Authority

AUTHORITY. – In a broad sense, authority signifies any power existing in a superior over subjects to direct, govern, and, if necessary, compel. Authority may be of natural origin, as in the domestic and civil society; voluntary, as in contractual society; or transcendent, as is that of the Supreme Pontiff in the Church, grounded in a positive divine mandate. Each of these authorities possesses a distinct content and a specific character that differentiates it from the others.

OUTLINE:
I. Authority in civil society: 1. Necessity; 2. Concept and essence; 3. Origin; 4. Primary subject; 5. Limits of authority.
II. Authority in pedagogy: 1. Concept and problem; 2. Moral authority; 3. Authority and didactics.

I. AUTHORITY IN CIVIL SOCIETY

With regard to social authority, five distinct aspects must be considered, each representing a problem of Catholic sociology: necessity, concept and essence, origin, primary subject, and intrinsic limits. Other secondary questions connected to these will be addressed incidentally when the occasion arises.

1. Necessity of Authority. - There is no serious disagreement among theorists regarding the necessity of authority in the social organism, except for anarchist ideologies, which, being detached from reality, do not merit consideration. This noted concordance arises from a simple observation of the social fact. Without distinction of time or place, whenever rational subjects gather to pursue a common end, a central active force always emerges from their psychological union, directing, regulating, coordinating, and, when necessary, compelling the members in the exercise of their activity. The constancy of this fact leads to the admission of a natural law governing the development of human society in a stable manner, an objective necessity. Indeed, every experience that repeats itself in a stable and fixed way, every effect that manifests universally in space and duration, requires an adequate cause, which can be none other than human nature, identical everywhere and at all times. It follows, therefore, that political authority is of natural origin, just as the origin of public society, which it is destined to preside over, is natural.

It is peremptorily required by multiple reasons, which it is useful to briefly mention. Society is essentially an aggregate of multiple intelligent beings who aim to achieve a common purpose through collaboration. For this to be vital, while each subject retains an ineliminable autonomy of judgment and will, a central force is required to maintain a triple unity: of ends, of intentions, and of action.

The fundamental unity of the collective purpose exists from the very formation of the social organism, as the cohesion of wills, which gives rise to the collective entity, is its effect. However, beyond the universal common end, intermediate, contingent, and historical ends present themselves to the evaluation of individual intelligence, with respect to which divergences of opinion are possible, harmful to the harmonious collaboration of members if a superior reason and a preeminent will do not intervene to remove uncertainties and set common directives.

What has been said regarding the unity of ends and the consequent necessity of a supreme power also holds for the unity of intentions. Society is sustained by an act of consent, which must be continually defended against the germs of disintegration, so that the rise of personal egoisms and partisan passions, not extinguished by the fact of association, does not weaken its cohesive force. This becomes even more necessary when it comes to the choice of means to achieve 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 imparts the appropriate direction.

Finally, the unity of intentions, provided by social authority, is already a presupposition for the unity of action, against which, however, the abuse of individual freedom, intrigue, crime, the violation of the laws of justice, and insubordination to the natural or positive norms of coexistence may arise. The health of social life thus requires a power that stimulates the indolent, compels the recalcitrant, punishes criminals, and maintains order by safeguarding the law.

2. Concept and Essence. - As previously noted, there are no appreciable divergences regarding the necessity demonstrated thus far. However, they become numerous and irreconcilable concerning the other aspects yet to be considered. The concept of authority reflects all the theories elaborated by different currents of thought regarding the very essence of collective life.

According to Rousseau, authority would be the arithmetic sum of individual rights that, by 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 ultimately reduces to the force of the majority.

Doctrines with a materialistic foundation—sociologism, organicism, racism, and positivism in general—exclude any conscious influence of the human person in the production of the collective entity and attribute its origin to physical, mechanical, or biological forces. Consequently, they conceive authority as the sum of cosmic and vital forces, a physical or biological energy concentrated in a single propulsive point. Authority is thus stripped of any moral or juridical character.

Nor is the attitude of immanentism different. Since the State, even in this theory, is the effect of the necessary evolution to which the absolute spirit is subject, authority, which arises by virtue of the same interior evolutionary law, is a chain that binds the individual to the State. It thus reduces to force, as in 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 coercively impose its own will or a power of self-determination. The two conceptions coincide in considering authority a prejudicial fact, produced by virtue of historical evolution unfolding outside of law, and thus the sovereignty of the State would be devoid of any ethical content, a fact without justification and a power free from every law and unbound by any tie.

From this summary exposition, it can be concluded that almost all currents of contemporary thought, despite the diversity of their starting principles, arrive at the same deformation of the concept of authority, lowering it—whether openly or covertly—to the level of physical force, however this force may then be explained.

