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This article explores the emergence of a central feature of modern constitutionalism during a period of intense political conflict between the members of the Society of Jesus and the defenders of absolute monarchical authority in England and France. The crucial idea to emerge from this debate was that although political authority in general is ordained by God, it is most immediately shaped by human hands and is subject to the judgment of the entire body of citizens. Against Jesuit attempts to secularize the idea of the state, absolutists sought to sacralize civil authority in an attempt to shore up state sovereignty against the threats of popular resistance and ecclesiastical encroachment. They thus turned to the notion of 'divine right' as a strategy for bringing all secular and ecclesiastical authority under the control of a single sovereign. The article argues that these Jesuit thinkers re-shaped the natural law theories of Aquinas, Cajetan and Vitoria in order to arrive at the idea of the secular constitutional state: a civil authority constituted by the entire commonwealth and placed by the commonwealth under legal limits. Particular attention is given to four Jesuit thinkers: Luis Molina, Robert Bellarmine, Francisco Suárez and Juan de Mariana.
