emphasis on casuistry and situational ethics, a version of relativism. For the
Jesuits at this time, it was a liberal position against the authoritarians and
absolutists of both the Protestant and Counterreformation hard-liners. Cru-
sades and holy wars could not be justified, since no convictions could be certain
enough to support no-holds-barred conflict; this led naturally into a criticism
of the divine right of kings and of the absolute authority of the state. In this
Molina was followed by other Jesuits, including Bellarmine (Galileo’s critic)
and Suarez.
Culminating three generations of creativity in Spain, Suarez was the last
great scholastic philosopher; in subsequent Catholic circles his reputation was
second only to that of Aquinas. He produced a massive synthesis of Scotist
and Thomist metaphysics. The two high points of medieval philosophy, rival
lineages for 300 years, were brought together just when the medieval structure
was in its final collapse. Here we find another case of creativity driven by the
rearrangement of the attention space, the creativity of intellectual alliances
which we have seen exemplified in the grand pagan synthesis at the end of the
ancient Greek world. Suarez formulated metaphysics as the science of being
qua being; it comprises acts of existing, but also real essences, characterized
by non-contradiction. Breaking with Scotus, Suarez held that being is not
univocal but is a concept derived by analogy from the various kinds of being.^3
Suarez shaped the heritage of philosophy that was to be passed along to the
modernists, who believed they were breaking with medieval thought.
Suarez’s philosophy became the center of the curriculum in Catholic and
many Protestant universities (especially in Germany) for 200 years; and this
tradition kept resurfacing whenever philosophy became consciously metaphysi-
cal. Wolff’s masterwork Philosophia Prima Sive Ontologica (1729) builds
explicitly on Suarez (EP, 1967: 8:340–341). Wolff takes ontology as purely
self-contained argument over first principles, governed by the principle of
non-contradiction. From thence he deduces the principle of sufficient reason
which governs physical, non-logical necessity: that in every case there must be
a reason why something exists rather than not. This is a touchstone of Leibniz’s
philosophy as well, and it is implicit in Kant’s problematic of pure reason, the
justification of the synthetic a priori. When Schopenhauer at the beginning of
his career proposed to overthrow constructive idealism and return to Kant, his
first statement was The Four-fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason,
with its explicit admiration of Suarez. Still later, Heidegger—the product of a
Catholic seminary education—revived the ontological question, returning ex-
plicitly to Scotus and overturning the Principle of Sufficient Reason by declar-
ing the logical unfoundedness of existence. This was one more move on the
turf delineated by Suarez.
Figure 10.1 shows Suarez contemporaneous with Bacon, Campanella, and
580 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths