Things are more complicated than that, and we have to puzzle out how things stand, under B's formulation. A will in the thrall of the flesh can be spoken to only through the body. To break the defiant will, it is necessary to break the body whose appetites hold it in subjection.
Reason determines which hypotheses best accord with the appearances.
The senses put us in touch, directly and through instrumentation, with the appearances Nature affords us. To say that authority itself is constituted by power is thus flagrantly to beg the question, by reasoning circularly. Yet, in Bronowski's picture, they were reduced to a show of force in order to uphold their authority. The authority they believed they held that entitled them both to determine what ought to be taught and to exercise this power in these ways is something else again. And, in the case of the Roman Catholic Church, as you recall, the basis of its claim to this sort of authority was the Doctrine of the Apostolic Succession .