Sez Who?

Even a woken crock is bright twice a day, or at least unwittingly stumbles into an honest question from time to time, in this case the question of authority. Who or what is the ultimate authority, and how can we tell? 

He mentions the Bible, but that can't be right, because it is only recognized as authoritative on the authority of another entity. Obviously, no writer of the Bible had the slightest idea that he was a co-contributor to a compilation that was only closed and canonized as infallible hundreds of years later. 

At the same time, any number of would-be gospels and apostolic letters were rejected for inclusion by this same authority. So our principle of authority can't be located in the Bible, except by extension from the prior authority upstream from the Bible itself.

Yada yada, we can trace this authority back from the apostles, bishops, popes, councils, saints, and doctors to Christ himself, who founded the Church and handed on the authority to teach what he had orally communicated. 

Ultimately the buck stops with God, but ignoring the mediators is as illogical as denying secondary causes in science, as in the occasionalism of Islam or the double-predestination of Calvin that renders human life utterly superfluous. Besides, who died and left Calvin in charge?

The same commenter asks if our ultimate authority might be something a philosopher said, but again, it depends on the source of the philosopher's authority.  

Let's get right on down to the real nitty-gritty, with the Cosmic Flow Chart: at the top of the Flow Chart is the initial bifurcation between Authority and non-Authority. 

Supposing we choose the latter, then there is and can be nothing but opinion, and we are thereby plunged into the tyranny of relativism. Everything is truly just your opinion, man, which then redounds inevitably to a nihilistic world of pain and coercion: MARK IT ZERØ!  

But this isn't 'Nam. Rather, we choose Authority, which is to say, absolute order (or order of the Absolute). 

That sounds a bit fishy, so stop being coy: who or what is Bob's Ultimate Authority? When Bob says he "chooses" the Absolute, isn't that implicitly saying that Bob is the authority, no better than, say, Luther, who pretends he isn't the authority who authorizes the authoritative principle of sola scriptura? 

Settle down, Beavis! There are ways out of this nul de slack of solipsism and special pleading, but is there any way out short of faith? 

No, there is no way short of faith. However, there are reasonable and unreasonable forms of faith. Let me turn the wheel over to the Aphorist while I try to sort this out. 

There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap.

Thank you, Nicolás, that is absolutely correct. Anything else?

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities.

The first aphorism goes to the faith required of any truth in any field -- even to the very existence of truth, and of our capacity to know it. 

So if you want to know the source of my terrestrial authority, it rests on this faith: that there is a total order of intelligible reality spanning the horizontal and vertical, interior and exterior, subjective and objective realms, AKA the cosmos; and that this order is intelligible to human intelligence, which is to say that being is convertible to truth, uniquely so in the human being.

The second aphorism is almost equally important, as it goes to the spiritual organ ordered to this totality, which is to say, the intellect as opposed to the profane ego, the latter having more to do with adaptation to this or that human community. This intellect sees before it knows, such that it is indeed the perception of a special order of realities.

BUT. This is only half the story, and that's not even the half of it. We'll discuss how that other half lives in the next post -- and in particular, how it can live in us.