Catholic public law, instead, usually defines authority as the right to govern civil society for the attainment of its own end. Authority, first of all, is a right, the nature of which can only be grasped by referring to the more general concept of subjective right, which, according to Catholic thought, is understood as an absolute faculty, original or derived, to do or to demand something. Authority is not, therefore, a mere coercive power, although it must often make use of coercion to maintain order, but an essentially and intrinsically moral power. Nor could it be otherwise, given 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 internal unity in the collaboration of members toward the attainment of the common good. Now, neither order nor unity can be achieved among rational subjects through a mechanical arrangement of norms or through the threat of the State’s coercive force. 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 can be nothing other than a power that influences intelligences and free wills, that is, a moral power.

The internal unity, then, results from the unity of purpose and collaboration, which in turn are the effect of a prior rational evaluation, followed by the assent of the will and its direct command to practical action. Authority must, therefore, be a force that moves reason and will, and the consequence reasserts itself that it cannot be conceived otherwise than as a moral power producing a true obligation. It will suffice to observe the fact to recognize the justice of this position. As soon as several rational subjects deliberately accept the same purpose and propose to unite their activities in stable collaboration, that purpose becomes the common goal of the collectivity as such, to which, therefore, from that moment, belongs the right to demand from each of its members the necessary contributions to achieve it, while each bears the duty to comply with its requests and 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 to have the complete concept of authority, it is necessary to establish the specific and proper content of such a right. This content is expressed by the aforementioned definition when it specifies that authority is the right to govern society. It is not an indeterminate faculty of action, a discretionary power—as will be better seen later—but a faculty well-defined by the purpose 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 determinations that may help clarify the explained concept.

Political authority differs especially from both domestic and masterly authority. The domestic concerns immediately the private good of the family and its members, nor is it fully self-sufficient, whereas the political has as its purpose the public good and possesses full sufficiency, in that it is independent of any other authority of 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, regarding personal services only indirectly; the political, instead, concerns itself with the public and general good and provides for the government of persons and the procurement of means that may benefit them in their needs. Other characteristics that help to distinguish it will be discussed 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 undoubtedly that concerning the origin of political power. It is clear, indeed, that until it is demonstrated to man, as a reasonable being, why authority must command and he must obey, and until he grasps the moral essence of this power and this subjection, everything in social life remains without support. This was intuited by ancient thought, which took care, first of all, to seek the proximate and remote source of the power to command men and impose imperative precepts upon them, and thus often dwelt at length on the analysis of authority and its causes.

The same exact intuition, however, has been lacking in more recent juridical speculation. Since the first half of the 19th century, it has relegated discussions about the origin of authority to the field of morality and politics, and has claimed to construct the theory of sovereignty with exclusively juridical materials, without the interference of other elements. This rigid position is taken in virtue of a more general conception, which holds that true science must content itself with analyzing the fact, the positive datum, without concerning itself with ascending to principles and first causes.

According to the common opinion of contemporary public law scholars, 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. Thus, any research into its origin would be superfluous.

The poverty of this conception is reflected in the doctrinal elaborations of previous epochs, when there was an acute sensitivity to the problem and several paths were attempted in order to ground the authority of the State on a foundation other than the State itself. The proposed supports were two: divinity and the popular will.

A conception that dates back far in time placed the origin of authority in the supreme being, though it took on different colors according to the particular religious vision inspiring the theorists. 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, upon which ancient absolutism was founded, Christian thought rose up. While preserving the idea of the divine origin of power, it purified it in accordance with the new concept of divinity and the relations that bind man to the supreme creator, preserver, and legislator, excluding and combating every apotheosis of the creature.

The words 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 can 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 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 gaze of the theorist then, after extinguishing the light of divinity from the horizon of human speculation, shifts to the earth, from which it will no longer rise. According to Rousseau, political power arises from an act of popular will, by 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 arithmetic sum of individual wills.

Positivism and idealism completely lose sight of the seriousness of the problem. In the various theories to which they give rise, authority is either a naturalistic fact, the effect of biological and mechanical forces that preside over the formation of the social entity, or an indeclinable dominion exercised by the absolute spirit, which in the State attains 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 previous centuries, have been reaffirmed by the voices of the most recent Pontiffs. In the encyclical Diuturnum, Leo XIII writes: «Moreover, concerning the power to command, the Church rightly teaches that it comes from God; for this she finds openly attested in the sacred Scriptures and in the monuments of Christian antiquity». Indirectly and directly, Pius XI and Pius XII have taught the same doctrine.

