Theocracy

THEOCRACY. - According to its etymology (from θεός and χρῆσθαι), it signifies a form of regime in which the supreme political dominion belongs to God and is directly exercised by Him.

The term was coined by Josephus, who with it wished to distinguish the political regime of the Jewish people from the other forms already theorized by Aristotle, monarchy and democracy. It must be noted, however, that a direct regime of God, such as the etymological meaning would suggest, has never come about in the history of humanity, since even among the Jewish people, usually cited as the classic type of theocracy, before the appointment of kings, the law was dictated by a human legislator, whom God would use to guide the chosen people. In this period, rather than of theocracy, it would be more proper to speak of hierocracy, on account of the pre-eminence 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 governed in the name of God and as the executor of His commands. Not even this second phase presents, therefore, the character of a true theocracy. It is true that on the occasion of the people's request to have a king, in order to be governed like the others, God lamented that Israel had by this act rejected its true king (I Sam. 8:4 ff.). Nevertheless this and other expressions that are 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 of the chosen people with the divinity, for the carrying out of its historical function, by virtue of which it remained subject to a special divine guidance. It is a question, therefore, of an extraordinary transcendent relationship, which, although it had repercussions in political life, cannot be defined as a theocracy.

This, on the other hand, on the political plane is linked to particular primitive conceptions, which in time evolve toward the deification of the temporal sovereign. Such conceptions, indulging in a naive anthropomorphism, depicted the divinity under human semblance, imagining a close relationship and kinship between it and the tribe, in such a way as to arrive at a certain identification of the gods with the social group. In this manner the gods of the tribe and later the national god became the absolute lords of the people. From this conception to the more concrete one of the identification of the sovereign with the divinity, as son of God and His manifestation, the passage was rather easy, and it was accomplished in the East, where the apotheosis of the living man as an object of worship by the people was brought about. Political motives of easier dominion induced sovereigns to strengthen beliefs in their divine origin and to establish a cult. From the East, with which he came into contact because of his fortunate expeditions, Alexander borrowed, together with religious syncretism, the cult of the emperor, until that time unknown to Greece, whence the Romans then copied it, adopting the appellation of divus, as Augustus did not without resistance on the part of the Senate, and surrounding the imperial majesty with a cult of its own. In the same East the very same conception has survived in the emperor of Japan, held to be the son of God, and in Tibet, where the Dalai Lama is supreme head and object of worship (v. LAMAIEMO).

From this very rapid sketch it is deduced that the theocratic conception, with the deification of the sovereign, is associated with Oriental despotism and with imperial absolutism, as a political means for a more oppressive dominion over peoples. Yet even here it is not a question of a true theocracy, but of a form of absolutist regime, supported by religious beliefs. Christianity, with its pure concept of the divinity and its hostility toward idolatry, had to enter at once into struggle against such imperial pretensions, in which it encountered one of the greatest obstacles, while on the other hand, relying on a new idea of man and of his dignity and on the separation of religious power from temporal power, announced by Christ, it worked to undermine from its foundations theocratic absolutism, whose decline is one of its conquests.

It is not understood, therefore, how the theory of the divine origin of power, upheld by St. Paul and thereafter by the whole tradition of Christian thought, could have been given the appellation of theocratic. Such a designation, long since become of common use in the history of political doctrines, derives from a manifest error of historical and doctrinal evaluation. As is more fully set forth under the entry authority (v.), the principle of the divine origin of power must not be interpreted as if God directly invested the sovereign with a particular intervention of His, 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 from a human process of association, so too the investiture of the subject who is to exercise it comes about through a purely human process. There is no doubt that from the principle less correctly understood 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 stirred up by Marsilius of Padua (v.), who subjected religious power to political power. Nevertheless the golden thread of the doctrine remained firm on its correct conceptual positions, which appear already clearly delineated in Gratian and were later systematized by Bellarmine. Christian thought is, therefore, far from being theocratic, unless by such an appellation one wishes to signify any theory that refers to the existence of a personal God, of whom it affirms the 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 thing.

Royal absolutism sought to exploit to its own advantage the principle of the divine origin of power, imagining a quasi-celestial investiture of the sovereign. It was a deviation fomented by the court divines, against which the best Catholic thinkers of the time were urged, one may recall the polemic against James I of England, for 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 Oriental and Roman model, but even when Louis XIV identified the State with himself, he did not arrogate to himself an 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, once again the term theocracy is used with regard to it and to the conceptions on which it was founded. Still less can the providentialist conception of De Maistre (v.) and the philosophy of history of Bossuet (v.) be accused of theocratism.

Toward an unacknowledged form of theocracy, on the other hand, the most recent conceptions of the State have been oriented, since it has not been doubted that the absoluteness of power, proper only to the divinity, should be attributed to it, going so far as to configure it as the presence of God in the world. To this new apotheosis of the human, born of the thought that defines the Christian conception as theocratic, there have contributed, by different but convergent paths, materialist positivism, which has sought a surrogate for God in the State, and idealist immanentism, which has made of it the supreme culmination of the necessary evolution of the universal spirit, in regard to which it suffices to recall Hegel. To this divinization of the social human are owed the so-called political mystiques, which flourished in the last 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 with which they have been surrounded.

Antonio Messineo