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| (Image: Christ Pantocrater, Monreale, Sicily) |
Such wondrous power God to his Saint will lend. – Milton
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” Lord Acton (a Catholic, as it turns out) once famously wrote. In our culture, with its deep mistrust of power, this is a truism. Power is associated with tyranny and abuse. It enables big people to oppress little people. It is something dangerous that must be contained through checks and balances. If there are some that must have more power than others, we treat it as a necessary evil. After all, history can provide a litany of examples of people whose power seems to have led to terrible corruption.
Despite the apparently obvious truth of Lord Acton’s dictum, I would like to question it—most obviously because it carries the absurd corollary that God, who has infinite power, is absolutely corrupt. On the other hand, there really does seem to be a correlation between power and corruption that we can see any day just by reading the news. However, it is a fallacy to turn correlation into causation and claim that power directly causes corruption. In fact, power is of itself a good and in is really a lack of power that leads to corruption.
