The Mystery of Evil

If the Church lays claim to a spiritual power to which the temporal power of the Empire or the State must remain subordinate, as happened in medieval Europe, or if, as happened in the twentieth-century totalitarian State, legitimacy insists on doing without legality, then the political machine spins in circles with often lethal results; if, on the other hand, as has happened in modern democracies, the legitimating principle of popular sovereignty is reduced to the electoral moment and is dissolved into procedural rules that are juridically fixed in advance, legitimacy runs the risk of disappearing into legality and the political machine is equally paralyzed.

Modernity’s attempt to make legality and legitimacy coincide, by seeking to secure through positive law the legitimacy of a power, is completely inadequate, as is clear from the inexorable process of decline into which our democratic institutions have entered. A society’s institutions remain living only if both principles (which in our tradition have also received the name of natural law and positive law, spiritual power and temporal power, or in Rome, auctoritas and potestas) remain present and act in them without ever claiming to coincide.

The hypertrophy of law, which presumes to legislate over everything, on the contrary betrays, through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy

that illegality is so diffuse and generalized because the powers have lost all awareness of their legitimacy.