By Whose Authority?
Growing Up.
And they came again to Jerusalem. And as he was walking in the temple, the chief priests and the scribes and the elders came to him, and they said to him, “By what authority are you doing these things, or who gave you this authority to do them?” Jesus said to them, “I will ask you one question; answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I do these things. Was the baptism of John from heaven or from man? Answer me.” And they discussed it with one another, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ But shall we say, ‘From man’?”—they were afraid of the people, for they all held that John really was a prophet. So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.”
— The Gospel of Mark, 11:27-33
If you could go back in time and fetch one of The Church Fathers back to the modern day… what do you think he would look like?
Make it fair, obviously. We don’t want the man to feel like a freak. We bring him back in the time machine and spruce him up with a modern haircut. We shave the scraggly beard. We take his robes and put him in some form of modern clerical dress or, maybe, just a decent blazer and some khakis.
What would he look like?
Well… He’d look like this:
Or, this:
Or… maybe even this:
That’s what a Church Father would look like, dressed in the contemporary style.
A normal dude.
Okay, and what about if we gave him a test? We dress him up like Pastor Rick Warren and have him sit down with a proctor who asks him questions about science and history? About psychology and mental health? We could even give him an abacus and ask him to do a bit of math…
How do you think he’d do?
Poorly, is the correct answer.
Piss poorly.
Again, we’d be being fair here. There’s no language barrier or anything like that holding him back. The test would be administered in his native language, or at least in Latin or Ancient Greek, which most of the Church Fathers would’ve known. We also, of course, wouldn’t ask him anything that was specific to his future. Like, “Who was the Prime Minister of the U.K. in 2024?” or “Name three of Elvis’s songs.” Questions like that are obviously out of bounds. The test would only be about stuff which presumably doesn’t change. Eternal constants. Things that would’ve applied equally well in his day as they do to our own. Math equations. Geography. What the stars are and questions about basic human biology. That kind of thing. Even so, being as brutally fair as we can manage, I submit to you that every single Church Father would fail, and fail abysmally, in practically every category. Pretty much every single thing he’d learned in his life would’ve been wrong.
“No. No, sorry that one’s wrong. Yeah. Yeah, no, really. Yeah it is a bit weird I guess but we discovered that insects don’t spontaneously generate out of rotten fruit. Yeah. Yeah, no it’s tiny eggs. Like, smaller than you can see with the eye. Oh, and this one, yeah so there actually is a whole other land mass out in the Atlantic. Yeah. Yeah, no, not a small one either, not like an island. It’s a whole continent. Two actually. Yes. Yeah really. Combined they’re bigger than Africa, and then some. Yeah. And umm… so, this one here. Yeah, number three. That’s actually wrong too unfortunately. Women don’t store the sperm of their lovers in their hair. Yeah. Yeah no we cut it up and looked. Not there. Also, the uterus doesn’t wander about the body. Uh-huh. No. Yeah it stays put pretty much. Okay so, yes you did better on the math portion here but you still have a lot to catch up on. Great work with the A squared B squared C squared thing. Perfect. But actually, there is a way to solve for the volume of irregular objects, and I see you marked “Impossible” there. Yeah. Yeah, smart fella called Newton figured it out. Calculus it’s called. Yeah. [Exhales in solidarity] ooooofff… Yeah I get it man, yeah. A lot is different. We can fly now too by the way. Yes. Yes really. Yeah like, really fast. Planes they’re called. Do you want to see one?”
That’s how it would go.
Sorry.
Just facts.
Every single Church Father would be less informed than a fourth grader.
Now, please.
I’m not insinuating that they were stupid. It’s just that, their education consisted almost entirely of the Classical Greek Corpus… and most of that turned out to be wrong.
And listen… they wouldn’t just fail the math and science stuff either by the way. No. Nooooo… They’d fail everything. I mean, Theology? In 2026? A Church Father… pass Theology… in 2026?
Are you insane?
Please.
Let us strive for at least a modicum of seriousness.
In the intervening centuries between that Church Father’s time and now, the Church has defined and redefined so much doctrine that, by today’s standards, every single Church Father would be considered a heretic or an extremist, and likely both. They wouldn’t make it past year one of seminary. I mean, can you imagine? LOL. How would that conversation go?
“What do you mean usury is okay now? What!?” “How can people outside the visible church go to Heaven? …. (Eyes growing impossibly wide) Even JEWS!?!?!” “The Death Penalty is ‘Inadmissible’? What are you talking about? I stoned like five Arians to death myself and got a plenary indulgence for it.” “And what is this ‘annulment’ thing? Looks a lot like divorce to me…” “The Earth moves!?!?!?!”
And numerous other such things as well.
For example, they’d probably believe a great many things to be “historical fact” which we now regard as mere legend or fable. Stuff which seems to have been proven impossible by the archeological record. Like, you know, Atlantis.
So.
The obvious conclusion from all of that is that these are exactly the guys whom we should defer to about everything.
Shrug
Makes sense to me!
…
… …
I’m being hyperbolic.
Forgive me.
