Selections from Three Works. Francisco Suárez

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      CONTENTS

      Introduction

      Note on Translation (from the Carnegie edition)

      Note on This Edition

Contents (from the Carnegie edition)

       SELECTIONS FROM THREE WORKS

       A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver

      A Defence of the Catholic and Apostolic Faith

       A Work on the Three Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity

      Bibliography

      Suggestions for Further Reading

       Index

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       INTRODUCTION

      Born in 1548 to a prominent noble family of Granada, Francisco Suárez was one of the most important thinkers of the second scholastic, that revival of Catholic school theology that centered on the study of Thomas Aquinas, and, following the early sixteenth-century example of Cajetan and Vitoria, replaced the long-established medieval practice of commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard with commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. Suárez entered the recently founded Society of Jesus in 1564, and after undistinguished academic beginnings progressed in the study of theology and philosophy to gain a chair in philosophy at Segovia in 1571. He held a chair in theology at the Roman College, the Jesuits’ college in Rome, from 1580 to 1585, but then had to return to Spain for reasons of health. There followed an unhappy period at Alcalá marked by tensions with supporters of the previous occupant of his post there, Gabriel Vásquez, who was both a more popular university teacher than Suárez and one of Suárez’s main intellectual rivals in the Jesuit order. These tensions were not lessened by Vásquez’s return from Rome in 1591. After teaching for more than three years at the Jesuit college at Salamanca, in 1597 Suárez moved to a chair in theology at Coimbra, where he spent the remainder of his career. He died in 1617.

      Besides composing one of the last intellectually formidable exercises in Aristotelian metaphysics, the Disputationes metaphysicae (1597), Suárez also wrote one of the major works of scholastic moral and legal theory, De legibus ac deo legislatore (1612), based on his course on law at Coimbra. This work, given in selections here, also served as the basis for his political thought, outlined in that treatise and developed in two further works, excerpts from which are also presented here: his treatise on the errors of Anglicanism and in particular on the errors of King James I in

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      relation to papal spiritual and temporal authority, Defensio fidei catholicae et apostolicae adversus anglicanae sectae errores (1613); and his treatise on the supernatural virtues, in part material taught by him in Rome but much expanded by him subsequently and posthumously published in 1621. The excerpts from the last treatise were taken from Suárez’s accounts of faith and love, De fide and De caritate. Together these selections, originally published in the Carnegie series The Classics of International Law and now republished as a Liberty Fund edition, will give a general view of Suárez’s political thought and of its basis in his moral theory.

      Suárez was a natural law thinker, a tradition that stretched from the Stoicism of pagan antiquity, and which continued through medieval and early modern Catholic scholasticism to remain the basis of the Catholic moral theory of the present day; but the tradition also included Protestant thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such as Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Christian Wolff. Central is the idea that morality comes to us in the shape of a universal law governing the actions of all humans by virtue of their shared rational nature, hence forming a natural law. The specific systems of positive (posited) law embodied in the customs or statutes of human communities have a moral authority—that of obligation—that is derived from the moral obligations imposed by universal natural law. We have then an account of political authority, in the form of the authority of state or civil law morally to oblige us, developed out of a general theory of moral obligation. The interest of this tradition in law, therefore, goes far beyond the humanly constructed systems of positive law, of humanly made custom and statute, that are the concern of modern jurisprudence. Law is first and foremost a moral standard before it is ever to be found in humanly created regulation. Human systems of positive law are of concern to the theory of law proper insofar as they serve a central function: that of defending, through human coercive authority, existing moral obligations and of adding to those existing moral directives new ones, general adherence to which will further the good of the community. As Catholic natural lawyers were all agreed, following St. Augustine, statutes or customs which fail to do this, which because of their injustice leave us under no moral obligation to conform to them, while they may be termed ‘laws’ and are presented as laws by

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      human authorities, do not constitute law of the kind with which Suárez and other natural lawyers were concerned. For they do not carry the force of moral obligation, which genuine law must do: an unjust law is not a true law (nam lex mihi esse non videtur, quae iusta non fuerit).1

      How similar was the moral theory of Suárez and his Catholic contemporaries to those of subsequent Protestant natural law theorists? We can best compare Suárez with Pufendorf, who more than Grotius was to develop a serious theory of obligation and its moral psychology, and who shared with Suárez a similar conception of moral obligation’s nature. In both thinkers natural law is imposed by a divine will and command communicated to us through our natural capacity for reason. Moreover, for both thinkers the moral obligation attaching to actions that