Francisco Suárez

Suárez, Francisco (1548–1617)

Francisco Suárez was the main channel through which medieval philosophy flowed into the modern world. He was educated first in law and, after his entry into the Jesuits, in philosophy and theology. He wrote on all three subjects. His philosophical writing was principally in the areas of metaphysics, psychology and philosophy of law, but in both his philosophical and theological works he treated many related epistemological, cosmological and ethical issues. While his basic outlook is that of a very independent Thomist, his metaphysics follows along a line earlier drawn by Avicenna (980–1037) and Duns Scotus (1266–1308) to treat as its subject ‘being in so far as it is real being’. By the addition of the word ‘real’ to Aristotle’s formula, Suárez emphasized Aristotle’s division of being into categorial being and ‘being as true’, as well as Aristotle’s exclusion of the latter from the object of metaphysics. Divided into a general part dealing with the concept of being as such, its properties and causes, and a second part which considers particular beings (God and creatures) in addition to the categories of being, Suárez’s metaphysics ends with a notable treatment of mind-dependent beings, or ‘beings of reason’. These last encompass negations, privations and relations of reason, but Suárez’s treatment centres on those negations which are ‘impossible’ or self-contradictory. Inasmuch as such beings of reason cannot exist outside the mind, they are excluded from the object of metaphysics and relegated to the status of ‘being as true’. In philosophy of law he was a proponent of natural law and of a theory of government in which power comes from God through the people. He was important for the early development of modern international law and the doctrine of just war. While his brand of Thomism was opposed in his own time and after by some scholastics, especially Dominicans, he had great authority among his fellow Jesuits, as well as other Catholic and Protestant authors. Outside scholasticism, he has influenced a variety of modern thinkers.

1 Life and works

Francisco Suárez was born at Granada in Spain. After preparatory studies, in 1561 he enrolled at the University of Salamanca, where he studied law until on 16 June 1564 he entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Three months later he began the study of philosophy. In October 1566, still at Salamanca, he went on to theological studies. Chief among his mentors in these was the Dominican, Juan Mancio (1497–1576), himself a successor of Francisco de Vitoria (c.1486–1546) in Salamanca’s principal chair of theology.

Following his theological studies, Suárez began to teach philosophy in 1570, initially at Salamanca and then at Segovia. Ordained a priest in 1572, he continued to lecture in philosophy until, in 1574, at the Jesuit College, Valladolid, he began his main life’s work as a theology teacher. Later he taught theology at Avila (1575), Segovia (1575), Valladolid again (1576), Rome (1580), Alcalá (1585) and Salamanca (1593). In 1597, he assumed the principal chair of theology at the University of Coimbra, in which he remained until his retirement in 1615.

Besides teaching, Suárez took part in theological and political disputes. The most famous of these was the debate De auxiliis (On the Helps [for Salvation]), between sixteenth-century Jesuits and Dominicans. The controversy concerned God’s foreknowledge and causality, grace and human freedom. In this debate Suárez, along with fellow Jesuits, Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) and Luis de Molina (1535–1600), allowed for divine prerogatives but championed human free will. On the core question of conditional future contingents (futuribilia), Suárez adopts Molina’s doctrine of a ‘middle knowledge’ that falls between God’s knowledge of merely possible things and God’s knowledge of things other than himself that are, were, or will be actual. However, he modifies Molina’s view that God knows all things other than himself by a ‘super-comprehension’ of them in his own essence, substituting for this a view that God knows these things immediately in themselves as they exist in a purely intentional or objective way. More political was a quarrel between the republic of Venice and the papacy about the limits of papal jurisdiction. In defence of the papal position, Suárez in 1607 composed a treatise, De immunitate ecclesiastica a Venetis violata (On the Ecclesiastical Immunity Violated by the Venetians). Commending his effort, Pope Paul V stated that the work revealed its author to be ‘an eminent and pious theologian’. From this came the honorific title with which Suárez passed into history – Doctor eximius ac pius (Eminent and Pious Teacher).

