A Kingdom of Kings
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There’s nothing more un-American than authority. The whole concept is alien to our entire way of life; our daddies made sure of that. Even today, you can’t even use the word without sounding a little sarcastic—or unbearably pompous.
So, if you insist on being an “authoritarian,” you may as well go all-out. Take all of your countrymen’s expectations—all of their pieties about the right to self-determination, etc.—and hurl them right back in their faces.
That’s exactly what our integralist friends are doing. And I salute them for it.
Exhibit A: In a recent article for Compact, Adrian Vermeule argues that what passes for “the Right” these days is nothing more than a controlled opposition. It’s all bought and paid for by the liberal elite. As Professor Vermeule argues stirringly that what these right-wingers need is a robust concept of (yes) authority: “the full authority of a reasoned political order, composed of both temporal and spiritual powers in right relation to the natural and divine law, that would put a mere Rome to shame.”
Here, Professor Vermeule echoes a recent essay in First Things by fellow integralist Sohrab Ahmari, who likewise decried the “modern Catholic yearning for catacombs and mustard seeds, the new abhorrence of worldly power and authoritative structures in favor of everything small.”
Vermeule and Ahmari are tapping into a deeply Continental vein of political thought. There are (very pleasant) notes of French reaction—specifically of Maistre and Veuillot, two of my favorites. And yet, as Marc Barnes points out in New Polity, there’s a pretty big hole in this argument:
Integralism has been critiqued for conflating power and authority: for either (a) identifying “authority” with whatever power is sufficiently scary to declare itself an “authority,” (b) reducing “authority” to mean “power used to enforce the good,” or (c) dodging the whole question by treating “authority” as a formal, juridical characteristic of some “legitimate” ruler, while offering no means for identifying legitimacy itself.
Mr. Barnes speaks to so much of the confusion that prevails in conservative and Christian circles. We may sense a need for authority, but that doesn’t mean such an authority actually exists.
Put it this way. I don’t know how much of Maistre’s work Professor Vermeule has read, but he is a well-known disciple of Carl Schmitt. In case you’re not up on your judicial history, Schmitt was a conservative Catholic jurist who became the Nazis’ chief legal theorist. He is best known today for his idea of the Führerprinzip.
The Führerprinzip points out that laws are not self-interpreting. Ultimately, they must be applied by a single man (like a dictator) or a small group of men (like the Supreme Court). But there cannot be “rule of law” as such. Ultimately, all rule is personal rule.
Maistre had a very similar insight, which is why Isaiah Berlin called him the first postmodernist. Unlike Burke or Chateaubriand, Maistre refused to wax romantic about the Ancien Régime. Yet he was a staunch royalist, because he knew that the Jacobins’ political idealism would ruin France.
Maistre also believed that “self-government” was a mere fantasy. So long as there is a government, there must be laws—and, so long as there are laws, there must be men who interpret those laws. Such men are the true rulers of any country. Better for those men to be kings (he argued) and fear eternal damnation if they rule badly. What’s the alternative? Fools like Robespierre, who justify all their stupidity and sadism by invoking “democracy.”
As I said, I like Maistre. I have a certain respect for Schmitt as well. Yet my complaint with them is the same as my complaint with Vermeule and Ahmari. Their “authoritarianism” is too cynical. Authority must be self-evident and self-justifying. Something (or someone) must be intrinsically authoritative; otherwise, it (or he) isn’t an authority at all.
But this is all a bit obscure. Maybe it would be helpful to look at the same problem in a different context.
As you might have noticed, there’s a crisis in the Church. Different factions seek to navigate this crisis using different “authorities.” Progressives invoke the Holy Spirit, insisting that their reforms [sic.] are being directed from on high. Traditionalists lean heavily on Medieval and Counter-Reformation sources, such as Thomas Aquinas and the Council of Trent. The “New Theology” looks to the Church Fathers. And so on.
Curiously, there’s a Schmittian party in the Catholic Church as well. They’re usually known as ultramontanists. Most integralists are also ultramontanists, though they aren’t very interested in Church politics. If you’re curious, I think the ultramontane position is represented best by a website called Where Peter Is. (The name comes from an old Latin adage: “Where Peter is, there is the Church.”)
In fairness, WPI isn’t inspired by Schmitt. If anything, the opposite is true: Schmitt, a lifelong Catholic, was inspired by the nineteenth-century ultramontanists. He perceived the need for a secular ruler whose authority was beyond question, like the Pope’s.
But here’s where things get interesting. To be sure, all Catholics believe in the immutable and intrinsic authority of the Roman Pontiff. The trouble is, there’s no consensus on how far that authority extends.
