The Creation of Authority in a Sermon by St. Augustine

As its title reveals, Joe’s early book, The Authoritative and the Authoritarian,1 drew an original distinction that is important to all thought about law, and about more than law: to all thought about any form of social organization, from the family to the church—for all human organization requires authority. As for the meaning of the word “authoritative”: in this book, and in his later thinking too, Joe worked out the idea that true authority requires the presence of a person speaking authentically to another person, as mind to mind, and establishing an essentially cooperative relationship between them. A crucial element of this relationship is openness to the new and creative, for in Joe’s view the law—and this is true of every phenomenon involving true authority—is not reducible to a set of rules or commands, let alone self-evident or self-interpreting ones, but consists of a community engaged over time in the activity of shaping itself and its future through an activity of thought and imagination. When the law is properly understood, it exemplifies the practice of authority at its most self-conscious, and can for this reason be a model of thought for the whole world. The law, and its authority, are thus not “in” the texts that purport to declare it, but in the world and in the mind, and especially in the relation of mutual respect he calls “authoritative.” This means that no mere system, whether social or intellectual, can have true authority, for a system, as Joe thinks of it, is not a person and can have no place for a person. The directives of a system are not explained, not interpreted, not integrated into the larger life of the relevant community—whether family, school, church, social grouping, private association, or any other—but stand apart from all those things. Unlike the law, they do not invite questions, call for a response, or constitute a form of life. They cannot have the true authority that arises only from a shared and authentic relation between persons. They are authoritarian.