Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Macht: Antike, Gelasius; Ockham: Gottes absolute Macht; Calvin; Bacon: Wissen als Macht (Naturwissenschaft); Nitzsche; gute Gegenüberstellung: Autorität, Hierarchie (Gleichheit) - Macht (Zwang, Kontrollem Ungleichheit) ; H. Arendt

Kurzinhalt: Ockham ... To say that God commanded us not to kill because murder is intrinsically evil would suggest that God's power is limited by something other than that power itself... since to deny authority is to deny the existence of a reality over which we ...

Textausschnitt: Fußnote:

14 One of the ironies of the situation we find ourselves in today is that hierarchy is associated with inequality, whereas power is associated with egalitarianism (as in the notion held by feminists and others that we will be equal only when we are all "empowered"). The reverse, however, is the case. Belief that hierarchy is synonymous with inequality is based on a misunderstanding of hierarchy. "Hierarchy ... means not holy domination but holy origin. Hierarchical service and ministry is thus guarding an origin that is holy, and not making arbitrary dispositions and decisions" (Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics, 128). Furthermore, as Yves R. Simon notes in his study of authority, when authority has to do with the truth of reality, as religious authority always does, those in authority are not leaders in the popular sense of the term; they are rather witnesses to the truth which they represent. Ratzinger concurs: "Apostolic succession is essentially the living presence of the Word in the person of the witness" (Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, The Episcopate and the Primacy [New York: Herder and Herder, 1962, 54). And witnesses, as Simon reminds us, "do not enjoy, in human relations, a position superior to ours. The authority of the mere witness is nothing else than truthfulness as expressed by signs which make it recognizable in varying degrees of assurance" (A General Theory of Authority [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962], 84).
Power, on the other hand, since it always involves in some fashion the exercise of control over someone or something, is synonymous with inequality. To exercise power over someone is always simultaneously to assert superiority over him. The notion that we shall all become equal by being equally empowered supposes that no one will be able to control anyone else, because each person will be able to use his or her power to hold everyone else at bay. Even were this possible, it is hardly a felicitous vision of society. But it is not possible, inasmuch as human beings demonstrably unequal in beauty, brains, athletic skills, etc., are also demonstrably unequal in their abilities to exercise power.
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Fußnote 32/19

19 In point of fact, religion, tradition and authority are apparently as interrelated as the Romans thought them to be. For, as Arendt observes, "Since then [when the Catholic Church took over the triune amalgamation of Roman religion, tradition and authority] it has turned out, and this fact speaks for the stability of the amalgamation, that wherever one of the elements of the Roman trinity, religion or authority or tradition, was doubted or eliminated, the remaining two were no longer secure. Thus, it was Luther's error to think that his challenge of the temporal authority of the Church and his appeal to unguided individual judgment would leave tradition and religion intact. So it was the error of Hobbes and the political theorists of the seventeenth century to hope that authority and religion could be saved without tradition. So, too, was it finally the error of the humanists to think it would be possible to remain within an unbroken tradition of western civilization without religion and without authority" ("What Was Authority", 105).

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POWER
27d When we turn from the subject of ecclesial authority to that of feminist power, we must first ask ourselves what the meaning of power is and whether or not there is a qualitative difference between power and authority. This was not an important question in the Roman Empire, where no clear distinction was made between the secular power of the empire and the sacred authority of the city.1 Once, however, Christ enjoined us to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's, the distinction between secular and sacred could no longer be ignored. All of us are familiar with St. Augustine's distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, a distinction given formulation toward the end of the fifth century by Pope Gelasius I in a letter to Emperor Anastasius I, in which he wrote, "There are two by which this world is ruled: the sacred authority of the popes, and the royal power...."2 What is it about power which distinguishes it from authority?

28a Although the literature abounds with definitions of power, the one thread which seems to run through every discussion of it is best stated by the Catholic priest/theologian Romano Guardini, when he says "To exercise power means, to a degree at least, that one has mastered 'the given.'"3 In other words, to exercise power with regard to any given reality is to exercise control over it. This is true whether we are talking about divine or human power. William of Ockham, the fourteenth-century proponent of God's absolute power, concluded, for example, that the Ten Commandments are good solely because God commanded them and that he could, had he wished, commanded us to do the opposite, i.e., to murder, to commit adultery, etc. Ockham's reasoning was quite simple. If God enjoys absolute power, then there is nothing in the givenness of things, even in the givenness of his own nature, which could limit his power. To say that God commanded us not to kill because murder is intrinsically evil would suggest that God's power is limited by something other than that power itself. Calvin had much the same notion of power in mind when he asserted that whether or not we go to heaven depends not upon our own behavior but solely upon the will of God. To say otherwise would suggest that God's power is limited by the givenness of our behavior. (Fs) (notabene)

