which Rousseau is one of the major representatives, does not derive authority from any metempirical cause, but rather makes it spring from man himself, from the play of free wills. The Catholic democratic conception, on the other hand, designates the supreme cause as the ultimate source of authority, as has been seen above.
Furthermore, agnostic rationalism proclaimed the people sovereign, maintaining that the people would not only be the first and original holder of sovereignty, but also that it possesses this right in an inalienable manner, so that those who exercise it would be nothing other than its mandatories, executors of its will or of the general will.
The Christian democratic conception, although it recognizes in the people the original and immediate subject of authority, maintains neither the unlimited autonomy of man, from which libertarian atomism derives, nor much less that of the people, both the one and the other being subject to the moral law and to natural right. Nor consequently does it teach that the latter is sovereign and remains so always and necessarily, but it maintains that the people transmits in toto its own right to the person or group of persons chosen by it, who become the true and proper holders of it and exercise it as integral organs of the State.
The people, once the irrevocable transmission has taken place, retains the right to express and make known its own will and to watch over whether the one who possesses authority exercises it in conformity with the demands of justice and the common good, there having intervened a kind of pact, codified or not in a constitution, between the people and the government, by virtue of which the latter undertakes to govern according to the institutional laws and the requirements of the common good. In one case only does the people acquire full freedom of action and the right to change the form of its regime, namely when the one who exercises power becomes a tyrant, subverting the laws on which the social organization rests, since, the power having been transmitted to him the better and more orderly to provide for the collective good, when this should be seriously compromised, because of his wickedness or incapacity, the natural juridical title on which the possession of authority rests having fallen away, this returns to rest upon the original subject, that is, upon the people, which may dispose of it as it sees fit.
With the spread of demagogic theories, however, in the 18th century, Catholic doctrine too changed orientation, abandoning the democratic conception, which until that time had been upheld unanimously. To better counter the voluntarism of the Rousseauian theory, which made society derive from a contract, there was excluded, first of all, from the production of the social being any causal influence of the human person, attributing its spontaneous birth to certain facts, called associative facts. On the other hand, to better guard against the theory of popular sovereignty and demagogism, it was denied that the people was in any way the original subject of power and, therefore, extending the theory of facts also to the question of authority, it was maintained that it was conferred immediately by God upon a determined physical or moral person, already designated for command by certain objective titles, such as, for example, territorial dominion, the development of the patriarchal family, conquest, and in a special way the greater capacity for government.
To Taparelli, to whom the elaboration of the new conception is due, there were added others, more or less perfecting and inflecting the original nucleus, among whom Zigliara deserves mention, who, while maintaining the principle of the immediate conferral of authority on the part of God, conceded to the people the faculty of designating its subject. It is to this last form of the theory that the encyclical Diuturnum of Leo XIII is preferably inspired. Nevertheless, both before and after the cited encyclical, the opinions of scholars of sociology in the Catholic field have remained divided, the two conceptions counting decided supporters. Those who still range themselves in favor of the democratic conception of power observe that the intention of the Pope, in promulgating the encyclical on political principate, was not that of condemning a doctrine professed and taught for so long a series of years by the most eminent authors of moral and theological sciences, but simply that of combating the errors widespread in his time, re-establishing the true concept of authority. And in this observation they are supported by express declarations of Leo XIII.
The two theories remain, in fact, probable, and may be freely defended, although for some years the more ancient one has again become preponderant, the one which rests on more convincing rational motives. Political power, in fact, as has been demonstrated, is an essentially original power, necessarily required by the social being, as soon as this is actualized, for the ordered attainment of its natural ends. Given this intimate connection, the consequence remains inevitable that the first subject, to which the order of nature confers the right to command, cannot be a determined physical or moral person, but is the whole social body, the collectivity, the people, the State. In fact, if such a right is indissolubly connected with the very being of society, in such a way that it accompanies its birth always and necessarily as an inseparable property, it exists together with the collective organization, and since this is in act at the precise moment in which several wills conspire toward the same end, at that moment too authority is in act, which, for very obvious reasons, finds then no other subject to which to adhere, if not the entire community, the people gathered in society.