In what sense must the divine origin of power now be understood? Not in the sense that God, in conferring power, intervenes in an extraordinary manner, with a gratuitous gift not due to the nature of the subject; but in the sense of an attribution necessarily connected with the nature of the entity, which, possessing that determined 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 as an effect of the very laws of social being, which require it necessarily. And since these laws have been determined by God, the author of nature, their effect ultimately depends on the same will. 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 must govern it, which is realized spontaneously at the very moment the subjects will the society, and would be realized, as Vitoria and Suárez noted, even in the hypothetical supposition of an act to the contrary.

Fundamentally, the solution that Catholic thought provides 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 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 finality, derive from God as the author of nature, and find in Him their ultimate reason and adequate foundation. Authority, on the other hand, is nothing but a natural and original right of the political body; therefore, like every other right, it 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 prefer to dismiss it more easily, erroneously supposing that it rests upon an act of faith to which science cannot resort without renouncing its own principles.

Now, a few simple deductions, supported by two factual data, suffice to demonstrate the thesis whose meaning has been clarified. First, it is universally admitted, since the decline of contractualist theories, that social life is an effect of natural forces. With 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 author of nature Himself, who, having made man social, also willed society. The conclusion then, to which reason arrives through this simple syllogism, extends also to all essential properties that flow from the same source of natural laws, of which authority is the principal one. Thus, for this too, the previous conclusion is imposed, that is, it also derives from God.

Furthermore, it is beyond dispute 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 its components. Now, if political power in its genesis does not depend on the free act of men gathered in a collective organism, but instead is produced by virtue of a natural and indeclinable exigency, one must once again ascend to the author of nature Himself to find its source and adequate reason.

To this double deduction, which only the atheist can doubt, another can be added, based 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 toward 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 subjects capable of binding, with its precepts, laws, and prescriptions, the will with an indeclinable moral bond called obligation. Given these particular properties, 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, instead, requires that it be recognized as 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 that debated among Catholic authors themselves, whether authority should be regarded as a substantial form of the social organism or merely as one of its essential properties. While both opinions may be considered probable, the second is to be held as more well-founded, since the social entity emerges on the plane of reality when several rational subjects have adhered to the same collective end and arrange to coordinate their activity to achieve it through stable collaboration. As soon as this fusion of wills occurs, the matter, represented by the human mass, is informed by a new spiritual principle, the psychological union of the subjects, by which they are compacted into a single social organism. Authority is required so that such union may endure and collaboration may proceed in an orderly manner, not in order for it to exist. Undoubtedly, 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 of the immediate subject in which authority resides, there exists a strong divergence of opinions within Catholic doctrine. Contemporary juridical doctrine is now in agreement in holding that sovereignty must be considered an original faculty, of which the immediate subject and holder is the State. Sovereignty, according to the most common opinion, is so closely connected with the State that it is impossible to conceive of it without a relative power of command. Being the State an original juridical person, it possesses an equally original power of imperium, by virtue of which it can impose precepts, dictate norms, constitute its own juridical order, and equip it with a coercive apparatus.

This conception aligns with one of the major currents of Catholic thought. The Catholic doctrinal tradition, of which its great theorists such as Vitoria, Suárez, Soto, Molina, and Bellarmine are expressions, was perfectly unanimous until the 18th century in upholding a double principle. The primary subject, in which, by immediate communication of nature and the Creator, authority resides, is the people, the collectivity, the social organism. The monarch, the prince, the physical or moral person who exercises its right, receives it immediately from the people. That is, there exists a substantial difference in the value of the titles upon 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 moral person holds it by a derived title, insofar as its real possession and legitimate exercise presuppose a conferral by 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 highlight the differences. The agnostic thought, of which Rousseau is one of the major representatives, does not derive authority from any meta-empirical cause but rather makes it spring from man himself, from the interplay of free wills. The Catholic democratic conception, on the other hand, designates the supreme cause as the ultimate source of authority, as seen above.

Furthermore, agnostic rationalism proclaimed the people as sovereign, arguing that the people not only would be the primary 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 more than its agents, executors of its will or of the general will.

The Christian democratic conception, while recognizing the people as the original and immediate subject of authority, does not uphold either the unlimited autonomy of man, from which libertarian atomism derives, nor much less that of the people, both being subject to moral law and natural right. Nor does it consequently teach that the latter is sovereign and remains so always and necessarily, but rather that the people transmit in toto their right to the person or group of persons chosen by them, who become its true holders and exercise it as integral organs of the State.