The majority of Suárez’s writings are theological, often corresponding to specific parts of the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (§6), but there is also the extremely influential De legibus seu de Deo legislatore (On Laws or on God the Legislator), the fruit of Suárez’s teaching between 1601 and 1603, published at Coimbra in 1612. Outside the Thomistic framework are the work on ecclesiastical immunity mentioned above and, at Coimbra in 1613, the Defensio fidei catholicae adversus anglicanae sectae errores, cum responsione ad apologiam pro juramento fidelitatis et praefationem monitoriam serenissimi Jacobi Angliae Regis (Defence of the Catholic Faith against the Errors of the Anglican Sect, with a Reply to the ‘Apology’ for the ‘Oath of Fidelity’ and the ‘Warning Preface’ of James, the Most Serene King of England). Upon its publication, this work, which details Suárez’s political philosophy, was condemned by James I and publicly burned in London, because in it Suárez had opposed the absolute right of kings and defended the indirect power of the papacy over temporal rulers, as well as the right of the citizens to resist a tyrannical monarch. Suárez even defended tyrannicide in the case of a monarch deposed for heresy by the pope.

2 Metaphysics

Also outside the Thomistic framework are the two volumes of Suárez’s most important work, the Disputationes metaphysicae (Metaphysical Disputations), which first appeared at Salamanca in 1597. A résumé of his own and previous thought on myriad questions, it is arranged in the form of fifty-four ‘Disputations’ dealing systematically with metaphysics. In this format, Suárez’s volumes mark a radical departure from previous metaphysical treatises, which usually had been either short works, such as Aquinas’ De ente et essentia (On Being and Essence), or commentaries on the text of Aristotle.

The Disputationes metaphysicae is a feat of learning. After stating each problem, Suárez has searched the history of philosophy and theology for solutions offered to it. Every conceivable Greek, Arabic, patristic and especially scholastic writer seems to have been cited at least once. As many as twenty-two opinions have been cited in connection with a single question. The historian J. Iturrioz (see Martín, Ceñal, Hellin et al. 1948) has compiled a list of 7,709 of these citations, which refer to 245 different authors. Of these, Aristotle was mentioned most often (a total of 1,735 times), and Aquinas the next most (cited 1,008 times). No mere compiler of opinions, Suárez was an independent thinker who, as he reported positions and gave due regard even to those he opposed, was intent on presenting his own metaphysics.

The disputations begin with Suárez telling us that the object of metaphysics is ‘being in so far as it is real being’ (Disputationes metaphysicae 1). To explain this, he employs two distinctions, already familiar among scholastic authors. The first of these is between the ‘formal concept’ as an act of the mind, and the ‘objective concept’ as what that act immediately intends as its object. This latter may be some individual thing or some common or universal character (ratio). Again, it may be something actual, possible or merely objective. The second distinction falls between ‘being (ens) taken as a participle’ (which refers to an actual existent), rather than ‘being taken as a noun’ (which refers to whatever is not a mere fiction but is true in itself and apt really to exist). The object of metaphysics is then more exactly identified with the ‘common objective concept of being as a noun’ (Disputationes 2). This object, which reflects Avicenna’s interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, prescinds from existence and, precisely as common, transcends all genera, species and differences to encompass everything real, from extrinsic denominations (such as ‘being right’, ‘being left’, ‘being known’ or ‘being willed’), through mere possibles (which at their core reduce to non-contradiction), to actual created substances and accidents, to the subsistent, purely actual and necessary reality of God. Over the range of such beings, the common concept of being is analogous with ‘an analogy of intrinsic attribution’. In this analogy, a unified concept is shared in an ordered way by different beings (God and creatures, substance and accidents) inasmuch as the being of what is posterior depends upon the being of what is prior (see Language, Renaissance philosophy of §4).

After a general treatment (Disputationes 3) of the transcendental properties of every being as it is a being – namely, unity, truth and goodness – questions are raised under unity about individuation, universal natures, and various kinds of distinction (Disputationes 5–7). Rejecting the Aristotelian and Thomistic account of individuation in terms of ‘quantified matter’, as well as Scotistic ‘thisness’, Suárez comes close to nominalism and says that every thing is individual by its very entity. On universals, he again leans towards nominalism and denies any real common nature independent of individuals, yet he insists that the universalizing activity of the mind has a foundation in the likenesses of things. Restricting distinctions to real, rational and modal, he rejects the formal distinction, which Duns Scotus asserted to be present between ‘formalities’ prior to any operation of the intellect. In following disputations, discussion of truth, which centres on the conformity of formal with objective concepts, is balanced by discussion of falsity (Disputationes 8–9); and discussion of goodness is balanced by that of evil, which in standard scholastic fashion is regarded as a privation of good (Disputationes 10–1). The twelfth disputation generally treats causes, while 13–25 deal specifically with material, formal, efficient and final causes. Concluding this first part is a consideration of causes in comparison with their effects and in relation one to another (Disputationes 26–7).