Furthermore, it is the common opinion of Catholic publicists that the will of rational subjects exercises no causal influence in the production of authority. Given such independence from the free will, which, if it wills society, must also necessarily await authority, no succession of time can be assigned between the collective act of the will, which creates the social being, and the act of the superior Cause which joins to it the right to govern. And this leads to the conclusion, as has not failed to be observed, of the simultaneous birth of the one and the other, and as above of the presence of a single possible subject, to which such a right originally belongs, that is, the community, the people. Let it be added that, beyond all dispute, the organic collectivity, as soon as it is brought into being by its productive causes, becomes a moral person, to which from the objective order there is assigned an end of its own. Now when the natural order assigns a necessary and intrinsic end to a physical or moral person, it also confers upon it the means suitable and indispensable for attaining it, which are original faculties and rights. Authority, on the other hand, is nothing other than one of these rights, the principal one, the most necessary. It must, therefore, belong to the person to whom the end belongs, that is, once again, to the community, to the people, to the State.
All these arguments, in another form, are gathered in two passages, one from Vitoria and the other from Bellarmine, which it is worth quoting. Vitoria writes: "The material cause, where such power resides by natural and divine right, is the same society, to which it belongs to govern and administer itself and to direct all its forces to the common good. For by natural and divine right there must be a power to govern society, and, setting aside positive and human common right, there is no greater reason why that power should reside in one rather than in another; it is therefore necessary that the same community be sufficient unto itself and have the faculty of governing itself. For if, before men gathered into society, no one was superior to the others, there is no reason why in the community, that is, in civil society, someone should claim for himself a power over the others" (De potestate civili, n. 7).
More succinctly Bellarmine writes: "This power is of divine right, but the divine right has given such power to no one; therefore it has given it to the multitude. Finally, human society must be a perfect society, and must therefore have the power to preserve itself and consequently to punish disturbers of the peace" (De laicis, III, 6).
The theory of associative facts is moreover irreconcilable with the history of institutions, which shows how in every age the power of those who govern has been restricted by fundamental charters, constitutions and transactions imposed on the sovereign by the collectivity. If authority were conferred directly by God on a determinate subject, it would have to pass entire into that subject, without any restriction other than that deriving from the natural purpose of society. But in that case the interferences of the collectivity, which seeks to protect itself against the abusive exercise of power by the means mentioned above, would have to be judged illegitimate. A harsh conclusion to admit.
The principal difficulties that are usually raised against the democratic conception are easily overcome. It is objected that, if authority resides in the people and is transferred by them to those who exercise it, the instability of institutions cannot be avoided, since the people can revoke the act of consent by which it has transmitted the power. The consequence would be legitimate if it were demonstrated that, according to the laws of nature, no act of voluntary consent can produce a stable effect which, once brought into being, is withdrawn from the discretion of the cause that produced it. But such a demonstration is impossible, since there are cases in which the contrary occurs, as, for example, in matrimonial consent. In this case the necessity of the end detaches the effect from the free wills: the same must analogically be said of authority, whose stability is required by the social end. It is further objected that, if authority resides in the people, democracy would be an institution of natural right and therefore every other form of government would be illegitimate. To this difficulty Suárez has already replied, observing that "this power, as it is given immediately by God to the community, in the manner of speaking of the jurists, may be called of natural right in a negative way, not positive, or rather of natural right conceding, not simply commanding" (Defensio fidei, III, 6).
5. Limits of authority
The democratic theory concerning the original subject of authority is, according to Suárez, necessary for understanding the limits of public power, a subject on which moral and juridical speculation has been exercised in every age. The picture of conceptions in this regard offers a double panorama: the first is occupied by absolutist theories, the other by those that assign limits to social authority.
The absolutist conception may be said to be as old as human thought. Setting aside Oriental absolutism, supported by the concept that the sovereign was an omnipotent divinity, a concept later transferred to the Roman State, the formulation of the theory is already found in the Digest, which attributes to the will of the sovereign the value of law and defines his power as legibus soluta. The penetration of Christian thought temporarily corrected this false principle, which began to revive in the period of royal absolutism of the 16th and 17th centuries through the work of court theorists. Nevertheless, even at this time, conceptions still fail to detach themselves totally from the medieval tradition, and the prince, although of divine election and conceived as supreme authority, superiorem non recognoscens e legibus solutus, is subjected at least to the divine law and to the imperative of his conscience. Even Bodin, to whom the modern concept of sovereignty is erroneously attributed, assigned limits to the sovereign's power in the divine law, in natural law and in international law.