At the same time though, everything I’ve just said is true, and I’ve said it to try and take away the mystique. To take the Church Fathers down a little from off their pedestals. To remind you that, in the end, The Church Fathers were just normal guys. Smarter than the average bear for their time, certainly, but nonetheless still men who would look frumpy in a button-down and whom you could probably beat in a game of chess.
They actually weren’t super geniuses.
So what do we do about that?
In every man’s life there comes a time when he is more capable than his father.
That’s the hope anyway. The goal.
My dad raised me with the hopes that I’d be better than he was. Achieve more. Know more. See more… And I raise my own children today in that same spirit. But, even apart from such high aspirations of successive generational attainment, there’s the practical side of things that simply comes with time. Your parents age. If he lives long enough, eventually your dad will begin to weaken. His thinking will slow. His memory will maybe not be what it once was. Now I believe, personally, and have seen evidence of this in reality, that men and women can actually continue being physically and mentally robust (and even beautiful) for far longer than most people assume but… even so… Time Marches On. Most people will sooner or later find themselves above their parents.
So why assume the same is not true for our parents in Faith?
?
Think with me seriously for a moment. Be honest. In many ways we are actually better people than the Church Fathers. Blasphemous to say I know but, I wouldn’t stone a man for believing different things about Christ than I do. I wouldn’t own a slave. I do not believe that women are simply imperfect men or that every Muslim and Buddhist is by default condemned to a Devil’s Hell.
Is this not genuine progress?
Real, spiritual growth?
To be sure we have our own faults and sins, common to our own time, but these I think are real examples of the child reaching beyond the father, which, of course, is surely what The Fathers themselves would’ve hoped.
The malaise affecting Western Civilization today is that we are a people of stunted growth who think they are mature. A society of adults that never grew up. Is it not obvious that both Conservatives and Progressives are men and women of arrested development? People thirty-five, sixty, and eighty-two still clinging to their mother’s apron strings and defined by their father’s enormous shoes? They still feel little. Incomplete. The Conservative looks back and remembers his father’s dictates, the man’s stern commands, his values and his taboos, and he takes it all as gospel. A good little boy who does no wrong. The Progressive remembers the same and rebels against it. Builds his whole life on simply doing the opposite. He says to himself, “Daddy’s not going to tell me what to do.”
That’s all it is.
A society divided between “I must make my Daddy proud” and “For God’s sake let me not become my Mother.”
Both sides are defined by Daddy Issues. Parental issues.
Man, as a species, is perhaps defined by Daddy Issues. Dyḗus Phatḗr. The “Sky Father.”
“Our Father who art in Heaven.”
…
But see,
You have to make peace with your father.
That’s growing up.
Coming to terms with your parents. That’s growing up.
And making peace with your father requires that you at last see him as Human, as, really, just a normal guy and…
oh.
Oh I see…
You had not yet realized why Jesus came.
You can only hide behind the apron so long before it begins to get embarrassing and, of course, Death is great for making heroes.
Hard to be a legendary figure if you’re still alive.
So long as you draw breath you can (and will!) say dumb things and get caught up in scandals but, once you’ve been dead a while you kind of become amorphous. Ill-defined. A few decades after you’ve gone you become just a sort of vague idea in the shape of a person. Something that everyone can shoehorn into their preferred hallucinations.
Because no one is free of it you see! No! Everyone feels the need to source themselves. To ground themselves in some tradition. Not even the people who pretend to hate tradition are above it. They too have to constantly pretend. Always, every day, they are continually going back and back, rifling through the archives for someone somewhere in the past doing something kind of like what they’re doing now so that they can claim precedent. So that they can Normalize and Justify themselves by reference to the ancestors. To “Tradition”. To “Authority”. Ultimately, to people long dead.
This is a lack of courage.
A failure to stand on your own two feet.
Today there are no Übermen and we live beneath a sky without eagles.
Be a degenerate if you want to. Sodomy. “Pet-play.” Whatever. Or, fill your heart with hate. Or maybe blow up your family and have an affair over some bullshit desire for “self-actualization.” Better yet, go join a Foreign Legion to get your rocks off killing.
I don’t care.
But you do it.
Understand?
Don’t give me some bullshit justification about double-penetration on Greek Pottery or the Judeo-Christian roots of cuckoldry. Don’t tell me how it’s “based” and “red pilled” to be pro genocide because Aristotle said so. Don’t hide your lack of commitment to your spouse behind the curtain of a therapist and don’t swagger around in imitation of a 1950s sitcom dad with a cigar, giving me a complicated justification for your third tradwife via Canon Law.
All of this is lying.
All of this is agency laundering.
All of this is placing the consequences for your actions upon some other outside authority so nobody yells at you.
“Yell at Aquinas! He said so!” “Yell at the World Health Organization!” “Yell at The American Academy of Pediatrics, they’re the ones who told me to cut my daughter’s breasts off!”
No.
Man. Justify thyself.
Why?
Because Authority is always Dead.
It must be.
If “Authority” were alive it might have the power to correct you, and that has never been its function in your life.
Not even one time.
Rather, Authority exists to affirm you.
To give you license.
Cover.
