Justified True Belief

(●) The last of the great scholastics, who rebuilt metaphysics from the ground up and told the king of England that a crown comes to a king through his people. + He wrote about twenty-one million words, which is more than twice the output of Thomas Aquinas, and he wrote them by hand while moving from one Jesuit college to the next. His biographers relate that one wing of the old Jesuit college at Salamanca was repaired out of the money his metaphysics books earned. That is the shape of the man: enormously productive, read everywhere, and almost entirely unknown today outside the philosophy departments that still argue about him. Francisco Suárez matters to a Christian reader for three reasons, and they have almost nothing to do with one another. He gave Europe the vocabulary of being, the words for what a cause is and what it means for a thing to exist at all, and Descartes, Leibniz and the Protestant universities of Germany all learned their philosophy in it. He worked out the account of grace and free choice that the Jesuits would hold for centuries, the one that runs on what Luis de Molina called middle knowledge: God’s knowledge of what any free creature would freely choose in any situation it might be placed in. And he wrote the book on where a king’s power comes from that made a king so angry the public hangman burned it in London. Scholasticism, the word attached to him, means the method of the medieval schools: pose a question, line up every serious answer that has been given, weigh the objections one by one, and only then say what you think. It had been going for four hundred years when Suárez took it up, and he is usually called its last great practitioner. He was also its most independent one. He is buried in Lisbon, and the fights he started are still running.

(●) 1548 AD: Born in Granada, in a comfortable house in a city that had changed hands within living memory. + Granada had been the last Muslim kingdom in Spain until Ferdinand and Isabella took it in 1492. Francisco was born there on 5 January 1548, fifty-six years later, into a city where the change was still the first thing anyone told you about the place. His father, Gaspar Suárez de Toledo, was a prosperous lawyer; his mother was Antonia Vázquez de Utiel. He was the second son of eight children, and the family sent a remarkable number of them into the church: a brother to the Jesuits, another to the priesthood, three sisters to a convent. There was a shadow on the family as well. On his mother’s side, earlier generations were of Jewish descent, and some of them had fallen foul of the Inquisition. Whether the household’s devotion was simple piety or partly a shield, nobody can now say. He was taught Latin and rhetoric at home until he was thirteen, and then sent to Salamanca to read canon law, the law of the church. He was not a good student. Nothing in the boy who arrived there suggested the man who would leave.

(●) 1564 AD: The Jesuits turned him down as not clever enough, and admitted him at last on appeal. + At sixteen he heard the Jesuit preacher Juan Ramirez at Salamanca and decided what he wanted. The Society of Jesus was barely twenty-four years old and hungry for men. He applied, and of the fifty who applied with him, he was the only one refused: his health was poor and his mind, in the judgment of the examiners, was unpromising. He appealed. He kept appealing, and on 16 June 1564 he was admitted, not as a full candidate but as an indiferente, a provisional entry with his eventual rank left open, which in plain terms meant that he might never be allowed to become a priest. Imagine being told you may stay in the building but not that you belong in it. Then the gift arrived. Within a few years he was outrunning his teachers, and his own order has always told the story of a young man near despair who prayed to the mother of Christ and found his mind opened. That is a tradition from inside the Society, written down long afterward, and it should be read as one. What is not in doubt is the result. In 1570 he was chosen for the Grand Act at Salamanca, a public examination in which a student stood alone before the faculty and any visitor who cared to come and answered every question and objection thrown at him. It was given only to the best, and the hall was full.

(●) 1571 AD: He began to teach, and spent the next twenty-six years moving from one lecture hall to the next. + He started with philosophy at Segovia in 1571, and was ordained a priest the year after that, in 1572. Then came theology, at Ávila and again at Segovia, and after that Valladolid, and in every one of those halls he did the same thing and annoyed the same people by it. He would not lecture the usual way. The usual way was to dictate from a copy book, so that a class wrote down what the last generation of students had written down, and a young man could leave with a set of notes his father would have recognized. Suárez said he went looking for truth at its very roots instead. The novelty of it drew complaints almost at once. In 1580 he was called to Rome, to the Collegio Romano, where the Jesuits kept their best minds. His biographers report that Pope Gregory XIII came to hear his first lecture. Robert Bellarmine was on the faculty, and so was the mathematician Christopher Clavius, whose calendar the world still keeps; the young general of the order, Claudio Acquaviva, became a friend. Suárez had a hand in the Ratio Studiorum, the Jesuit plan of studies that would shape schools on four continents. He was not, by all accounts, much of a preacher. His few attempts failed because he could not stop himself wandering into fine points of doctrine that his hearers had no way of following. He went back to Spain in 1585, to Alcalá, and spent seven unhappy years there quarrelling with his colleague Gabriel Vázquez, a rivalry that outlived both men and split Jesuit philosophy for generations. He asked to be released from the post, and in 1592 was sent back to Salamanca, where he had been a student.

