THEOCRACY. — According to its etymology (from θεός and κράτος), it signifies a form of government in which supreme political dominion belongs to God and is exercised directly by Him.
The term was coined by Flavius Josephus, who used it to distinguish the political regime of the Hebrew people from the other forms already theorized by Aristotle, namely monarchy and democracy. It must nevertheless be noted that a direct regime of God, such as the etymological meaning would suggest, has never been realized in the history of humanity, for even among the Hebrew people, usually cited as the classical type of theocracy, before the appointment of kings the law was dictated by a human legislator, whom God used to guide the chosen people. During this period, rather than speaking of theocracy, it would be more proper to speak of hierocracy, on account of the predominance acquired by the priestly caste, to which the prophets were added, who spoke in the name of God.
After the anointing of the first king, performed by the prophet Samuel upon Saul, the regime became monarchical, though the king governed in the name of God and as executor of His commands. Nor does this second phase present, therefore, the character of a true theocracy. It is true that on the occasion of the people’s demand to have a king, so as to be governed like the other nations, God lamented that Israel had thereby rejected Him as their true king (1 Sam. 8:4 ff.). Nonetheless, this and other expressions frequently encountered in the Bible must be understood in relation to the general Jewish conception of God’s supreme power over all things and to the particular covenant of the chosen people with the deity, by virtue of which they remained subject to special divine guidance. It is, therefore, a matter of an extraordinary transcendent relationship, which, although it had reflections in political life, cannot be defined as theocracy.
Theocracy, instead, in the political sphere is linked to particular primitive conceptions, which over time evolve toward the definition of the temporal sovereign. Such conceptions, indulging in naïve anthropomorphism, depict the deity in human guise, imagining a close relationship and kinship between it and the tribe, so as to arrive at a certain identification of the gods with the social group. In this way, the gods of the tribe—later the national gods—became the absolute lords of the people. From this conception to the more concrete one of the identification of the sovereign with the deity, as the son of God and His manifestation, the transition was rather easy, and it was accomplished in the East, where the apotheosis of the living man as the object of the people’s cult took place. Political motives of easier dominion induced sovereigns to reinforce beliefs in their divine origin and to establish a cult. From the East, with which it came into contact because of its fortunate expeditions, Alexander, together with religious syncretism, introduced the cult of the emperor, hitherto unknown to Greece, whence it was then copied by the Romans, who adopted the title of *divus*, as Augustus did not without resistance from the Senate, and surrounded imperial majesty with its own cult. In the same East, the same conception has survived in the emperor of Japan, considered the son of God, and in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama is supreme head and object of cult (v. LAMASISM).
From this very brief outline, it may be deduced that the theocratic conception, with the definition of the sovereign, is associated with Eastern despotism and imperial absolutism, as a political means for more oppressive domination over peoples. Even here, however, it is not a matter of true theocracy, but of a form of absolutist regime supported by religious beliefs. Christianity, with its pure concept of the deity and its hostility toward idolatry, had to enter immediately into conflict with such imperial pretensions, in which it encountered one of the greatest obstacles, while on the other hand, basing itself upon a new idea of man and his dignity and upon the separation of religious power from temporal power, announced by Christ, it worked to undermine from its foundations the theocratic absolutism whose decline is one of its achievements.
It is therefore incomprehensible how the theory of the divine origin of power, sustained by St. Paul and thereafter by the entire tradition of Christian thought, could be given the appellation of theocratic. This denomination, which has long been common in the history of political doctrines, derives from a manifest error of historical and doctrinal evaluation. As is more fully expounded in the article on authority (v.), the principle of the divine origin of power must not be interpreted as though God directly invested the sovereign with a special intervention, but in the sense that authority, being a necessary requisite of the social organism, is willed by nature and therefore by its author, God, from whom it derives as from its ultimate source. Just as authority arises in concreto from a human process of association, so too the investiture of the subject who is to exercise it occurs through a purely human process. There is no doubt that from a less rightly understood principle there have been deduced hierocratic conclusions, with the asserted universal dominion of the Pope, particularly in the Middle Ages and at the time of the controversies raised by Marsilius of Padua (v.), who subjected religious power to political power. Nonetheless, the golden thread of doctrine remained steadfast in its correct conceptual positions, which already appear clearly delineated in Gratian and were then systematized by Bellarmine. Christian thought is, therefore, far from being theocratic, even if one does not wish to mean by that appellation any theory that refers to the existence of a personal God, of Whom it affirms universal dominion; but in that case the distinction does not run between theocratic and democratic doctrines, as Duguit thinks, but between believing and atheistic doctrines, which is a very different matter.
Royal absolutism sought to exploit to its advantage the principle of the divine origin of power, imagining a sort of celestial investiture of the sovereign. It was a deviation fomented by flatterers, against which the best Catholic thinkers of the time rose up; witness the controversy against James I of England, in which Suárez and Bellarmine were numbered among the monarchomachs (v.), and yet it remained not only far from the apotheosis of the sovereign on the Roman Eastern model, but even when Louis XIV identified the State with himself, he did not arrogate to himself unlimited and divine power, recognizing the subordination of the king to God and to His law at least in the forum of conscience. Improperly, therefore, the term theocracy is once again applied to it and to the conceptions on which it was founded. Still less can De Maistre (v.) and Bossuet (v.) be accused of theocratism.
Toward an unconfessed form of theocracy, on the other hand, have tended the most recent conceptions of the State, to which it has not been doubted that absolute power, proper only to the Divinity, could be attributed, arriving thus at configuring it as the presence of God in the world. To this new apotheosis of the human, born from the thought that defines the Christian conception as theocratic, have contributed, by different but convergent paths, materialist positivism, which sought the emergence of God in the State, and idealist immanentism, which made it the supreme culmination of the necessary evolution of the universal spirit, about which it suffices to recall Hegel. To this divinization of the social human are owed the so-called political mysticisms, flourished in the most recent period of history, the creation of the myths of class, of blood, of the nation, of the empire, to be accepted with blind faith, and the words of the divine by which they have been surrounded.