SUÁREZ, FRANCISCO

SUÁREZ, FRANCISCO (1548–1617), was a Spanish Jesuit philosopher, theologian, and jurist. Francisco de Suárez was born on January 5, 1548, at Granada, where his father was a wealthy barrister. Destined by his family to an ecclesiastical career, he prepared for it by studying canon law at the University of Salamanca. In 1564 he joined the Society of Jesus. From 1566 to 1570 he was a student of theology at the same university at a time when it was undergoing a lively Thomist revival.

In 1571, the year before he was ordained priest, Suárez was assigned to teach philosophy at Segovia, and over the next decade he taught both philosophy and theology at various Jesuit colleges in Castile, including Valladolid, where he delivered a set of celebrated lectures on the first part of Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologiae. Called to Rome in 1580, he continued the series at the Roman College, where his subject was the second part and where, it is said, Pope Gregory XIII was occasionally in attendance. Uncertain health brought Suárez back to Spain in 1585, to Alcalá, and here his lectures on the Summa, specifically on the third part, were concluded. He transferred to Salamanca in 1592, and in 1597, at the instance of Philip II of Spain (now also king of Portugal), he went to Coimbra, where he taught until 1616. He died a year later in Lisbon.

Suárez's first published work, De deo incarnato, which grew out of his lectures on the third part of the Summa, appeared in 1590, and his last, De defensione fidei, a tract directed against the views on the divine right of kings held by James I of England, in 1613. In between he published eleven other works, of which the most popular and influential, Disputationes metaphysicae (1597), went through eighteen editions in the course of the seventeenth century. Ten more works were published posthumously before 1655, under the direction of the Portuguese Jesuits. The passage of time did not lessen interest in Suárez's writings; editions of his Omnia opera were published in Venice in 1747 and in Paris in 1856.

Suárez's thought was expressed always within a scholastic context, and he professed to be a Thomist. Certainly the work of Thomas Aquinas was basic to his own, but he often deviated from classical Thomism, a fact stressed particularly during the Thomist revival of the early twentieth century. Suárez, for example, did not admit the real distinction between essence and existence, and his metaphysics was more a self-contained whole than a mere elaboration of Aristotle. He viewed philosophy in any case as a basis for theological research.

In the quarrel between the Jesuits and the Dominicans over the problem of the relationship between grace and free will he took no formal part, though during the crisis of the first decade of the seventeenth century he was active behind the scenes promoting the more liberal Jesuit position. Similarly, he did much to establish the moral school of probabilism, which was later associated with Jesuit confessional practice. As a jurist Suárez did much to elaborate the notion of penal law and the juridical force of custom. He was a powerful advocate of the principle of subsidiarity in civil society, and he insisted that the powers of the state were rooted in the free consent of the governed. His doctrine of ius gentium, based upon the precept of universal love that transcends national or racial divisions, contributed to the development of international law.

Suárez was probably the greatest of all the Jesuit theologians, and as such he has had continuing importance within the intellectual life of the Catholic church. But he was influential far beyond his own order or his own communion. Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Vico have all acknowledged their debt to Suárez. The title given him by Pope Paul V—Doctor Eximius ("distinguished scholar")—seems even now appropriate.

Bibliography

For a good synopsis of Suárez's teaching, see René Brouillard's article "Suarez, François," in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (Paris, 1941). A longer study, with biographical details, is Raoul de Scorraille's François Suarez de la compagnie de Jésus, 2 vols. (Paris, 1912–1913). Two useful special studies are Francisco Suárez: Addresses in Commemoration of His Contribution to International Law and Politics, edited by Herbert Wright (Washington, D.C., 1933), and José Hellín's La analogía del ser y el conocimento de Dios en Suárez (Madrid, 1947).

Marvin R. O'connell (1987)