(●) 1594 AD: He threw the weight of his order behind the Jesuit answer to how grace can be certain while a choice stays free. + In 1588 a Jesuit at Évora named Luis de Molina published a book with a long title everyone shortened to the Concordia, the reconciliation: an attempt to hold together God’s complete foreknowledge and the reality of human choice. The Dominicans, led by Domingo Báñez at Salamanca, said it gave away too much to the creature, and the quarrel turned bitter enough that both orders were denouncing each other to the Inquisition within a few years. In 1594 Suárez sent a memorandum to Juan de Zúñiga of the Inquisition Council defending the Jesuit position. It was an effective piece of work, and it changed the shape of the fight: what had been one man’s book became the cause of an entire order, with Suárez as its most respected advocate in Spain. Rome took the case over. The commissions known as the congregations de auxiliis, meaning "on the helps of grace," sat through the reign of Clement VIII and into the reign of his successor, hearing the two orders out at enormous length, and in the end they decided nothing at all. On 28 August 1607 Paul V ended them, and the ruling he handed down was this: both sides could hold and teach their view, and neither side could call the other heretical. The verdict, in other words, was that the church had not settled it. Four centuries later it still has not.

(●) 1597 AD: Salamanca printed his metaphysics, and the king of Spain ordered him to a chair in Portugal. + The Disputationes metaphysicae came out at Salamanca in 1597 in two folio volumes, folio being the big page size a printer used for a book meant to lie open on a desk rather than travel in a pocket. It sold immediately and it kept selling. Pirated printings appeared in Paris, Cologne, Geneva, Vienna, Lyons and Mainz almost as fast as the authorized ones, which is the sixteenth-century equivalent of a book nobody can keep in stock. A year earlier Philip II of Spain, who had ruled Portugal as well since 1580, had decided that the University of Coimbra needed a theologian of the first rank. He asked Suárez, who did not want to go: the teaching load would eat his writing, his health was bad, and a Spanish professor in a new Spanish province, holding a new Jesuit chair at a university the Dominicans regarded as theirs, could expect a cold welcome. He asked to be excused, and for the moment he was. Then the man appointed in his place died at the end of 1596, and Philip wrote again. This time there was no question of refusing. One indignity remained. The Coimbra faculty would not accept a professor without a doctorate, and Suárez, whose books were by then being reprinted all over Europe without his leave, had never taken one. An offer from the Jesuit provincial in Lisbon to simply confer the degree did not satisfy them; they wanted it done properly. So he travelled to Évora, presided over a public theological disputation like any other candidate for a degree, and came away with the doctorate the faculty required. He held the Coimbra chair for the rest of his working life, and the books people still argue about came out of those years.

(●) 1613 AD: The public hangman burned his book in London, and Paris burned it the following year. + After the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, James I of England required his Catholic subjects to swear an Oath of Allegiance. It went further than promising civil obedience. It made a man swear that the pope had no power whatever to depose a king, and that he abhorred as impious and heretical the doctrine that princes excommunicated or deprived by the pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects. James defended the oath in print himself, which is unusual in a king and made a reply possible. Pope Paul V asked Suárez to write it, through Decio Caraffa, the papal representative in Madrid. The result, the Defensio fidei catholicae, appeared at Coimbra in 1613, and it went well past the oath it was answering: six books, the third of them a full theory of where political power comes from and what the church may and may not do about kings. James had it burned by the common hangman before the year was out, forbade anyone to read it, and complained to Philip III that Spain was sheltering a declared enemy of the throne. The following year, in 1614, the Parlement of Paris burned it in its own courtyard. The French had their own reasons, and they were not the king of England’s. Henri III and Henri IV had both been assassinated within living memory, both of them by a man who thought he was serving God; French opinion blamed the Jesuits for the teaching behind the knives. Suárez had chosen exactly that moment to publish a chapter on when a tyrant may be killed.

(●) 1617 AD: He died at Lisbon at sixty-nine, with his last book unfinished. + He had come to Lisbon, and he fell ill there. The illness ran about a fortnight, and on 25 September 1617 it killed him, a few months short of seventy; it may have been dysentery. He had been working, in what turned out to be his last months, at turning an old set of lecture notes into a finished commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. He got through twelve chapters of the first book and no further, and the friends who saw the volume into print four years later had to build the rest of it out of the notes as he left them. That was not the end of the books. Nine more volumes came out of his papers after his death, under the care of his friend Baltasar Alvarez, the last of them in 1655, thirty-eight years after the funeral. They travelled a good deal further than their author ever had. In those same years a Jesuit missionary named Martino Martini, working at Hangzhou, set about translating the Disputationes metaphysicae into Chinese, so that a man who had spent his life arguing in Latin with Spaniards was being read on the far side of the world by people who had never heard of Salamanca.