One must reach the 18th century to find ourselves once again confronted with an absolutist formulation of power. Starting from a purely naturalistic presupposition, Hobbes and Rousseau configure power as unlimited. In their thought, by different processes, the State is transformed into absolute power, and sovereignty is totally dissolved from every moral and juridical bond. In the 19th century, then, in reaction to natural law, from which the two previous theorists had drawn their inspiration, although national sovereignty was replaced by that of the State, the absoluteness of power was not tempered. Positivism and idealism found themselves in agreement in dissolving the power of the State from any external and internal bond.
Historicism and sociologism conceived the State as an entity standing by itself, with its own being and its own will, entirely different from the being and will of its components, and to it they attributed an unlimited faculty of action, a despotic dominion over individuals, conceived as integral cells of the social organism. Idealism in turn, through the triad Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and their imitators, conferred on the State the attributes of divinity, imagining it perfectly free, a law unto itself, unlimited will.
With these doctrines the principle of the absolute autonomy of sovereign power established itself in the juridical sciences. At present the great majority of publicists conceive the power of the State as juridically unlimited, that is, not bound in its power to act by any norm, whether internal or external, that does not proceed from its own discretionary will, the autonomous source of all law.
Catholic doctrine is contrary to this pernicious dogma, which lends itself to justifying every form of tyranny. While recognizing that social authority is supreme in its own order, in which it recognizes no superior, it confines it within exact limits, which are determined by the law of nature, by the rights of the person and by the end of society. Every visible entity carries with its own being an immanent law, by which it is governed, and this manifests the existence of an objective order, to which all beings conform, obeying certain internal principles of action. Man does not escape this universal order, and he too carries a law of his own being which, in conformity with his rationality, is configured as a moral precept. Passing from man as individual to man as collective, the gears of the order multiply, but they do not cease to exist. The State too, as a natural entity, receives a law of its own being, which presides over the development of its own life: a law that it does not create, but finds constituted and must recognize and observe. There exists, therefore, an internal limit to its power.
This finds another important restriction in the subjective rights of the human person. Man, as a person constituted in being independently of the State, is born with a complex of rights, which are so many faculties of action granted to him by nature for the attainment of his own end. He does not enter society in order to be totally absorbed in it, and therefore he does not renounce, nor does he intend to renounce, his own rights, since if he renounced them he would annul himself as a person. Authority, then, finds in the subjective right of the human person a natural value that it cannot disregard, and must indeed protect, in conformity with its specific mission.
For, like every other entity, the public society too has a constitutional end, consisting in the common good of the associates, to be obtained through an ordered collaboration. Now the end, together with the term, toward which social action must tend by its very nature, also marks the limits within which authority may require from its subjects the services necessary to attain it, since this is not an abstract power, but a potestas that arises from the necessity of order in social life. Therefore, in the exercise of its functions, it remains essentially subordinate to the fundamental requirements expressed by the universal end. In this end, to be realized in an ordered manner, it finds its reason for being and likewise the exact scope of its competence.
In this supreme point of reference, authority and liberty are reconciled — made irreconcilable by individualism and absolutism — and from it one can deduce the limitations of both within social life. Outside the scope of the State's competence remain religious and supernatural values, with respect to which man preserves full liberty, subject only to that religious and divine society which by positive institution has the office of providing for the religious life of humanity. If the social good, in fact, is a temporal and earthly good, then internal, supernatural and eternal goods cannot fall within the scope of social authority. Private initiative must be respected by authority, just as liberty must respect the public good. The social good is a good that completes the human person and the family; where, therefore, man and the family are sufficient unto themselves, authority cannot and must not interfere. On the other hand, the social good is a collective, public good and, as such, falls within the range of authority's competence.
In social life, just as man must respect the rights of others, so too must authority respect the rights of the human person. The means by which the social end is realized is collaboration, which cannot be obtained if the living forces of society overpower and cancel one another out, as would happen if each tended to invade the rights of others, or if authority sought to overpower the parts of the collective organism, stripping them of their rights. The duty of subjection to authority does not extend beyond the limits of the common good; if authority surpasses them, it ceases. The obligation of the individual, in fact, is strictly commensurate with the end, just as the extent of the State's power remains commensurate with it — a power that acts illegally if it oversteps its boundaries. In such a case its law is unjust, and an unjust law is not a law but an abuse.
The principles established are fruitful in practical applications, which it would be too long to develop at length; rather, it is better to conclude with a panoramic view of Catholic doctrine on authority. Authority is an original subjective right of the social body, imperiously demanded by the law of nature: it derives from God, by whom it is communicated to the people, who stably transfer it to the subject designated to exercise it; it is a supreme power, independent of every other power of the same order, and yet limited by the natural law, by the rights of the person, and by the essential and internal end of the social organism.
