Earlier this year I had the privilege of working at the 2024 Touchstone Conference. I always come away from these annual conferences inspired to take my faith more seriously, and to recover from the secular assumptions that can so easily creep into the nooks and crannies of my thinking. When listening to the different speakers, I sometimes have an “aha” moment where suddenly something makes sense that I never understood before. I want to share one example, related to hierarchy and authoritarianism.
In 2022, Dr. Hans Boersma gave a talk titled “Dionysian Power,” which was later published in the Mar/Apr 2023 issue of the magazine with the subtitle “A Positively Medieval Hierarchy.” Although Boersma’s talk was primarily about hierarchy and godly authority, it helped me understand why authoritarianism is becoming an increasing feature of modern life.
There is an acute irony in saying that authoritarianism is an increasing feature of modern life, given that the project of secular modernity has involved the rejection of authoritarianism. Indeed, from the 18th century through to WWI, we have seen a string of revolutions establishing democracy as the political norm for much of the western world. Correlative with this has been a gradually negation of hierarchy in favor of egalitarian commitments in all spheres of life. And, of course, the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century had the effect (though not intended by most of the reformers themselves) of undermining, not just authoritarianism, but the very idea of authority in religion, replacing horizontal-hierarchical modes of church governance with more vertical structures.
And yet, for all the advances of modernity, authoritarianism still remains a feature of contemporary experience. From extremist religious movements like ISIS, to elements of martial law in response to pandemics and social unrest, to growing threats to free speech on university campuses, to cult leaders who wield unprecedented powers, it seems that authoritarianism is not only alive and well, but picking up momentum in the contemporary world.
Part of the problem when trying to grapple with the problem of authoritarianism is that our modern worldview has left us without a coherent framework for understanding not only authoritarianism, but authority itself. As a result, we are unable to mount a coherent response, or even just to understand, the challenge of authoritarianism in the contemporary world.
The problem is that modern egalitarianism has rejected not just negative authoritarianism but the very idea of hierarchy itself. Consequently, where authority does exist in the modern world, it means something very different to what it meant historically.
And that brings us back to Touchstone, and Dr. Hans Boersma’s talk at the 2022 conference. Dr. Boersma contrasted our modern understandings with the older tradition, as represented by ancient Christian thinkers like the 6th century Christian philosopher, Dionysius the Areopagite. For those in the Dionysian tradition, hierarchy is baked into the very fabric of reality itself. Reality is patterned vertically with higher and lower places on the chain of being. Dionysius famously described this hierarchy in works such as “The Celestial Hierarchy” and “The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy.” The celestial hierarchy includes various ranks of beings from seraphim and cherubim at the top down to archangels and angels. The ecclesiastical hierarchy deals with levels in the church with hierarchs or bishops at the top through various levels like deacons, monks, laity, etc. with demon-possessed at the bottom. We might add other levels as well, such as authority in the family, or a kingdom. Then there are also various levels of hierarchy in living beings from humans to beasts to plants to inanimate life.
Now here’s the crucial point: for St. Dionysius and for all the ancient church, these structures are not merely arbitrary but reflect patterns at the heart of reality. It isn’t the case that a father has authority over a child merely because he is bigger and smarter, but because fatherhood is part of reality on a primal level. Or again, it isn’t that I have authority over a plant merely because I am more powerful than my front yard shrub and can move plants to my will. Rather, as a human being, I occupy a higher spot on the chain of being, one which comes with responsibility over lowers level of creation. Crucially, in the Dionysian framework, hierarchy is not oppressive but works to raise up—to hierarchize—those on the lower levels. Plants are elevated through mankind’s loving stewardship, humans are elevated through angels, and all things in the chain of being are linked to God, who sustains the entire cosmic hierarchy while remaining outside it.
In philosophical terms, these hierarchical patterns are ontological rather than nominalist. To say that something is true ontologically is to say that it reflects what is real. An ontological truth is rooted in being itself, not just something that becomes true after we name or label it. Thus, to say that hierarchies are ontological is to say that they embody and reflect primal patterns at the heart of reality itself. This is how medieval Christians understood the world. They viewed everything from the planets to politics to human authority was integrated into hierarchical metaphysics—hierarchy grounded in the very nature of things. This worldview is incapsulated in St. Dionysius.