Once the irrevocable transmission has taken place, the people retain the right to express and make known their will and to oversee whether the holder of authority exercises it in accordance with the demands of justice and the common good, a kind of pact—whether codified in a constitution or not—having been established between the people and the government, by virtue of which the latter commits to governing according to institutional laws and the requirements of the common good. In only one case does the people acquire full freedom of action and the right to change the form of their regime: when the one who exercises power becomes a tyrant, subverting the laws upon which the social organization rests. Since power was transmitted to him to better and more orderly provide for the collective good, when this is seriously compromised due to his wickedness or incapacity, the natural juridical title upon which the possession of authority rests lapses, and authority returns to its original subject, that is, the people, who may dispose of it as they see fit.

With the spread of demagogic theories, however, in the 18th century, Catholic doctrine also shifted its orientation, abandoning the democratic conception that had until then been unanimously upheld. To better counter the voluntarism of Rousseau’s theory, which derived society from a contract, it was first excluded that any causal influence of the human person contributed to the production of the social being, attributing its spontaneous birth instead to certain facts, called associative facts. On the other hand, to better guard against the theory of popular sovereignty and demagoguery, it was denied that the people were in any way the original subject of power, and thus, extending the theory of facts to the question of authority, it was maintained that authority was immediately conferred by God upon a specific physical or moral person, already designated for command by certain objective titles, such as territorial dominion, the development of the patriarchal family, conquest, and especially greater capacity for governance.

To Taparelli, to whom the elaboration of the new conception is owed, others were added, more or less perfecting and modifying the original core, among whom Zigliara deserves mention. While maintaining the principle of the immediate conferral of authority by God, he granted the people the faculty to designate its subject. This latter form of the theory is the one preferred by the encyclical Diuturnum of Leo XIII. Nevertheless, both before and after the aforementioned encyclical, the opinions of scholars of sociology in the Catholic field have remained divided, with the two conceptions counting equally determined supporters. Those who still align themselves in favor of the democratic conception of power observe that the Pope’s intention, in promulgating the encyclical on political principality, was not to condemn a doctrine professed and taught for so long a series of years by the most eminent authors of moral and theological sciences, but simply to combat the errors then widespread, re-establishing the true concept of authority. And in this observation, they are supported by express declarations of Leo XIII.

The two theories, in fact, remain probable and may be freely defended, though in recent years the older one has regained predominance, as it rests on more convincing rational grounds. Political power, as has been demonstrated, is an essentially original power, necessarily required by the social being as soon as it is realized, for the orderly attainment of its natural ends. Given this intimate connection, the inevitable consequence is that the first subject to which the order of nature confers the right to command cannot be a specific physical or moral person but is the entire social body, the collectivity, the people, the State. Indeed, if such a right is indissolubly connected with the very being of society, so 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 very moment when several wills conspire toward the same end, authority is also in act at that moment, which, for very obvious reasons, finds no other subject to which to adhere except 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 free will, which, if it wills society, must also necessarily await authority, no succession of time can be assigned between the collective act of willing that creates the social being and the act of the Superior Cause that joins to it the right to govern. And this leads to the conclusion, as has been observed, of the simultaneous birth of the one and the other, and thus, as above, to the presence of a single possible subject to which such a right originally belongs, that is, the community, the people. It may 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 the objective order assigns its own end. Now, when the natural order assigns a necessary and intrinsic end to a physical or moral person, it also confers the suitable and indispensable means to achieve it, which are original faculties and rights. Authority, on the other hand, is nothing other than one of these rights, the principal and most necessary. It must, therefore, belong to the person to whom the end belongs, that is, once again, to the community, the people, the State.

BIBL.:
G. TAPARELLI D'AZEGLIO, Saggio teoretico di diritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto, Roma 1840-43; T. M. ZIGLIARA, Della luce intellettuale e dell'ontologismo, Roma 1874; ID., Summa philosophica, Roma 1889; LEONE XIII, Enc. Diuturnum, 29 giugno 1881; J. DE MAISTRE, Du Pape, Lyon 1819; J. DONOSO CORTÉS, Ensayo sobre el catolicismo, el liberalismo y el socialismo, Madrid 1851; A. DE MUN, Discours politiques, Paris 1888; G. LE BRAS, Études de sociologie religieuse, Paris 1955; V. DEMOCRAZIA; SOVRANITÀ; STATO; POTERE. A. Brucculeri.

All these arguments, in another form, are gathered in two passages, one by Vitoria and the other by Bellarmine, which it is fitting to cite. Vitoria writes: «The material cause, where such power resides by natural and divine right, is the society itself, to which it belongs to govern and administer itself and to direct all its forces toward the common good. For by natural and divine right there must be a power to govern society and, apart from positive and human common law, there is no greater reason why that power should reside in one rather than another, it is necessary that the community itself be sufficient unto itself and have the faculty to govern 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 power over the others» (De potestate civili, n. 7).

