Steiner's teaching that modern state power, its civil service, its law, and its military, is secularised church hierarchy: theocracy with the theology stripped out.
The Theocratic Origin of the State in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of where modern political and legal life came from: not from a social contract, but from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element of earlier civilisations, secularised step by step until its origin was forgotten. Steiner set it out in the tenth lecture of the training course for Upper Silesian speakers, Stuttgart, 17 February 1921, published as How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order? (GA 338). The bearer of the pattern is the human community itself, working through its administrations. Rulership “by the grace of God” is the residue of appointment by spiritual authorities; the civil service is the church hierarchy in secular dress; the military follows the state organisation as a shadow follows a lit object; court robes and doctoral formalities are the discarded clothing of the old theocracy. Steiner's application: name the inherited form, then build new ones out of a free spiritual life.
The Theocratic Origin of the State names a historical claim, not a metaphor. Steiner told his Upper Silesian speakers that the political-legal sphere everywhere grew out of the theocratic-ecclesiastical sphere, and that Europe kept the forms after losing the content. Read this way, the modern civil service, the courtroom, and the standing army are readable as liturgical structures that changed vocabulary.
In Steiner's Own Words
But in fact the political-legal element has gradually emerged everywhere from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element. It is just that it is no longer noticed so clearly in other places. For example, there is a secret connection between the entire system of civil servants, at the top of which one can imagine the absolute ruler “by the grace of God”, which latter reveals the origin from the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, because only the one who was appointed by spiritual authorities was “by the grace of God”. The entire body of civil servants is simply the ecclesiastical hierarchy that has become secularized. But the other side, which basically also developed out of the theocratic-ecclesiastical element, is the military. This is perceived as paradoxical by people today. But the military is only that which, like the shadow of an illuminated object, follows the whole organization of the state.
What it Means Today
One year after Steiner spoke in Stuttgart, a German jurist published the same observation in a form the universities could not ignore. Carl Schmitt opened the third chapter of Politische Theologie (Duncker and Humblot, 1922) with the claim that all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts: the omnipotent lawgiver stands where the omnipotent God stood, and the state of exception in jurisprudence answers to the miracle in theology. Schmitt was tracing the same descent Steiner traced, from a different chair and toward a different conclusion. The line he opened became a working method in twentieth-century scholarship: Ernst Kantorowicz's The King's Two Bodies (Princeton University Press, 1957) followed royal insignia, coronation rites, and the doctrine of the undying body politic back into medieval liturgy and canon law, which is Steiner's remark about robes and doctoral formalities carried out as archival research.
Thalira synthesis: Schmitt treated the secularised theology as the permanent grammar of sovereignty, something a state can never step out of, while Steiner treated it as clothing already taken off, a form outliving the wisdom that once justified it. That difference decides what a reader does next. On Schmitt's reading, you learn to see the theology inside the law. On Steiner's, you notice the empty vestment and ask what a free spiritual life would put in its place, which is the question the threefold social organism was built to answer.
Where to Read More
- How Can We Work for the Impulse of the Threefold Social Order?, GA 338
- Find threefold social order titles at SteinerBooks
- The Chaldean Oracles: Ancient Theurgy and the Fire of the Gods
- Theseus: The Athenian Hero, the Labyrinth, and the Civilising of Chaos
- The Divine Aura: Unlocking the Science of the Halo