The second part opens with the main division and principal analogy of being between infinite and finite (Disputationes 28). The existence of God is then causally demonstrated in an expressly metaphysical way which, again reflecting Avicenna, employs the principle, ‘Everything which comes to be, comes to be by another’ (Disputationes 29) and follows the analogous common concept of being from lesser and lower being to a First Being. In the same disputation, Suárez rejects any physical demonstration, like that of Aristotle, adopted by Averroes and Aquinas, which would employ the principle, ‘Everything which is moved is moved by another’, to pass from motion to a First Mover. Suárez goes on to investigate the perfection, simplicity, immensity, immutability, wisdom and omnipotence of God (Disputationes 30). Disputation 31 begins treatment of finite being with a denial of the Thomistic distinction in creatures between essence and existence, which Suárez understands as falling between two ‘things’ (res). Rejecting Scotistic formal or modal distinctions, Suárez says that the only distinction here is one of reason with a foundation in reality. Disputation 32 considers substance and accidents in general, plus the analogy of being between created substances and accidents. Substance is treated in detail through the next four disputations while the different categories of accident are the subject matter of Disputations 37–53. Of particular interest is Disputation 47, where Suárez treats real relations, which divide into transcendental and predicamental. Transcendental relations – such as those between matter and form, accidents and substance, creatures and God – transcend the lines of categories, whereas predicamental relations are restricted to the accidental category of relation. Every such relation (for example, one of likeness) involves a real subject (one person), a real terminus (another person), and a real foundation (brown hair), but Suárez maintains in nominalist fashion that a predicamental relation is ultimately identical with its foundation, as this exists in both the subject and the terminus. The work concludes with a discussion of ‘beings of reason’, which divide into negations (including impossible objects), privations and reason-dependent relations – all of which fall outside real being, the object of metaphysics (Disputationes 54).

3 Philosophical psychology

While Suárez treated topics like abstraction, universal knowledge and personhood also within metaphysics, he regarded philosophical psychology as properly a part of physics (that is, the Aristotelian philosophy of nature). His work De anima (On the Soul), which he was revising at the time of his death and which was again a systematic presentation rather than itself a commentary, returned to the medieval tradition of commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. Divided into six books, it dealt successively with the nature, attributes, faculties, operations and ultimate status of the rational soul, which in the human composite is related to the body as form to matter.

The only substantial form of a human being, the rational soul is principle for a variety of vegetative, sensitive and intellectual activities (De anima I). The distinction among such activities indicates specifically distinct powers (vegetative, sensitive and intellectual) from which they immediately stem, as well as a real distinction between such powers and the soul itself (II c.1–2). Differing from the whole scholastic tradition, Suárez unites the common sense, imagination, memory and estimative sense in one internal sense power (III c.30). At the intellectual level, he distinguishes between the adequate object of the intellect as such (that is, being as being, which embraces all intelligible items), and the object proportionate to the human intellect in its present state (that is, sensible or material things). He also allows for a direct and immediate knowledge of the singular (IV c.1–2). The excellence of its intellectual operations indicates the intrinsic spirituality and the transcendence of the soul over the body (I c.9).

For the immortality of the soul, Suárez offers two main arguments (De anima I c.10). First, inasmuch as the human intellective power is incorporeal and spiritual it is also substantially simple. Therefore, of its nature it is incorruptible and thus immortal. Second, under the justice of God evil persons should be punished and good persons rewarded. However, that often does not happen in this life. Therefore, there must be another life in which it can happen and this can only be if the soul is immortal.

Both in this life and in any afterlife the soul alone without the body would be less than a full human being. To designate it as such, Suárez accepts the bold word of Cajetan (§§3–4): the soul by itself is a ‘semi-person’ (De anima VI c.1). This incomplete character of the soul alone may suggest a philosophical suasion for the resurrection of the body (VI c.9) (see Aristotelianism, Renaissance §§4–5).

4 Philosophy of law and society

For Suárez all law stems from the ‘eternal law’, which is ‘a free decree of the will of God establishing the order to be observed either generally by all parts of the universe in relation to the common good… or especially to be observed by intellectual creatures in their free operations’ (De legibus II c.3). In so emphasizing God’s will, Suárez has distinguished himself from Aquinas who identified the eternal law with divine reason as it governs the created universe.