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Antonio Messineo
II. THE AUTHORITY IN PEDAGOGY
1. The concept and the problem
The concept and the problem of authority are also of great importance in pedagogy.
The school and the educational methods of antiquity were founded on authority, understood most of the time in a wholly extrinsic manner. The teacher was the little tyrant of the school: the plagosus Orbilius has passed into history as the incarnation of a type thanks to a pupil of genius, Horace, whom he could not have spared the whip. Men thoughtful about the problem of education glimpsed the difficulties of an education not founded on methods and presuppositions of that kind, but the school essentially did not change. Christian thought introduced into the pedagogical sphere as well a sounder and more fruitful concept of authority, illuminating authority with the awareness of its limits, its duties and its responsibilities toward God and quickening it with the flame of charity. But the Christian pedagogical ideal, put into practice whenever holiness was joined to teaching, while it undoubtedly modified educational practice and institutions, was nevertheless not universally followed. Authority in the school, as elsewhere, continued to be understood always in its exterior aspect as a power of arbitrary will, binding its subjects, that is, pupils and those being educated, with an inescapable sic volo, sic iubeo. The historical evolution of the times led, with the Enlightenment, to one of the most serious and most significant crises of the principle of authority, with a tendency toward immediate applications in the political and social field. Pedagogical thought was also strongly affected by it, and from it was born Rousseau's pedagogical utopia, in which the teacher's authority is, at least in certain respects, reduced and attenuated to such a degree as to pose for the critic the problem of its possibility and its consistency. Modern pedagogical thought is, in varying measure but not without exceptions, indebted to Rousseau. In nearly two centuries since the appearance of the Émile (1762), strong and noble criticisms and important integrations have not been lacking. Even Fröbel, so sensitive to Rousseauian influence, ends by recognizing the rights of authority when he affirms that "every true education, every true teaching, every true instruction, the authentic educator and teacher must at every moment, in all his demands and determinations, maintain a twofold attitude, aim at a twofold end at the same time: to give and to take, to join and to divide, to prescribe and to second, to be active and passive, to determine and to set free" (cf. The Education of Man, 13).
In contemporary thought as well the Rousseauian current has developed to the point of feeding a pedagogical optimism founded on the overvaluation of the spontaneity of the one being educated, which, if it were carried to its most logical consequences, would have to render superfluous the work of the teacher and the educator.
Meanwhile, in school practice, while discipline was exalted in words, it was relaxed in deeds, as a consequence of that decline in moral values which is one of the most characteristic aspects of our age. Authority, when abstractly radiated in hateful attitudes, or denied, or reduced to something too vague and evanescent, is by turns cause and effect of the obscured consciousness of moral values. The crisis of the school is today also a crisis of authority. And this is so intimately connected to pedagogical activity that without it, as without the freedom that corresponds to it as its correlative and integrative term, that activity would not be possible.
The still budding spirituality of the one being educated must be, so to speak, attracted and directed toward a process of interior formation ever more complex, perfect and sure. If the child were capable of conquering by himself, without any help, a moral and cultural personality, education and teaching would be superfluous, and authority too, regarded under its pedagogical aspect, would be superfluous. But there is no one who reflects sufficiently and does not realize how difficult, even with all the aids and devices of a wise education, the conquest of personality is. Exceptions do not make a rule, and besides, if the educational process had not been begun by someone and in some way, the marvelous conquests that make us forget the humble origin from which they set out would not have been possible.
Undoubtedly in every human consciousness the spontaneous demand for personality urges, and this is not attained without the development of the intellectual and moral faculties; but in the ordered and harmonious development of these faculties a thousand interior and exterior obstacles interpose, which cannot be overcome without toil and without effort. To accomplish this toil and this effort, the authority of the teacher and the educator induces one, and in the eyes of the one being educated it must be the living example of the goal to be reached, the incarnation of an ideal type. St. Thomas notes profoundly that in man there is a natural disposition to virtue; but, since the perfect actualization of virtue is necessarily attained through a certain discipline, and since a man capable of giving himself a discipline is not easily found, it is necessary that it come to him from elsewhere (Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ-2ᵃᵉ, q. 95, a. 1). From which it does not follow that discipline must on the one hand be arbitrarily imposed and on the other passively received and endured.
