When our rulers and men of wealth, the mighty in the land, take counsel together to substitute human authority for divine authority, when by their lies they throw all things into chaos that they might impose an order of their own making, this Petrine counsel is the counsel we must take. We must fearlessly adhere to the truth, and to true order, even when we are accused of destroying order and are ourselves brought before the courts. We can bear witness to God and his Christ in no other way. We can serve the end of civil society in no other way. We do both these things, or we do neither; just as we fulfill both great commandments or we fulfill neither. That is what it means to be lawful. 

The wars of the last century dealt the myth of progress a deadly blow. Moral order disappeared in puffs of musket smoke in Europe, then in mushroom clouds over Japan. The West, contrary to popular opinion, did not win the Cold War that followed. Rather, it lost its democracies to a military-industrial complex into which it imported fascist war criminals. It lost the foundations of domestic order to sexual revolutionaries. It lost its universities to socialist revolutionaries. And now it is succumbing, as N. S. Lyons has argued, to a managerial revolution in which nothing is to elude the scrutiny of the bureaucrats. It is succumbing, as I have argued, to a “public health” revolution in which the individual good disappears into some putative common good determined at a planetary level by the Controllers against whom Chesterton and Huxley and Lewis warned us. A totalitarian plutocracy, backed by a pantheon comprising Secularism, The Science, Artificial Intelligence, Climate Change and other deities, is assuming control of everything from money to medicine to movements of peoples and goods. They are the mighty in the land, the arrogant whom Asaph envied:

They are free from common human burdens;
they are not plagued by human ills.
Therefore pride is their necklace;
they clothe themselves with violence.
From their callous hearts comes iniquity,
their evil imaginations have no limits.
They scoff, and speak with malice;
with arrogance they threaten oppression.
Their mouths lay claim to heaven,
and their tongues take possession of the earth.
Therefore their people turn to them
and drink up waters in abundance.
They say, “How would God know?
Does the Most High know anything?”
(Ps. 73:5–11)

From such men a new kind of “authority” is emerging in which no reference is made to natural or divine law, or even to the consent of the governed. They have taken counsel together, in their public-private partnerships, and they are deliberately dissolving what is left of civil society that they might “build back better” with a system of well-monitored serfdom. They are devising a bio-security state in which the number of men, the activities of men, and even the human genome will be subject to them.

Their project will fail. Their great Tower, with its high-speed communications rivaling those of the cherubim, will last but briefly. When Asaph withdrew into the sanctuary of God, to pray for a way of escape from his temptation, he perceived their end:

Truly thou dost set them in slippery places;
thou dost make them fall to ruin.
How they are destroyed in a moment,
swept away utterly by terrors!
They are like a dream when one awakes,
on awaking you despise their phantoms.
(Ps. 73:18–20)

Yes, their project will fail. But only after first appearing to succeed. Already we behold its outline and discern its nature. We believe authority to be grounded in God. These people do not believe in God. We believe all authority to have been given to God’s Christ. They do not believe in Christ. We believe that the present age is a time for choosing to enroll in the service of Christ and to discover there “the greater operation of liberty.” These men are not interested in liberty. We believe in law and lawfulness as indispensable to liberty. These men introduce lawlessness into law. They rule by crisis, by emergency, by a state of exception. Which creates a conundrum: as the mystery of lawlessness percolates through the remains of our civilization, dissolving ancient assumptions and institutions, how are we ourselves to be lawful?

On Law & Authority

There are, as Aquinas observes, four kinds of law: two that are fundamental, namely, the eternal law and natural law; and two forms of positive law, divine and human. Eternal law is the highest of the four. It is the law governing creation that exists in the mind of the Maker. The second is the most basic to man, for it is that same law insofar as God has made it accessible to rational animals; it is what we can know or discover of the eternal law. The third is the law God crafts for us and delivers to us, not merely by reason but by revelation, whether under the old covenant or the new. The fourth is civil law, the laws we craft for ourselves, that we may live together in some degree of conformity to natural and divine law. This also takes two forms: as canon law in the city of God, and as secular law in the city of man.

