Rights derived from above: John of Salisbury

In the period from John of Salisbury to Richard Hooker and Francisco Suárez the concept of a right and the theory of natural rights emerged from a religious view of society with which the subsequent politics of rights has more or less willingly dispensed. At the outset sacral kingship and, more convincingly, the authority of the Church, especially the papacy, claimed divine warrant and support. At the same time those who wished to resist their superiors could usually allege violation of mutual obligation, or failure to conform to the requirements of rulership, and Christian impulses to condemn, flee, or find a radical alternative to ordinary worldly life were always active.

John of Salisbury's Policraticus, although a highly personal work, shows important aspects of the original view. John regards rights (iura) as the vital means which an ideal court (an Areopagus) would give each class or profession in a community as required to perform its proper functions (Policr. I.3) – functions in an organic social whole, which has as its soul the priesthood and whose princely head of government is an earthly image of the divine majesty. John draws his organic model for society from classical sources but adapts it to medieval Christian needs by making the sacerdotal soul a distinct class, of which the prince is in some sense a minister. In the same way, he takes over the Roman jurists' impersonal definition of fairness or equity as a rational equilibration of disparate things with respect to the same laws (iura), bestowing on each what is his own, but identifies such aequitas with the justice of God, to which rulers are emphatically subordinate.