More succinctly, Bellarmine writes: «This power is of divine right, but 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, it must therefore have the power to preserve itself and thus punish the disturbers of peace» (De laicis, III, 6).

The theory of associative facts does not then reconcile with the history of institutions, which demonstrates how at all times the power of those who govern has been restricted by fundamental charters, constitutions, and transactions imposed upon the sovereign by the collectivity. If authority were conferred directly by God upon a determined subject, it should pass entirely to that subject, without any restriction other than that which derives from the natural purpose of society. But in such a case, the interferences of the collectivity, which seeks to protect itself against the abusive exercise of power through the aforementioned means, should be judged illegitimate. A conclusion hard to admit.

The principal difficulties that are usually opposed to the democratic conception are easily surmountable. It is objected that, if authority resides in the people and is transferred by them to those who exercise it, one cannot avoid the instability of institutions, since the people could revoke the act of consent by which they have transmitted 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 II. But such a demonstration is impossible, since there exist cases in which the contrary occurs, as, for example, in matrimonial consent. In this case, the necessity of the end detaches the effect from free wills: the same must be said analogously of authority, whose stability is required by the social end. It is further objected that, if authority resides in the people, democracy would be of natural institution and therefore every other form of government would be illegitimate. To this difficulty Suárez has already responded, observing that «this power, as it comes immediately from God to the community, according to the manner of speaking of the jurists, can be said to be of natural right in a negative, not positive, way, or better, of natural right conceding, not simply commanding» (Defensio fidei, III, 6).

5. Limits of authority — The democratic theory on the original subject of authority is, according to Suárez, necessary to understand the limits of public power, a subject around which moral and juridical speculation has exercised itself in all ages. The panorama of conceptions in this regard offers a double view: the first is occupied by absolutist theories, the other by those that assign limits to social authority.

The absolutist conception can be said to be as old as human thought. Apart from Eastern absolutism, supported by the concept that the sovereign was an omnipotent deity, 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. However, even in this period, conceptions do not yet completely detach themselves from the medieval tradition, and the prince, although of divine election and conceived as supreme authority, superiorem non recognoscens et legibus solutus, is at least subjected to divine law and the imperative of his conscience. The same Bodin, to whom the modern concept of sovereignty is erroneously attributed, assigned to the power of the sovereign limits in divine law, natural law, and international law.

One must arrive at the 18th century to find oneself once again faced with an absolutist formulation of power. Proceeding from a purely naturalistic presupposition, Hobbes and Rousseau configure power as unlimited. With them, through different processes, the State is transformed into absolute power, and sovereignty is completely freed from every moral and juridical bond. In the 19th century, then, in reaction to natural law, from which the two previous theorists had drawn inspiration, although national sovereignty was substituted with that of the State, the absoluteness of power was not tempered. Positivism and idealism found themselves in agreement in freeing the power of the State from any external and internal bond.

Historicism and sociologism conceived the State as an entity standing on its own, with its own being and will, entirely different from the being and will of its components, and to this they attributed an unlimited faculty of action, a despotic dominion over individuals, conceived as integrating cells of the social organism. Idealism, in turn, through the triad Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and their imitators, conferred upon the State the attributes of divinity, imagining it perfectly free, a law unto itself, an unlimited will.

With these doctrines, the principle of the absolute autonomy of sovereign power took root in juridical sciences. At present, the great majority of publicists conceive the power of the State as juridically unlimited, that is, not bound in its faculty of action by any norm, neither internal nor external, that does not proceed from its own discretionary will, the autonomous source of all law.

The 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 order, in which it recognizes no superior, it constrains it within exact limits, which are determined by the law of nature, the rights of the person, and the end of society. Every visible entity carries connected 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 bears a law of his own being, which, conforming to his rationality, is configured as a moral precept. Passing from the individual man to collective man, the gears of order multiply, but do not cease to exist. The State, too, as a natural entity, receives a law of its own being, which presides over the unfolding 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.

Authority, in this context, finds another significant 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 as many faculties of action granted to him by nature for the attainment of his own end. He does not enter society to be entirely absorbed by it, and thus does not renounce, nor intends to renounce, his own rights, for if he were to do so, he would nullify himself as a person. Authority, then, encounters in the subjective right of the human person a natural value that it cannot disregard; it must, rather, protect it, in accordance with its specific mission.

For, like every other entity, public society also has a constitutional end, consisting in the common good of its members to be achieved through ordered collaboration. Now, this end, together with the term toward which social action must naturally tend, also marks the limits within which authority may require from its subjects the contributions necessary to attain it, for this is not an abstract power but a faculty that arises from the necessity of order in social life. Therefore, in the exercise of its functions, it remains essentially subordinate to the fundamental exigencies expressed by the universal end. In this end to be orderly realized, it finds its reason for being and, therein, the exact scope of its competence.