Secular law, though good and necessary, comes last and least. Where it violates natural or divine law, it does not have the binding force of law, so far as the conscience is concerned. For every human being is duty-bound to obey God at all times. God, on the other hand, is bound by none but himself. He is what he has and has what he is. He is therefore a law unto himself. It is not so with us. With us, law depends on authority. Law, it is true, helps us know who has authority and what authority they have. But there is no law without authority to make law. Only by divine authority does the world exist, with its laws; only by divine fatherhood do families and tribes exist, with their laws. The authority to order their relations by law is a participation, however remote, in his authority.

Otherwise put, all authority comes from God while remaining with God. It does not go forth from God in such a way as to abide independently with creatures. They have it exactly as they have everything else. They have it as a gift entrusted to them. They have it in such a way as to remain accountable for their use of it. They are stewards, not masters, of their own lives and laws.

Recall the great king, Uzziah, whom God struck with leprosy when he went into the temple to pray. Why? Because he presumed to preside over his own sacrifice. He acted as one who had authority he did not have. In contrast, consider Jesus, who came to heal lepers. He announced to the Jews that the kingdom of God was present in their midst, in his own person, and had at last come within their grasp. So they grasped him, using their own law perversely, and subverting that of the Romans, to nail him to the wracking cross. But no one took his life from him; they had no such authority. He himself had authority to lay it down and to take it up again. When he had done so, he announced that the kingdom had indeed come. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

That is what the apostles were sent into the world to proclaim, that all might ready themselves for the manifestation of the kingdom upon his return in the glory he was about to receive from his Father. “Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: The Lord, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and he has charged me to build him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah.” And what says Jesus, King of kings? “The Lord has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and the heavens into the bargain; now build me my house in every nation under heaven, teaching men to observe all that I have commanded you.”

Law, I repeat, rests on authority. But the question now arises: in what relation to the law of Christ does the ius gentium stand? For Christ is still with the Father; he has not yet returned with glory. It is crucial that we get the answer right. We do not get it right if we suppose that the Church now rules the nations on behalf of Christ. Nor do we get it right if we fancy that the world still rules itself and may do so without reference to Christ. We get it right only if we see that the nations are obligated to Christ and will be judged on that basis when he makes his royal appearance, his Parousia.

Now the word of obligation is, for the moment, an invitation. The leaders of the nations may and should follow the example of the Church and cast their crowns at the feet of Christ. In due course, however, obligation will become stipulation. “Every knee shall bow, whether in heaven or on earth or under the earth.” Meanwhile, mankind has been taught a fundamental principle of authority, as Augustine points out in De Trinitate. The principle is that justice ought to precede power and that genuine authority exists only where justice accedes to power. From which it follows that power attained or exercised without justice is not an exercise in authority but only a simulacrum thereof.

This simulacrum brings authority into crisis, as it is now doing both in the Church and in the world, where violent men still attempt to seize the kingdom by force despite the fact that it has quite escaped their grasp. The kings of the earth take counsel together against the Lord and his anointed. “Let us burst their bonds asunder,” they say, “and cast their cords from us, while we still can.”

They are clever, these proud men. They exacerbate the crisis of authority in every way they can think of, in order to press their false claims to authority. Why do you suppose they are so intent on destroying the family, on erasing the boundaries of peoples and nations, on producing everywhere what Irenaeus called “minglings without cohesion”? Because they would have men call on none but themselves. Why do they hate religion and erase cultural memories? Because there must be no thick centers of culture by which men might resist their will. Why do they back the most radical forms of autonomy, even the most insane, self-mutilating forms? Because they must eradicate even the laws of nature if they are to impose their own lawless laws. Everywhere they introduce chaos, resorting even to acts of terror, that from chaos may emerge an order not beholden to the Creator, not subject to his Word.

But if they are clever, they are also quite mad. “He who sits in the heavens laughs; he has them in derision.” For he has set his King on Zion, his holy hill. They cannot move or remove him. He will terrorize them on the day of his wrath.

On the Situation of the Faithful

Meanwhile, the prayer that was on Jesus’ lips, as he laid down his life, goes up again to heaven from the faithful:

O my God, I cry by day, but thou dost not answer;
and by night, but find no rest.
Yet thou art holy,
enthroned on the praises of Israel.
In thee our fathers trusted;
they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
To thee they cried, and were saved;
in thee they trusted, and were not disappointed. . . .
For dominion belongs to the Lord,
and he rules over the nations.
Yea, to him shall all the proud of the earth bow down. (Ps. 22:2–5, 28–29)

The situation of the faithful today looks increasingly like that of those who first conquered the kingdoms of the world with the gospel of Christ and the blood of the martyrs, in which is true authority, for they reign with Christ. The situation is not identical, however. The early martyrs wrestled with a dying monster, in its embodiment as imperial Rome. Today we are wrestling with a reviving monster, as it recovers from the mortal wound it received at their hands. We are face to face now with the beast that “was, and is not, and is to ascend from the bottomless pit and go to perdition.”

If you ask me how this recovery happens, I answer, first, with Augustine, that God in his justice will judge evil at its zenith, not its nadir; and that he will display both to the righteous and to the wicked that evil cannot overcome good, no matter how hard it tries. I answer, second, by saying that the ascent of the beast is a byproduct of the grace of God. New graces deliver from old evils, but they also make possible new perversions. Evil is nothing in itself. It is parasitic on good. And what good is better than the good announced in the gospel of Jesus Christ, through whom God showed us “how much value he attaches to us and how much he loves us”?

For example, the gospel made possible the appearance of Christendom as a realm in which the lordship of Jesus was acknowledged in the political sphere and the dignity of man began to be recognized in law and culture. But the same gospel made possible the rebuilding of Babel, a Babel far more formidable than the Babel of old. The law of liberty became a law of license and, just so, created a chaotic flood that is driving men to that tower for refuge. The end of the old law made possible, in the political imagination, an indefinite suspension of all law. The seven sacraments made possible seventy-seven substitutes, from Masonic rituals to same-sex marriage to the mark of the beast. The appearance of the Church, of the city of God lodged in the very heart of the city of man, gave birth to the ambition to make the city of man itself a kind of church, a temple in which the man of lawlessness can take his seat as if God, becoming the legislator of all reality, even ecclesial reality. The promise of the Parousia of Christ made thinkable the parousia of Antichrist.

I answer, third, that it happens through apostasy in the Church. Without apostasy in the Church, these parasitic evils would not prevail, even for a day. For it is a rule of theology that, where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. But when Christians apostatize, they forfeit this abounding grace. When the orant hands slump, sin, like the army of Amalek, prevails. There has been a great deal of apostasy in the Church for centuries now. Deceiving influences have gone forth and are going forth, even from Rome, where Petrine authority is being used to abdicate authority, leading to a major crisis of authority. It seems clear enough that the question of authority must be faced inside the Church before it can be faced properly outside the Church, though Solovyov (whom Francis misuses in Laudate Deum) rightly suggests that the two processes are intertwined, neither being able to proceed without the other. It is the latter, however, that we are concerned with here.

On Denying Caesar

Nearly a century ago, the Barmen Declaration insisted that Christians must concede nothing to those who claim that there are areas of our life in which we do not require the justification and sanctification that are ours in Christ, areas in which we may therefore own some other lord or lordship, based on some other salvation. For we cannot confess the lordship of Christ at all if we are also confessing competitors to Christ. We cannot proclaim his lordship if we are acknowledging that it is limited. If it is limited, he is not the Lord but a liar; for he said, not that some, but rather that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him.

The same conviction was at work in the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, whose signatories asserted that secular authorities could not expect their compliance “with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act.” While the authorities could expect them to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, they could not expect them to render to Caesar what is God’s.

But what are we to make of that dominical instruction, “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s”? If you use Caesar’s coinage, pay Caesar’s tax. That much is clear. But suppose Caesar insists that you must use his coinage?

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