Immediately derived from the eternal law is the natural law which resides in human minds and enables human beings to discern moral good and evil (see Natural law). Suárez (De legibus II c.7) tells us that natural law first embraces general moral principles like: ‘Good must be done and evil avoided’ and ‘Do not do to anyone else what you would not want done to you’. Next come principles more particular but still evident from their terms, such as: ‘Justice should be observed’, ‘God should be worshipped’, ‘One should live with self-control’, and so on. From these principles come conclusions more or less easily and broadly known, for example, that such things as adultery and theft are wrong. Requiring more reasoning and not easily known to all are conclusions like: fornication is intrinsically evil, usury is unjust, or lying is never justified.

While it may be affected extrinsically because of changed circumstances, no true principle of natural law can be diminished or dispensed from by any human law or power (De legibus II c.14 n.5). Rejecting both the opinion of William of Ockham, that God can dispense from the entire Decalogue and could indeed abrogate the whole natural law, and the opinion of Duns Scotus, that God can dispense from the precepts in the second table of the Decalogue (which regard human beings or other creatures), Suárez maintains that the whole Decalogue is indispensible even by the absolute power of God (c.15 n.16). Thus, even though it is rooted in the divine will, law is not arbitrary either for men or for God.

Close on natural law, the ‘law of nations’ (jus gentium) has the general character of positive law but differs from the civil law of particular states. Unwritten, it has been established not by a single state but by the customs of almost all nations (De legibus II c.19 n.7). It thus originates in human consensus and it can in principle, though not with ease, be changed.

In one sense, the jus gentium is ‘the law of nations among themselves (inter se)’ – a law which different nations are obliged to observe vis-à-vis one another. Such items as the immunity of ambassadors and free commerce, as well as the ‘right of war’ (jus belli), belong to the jus gentium understood in this way. In a second way, it is ‘the law of nations within themselves (intra se).’ This is the law which individual states commonly observe within their own borders. Items such as the division of goods or possessions, private property, buying and selling, and the use of money, belong to the jus gentium taken in this second way. The first way, which is effectively an international law, is most properly called ‘the law of nations’ (De legibus II c.19 n.10).

Like other Catholic thinkers of his day, Suárez did not regard war as intrinsically evil (see War and peace, philosophy of §2). Although it was deplorable and should be avoided wherever possible, at times war was the only option open for the preservation of the republic, which has a right and even an obligation to defend itself (De legibus II c.18 n.5). That any war be ‘just’, proper authority (legitimate, public and supreme) was required to declare it. Again, a just cause of sufficient gravity was needed. Furthermore, right conduct should be the rule at the beginning of the war, in its prosecution and in victory afterwards. As regards authority to declare and wage it, war may be based upon one state’s right to punish or avenge an injury done to it by another. Each state, ‘supreme in its own order’ – that is, the temporal order – with no tribunal beyond, has the authority forcibly to redress injuries against itself (c.19 n.8).

Because civil power as such is not greater in Christian than in pagan princes, Christians can have no more reason than pagans for a just war. Neither can Christians make war against pagans solely because these lack faith. By Suárez’s time, questions raised by the evangelization of the Native Americans were largely settled for Catholic thinkers. From Vitoria on, it was commonly held that they were human beings, masters of their own lives and possessions, and that it was not lawful without just cause to subjugate and despoil them – even in order to Christianize them. This was also Suárez’s position, which he took, however, on an abstract level, almost without mention of the Native Americans. Against a possible application to them of Aristotle’s division of human beings into those fitted by nature to rule and those who were by nature ‘slaves’ (Politics 1.5.1254a18–1255a2), Suárez’s view was simple and direct. It is incredible to say that all the people in any region or province have been born ‘monstrous and in a way that contradicts the natural disposition’ of human beings to be free (De justitia q.6). In fact, all persons, as made in the image of God, are equally capable of dominion over themselves and their possessions (Defence of the Catholic Faith III c.1).

