the Jesuits were at the high point of the intellectual creativity which broke out
in the Spanish universities. Christian Spain had never been an intellectual
center, except when Toledo in the mid-1100s had been the translation center
with the Muslims; after the fall of the Córdoba caliphate in 1236, the only
activity of philosophical significance comprised the Jewish Maimonidists, Aver-
roists, and Kabbalists, typically in an underground against the authoritarianism
of Christian orthodoxy. There were two large medieval universities, at Sala-
manca and Valladolid, but these were never important in philosophy. So it is
rather abruptly in the early and mid-1500s that we find Spanish thinkers of
world importance—Las Casas, Vitoria, and Soto—developing the theory of
natural rights and international law.
In network structure the Spanish intellectuals were a spinoff from the main
scholastic lineage at Paris.^2 An early Spanish Humanist, Juan Luis Vives, like
Loyola went to Paris but did not return. By the mid-1500s, the leading
Dominican Thomists were in Spain, and some of the northerners, such as the
Latin stylist Buchanan, even sojourned there. The typical structural pattern of
creativity emerges: lines of conflict among interlinked factions. The famous
Carmelite reformers, the mystics Saint Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross,
were attacked by the Dominican Melchior Cano; a proponent of scientific
method, he saw these mystics as anti-intellectual reactionaries. Teresa was
supported by her confessor, Bañez, a Salamanca metaphysician and another
Dominican Thomist. In the heart of these conflicting networks emerged the
most important Jesuit philosophers, Molina and Suarez.
Molina formulated the distinctive Jesuit philosophy, the sophisticated cal-
culation bordering on cynicism which would characterize much of the leading
secular thought of the following generations. In 1588 Molina published a
philosophical path out of the dilemmas of predestination, the trademark theo-
logical issue of the Calvinists. He proposed a scientia media, a middle kind of
knowledge between Aquinas’s two kinds, God’s vision of concrete existences
and God’s knowledge of possibilities. The traditional Thomist position, that
man is physically predetermined by God to act freely, Molina charged, is only
a disguised form of determinism. Molina argued for God’s knowledge of
conditional future contingent events, and hence the cooperation of free will
with divine grace, bringing down on himself the attack of Cano and Bañez.
The theological dispute had a wider significance, affecting the concept of
knowledge and hence of the emerging epistemological space within philosophy.
Three generations later Leibniz was to draw on Molina’s scientia media to
overcome the rigidities of Cartesianism (Brown, 1984: 26). Molina created a
theology and ethics of probabilism: cognitions are less true the more general
they are; concrete activity in the world always entails choices involving mix-
tures of greater or lesser evil consequences. Molina launched the famous Jesuit
Secularization and Philosophical Meta-territoriality • 579