2. Moral authority
Authority is above all moral authority. Age, culture, the spirit of duty, of sacrifice, of love, the strength of character must create for the educator a halo whose fascination it is not easy for one to escape who cannot but recognize himself inferior in all those qualities that he admires in the teacher. The human spirit naturally aspires to knowledge and to the good: the personality of the educator must demonstrate in a high degree the possibility of both, which the child feels confusedly but strongly. In that universal aspiration lies the psychological source of authority, understood in its noblest sense and in its most profound efficacy.
But "in puero homo": in the child there is the man with all his aptitudes and his deficiencies, with his qualities and his defects. The weakness of the active forces of reaction and action, of assimilation and selection, which characterizes the first phases of the development of the personality, makes easier the consolidation of defects and deficiencies in the sediment of habits and allows deviations and dispersions under the impulse of various factors. This makes indispensable the intervention of the educator, who must be able and must know how to dispose of all those means suited to gathering the spiritual and physical energies of the pupil, to stimulating them, to sustaining them. Thus one passes to the second aspect of authority. When irrationality rises up and bursts forth in the consciousness and in the life of the child and of the man, pure and simple moral authority is not enough, susceptible as it is of being disowned, even against the intimate conviction of the conscience. The authority of the teacher must be in a position to avail itself of all those means, even external ones, which, without offense to human dignity and Christian charity, are suitable to check the irrational impulse that has determined the caprice or the transgression, to make the pupil withdraw into himself, to restore him to the full possession and the undisturbed use of reason. The wisdom of the educator will consist in choosing, determining, carefully preparing these means, grading them in relation to the psychology of the pupil, to particular cases and circumstances. Admonition and reproof, for example, are susceptible of multiple gradations, variations and shadings: they can be mild and reticent, barely hinted at almost in passing and concealed in a praise, which highlights other positive qualities of the pupil different from those whose constant or temporary deficiency is lamented, or recalls happier moments and tests more brilliantly passed, and they can also reach heights of tone and intensity, without ever degenerating into vulgarity and irascibility. A note out of tune is enough to compromise the educational efficacy.
The educator must have the sensitivity of the artist and the wise delicacy of the surgeon who operates with a light hand on delicate organs. Indeed, since adolescence, which is the most critical age of the pupil, often has its wounds, one must barely touch them, most of the time with a rapid touch if one wishes the educational action to be effective.
When the educator, because of extraneous demands, because of the undue interference of another authority, finds himself unable to put into operation those corrective means whose efficacy he has weighed and whose necessity and opportuneness he feels in all conscience, he is deprived of authority and his work, his educational mission is rendered in large part sterile and ineffective.
But in every case, even when he reproves, the voice of the educator must be the expression of the profound conscience of the pupil, in such a way that the latter feels that, resisting it, he places himself in ever more intimate contrast with himself. Here is the root of the reconciliation of authority with freedom and the only solution of the relative problem, which with the shifting or the stiffening of terms has wearied and still today wearies the mind of philosophers and educationists.
Authority cannot and must never be founded on morally extrinsic elements: authority is not acquired by mounting the teacher's desk. Its many external coefficients must be vivified by its intrinsic constitutive factors. To enjoy the authority indispensable to his function, the teacher must be able to count on an adequate moral and cultural preparation. Only in such a case will authority be able to find its natural point of fusion with the freedom of the learner and of the pupil. Authority will be able to harmonize with freedom only when it is in a position to provoke the intimate recognition of the child's conscience, even if the external attitude may contingently not correspond to it. When there is on the one hand interior consent to authority and on the other the failed practical recognition of it, one has not the defeat of authority, but the crisis of the guilty conscience.
The educator, by every means and by every expedient that love and wisdom can suggest, will seek to raise up again the soul of the disciple from the painful state constituted by that crisis. Should every attempt, inspired by a vigilant and loving educational wisdom, irremediably fail, this could not be attributed to anything but the irrepressible freedom of the pupil. It is well here too to recall that freedom also, understood in the highest and noblest sense of emancipation from the dark powers of evil, has its root in an irreplaceable act of option, which is the prerogative of man insofar as he is a moral person. Now one can and must, in the pupil, safeguard and preserve the conscience from interior and exterior suggestions and stimulate the conquest of moral freedom, but one cannot will for one who absolutely does not will. When the will is weak and subject to undergoing, perhaps with intimate struggle and reluctance, debased influences, it is the duty of the educator to protect it even against itself or, to be more precise, against its weaknesses and its failings, but not to the point that it ends up being suffocated or further weakened in such a way that there is cut off at the root that higher conquest of the moral life, which is the most beautiful flower and the most mature fruit of freedom.