28b The same theme appears in all discussions of human power from Francis Bacon through Friedrich Nietzsche. Bacon asserted, in the seventeenth century, that "knowledge is power", thus setting the stage for modern scientific technology. His thesis was also very simple. We should acquire knowledge about the workings of nature in order to exercise mastery over it. Nietzsche at the close of the nineteenth century spoke of the overman whose will to power would be such as to place him beyond all good and evil, thus enabling him to transvalue all values. Man can, in this view, become a god unto himself, whose will to power would know no limits because nothing has been given which he cannot master or overturn. (Fs) (notabene)

29a It should be apparent by now that power and authority are not at all the same thing. They move in quite opposite directions. Authority, on the one hand, is rooted in and derives all of its legitimacy from the givenness of a reality uncreated by those who exercise authority. Authority bears witness to that reality and seeks to evoke our acceptance of and obedience to it. Power, on the other hand, seeks to master or control any reality it encounters. Therefore, while authority employs neither force nor coercion, power is always to one degree or another coercive. Whether we be talking about that power over nature which turns a tree into a bookcase or that power over human beings which turns a citizen into a taxpayer, force is used. Mao Zedong may not have been entirely right when he said that all power comes from the barrel of a gun, but he was right in supposing that all power rests upon the ability to employ force of one kind or another. And because power is coercive, it is self-generated unless authority intervenes to make it otherwise. Those in power rule by the force they possess, not by the authority of some reality greater than themselves.4

29b Power does not evoke the free obedience of those over whom it rules. Power dependent upon free obedience is not power, since that which is freely given is by definition not mastered or controlled by power and can be withheld as easily as it is given. Nor does power require the obedience of those who exercise it. The whole purpose of power is to exercise control over, not to submit to.5 Therefore, power per se sets no limits upon itself. To the extent that it is limited, it is always by something or someone outside itself. In nature, for example, power seeks to overcome the givenness of things but is always at the same time limited by that same givenness. Power can turn a tree into a bookcase, but, given the nature of trees, it cannot turn one into a nuclear weapon. (Fs) (notabene Fußnote 27/14)

30a Finally, while authority looks to a past founding event which creates that reality to which it calls everyone to conform himself, and relies upon tradition to establish continuity between that event and all subsequent generations, power sees the past solely as the source of a given reality it seeks to overcome and looks therefore to the present and especially the future as the arena for its own achievements. And power positively revels in the discontinuities or ruptures it is able to create by destroying or changing what has been given from the past. (Fs) (notabene)
30b As can be seen, authority and power exist in a relationship of tension and even antagonism. Authority seeks to set limits on power, while power seeks to overcome all limits it encounters. If nature itself sets limits on scientific power, only authority can set limits on political power, because only authority in the realm of history confronts us with a reality larger than ourselves to which we are called to give our assent.6 Such authority is always religious in nature, because the reality to which it bears witness is never of our making and always transcends us. To refuse to give our assent to authority is to align ourselves, to one degree or another, with power, since to deny authority is to deny the existence of a reality over which we cannot or at least should not seek to exercise control. (Fs) (notabene)

31a Unfortunately, the world in which we live today is dominated almost exclusively by power. To all practical intents and purposes, authority has disappeared from the landscape. Hannah Arendt entitled her article on authority "What Was Authority", because, as she put it, "It is my contention ... that authority has vanished from the modern world, and that if we raise the question what authority is, we can no longer fall back upon authentic and undisputable experiences common to all."7 Therefore, "Practically as well as theoretically, we are no longer in a position to know what authority really is."8 (Fs)

31b The reason for this she spells out most clearly in her classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she notes that the modern world is characterized by a rejection of all givenness, whether in nature or in history. "Our new difficulty is that we start from a fundamental distrust of everything merely given, a distrust of all laws and prescriptions, moral or social, that are deduced from a given, comprehensive, universal whole."9 Unwilling to accept anything as merely given, we are necessarily unwilling to accept any authority, since authority by definition derives its legitimacy from the givenness of the reality to which it bears witness. Arendt points out that this loss of authority is the final chapter in a long and complex process in the West in which religion and tradition were undermined first. This has left authority in the position in which, without religion and tradition, there is nothing which it can bear witness to or represent.10 (Fs)