‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely’

The full quotation is: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Its author was John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, aka Lord Acton (1834-1902), an English aristocrat, writing in 1887. Other memorable lines (Wikipedia): “Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought”; “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it”; “The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.”

Lord Acton’s basic occupation was not politician—occasionally he was a member of parliament—but historian; in his senior years, he was Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. His writing, which was prodigious, was not so much about power in London, as about power in Rome. Acton happened to be Catholic. His slogan was “A free Church in a free State.”

I encountered Acton this week as the entry for June 19, his deathday, in the book, “All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time,” by Robert Ellsberg, 1997, which is a frequent reference for my hobby of sharing a saint’s story with friends (“My saints of the week,” inquirer.net, 3/23/24); I cited him yesterday.

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Ellsberg is Catholic, and so are most, but not all, of the people he personally chose for his book, which has, among others, Indian national hero Mohandas K. Gandhi (assassinated Jan. 30), German composer Johann Sebastian Bach (born March 21), and American “Apostle of Freedom” Martin Luther King Jr. (assassinated April 4, his commemoration day for Episcopalians).

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At age 14 to 20, at a time when Catholics were still banned from Cambridge and Oxford, Acton was in Munich University, living with and studying under Fr. Ignaz von Döllinger, a renowned Catholic historian and a fearless theologian (eventually excommunicated by Rome). (It was much later, in 1871, that Catholics, nonconformists and non-Christians were allowed by an Act of Parliament to take professorships, fellowships, and studentships at Oxford and Cambridge.)

Acton returned to England at 24. He edited liberal Catholic journals, where he linked the Catholic Church’s temporal power to corruption. He criticized the Spanish Inquisition and the church-authorized massacre of the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants, in 1572). He lobbied, in Rome itself, against Pope Pius IX’s decree of infallibility.

“There was little precedent or tolerance in the church for the role of loyal critic, and Acton’s self-assurance in speaking his mind was a source of astonished irritation to the hierarchy. He constantly criticized the alliance between the church and reactionary political causes; he challenged the church’s claim to the Papal States and urged the pope to renounce all temporal power, the source, he believed, of much corruption … Resolutely opposed to the idea that the end justifies the means, Acton found it abominable that the church should have allowed the faith to be defended by means of murder. All theorists, divines or historians who justified these acts were no better than the original culprits. And this corruption, he believed, was the inevitable fruit of the marriage of sacred and temporal power.” (Ellsberg, p. 266)

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How does Acton qualify as a saint? “Acton was a complicated and in some respects unattractive personality. Furious in his disdain for hypocrisy or any compromise with deceit, he could be unforgiving toward friends who fell short of his high standards. Certainly his positions were out of step with the church of his time. Yet few recognized that his zeal in exposing the historical sins of the church were in fact an expression of deep piety. His violent speech represented the extreme tension of a man who desired nothing more than to love with equal passion both the church and the truth.” (Ellsberg, p.267)

Acton died peacefully on June 19, 1902 in Tegernsee, Bavaria, Germany, leaving a wife and six children. His grave there is unmarked, having lost its headstone sometime late in the 20th century. But his warnings about corruption in the highest places continue to resonate all over the world, including the Philippines.

One more Acton line: “The wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world … History is the true demonstration of Religion.”

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