On the practical ground the educator must take account of age, a concrete reality with which it is not possible not to reckon, whatever actualistic pedagogy may claim, which has heaped up sophisms to disregard its importance and deny its value. In early age, when all the faculties are in bud, and spiritual development traverses its antelucan trajectory, authority has a very vast sphere of action, which is gradually narrowed in the further stages, without educational activity for this renouncing the efficacy of a spiritual penetration, which must go on acquiring, in depth, as much as it loses in extension.
It is not possible always to leave the child free from the earliest age, as Kant claimed in the footsteps of Rousseau, because he is not in a position to exercise his freedom within the limits of an enlightened autonomy, which can be given only by the development of reason and of experience. But for the youth, to whose intelligence ever vaster horizons open up, the same rigid bridle is not fitting, but rather a guide strong though always wise, but aimed at soliciting in him the voice of reason and the nerve of the will.
3. Authority and didactics
Of the highest importance in the ethical sphere of education, authority is anything but negligible in that, more specifically didactic, of instruction. He will never be a teacher who does not inspire in his learners the trust and the conviction that he is the sure and faithful guide of their intelligence on the way of truth. Naturally such sentiments aroused in the souls of the pupils must have their foundation, so to speak objective, in the real preparation and fitness of the teacher, which otherwise would be the fruit, quite fleeting, and the precarious result of histrionic poses and attitudes, implying a veritable deception aimed at the trusting inexperience of children and young people.
Knowledge must be, as it is every time it is realized, a conquest; in the process of this conquest the teacher cannot substitute himself for the pupil, but can and must lovingly guide him. But the illusions fall of those who would limit to a pure and simple predisposing of extrinsic aids the work of the teacher, reserving to the child the freedom to create science. It is absurd to claim that the child, placed before infinite nature or before materials more or less happily chosen and prepared, can by himself retrace the path traversed by humanity during centuries and millennia of civilization, and create or recreate science.
Reality is more modest than certain pedagogical myths, but even when brought back within its natural limits, it still leaves a wide margin for the spontaneity, freedom and activity of the learner. The teacher must accompany him step by step in the progressive acquisition of knowledge, but since no step, however infinitesimal, would ever be reached without the personal and irreplaceable tension of the intellect and the will, knowledge remains always a conquest, which can be promoted and stimulated, but not mechanically determined by the teacher. Pedagogical action, it is worth recalling, is spiritual action, from soul to soul. The authority of the teacher and the freedom of the pupil cannot be conceived as material forces which by necessity of nature are destined to clash, to repel one another or to diverge of themselves, in such a way that their reconciliation comes about as the result of a third force that subdues and binds them together, or of a practical expedient, of a clever artifice that constrains them to draw near and coincide.
Authority and freedom, even in the pedagogical field, are made to be integrated in a mutual harmony. The problem of their reconciliation is practically resolved in that communion of souls which is a necessary condition of the fruitfulness of teaching and education. Nothing is more difficult than an intimate fusion of souls, when particularly happy conditions are lacking or do not occur: the initiative for effectively promoting it belongs to the authority of the teacher, to which wisdom and love give wings and power of penetration.
The communion of souls in the worship of the true and of the good must not, however, be understood in an idealistic sense, as the pedagogy of actualism naturally understands it. It is undoubtedly the common humanity that lives in the teacher and in the disciple which allows the meeting of two intellects, the one developed and mature, the other still in formation; but one cannot make of the common human nature a concrete reality, a single spirit, an act that resolves every educational process in its own self-making. This conception, which has been extensively criticized elsewhere, dissolves the very possibility of pedagogical activity, by denying the concrete personality of the teacher and of the pupil, irreducible even in the throbbing of the love in which the common humanity of both vibrates and expands.
The communion of souls of which we have spoken is not a fact springing from an immanent necessity, but a conquest which, in any case, does not destroy the personal spirituality of the teacher and of the pupil, but rather requires it as a condition. The difficulties that spring from Leibniz's monistic conception cannot serve as a pretext for abandoning to mere empiricism the distinction between teacher and pupil, while on the other hand the eternal self-making of the act, which also and no less implies an eternal self-unmaking, has nothing that resembles the concrete educational process.
The argument would not be exhausted if we did not mention that the authority of the educator is the natural channel through which the idea and the respect of every other form of authority penetrate and gain strength in the consciousness of the one being educated. Education, in fact, would not be complete if it were not also religious and civic education.