Some (like the late Cardinal Manning, and our friends at WPI) think that “personal magisterium” of the Roman Pontiff carries a weight equal to the Ecumenical Councils. Others (such as Patriarch Gregory II Youssef of Antioch, as well as many Eastern Catholics today) believe his authority over the Universal Church is mostly juridical, not dogmatic.
Both camps are in full communion with the Holy See. In other words, Catholics are not required to acknowledge one-tenth of the powers attributed to the Pope by the ultramontanists. Now, the Pope may well possess that authority. But it has not been universally defined or acknowledged by the College of Bishops, nor has it been asserted by the popes themselves.
So, when ultramontanists declare the Pope’s “personal magisterium” to be the highest authority on earth, they’re really advancing a kind of Führerprinzip. They’re not arguing from authority; rather, they’re arguing for a certain theory of Church authority—specifically, a personalist theory.
As in the Church, so too in the State. The (perceived) need for an authority does not guarantee that such an authority exists, or ever has existed, or ever will exist.
For whatever it’s worth, I do think authority exists. I also have extremely retrograde, divine-right notions of how authority works. Yet I think the integralists and the ultramontanists make two serious errors: they assume that authority is (A) unitary and (B) personal.
Now, to be totally clear, I have a deep affinity for the integralist/ultramontanist approach. It would sure be nice if we could outsource all our thinking to one man, or to a small group of men. But I’m afraid that’s not the way it works. And it never has been—not since Christ walked the earth—and it won’t be until He comes again.
In this, as in everything else, I agree with Cardinal Newman. The reality of authority was central to his whole worldview, and yet he rejected the idea of a single authority-figure, even in the Church. As he wrote in his Apologia,
Conscience is an authority, the Bible is an authority; such is the Church; such is Antiquity, such are the words of the wise, such are hereditary lessons; such are ethical truths; such are historical memories, such are legal saws and state maxims; such are proverbs; such are sentiments, presages, and prepossessions.
Notice, these authorities are always with us. They never go away. They only wait to be recognized by a fellow-authority—one vested within each human being. That, of course, would be our conscience, which Newman called the “aboriginal Vicar of Christ.”
This sounds like dry Victorian stuff, but it’s not. Newman is saying that our ability to perceive and understand these authorities depends on our having a well-formed conscience—what Our Lord called a pure heart. The sources of the law (both spiritual and temporal) are all around us. They speak to us all the time. The question is whether our hearts are tuned into the same frequency. Do we speak the language of Truth and Goodness and Beauty? Or are we mired in the False and the Wicked and the Ugly?
In some instances, this is self-evidently true. For example, every Christian acknowledges the authority of the Bible. Yet we also know that not everyone who reads the Scriptures will understand its teachings, or even believe in its authority. Such insights are a gift of the Holy Ghost, which He grants to those who truly desire to know Him.
It’s the same for all these other authorities. They are known and acknowledged only by the pure of heart. Good men make good citizens; bad men make bad citizens. So, the best thing you can do to advance the “common good” is to become a saint.
Friends, I know I sound like a broken record. But here’s the point I’m trying to make:
There’s a crisis in the State, no less than in the Church. The temporal and the spiritual orders seem to be falling apart. The integralists and the ultramontanists are both asking, “Who can hold us all together? Who can stop the decline? Who can force us to be good?” They demand a Führer—an Emperor, a Pope, whatever—who will take charge and put things right.
Yet the Father didn’t give us a conscience merely so we can lay it aside. He doesn’t want us to outsource our judgment to men in crowns and miters. No: he gave us a conscience in order to speak into our hearts. He wants us all to grow in wisdom and holiness. He wants us to make good decisions for ourselves.
In fact, He insists on it. That’s what George MacDonald meant when he said that Christ wants to be the King of a kingdom of kings.
Here, I think, is the long and short of it. With all due respect to Professor Vermeule and his friends, we have no lack of authorities—legitimate, God-given authorities—in the world today. What we do lack are men whose hearts are trained to love the Good. That’s why those authorities are summarily ignored.
Now, given all that, it’s only natural to long for a strongman—one who will seize the levers of power, banish the evil, and enforce the Good. But that desire has never served humanity well, and it never will.
Our freedom is not a burden we can simply shrug off when it becomes tiresome. Our freedom is that which allows us to love God, because love must be given freely, or it isn’t love. And loving God is the whole reason we exist.
Yes: by abusing that freedom, we usher in the reign of anarchy and sin. But by putting our freedom to good use, we may “escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.”
Our Lord said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” The only way to spread the rule of law—to beat back the forces of chaos—is to awaken our neighbors to indwelling presence of Christ. Heaven’s borders grow heart by heart by heart.