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Divine right of kings, divine right, or God's mandation, is a political and religious doctrine of political legitimacy of a monarchy in Western Christianity up until the Enlightenment. It is also known as the divine-right theory of kingship .
The Divine right of kings, the doctrine that a monarch derives his or her power directly from God "The Divine Right of Kings" (poem), an 1845 poem attributed to Edgar Allan Poe; Divine Right, a 1979 fantasy wargame; Divine Right: The Adventures of Max Faraday, a comic book series, 1997–1999; Divine Right, a 1989 anthology in the Merovingen ...
Divine kingship is related to the concept of theocracy, although a sacred king need not necessarily rule through his religious authority; rather, the temporal position itself has a religious significance behind it. The monarch may be divine, [1] become divine, [2] or represent divinity to a greater or lesser extent. [3]
The book defends the divine right of kings on the basis that all modern states' authority derived from the Biblical patriarchs (whom Filmer saw as Adam's heirs), history and logic. Concurrently, he criticized rival theories claiming the basis of a state should be the consent of the governed or social contract.
Sir Robert Filmer (c. 1588 – 26 May 1653) was an English political theorist who defended the divine right of kings.His best known work, Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680, was the target of numerous Whig attempts at rebuttal, including Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government, James Tyrrell's Patriarcha Non Monarcha and John Locke's Two Treatises of Government.
His Discourses Concerning Government (the text for which Sidney lost his life) was written during the Exclusion Crisis, as a response to Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, a defence of divine right monarchy, first published in 1680. The divine right of kings is a political system in which all powers of government are vested solely in the king and ...
Originally, it had a literal meaning: the divine right of kings was invoked—notably by Christian monarchs—as legitimation (the only one above every sublunary power) for the absolutist authority the monarch wielded, that is, the endorsement of God for the monarch's reign.
Bossuet was a strong advocate of political absolutism and the divine right of kings. Later in his life, he was also involved in the controversies over Gallicanism and Quietism, and supported the king's revocation of the Edict of Nantes, which abolished the rights of the Huguenot Protestant minority. Bossuet died in 1704 at the age of 76.