That’s why it must be truly awful being Pope. To be turned into nothing more than a rhetorical device and a meme. To be spiritually neutered, killed while still alive.
There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of the recently deceased Pope Benedict. Sitting in his chambers, a fellow bishop came in and started lamenting over the state of the church and lambasting Benedict for not doing more to fix it.
“Do you see that door?” Benedict asked, pointing to the door of his bedroom. “What do you want me to do? My authority ends right there.”
I understand him. I sympathize. The old man, sitting alone on his bed, at last all the supposed POWER to fix things in his grasp after so many years…
Only to find it’s all smoke.
That he can decide nothing except what he has for lunch.
How awful.
Pray for that great man’s soul.
…
Here’s how it works. Listen and I will tell you. You see, Pope says THING. Yes? But, is THING “authoritative”? That’s always the question. Is THING ex cathedra? Is it infallible? Is THING doctrine to which I and the other faithful have to listen to?
Ah.
Glad you asked. To answer that question let me consult…
Me.
And that’s how it works.
That’s how it actually works.
You know I’m right.
Invariably, the infallibility and dogmatic weight of any papal utterance depends entirely upon whether or not the person telling you about it agrees with him. Every time. If the person agrees with the pope then any given statement is, naturally, “in line with the consensus of The Fathers” and with “Tradition” but, if he doesn’t, well…
Well, I mean…
Naturally, in that case, we have to weigh the pope’s statement against the “received wisdom of the Church” and consult past records of the magisterium and, obviously, “put it into context.”
I see you.
I know exactly what you’re doing.
I’d say “the only person you’re fooling is yourself” but you’ve actually got a lot of others fooled besides that.
Not me though.
I see.
I’ve already stood in your shoes.
And the Bible? Think not for a moment that such saves you. That you can escape the same trap by means of The Reformers decision to use scripture alone. All you have done is substitute the old man in the bedroom for a pope made out of paper which, in the end, again, curiously turns out to always agree… with you.
“All that stuff I want to think and how I want to behave? Yeah. Yeah that’s exactly what God wants too actually. No. No you don’t have to believe me. Read The Church Fathers. No, not that one. The other one. No, not that one either. Yeah. Yeah, that one. Popes say so too actually. No, not the one right now, the other guy. Yeah. Yeah the one in medieval France. I mean, the current one actually agrees with me too, you just have to understand that you’re supposed to change the meanings of all the words in the sentence he said. Yeah. See I have this book that says his words mean different stuff. Yeah. Exegesis. It’s all in Aquinas bro. Women shouldn’t drive and it’s okay to kill Muslims. Yeah. Gay sex too actually. Oh. Oh! What? Bro? Bro, you kidding me bro? It’s so in line with Tradition for me to have gay sex. Yeah man. Absolutely. Doctrine Develops. Read Newman.”
That’s Father James Martin by the way. Catholic. Every pope likes him. What he’s doing has the full blessing of Authority.
…
… … …
Well.
As the kids say, “Don’t get it twisted.”
I’m not making moral claims about anything here. Not about your sexuality, nor your racism, nor your desire to wear tweed and smoke tobacco, or your desire to abort your kids. Not even about your desire to commit genocide.
Okay?
That’s not the point.
This is a judgment free zone.
The point is that Authority is fake.
It’s based on nothing. It’s written on water.
Authority changes all the time, with the wind, and isn’t it funny how it just so happens to always change to suit the sensibilities of the people claiming it? How it’s always so perpetually amorphous that both the most traditional conservative and most progressive liberal can claim it as their own?
In the end then, we see “Authority” for what it really is:
A profound discomfort in one’s own convictions.
A need, pathological, to say, “I’m okay because someone else says so.” To be able to look around at your peers and declare “What I think is right because an expert told me.”
You can’t think for yourself.
You can’t decide for yourself.
You can’t accept the consequences for your own actions and chart the path of your life yourself.
…
Except that you can and you do.
You just lie about it.
You couch everything in the language of outside approval so that you bear no blame but… in the end… you are always your own secret Pope.
And do listen.
There is nothing else to be.
The message here is not that you’re doing Authority wrong and ought instead to really submit and really accept correction and genuinely have others decide for you.
No.
It’s that all such posturings are always lies. It’s that you actually are a Free Agent and that you cannot help but think for yourself.
There is no other way to exist.
But.
You can lie about it.
And lying lets you pretend that it’s not your fault.
It stunts your growth you see. Prevents you from flowering and becoming all that you were made to be because you cannot be honest with yourself about what and who you are.
“By whose authority do you do these things?”
“Mine.”
That’s the only correct answer.
Own your actions. Own your beliefs. Own your thoughts and logic and emotions because offloading it onto others via complicated schemes of gamesmanship and moving the goal posts doesn’t actually make you less guilty or more vindicated.
It just keeps you small.
Go in peace.
Agree with me or not. It’s your choice.
Namaste.
“When you confer spiritual authority on another person, you must realize that you are allowing them to pick your pocket and sell you your own watch.” - Alan Watts
Interesting read. I think the leading authority soon will be Grok/Chat GPT :D Be your own AI pope :P