What He Taught

(T1) A theologian who has not done metaphysics is building a house without footings. + Dig down beside any house and you come to the footings, the concrete the walls are standing on. Nobody admires the footings. Nobody photographs them. But the house is only as square as they are, and a crack down there shows up years later in the plaster upstairs. Metaphysics is the study of what it takes for anything at all to exist. Not what stars or stones or souls are made of, which is the work of other sciences, but what we are saying about a star, a stone or a soul when we say that it is. It sounds like the most useless question in the world until you try to talk about God without answering it, at which point every sentence you write depends on it. Say that God exists, and you have used the word "exists" of a being who never began, in the same breath in which you use it of a coffee cup. Say that God caused the world, and you have used the word "caused" of something with nothing before it. Get the footings wrong and the cracks come out upstairs, in the doctrine. Before Suárez, a European student met metaphysics as a commentary. A professor worked through Aristotle’s Metaphysics a passage at a time, in the order Aristotle happened to have left the book, and the student learned the subject in whatever sequence a Greek manuscript dictated. Suárez decided that was backwards. He set the questions out in the order a person would need to learn them: the first disputation asks what metaphysics is even about, and the fifty-three that follow work outward from being itself to its properties, its causes, and then to the great division of everything there is into the created and the uncreated. It is widely reckoned the first full metaphysics in the West arranged in its own order rather than somebody else’s. The size of it is part of the point. There are fifty-four disputations, and each one is a small book in its own right. Running through them are roughly seven thousand seven hundred references to some two hundred and forty-five authors, with Aristotle cited about seventeen hundred times and Thomas Aquinas about a thousand, which means that a student who worked his way through the whole thing had been walked past very nearly everything anyone in the West had said about being since the Greeks, with the objections attached. Schopenhauer, no friend of scholastic theology, called it a genuine compendium of the whole of scholastic wisdom, and he meant it as praise. So when Suárez said that he was writing philosophy as a servant of theology, he was not being modest about the philosophy. He was saying what the footings were for.

(Q) "In the present work I am doing philosophy in such a way as to keep always in mind that our philosophy should be Christian and a servant to divine theology." + Source: Metaphysical Disputations, "To the Reader" (Freddoso translation). He opens the preface by explaining why he interrupted his commentaries on Aquinas to write a book of pure philosophy: "Since no one can become an accomplished theologian without having previously laid down firm foundations in metaphysics," the groundwork had to come first. In the same few paragraphs he says that in choosing among philosophical opinions he inclined toward those that "comport better with piety and revealed doctrine" (T1).

(T2) A choice is free only if, with everything left exactly as it stood, the person could have done otherwise. + Hold up your hand and write your name. Your hand had the power to write and the power not to write, and yet nobody thinks a hand is free. It cannot write without the will behind it, and once the will has moved, the hand is not going to do anything else. Suárez uses exactly that example, and he uses it to press a hard question: if the grace of God moves the will the way the will moves the hand, in what sense is the will free? The scholastics had a pair of phrases for the distinction he needed here, and they are worth learning slowly, because the whole quarrel turns on them. Something is possible in the divided sense if it could happen once you change some of the surrounding conditions. Your hand could refrain from writing, certainly, if your will let it; the power is in the hand, and all that stands in the way is the will behind it. Something is possible in the composed sense if it could go either way with every condition left exactly where it is: the same desires, the same reasons, the same moment, the same grace, nothing altered anywhere, and still either answer genuinely available. Freedom, Suárez insisted, requires the second kind. The first kind is what a hand has, and a hand is not free. That is a costly position to hold, and he knew it was, because the obvious next question comes straight back at him: if a creature could really have gone either way with everything left as it stood, how can God be certain in advance of anything that creature will do? The Jesuit answer he defended is what Luis de Molina had named middle knowledge. God knows, before he decides what world to make, what any free creature would freely choose in any situation it might be placed in. Suárez then added a turn of his own, later called congruism, and the name carries the idea. God does not save anybody by overpowering a will. He gives the one he means to save a grace congruent to that person, fitted to who they are and what moment of their life they are standing in, the way one word from the right friend at the right hour does what a year of lectures could not, so that they freely say yes; and he knew before he gave it that they would. Christians have never agreed about this, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. The Dominicans held that grace is effective by its own power and not because God foresaw that it would fit, and they had an ancient case to make from Augustine. That is why the pope’s 1607 ruling let both sides go on teaching. The disagreement is a family one. Everybody in it confesses that salvation is God’s work, and that the sinner who refuses has nobody else to blame.