In Dr. Boersma’s talk at the 2022 Touchstone conference, he contrasted St. Dionysius’ understanding of hierarchy with that of modernity. Here’s how Dr. Hans Boersma put it,
“We tend to associate hierarchy with medieval feudalism, obscurantism, unfairness, and especially, oppressive power and violence. As moderns, we celebrate the equal opportunity that a non-stratified, egalitarian society offers, and we take courage from the horizontalizing or flattening of its horizons, for it treats everyone as equals and hence offers protection against arbitrary power from above —or so we think. In short, modernity associates hierarchy with imposition of power and aims to eradicate this evil by replacing hierarchy with equality, vertical stratification with horizontal relationality.”
This much is obvious, but the genuine “aha” moment came when Dr. Boersma suggested that this contemporary approach to authority leaves us unable to mount a coherent response to the problem of authoritarianism. Here’s how it works. The human need and desire for authority, like the human need and desire for beauty, is escapable. But if authority is not rooted in ontological hierarchies—that is, if authority does not reflect how the world actually is on a primal level—then it must be rooted in something else. Lacking a hierarchical metaphysic, we must look to mere power to justify authority.
Why power? Because in the modern scheme of things, authority is not given but constructed. But the maintenance of constructed authority depends, in the end, on power, since there is no prior ordering in which it can seek legitimacy. That power might be the power that money brings, or the power of negative reinforcement through the law, or the power of force and violence. In all such cases, however, authority is not a participation in a hierarchical ordering of the cosmos, but emerges out of constructed relationships that are ultimately arbitrary. To quote again from Boersma,
“It is not, however, as though we no longer have any hierarchies. It is just that they are socially constructed and are strictly functional. My dean still tells me when to teach a course, army captains still issue military orders to their lieutenants, and —to give a more revolting example —health officials still demand vaccinations as a prerequisite for participation in public life.
All of these, however, are functional rather than ontological hierarchies. They are the result of various social contracts rather than being grounded in the nature of things. We need these social contracts because life together would be impossible without power or hierarchy. Power, in modernity, is the result of the way in which we construct relationships. In other words, the modern social web, including its power relations, is grounded in a nominalist (constructivist) understanding of reality rather than in a realist (participatory) metaphysic.”
We cannot understand the rise of modern authoritarianism without understanding this shift. Once authority is reduced to merely a pragmatic tool, then it loses its ontological grounding and becomes merely functional. Again from Dr Boersma:
“Egalitarians construe power as a means of control. Power is a functional thing, after all; it is something we give to people who we think will get the job done. The result is that we link power with control, whether subtle or harsh. For Dionysius, and for the Christian tradition in his wake, power is an ontological thing; it is something rooted in the nature of reality. As a result, for Dionysius, power is mystagogical in character, facilitating the return of created beings to the Being of God. Modern egalitarians use power to oppress and put down; Dionysian mystics use it to hierarchize and lift up.
True, power has been misused within traditional hierarchies, while modern egalitarian structures witness at times shining examples of selfless service. How come? Sinful behavior negatively affects even the best of structures, while the image of God continues to shine no matter how confused and messed-up our structures become. Counterexamples are hardly surprising. Nonetheless, Christian hierarchies lift us up to heaven while modern hierarchies bring us down to hell. This truth is nothing new to those who have read and compared the founding documents of the Christian and the modern, liberal traditions.”
And that is why, for all the leveling effects of modern egalitarianism, authoritarianism remains a feature of the contemporary experience. That was my big take-away Dr. Boersma’s talk. In the most simple terms, authority that is merely functional—that exists simply to get things done—easily lapses into oppression. Why? Because having exchanged hierarchy for a purely constructivist understanding of authority, we lose the inbuilt limits of God-given ontology. What remains are authority structures that rely solely on pragmatic outcomes for justification, with power as the only method left for securing those outcomes.
Further Reading