You can quote a handful of philosophers and priests, but the standard practice was for the church to support the legitimacy rulers and the rulers to support the legitimacy of the church. And I'll bet these quotes refer to overthrowing "tyrants" of the wrong Christian denomination. Either way, these men are likely noteworthy because they went against that norm. We saw the Catholic Church supporting and covering for Germany in WWII. Were many priests against this? Sure, but they weren't the ones in control.
The 'handful' in question happens to consist of the leading Catholic and Protestant luminaries of the period.
I can go one further though than that (see below, with reference to Pope St. Gregory VII, the most important pontiff of the entirety of the medieval period, the father of the Gregorian Reform that effectively shaped the modern Catholic Church, including enforcing the celibacy of the priesthood).
St. Thomas Aquinas practically defines Catholic (scholastic) theology to this day - it is literally termed
Thomism after him. St. Robert Bellarmine was not just a cardinal and Jesuit but is a
Doctor of the Catholic Church. Calvin is the founder of every Presbyterian church denomination, and remains influential amongst Protestants more generally, including Evangelicals.
These are hardly 'no-bodies' from the medieval and early modern eras. Their writings were incredibly influential then and now, on everything from theology to political theory. I would be happy to cite many more.
Secondly, in answer to your assumption:
no, the quotes do not refer to overthrowing 'tyrants' because they were of a different religious persuasion. Here is how St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1244) defined the criteria in his
De Regno:
Thomas Aquinas: on law, tyranny and resistance (scielo.org.za)
Political rule is sometimes just and sometimes unjust. On the one hand, if a community is administered by the ruler for the common good, such government will be just and fitting to free men. If, on the other hand, the community is directed in the particular interest of the ruler and not for the common good, it is a perversion of government and is no longer just (De Regimine Principum, caput i).
When government is unjustly exercised by one man who seeks personal profit from his position instead of the good of the community subject to him, such a ruler is called a tyrant (De Regimine Principum, caput i). The tyrant forcibly oppresses the people instead of ruling justly.
The ruler is bound by reason and justice and his power arises from the need of keeping them (reason and justice) in agreement with natural law. The ruler's power is implied by his guardianship of the common good. The dominion of one man over another must not take away the free moral agency of the subject. No man is bound to obedience in all respects and even the soul of a slave is free. Thomas Aquinas states that the Christian notion of obedience was developed in turn into a doctrine of passive obedience and into a duty of resistance. It is for this reason that the resistance of tyranny is not only a right but a duty.
Thirdly, you intimated in your original post that the 'divine right of kings' was preached and normative in the middle ages. It
wasn't.
That idea was only explicitly articulated as a theo-political doctrine from the 17th century onwards (an early advocate being King James VI of England) and into the so-called 'Age of Absolutism'.
In my opinion, you are applying the concept of divine right absolutism anachronistically to the medieval period, when in fact the idea did not exist at that time owing to feudal society, which resulted in generally weak monarchies with dissipated sources of authority operating alongside independent republics, city-states and communes, in addition to church and monastic institutions and guilds.
Divine Right absolutism became a prominent political theory only in early modernity, namely the 16th - 19th centuries. See:
Divine Right Of Kings | Encyclopedia.com
A theory that flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries to explain and justify the source of political authority in the state. The divine right theory did not treat primarily of the nature or character of political authority.
The idea flourished in 17th-century England, where it was used by the Tory party in reaction against the execution of Charles I and as a defense of the king after the Restoration. On the Continent, it was used to defend the rapidly developing national monarchies.
The theory of divine right was vigorously opposed by the theologians Bellarmine and Suarez, who claimed that, though God was the ultimate source, the people were the proximate source of political authority. This idea of the people as the source of authority was supported by the vast majority of the Catholic theologians of the 17th century.
Read the following from Oxford University's dictionary of the Social Sciences:
Absolutism - Oxford Reference
Absolutism
In practice, absolutism is associated with the consolidation of the state in early-modern Europe. The “Age of Absolutism” lasted from 1648 to 1789, and was personified by Louis XIV of France and Frederick II of Prussia, although czarist Russia retained many absolutist features until its collapse in 1917.
Medieval governments were entirely different, as the scholar Professor Jan Zielonka of Oxford University explains here:
In particular, medieval empires characteristically had limited and decentralized governments, performing only a few basic governmental functions. They were ridden by internal conflicts between a king or emperor and the lower aristocracy, whether feudal or bureaucratic, while the persistent divergence of local cultures, religions and traditions implied a highly divided political loyalty
The picture is, thus, far more complex than simply "
church and authoritarian governments backed each other up".
If we go back to the first century of the second millennium, Emperor Henry IV had written to Pope Gregory VII at the beginning of the investiture contest: "
You have dared to touch me, who although unworthy have been singled out by unction to rule, and whom, according to the traditions of the Holy Fathers, God alone can judge."
Pope St. Gregory VII's responded with a full-frontal ideological attack upon the assumed harmony between throne/altar in his (justly infamous) letter to Hermann of Metz:
"Is not [this] a sovereignty invented by men of this world, who were ignorant of God...? The Son of God [Jesus] we believe to be God and man. He despised a secular kingdom, which makes the sons of this world swell with pride and offered himself up as a sacrifice upon the cross.
Who does not know that kings and rulers derive their origin from men who raised themselves over their equals - fellow men - by pride, plunder, treachery, murder (in short, by every kind of crime) urged on, in fact, by the devil, the prince of the world, with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption?...
Such men desire to rule, not guided by love of God, but to display their intolerable pride and to satisfy the lusts of their mind. Of these St. Augustine says in the first book of his Christian dictrine: "He who tries to rule over men - who are by nature equal to him - acts with intolerable pride"...
When a man disdains to be the equal of his fellow men, he becomes like an apostate angel"
(To Hermann of Metz, in defense of the Papal Polict toward Henry IV, Book VIII, 21 (March 15, 1081)
Does that sound like a medieval papal endorsement of "
divine right of kings"? Gregory declared kingship - not just Henry's but
in general - to be a satanic institution in origin, created by power-hungry men: "
at the devil's instigation in the beginning of the world, to dominate men who were their equals" by nature.
As the legal historian Harold Berman wrote: "
The first of the great revolutions of Western history was the revolution against domination of the clergy by emperors, kings, and lords and for the establishment of the Church of Rome as an independent, corporate, political, and legal entity, under the papacy".
This, the Papal Revolution (1075-1122) or Investiture Contest between the medieval Papacy and Holy Roman Emperor, was the signal event that birthed the medieval social-political order - and it was a heightened state of intense antagonism between universal church and state.
And by the 17th century, as noted above by that encyclopaedia reference, the Catholic theologians were
still preaching the "
idea of the people as the source of authority" against the then growing divine right absolutism.