At its origin, the state is natural; but it is also voluntary (see State, the). Free persons, naturally inclined to political association, must still agree to it. Hence, the state itself arises out of a contract, or ‘a consensus’, explicit or tacit, freely entered into by the community (De legibus III c.3). People are not forced by nature to choose any particular form of state and in fact different forms exist, with a natural equality among them all. In practice, the best kind of government is some form of monarchy (c.4). But what form a monarchy takes and how much power any monarch has will depend upon the terms of the initial grant of the people (Defensio fidei catholicae III c.2). Thus, civil authority or power, in any form, is ultimately from nature, and the God of nature, but immediately from the people.

Even though each state is ‘supreme in its own order’, the power and laws of one end where those of another begin. Again, while the state has power to enact laws from which there is no appeal to any other earthly tribunal, the power of any state, even within its own territory, is not absolute. Though ordinarily their gift of power is irrevocable, in principle the people retain authority over their government. Accordingly, as the common good demands, political power, even that of a monarch, may in different circumstances be changed or limited (Defensio fidei catholicae III c.3).

Other restrictions on state power occur inasmuch as it stops short at the private zone of families and individuals. For these are by nature prior to the state. In addition, human beings are not just citizens of this world. And while he admits a legitimate concern by the republic for its members’ morality, Suárez tells us that, even at a natural level, each person aims at a final happiness which transcends the reach of civil law and power (De legibus III c.11).

While temporal power is ultimately from God, immediately its origin is natural and human; in contrast, ecclesiastical power is directly of divine origin, ‘from the special promise and grant of Christ’ (Defensio fidei catholicae III c.6 n.17). Although church and state are each ‘supreme in [their] own order’, the basic relation between the two is hierarchical, comparable to that between the soul and the body (De legibus IV c.9 n.3). The power of the many states of this world is directly and exclusively within the temporal order, aiming at a common temporal good of ‘political happiness’ (I c.13). The power of the one Christian church, pointed towards the eternal salvation of its members, is directly within the spiritual order. Indirectly, however, that church has power over a Christian state even in temporal matters (III c.6). Conversely, civil power, at least in Christian states, is indirectly dependent upon and should be at the service of the higher goal of the church (Defensio fidei catholicae III c.5). Suárez acknowledged in this a certain inequality between Christian and infidel princes, but he counts it a plus for Christian states and sovereigns that their power is raised to a new height in its subordination to the church (c.30) (see Political philosophy, history of §8).

5 Influence

Suárez exercised wide and deep influence on post-Renaissance Catholic scholasticism. Also, largely through the growth and agency of the Jesuit Order, Suarezian metaphysics spread from the Catholic schools of Iberia to various northern European locales. It penetrated the Lutheran universities of Germany where the Disputationes metaphysicae (of which seventeen editions appeared between 1597 and 1636) was pondered especially by those who preferred Melanchthon’s attitude towards philosophy to Luther’s. Indeed, in a number of seventeenth-century Lutheran universities it served as a textbook in philosophy. In much the same way, Suárez had major influence in the Reformed tradition of German and Dutch schools for both metaphysics and law, including international law. To sense Suárez’s importance here for the provenance of modern international law, it is enough to recall that, for the famous Dutch jurisprudent, Hugo Grotius, the Jesuit doctor was a philosopher and theologian of such penetration ‘that he hardly had an equal’ (Epistola CLIV; quoted in Scorraille 1912–3, vol. 2: 437).

As Martin Heidegger later saw it, Suárez was the main source through which Greek ontology passed from the Middle Ages to usher in the metaphysics and the transcendental philosophy of modern times. Most likely, Suarezian metaphysics was that first learned by Descartes from his Jesuit teachers at La Flèche. On at least one occasion he refers to the Disputationes, of which he is believed to have owned a copy. Leibniz boasted that while yet a youth he had read Suárez ‘like a novel’. Schopenhauer, in his chief work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), displays much acquaintance with the Disputationes, which he values as ‘an authentic compendium of the whole scholastic tradition’ (quoted in Grabmann 1926: 535). Similarly, Franz Brentano, in his 1862 work on the manifold meaning of being according to Aristotle (Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles), has recommended the Disputationes metaphysicae to anyone who wants to learn of the diversity of medieval views on Aristotle. But perhaps most strikingly, for Christian von Wolff (whose Ontologia Immanuel Kant thought practically coterminous with pre-critical metaphysics) it was ‘Francisco Suárez, of the Society of Jesus, who among scholastics pondered metaphysical questions with particular penetration’ (Philosophia prima sive ontologia I.2.3 n.169; quoted in Gilson 1952: 117).