In this supreme point of reference, authority and liberty are reconciled—rendered irreconcilable by individualism and absolutism—and from it can be deduced the limitations of both within social life. Outside the sphere of State competence lie religious and supernatural values, with respect to which man retains 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 is a temporal and earthly good, the internal, supernatural, and eternal goods cannot fall within the ambit of social authority. Private initiative must be respected by authority, just as liberty must respect the public good. The social good is an integrative good of the human person and the family; where, therefore, man and the family suffice 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 competence of authority.

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 achieved is collaboration, which cannot be obtained if the living forces of society overpower and nullify one another, as would occur if each sought to invade the rights of others, or if authority sought to overwhelm 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 it surpasses them, it ceases to exist. The obligation of the individual, in fact, is strictly measured by the end, just as the extent of the State’s power remains measured by it; if it exceeds these boundaries, it acts unlawfully. In such a case, its law is unjust, and an unjust law is not law but abuse.

The principles established are rich in practical applications, which it would be too lengthy to develop in full; rather, it is better to conclude with a panoramic view of the Catholic doctrine on authority. Authority is an original subjective right of the social body, imperiously required by the law of nature: it derives from God, from 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 any other power of the same order, yet limited by natural law, by the rights of the person, and by the essential and internal end of the social organism.

The school and educational methods of antiquity were founded on authority, most often understood in a purely extrinsic manner. The teacher was the school’s petty tyrant: plagosus Orbilius has passed into history as the embodiment of a type, thanks to a genius pupil, Horace, who must not have been spared the rod. Thoughtful men concerned with the problem of education glimpsed the difficulties of an education not founded on such methods and presuppositions, yet the school essentially did not change. Christian thought introduced into the pedagogical sphere a healthier and more fruitful concept of authority, illuminating it with an awareness of its limits, its duties, and its responsibilities toward God, and vivifying it with the flame of charity. Yet the Christian pedagogical ideal, realized whenever sanctity accompanied teaching, though it undoubtedly modified school practice and institutions, was not universally followed. Authority in the school, as elsewhere, continued to be understood in its external aspect as a power of arbitrary will, binding its subjects—that is, pupils and students—with an unassailable sic volo, sic iubeo. The historical evolution of the times led, with the Enlightenment, to one of the most serious and significant crises of the principle of authority, with a tendency toward immediate applications in the political and social spheres. Pedagogical thought was also deeply affected, giving rise to Rousseau’s pedagogical utopia, in which the teacher’s authority is, at least in certain respects, so reduced and attenuated as to pose for the critic the problem of its possibility and consistency. Modern pedagogical thought is, to varying degrees but not without exceptions, indebted to Rousseau. In the nearly two centuries since the appearance of Émile (1762), there have been no lack of strong and noble critiques and important integrations. Even Fröbel, so sensitive to Rousseau’s influence, ultimately recognizes 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 their demands and determinations, maintain a dual attitude, aim at a dual end at the same time: to give and to take, to unite and to divide, to prescribe and to follow, to be active and passive, to determine and to liberate» (cf. The Education of Man, 13).

Even in contemporary thought, the Rousseauian current has developed to the point of nourishing a pedagogical optimism founded on the overvaluation of the pupil’s spontaneity, which, if taken to its most logical conclusions, should render the work of the teacher and educator superfluous.

Meanwhile, in school practice, while discipline was exalted in words, it was relaxed in fact, as a consequence of that decline in moral values which is one of the most characteristic aspects of our era. Authority, abstractly radiated in harsh attitudes, or denied or reduced to something too vague and evanescent, is at times both cause and effect of the obscured consciousness of moral values. The crisis of the school today is also a crisis of authority. Authority is so intimately connected to pedagogical activity that the latter would not be possible without it, just as it would not be possible without the freedom that corresponds to it as a correlative and integrative term.

The budding spirituality of the pupil must be, so to speak, attracted and directed toward an ever more complex, perfect, and secure process of inner formation. If the child were capable of conquering, unaided, a moral and cultural personality, education and teaching would be superfluous, and so too would authority, considered from the pedagogical standpoint. But there is no one who reflects sufficiently and does not realize how difficult, even with all the aids and devices of wise education, the conquest of personality is. Exceptions do not make the rule, and moreover, if the educational process had not been initiated by someone in some way, the marvelous achievements that make us forget the humble origins from which they began would not have been possible.

