THEOCRACY. — According to its etymology (from θεός and χρῆσθαι), it signifies a form of government in which supreme political dominion belongs to God and is directly exercised by him.
The term was coined by Josephus, who intended by it to distinguish the political regime of the Jewish people from the other forms already theorized by Aristotle, monarchy and democracy. It should nevertheless be noted that a direct government by God, as the etymological meaning would suggest, has never occurred in the history of humanity, since even among the Jewish people, usually cited as the classical type of t., before the appointment of the kings the law was dictated by a human legislator, whom God would use to guide the chosen people. During this period, rather than t., it would be more proper to speak of hierocracy, because of the predominance acquired by the priestly caste, to which were added the prophets, who spoke in the name of God.
After the anointing of the first king, performed by the prophet Samuel in the person of Saul, the regime became monarchical, except that the king ruled in the name of God and as executor of his commands. This second phase, therefore, does not display the character of a true t. It is true that, when the people asked to have a king in order to be governed like the others, God complained that Israel had by this act rejected its true king (I Sam. 8, 4 ff.). Nevertheless, this and other expressions frequently encountered in the Bible are to be related to the general Jewish conception of God's supreme power over all things and to the particular bond between the chosen people and the divinity, in the fulfillment of its historical function, by virtue of which it remained subject to special divine guidance. It is therefore a singular transcendent relationship which, although it had repercussions in political life, cannot be defined as t.
On the political plane, however, t. is linked to particular primitive conceptions which, with time, evolved toward the deification of the temporal sovereign. Such conceptions, indulging in a naïve anthropomorphism, represented the divinity under human forms, 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, and later the national god, became the absolute lords of the people. From this conception to the more concrete identification of the sovereign with the divinity, as the son of God and his manifestation, the transition was quite easy, and it was accomplished in the East, where the apotheosis of the living man, the object of worship by the people, took place. Political motives, making domination easier, induced rulers to reinforce beliefs in their divine origin and to establish a cult. From the East, with which he came into contact as a result of his successful expeditions, Alexander, together with religious syncretism, adopted the cult of the emperor, until then unknown in Greece; the Romans later copied it, taking the title divus, as Augustus did, not without resistance from the Senate, and surrounding imperial majesty with a cult of its own. In the same East, the same conception has survived in the emperor of Japan, regarded as the son of God, and in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama is supreme head and an object of worship (v. LAMAIEMO).
From this very brief survey it may be deduced that the theocratic conception, with the deification of the sovereign, is associated with Eastern despotism and imperial absolutism as a political means of exercising a more oppressive domination over peoples. Here too, however, there is no question of a true t., but of a form of absolutist government supported by religious beliefs. Christianity, with its pure conception of divinity and its hostility toward idolatry, had immediately to enter into conflict with such imperial claims, in which it encountered one of its greatest obstacles; while, on the other hand, by relying on a new idea of man and his dignity and on the separation of religious from temporal power, proclaimed by Christ, it worked to undermine absolutist theocracy at its foundations, the decline of which is one of its achievements.
It is therefore incomprehensible how the theory of the divine origin of power, upheld from St. Paul onward by the entire tradition of Christian thought, could have been given the appellation of theocratic. This designation, long since become customary in the history of political doctrines, derives from an evident error of historical and doctrinal evaluation. As is explained authority (v.), the principle of the divine origin of power must not be interpreted as though God directly invested the sovereign through a particular intervention of his own, 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 concretely through a human process of association, so too the investiture of the person who is to exercise it takes place through a purely human process. There is no doubt that hierocratic conclusions were deduced from the principle when it was less correctly understood, with the asserted universal dominion of the Pope, particularly in the Middle Ages and at the time of the Padova (v.), who subjected religious power to political power. Nevertheless, the golden thread of the doctrine remained firm in its correct conceptual positions, which already appear clearly delineated in Gratian and were later systematized by Bellarmine. Christian thought is therefore far from being theocratic, unless by this appellation one wishes to signify any theory that refers to the existence of a personal God and affirms his universal dominion; but in that case the distinction is not between theocratic and democratic doctrines, as Duguit thinks, but between believing and atheistic doctrines, which is something entirely different.
Royal absolutism sought to exploit the principle of the divine origin of power to its own advantage, imagining a quasi-celestial investiture of the sovereign. This was a deviation fostered by the sulici, against which the best Catholic thinkers of the time rose up; one may recall the controversy against James I of England, as a result of which Suárez and monarchomachs (v.). Nevertheless, it remained not only far removed from the apotheosis of the sovereign on the Eastern and Roman model, but even when Louis XIV identified the State with himself, he did not claim unlimited and divine power, recognizing the subordination of the king to God and to his law, at least in the forum of conscience. The term t. is therefore improperly employed once again in his regard and for the conceptions on which his position was founded. Even less can De Maistre (v.) history (v.) be branded as theocratic.
Toward an unacknowledged form of theocracy, by contrast, have the more recent conceptions of the State been oriented; they have not hesitated to attribute to it the absoluteness of power proper only to divinity, going so far as to portray it as the presence of God in the world. This new apotheosis of the human, born of the notion that defines the Christian conception as theocratic, has been fostered, by different yet convergent paths, by materialist positivism, which sought a substitute for God in the State, and by idealist immanentism, which made it the supreme culmination of the necessary evolution of the universal spirit, in connection with which it is enough to recall Hegel. To this divinization of the social human are owed the so-called political mystiques, which flourished in the final period of history, the creation of the myths of class, blood, nation, and empire, to be accepted with blind faith, and the parodies of the divine by which they have been surrounded.