Up With Authority

I just started reading Victor Lee Austin's book Up With Authority. Austin is a resident theologian at an Episcopalian church in New York City and most recently published a memoir on his wife's multi-decade fight with cancer and slow diminishment and death, called Losing Susan: Brain Disease, the Priest's Wife, and the God who Gives and Takes Away. I am hoping to read the book soon, but in the meantime if issues of God's sovereignty and pain are on your radar I recommend this excellent first things conversation between Austin and R.R. Reno. This conversation and an interview in Ken Meyers' extraordinary Mars Hill Audio first brought Austin's work to my attention. When I saw that he had written a book on authority, a subject near and dear to my own heart, I had to pick up a copy.

The dearth of respect for and trust in authority is undeniable in our culture. And there is without doubt good reason for mistrust. Washington, our national emblem of authority, is a cesspool of corruption, cronyism, nepotism, and ethnically insensitive NFL teams. 

Despite clear abuses of authority in our culture, Austin's thesis is that, paradoxically, submission to authority frees us to be more free. The modern desire for a manager rather than a leader is symptomatic of what Austin sees as "leaders' who stand for nothing except fair process"--harnessing the energies of their subordinates rather than actively leading them. This lack of understanding of true leadership signals a "cultural impoverishment that we have a lack of a notion of authorities who have something to convey to us, have a place to lead us toward, authorities, that is, who embody a sense of what the human good is and who exist to help us flourish in it." In reaction to bad authority (coupled with the human desire for complete autonomy), we have rejected all formative authority and exalted the individual. But true authority rightly exercised leads us to a more human and more excellent existence, unleashing potentials that will remain forever latent outside of submission to authority.

Austin's final encouragement in the introduction is that Christian believers must of necessity embrace paradox. Our faith is shot full of paradox of which freedom through submission is perhaps one of the least vexing. We believe in the incarnation where the God-man came to earth to grow as a child and teach and heal and die and rise. But the church has forever maintained that Christ's dual position of fully God and fully man is not a contradiction but a paradox. Something, while outside of the bounds of our full understanding, we still can recognize as true. 

The modern mind has little room for paradox.I just taught my juniors Donne's great poem "Batter My Heart Three-Person'd God." They bristle, as they ought, at Donne's final request in the poem that he cannot be "chaste" unless he is "ravish[ed]" by God. But Donne is not literally asking God to overpower him sexually, but expressing the paradox that our moral purity depends on God's overpowering our weak desires with fulfillment beyond imagination. The lines prior to the shocking conclusion are just as paradoxical (though less incendiary): "But I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free." There it is. Freedom through enthrallment. Freedom through imprisonment to the will of God. Freedom through submission to be who we were made to be and thus be truly free.

(I plan on blogging more in detail through this book as I go. In my faltering manuscript on obedience and Paradise Lost the philosophical underpinning provided by Austin will be invaluable. And, while the index isn't overly-detailed, it doesn't seem that he covers Milton as an authority on this matter.)