Francisco Suarez 1548 – 1617

Francisco Suarez was a Spanish Jesuit priest and the leading philosopher of the late scholastic revival. Known as Doctor Eximius, he produced the Disputationes Metaphysicae, the first systematic Western metaphysical treatise organized thematically rather than as a commentary on Aristotle. His treatise De Legibus articulated a natural-law theory of political authority and law that would influence Grotius and the early modern tradition of natural rights. He defended the consent-based theory of political authority against royal absolutism and was widely read by Catholic and Protestant philosophers alike.

Francisco Suárez was born at Granada in January 1548 into an old Asturian family. He entered the Society of Jesus at Salamanca in 1564, took his theological degree there, was ordained priest in 1572, and held in succession the chairs of philosophy and theology at Ávila, Segovia, Valladolid, the Roman College, Alcalá, and Salamanca, before being summoned by Philip II in 1597 to the prima chair of theology at Coimbra, where he taught for almost twenty years. He was honoured by his contemporaries as Doctor Eximius, the Pre-eminent Doctor.

His major works are the great Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597), a fifty-four-disputation systematic metaphysics that became the standard textbook of seventeenth-century European universities; the Tractatus de legibus ac Deo legislatore (1612); the Defensio fidei catholicae (1613) answering James I of England; and a long series of commentaries on Aquinas and on the controversies de auxiliis on grace and free will.

Suárez articulated a distinctive synthesis of Thomism and Scotism — the analogy of being, the formal distinction, the constitution of the individual by its own thisness — and applied his natural-law theory to the right of resistance, the sovereignty of the people, and the rights of pre-Christian and non-European peoples. He was the principal late-scholastic source for Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff and stands at the threshold between medieval and modern philosophy. He died at Lisbon in September 1617.