Obedience: A Mortal Imperative

Sovereignty, the cosmic force that binds societies, is realized through all time.  It is inevitably realized because it must be.  Always.  Indeed, sovereignty, permeating that realm where all that is should be, transcends time.

The mortal domain, marked by time, is imbued with a mere shadow of sovereignty: power, which is the capacity to act through time.

In the mortal domain sovereignty is realized through obedience to power.

In the mortal realm power takes two forms: first as influence and second as action.  Influence is power that is perceived, while action is power that is realized.

Disorder, an intrinsic quality of the mortal realm, is the consequence of mutually exclusive effects.  Human desire, born of man’s universal degradation, is a general effect that renders social disorder in afflicting all men in all societies of all times.  A society is disorderly insofar as its power is perceived as political.  Inasmuch as power is, in other words, perceived to exist for social instead of spiritual purposes, it will likely be realized as such more quickly.

That is what we notice as violence.

For though all mortal power can (eventually) only serve the social purpose of preserving sovereignty, the process of ruling men is rendered rather less painful so far as those men act in accordance with sovereignty, the general interest, and the long-term (these, tender reader, are when properly understood demonstrative synonyms!), which is to say: obey – obey out of belief in power’s spiritual purpose.

But the disobedience that extricated man from divine provenance is defiling – thoroughly defiling.  Man knows only sin, for man was conceived in sin generally (metaphysically) and by sin particularly (literally).  Ergo, man rebels against authority.  But man can rebel less often and less egregiously!  To a degree.

In assuming that power is perceived as it ought to be, power is realized with less severity and less frequency.

Rephrase: in assuming that influence is distributed as it ought to be, action to modify the distribution of influence is undertaken with less severity and less frequency.

Rephrase: in assuming that things are as they ought to be, things become closer to how they should be.

If we define submission as obedience to sovereign power as a consequence of violence and belief as assumption of that which ought to be clothed in the garb of that which is, then we may rephrase yet again: insofar as obedience is offered by virtue of belief, obedience need not be eventually compelled by virtue of submission.  We see, tender reader, that Joseph de Maistre’s remark regarding submission and belief ("[…]these two infants of heaven prove their origin to all[…]”) was rather spot-on.

Sovereignty permeates only that realm where all that is should be.  The mortal domain, experiencing time, is imbued with power: the capacity to act through time.  It is through manifested power that all sovereignty is realized.  Since action is inevitable and every action is in some sense communication and since every communication betrays implicit meaning just as every action betrays implicit intention, it is only- but always! - through manifested power (action) that sovereignty is realized.  Action that realizes sovereignty through the meaning of action demonstrates (by definition) belief in sovereignty, while action that realizes sovereignty through the intention of action demonstrates (by definition) submission to sovereignty.

Sovereignty is realized by mortals through obedience to its incarnation in the mortal domain; power is obeyed, whether by submission or by belief.