Undoubtedly, in every human conscience there urges the spontaneous demand for personality, which is not attained without the development of intellectual and moral faculties, but in the ordered and harmonious development of these faculties a thousand interior and exterior obstacles intervene, which cannot be overcome without effort and struggle. It is the authority of the teacher and educator that induces this effort and struggle, which, in the eyes of the pupil, must be the living example of the goal to be reached, the incarnation of an ideal type. St. Thomas profoundly notes that in man there is a natural disposition toward virtue; but since the perfect realization of virtue is necessarily achieved through a certain discipline, and since one does not easily find a man capable of imposing discipline upon himself, it is necessary that it come to him from elsewhere (Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 95, a. 1). From this it does not follow that discipline must be arbitrarily imposed on the one hand and passively received and endured on the other.

2. Moral authority. — Authority is above all moral authority. Age, culture, the spirit of duty, sacrifice, love, the strength of character must create for the educator an aura whose charm is not easily escaped by one who cannot but recognize himself inferior in all those qualities he admires in the teacher. The human spirit naturally aspires to knowledge and to the good: the personality of the educator must demonstrate to a high degree the realization of both possibilities, which the child senses confusedly but strongly. In that universal aspiration lies the psychological source of authority, understood in its noblest sense and in its deepest efficacy.

But «in puero homo»: in the child there is the man with all his aptitudes and deficiencies, with his qualities and defects. The weakness of the active forces of reaction and action, of assimilation and selection, which characterizes the early phases of the development of personality, makes it easier for defects and deficiencies to consolidate in the sediment of habits and allows for deviations and dispersions under the impulse of various factors. This renders the intervention of the educator indispensable, who must be able and know how to employ all those means suited to gathering the spiritual and physical energies of the pupil, to stimulating and supporting them. Thus, we move to the second aspect of authority. When irrationality arises and erupts in the consciousness and life of the child and the man, mere moral authority is not enough, as it is susceptible to being renounced, even against the intimate conviction of conscience. The teacher's authority must be capable of availing itself of all those means, even external ones, which, without offending human dignity and Christian charity, are suitable for curbing the irrational impulse that has given rise to whim or transgression, for bringing the pupil back to himself, and for restoring him to the full possession and undisturbed use of reason. The wisdom of the educator will consist in carefully choosing, determining, and 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 to multiple gradations, variations, and nuances: they can be gentle and reticent, barely hinted at in passing and disguised within praise that highlights other positive qualities of the pupil, different from those whose constant or temporary deficiency is lamented, or recalls happier moments and more brilliantly overcome trials; or they can reach a high tone and intensity, without ever degenerating into vulgarity or irascibility. A single off-key note is enough to compromise educational effectiveness.

The educator must possess the sensitivity of an artist and the wise delicacy of a surgeon who operates with a light hand on delicate organs. Indeed, since adolescence—the most critical age of the pupil—often has its wounds, these must barely be touched, most of the time with a swift stroke if the educational action is to be effective.

When the educator, due to external exigencies or the undue interference of another authority, finds himself unable to employ those corrective means whose efficacy he has weighed and whose necessity and opportunity he fully senses in conscience, he is stripped of his authority, and his work, his educational mission, is rendered largely sterile and ineffective.

But in every case, even when reproving, the educator's voice must be the expression of the pupil's profound conscience, so that the latter feels that, by resisting it, he places himself in ever greater inner conflict with himself. Here lies the root of the reconciliation of authority with freedom and the only solution to the related problem, which, through the shifting or rigidification of terms, has wearied and still wearies the minds of philosophers and pedagogues.

Authority can and must never be founded on morally extrinsic elements: authority is not acquired by ascending the teacher's platform. Its multiple external coefficients must be vivified by its intrinsic constitutive factors. To enjoy the authority indispensable to his function, the teacher must be able to rely on adequate moral and cultural preparation. Only in this case can authority find its natural point of fusion with the pupil's freedom. Authority can harmonize with freedom only when it is capable of provoking the intimate recognition of the child's conscience, even if the external attitude may contingently not correspond to II. When there is, on the one hand, inner consent to authority and, on the other, the practical failure to recognize it, one does not have the failure of authority but the crisis of a guilty conscience.

The educator, with every means and device that love and wisdom may suggest, will seek to lift the disciple's soul from the painful state constituted by that crisis. When every attempt, inspired by a vigilant and loving educational wisdom, should irreparably fail, this could be attributed only to the insuppressible freedom of the pupil. It is also useful to recall here that even freedom, understood in the highest and noblest sense of liberation from the dark powers of evil, has its root in an irreplaceable act of choice, which is the prerogative of man as a moral person. Now, in the pupil, one can and must safeguard and preserve conscience from interior and exterior suggestions and stimulate the conquest of moral freedom, but one cannot will for someone who absolutely does not will. When the will is weak and subject to undergoing, even with inner struggle and reluctance, detrimental influences, it is the duty of the educator to protect it even against itself or, to be more precise, against its weaknesses and failings, but not in such a way that it ends up being suffocated or further weakened so as to cut at the root that higher conquest of moral life, which is the fairest flower and the ripest fruit of freedom.

In practice, the educator must take into account age, a concrete reality with which it is impossible not to reckon, whatever the claims of actualistic pedagogy, which has piled up sophisms to deny its importance and negate its value. In early childhood, when all faculties are in bud and spiritual development follows its pre-dawn trajectory, authority has a very broad sphere of action, which gradually narrows in subsequent stages, without the educational activity renouncing for this the effectiveness of a spiritual penetration that must gain in depth what it loses in extension.

It is not possible to always leave the child free from the earliest age, as Kant, following Rousseau, claimed, because he is not capable of exercising his freedom within the limits of an enlightened autonomy, which can only be given by the development of reason and experience. But for the youth, whose intelligence opens to ever vaster horizons, the same rigid restraint is not fitting; rather, a guide who is always strong and wise, but aimed at soliciting in him the voice of reason and the strength of will.

5. Authority and didactics

Of supreme importance in the ethical sphere of education, authority is anything but negligible in the more specifically didactic sphere of instruction. He will never be a teacher who does not inspire in his pupils the trust and conviction that he is the sure and faithful guide of their intelligence on the path to truth. Naturally, such sentiments aroused in the souls of the pupils must have their objective foundation, so to speak, in the real preparation and suitability of the teacher; otherwise, they would be the fleeting fruit and precarious result of histrionic poses and attitudes, implying a true and proper deception imposed on the trusting inexperience of children and youth.

Knowledge must be, as it is each time it is realized, a conquest; in the process of this conquest, the teacher cannot substitute himself for the pupil, but he can and must lovingly guide him. But the illusions of those who would limit the teacher's work to a mere predisposition of extrinsic aids fall away, 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 felicitously chosen and prepared, could retrace by himself the path traveled by humanity over centuries and millennia of civilization and create or recreate science.

Reality is more modest than certain pedagogical myths, yet even when confined to its natural limits, it still leaves ample room for the spontaneity, freedom, and activity of the learner. The teacher must guide the student step by step in the progressive acquisition of knowledge, but since each step, however infinitesimal, would never be reached without the personal and irreplaceable tension of intelligence and will, knowledge remains always a conquest—one that can be promoted and stimulated, but not mechanically determined by the teacher. It is worth remembering that pedagogical action is spiritual action, from soul to soul. The a. of the teacher and the freedom of the pupil cannot be conceived as material forces that, by necessity of nature, are destined to clash, repel, or diverge in such a way that their reconciliation occurs only as the result of a third force that subjugates and binds them together, or of a practical expedient, a clever artifice that compels them to draw near and coincide.

A. and freedom, even in the pedagogical field, are made to integrate into a reciprocal harmony. The problem of their reconciliation is practically resolved in that communion of souls, which is the necessary condition for the fruitfulness of teaching and education. Nothing is more difficult than an intimate fusion of souls when particularly favorable conditions are lacking or do not occur: the initiative to effectively promote it belongs to the a. of the teacher, to whom wisdom and love give wings and penetrating force.

The communion of souls in the worship of truth and goodness, however, must not be understood in an idealistic sense, as it is naturally conceived by the pedagogy of actualism. Undoubtedly, it is the common humanity living in both teacher and disciple that allows the encounter of two intelligences—one developed and mature, the other still in formation—but one cannot make this common human nature into a concrete reality, a single spirit, an act that resolves every educational process in its becoming. This conception, which has been extensively criticized elsewhere, dissolves the very possibility of pedagogical activity by denying the concrete personality of the teacher and the pupil, irreducible even in the throb of love in which the common humanity of both vibrates and expands.

The communion of souls of which we have spoken is not a fact arising from an immanent necessity, but a conquest that, in any case, does not destroy the personal spirituality of the teacher and the pupil, but rather requires it as a condition. The difficulties arising from Leibniz’s monadistic conception cannot serve as a pretext for abandoning to empiricism the distinction between teacher and pupil, while on the other hand, the eternal becoming of the act—which implies no less an eternal undoing—bears no resemblance to the concrete educational process.

The argument would not be exhausted without mentioning that the a. of the educator is the natural channel through which the idea and respect for every other form of a. penetrate and gain strength in the consciousness of the pupil. Education, indeed, would not be complete if it were not also religious and civil education.

Nicola Petruzzellis