(Q) "It is confirmed and explained by analogy to, for example, the power of writing that is in the hand. For it of itself is also the power not to write and yet is not free." + Source: On Grace, Prolegomenon 1, chapter 3, paragraph 13 (Penner translation, from the 1620 Lyons edition). He is arguing against theologians who wanted to say that a will moved by God is still free because it retains the power to do otherwise. Suárez answers that a hand retains that power too, in the same sense, and a hand is not free (T2).

(T3) The natural law does not merely show what is good; God commands it. + A man watching a stranger drown thinks two things almost at once. The first is that letting him drown would be a filthy thing to do. The second is that he had better get in the water. Those are not the same thought, and the difference between them is the whole of this argument. Natural law is the moral knowledge available to any human being through reason and conscience, without a Bible: that gratitude is owed, that cruelty is wrong, that promises bind. Paul takes it for granted when he writes that Gentiles who do not have the law sometimes do what the law requires, and that the work of the law is written on their hearts (Romans 2:14–15). The question the schools fought over was what makes that knowledge binding. One party, the intellectualists, said reason itself sees the wrongness, and nothing further is needed; God’s command adds no obligation that was not there already. The other party, the voluntarists, said an obligation is a command, so a thing is wrong because God forbids it, and if he had willed otherwise it would not have been wrong. Suárez said both parties were half right and took the middle road. Cruelty is genuinely evil in itself, before any command, because of what it is and what we are; God does not make it evil by a decree, and could not make it good. But God, who is good, also wills it and forbids it, and it is that will which turns "this is a filthy thing to do" into "you are under orders." So the natural law is real law, with an author, and breaking it is not merely falling short of an ideal but wronging a person. The advantage of his position is that it keeps both halves of what an ordinary conscience actually reports. Wrong is not arbitrary, and it is not merely a shame either. The man in the water is not consulting a preference. He is under command.

(Q) "Not only does the natural law indicate what is good or evil, but furthermore, it contains its own prohibition of evil and command of good." + Source: On Laws and God the Lawgiver, Book II, chapter 6, section 5 (Williams, Brown and Waldron translation). The chapter asks whether the natural law is truly divine law that commands, or only reason’s report on what is good. Suárez announces here that he holds a middle course, and credits it to Thomas Aquinas (T3).

(T4) Political power belongs to no man by birth; God gives it to the community, and a king receives it from them. + Kings of that century liked to say that they answered to God alone and to no one else on earth, and they had an argument for it. Adam, they said, was given dominion, and a father rules his household; kings are the fathers of nations; therefore royal power comes down from heaven to the man himself, directly, and no one under him gave it or can take it. Suárez took that apart piece by piece. Look at the Genesis text, he says: God said let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock, not over each other (Genesis 1:26). Adam had a household and the authority a father has in one, which is real and is not political power; political power appears only when many households gather into a community, and that gathering is done by the will of the people who do it. Nobody is born a ruler of other people. Scripture does say that authority comes from God and that the ruler is God’s servant (Romans 13:1, 13:4), and he takes that at full strength, but he reads it as saying that the power is from God, while which man holds it is settled among men. So the community holds the authority first, and a king holds it because the community handed it over. Suárez is not a democrat, and it matters to say so. He thought monarchy the best of the three ancient forms. He held that once a people transfers power to a king, the transfer is real and binding, and that they may not simply take it back whenever they like. The exception he allows is tyranny, and the grant itself carries conditions that bind the king’s heirs. A generation later an English gentleman named Robert Filmer wrote a book to answer exactly this, arguing that Adam and the patriarchs after him did hold royal authority by fatherhood. John Locke then wrote a book to answer Filmer. The line runs straight from the Jesuit at Coimbra to the arguments the English-speaking world would have about kings for the next century.

(Q) "Therefore, we must say that this power, viewed solely according to the nature of things, resides not in any individual man but rather in the whole body of mankind." + Source: On Laws and God the Lawgiver, Book III, chapter 2, section 3 (Williams, Brown and Waldron translation). The reason he gives in the next breath is the one his opponents could not forgive: "in the nature of things all men are born free; so that, consequently, no person has political jurisdiction over another person, even as no person has dominion over another" (T4).

(T5) The nations are one human community, and the law between them is real law. + Spain in his lifetime was governing territory on the other side of an ocean, and the question of what a nation may do to people who never agreed to its laws had stopped being academic. Francisco de Vitoria at Salamanca had already put it in those terms two generations earlier, arguing about the Indies. Suárez took the next step and asked what kind of thing the law between nations is. The Romans had a phrase, ius gentium, the law of nations: the customs that turn up in nearly every people, such as honouring treaties and the treatment of ambassadors. Lawyers argued about whether this was simply natural law under another name or merely each nation’s own law happening to look alike. Suárez said it is neither. It is genuine human law, made by custom rather than by a legislator, but made across the whole human race rather than inside one country, and it binds because the human race is one community. Every state is complete in itself and none of them is self-sufficient; they need each other, and what they owe each other is more than convenience. He worked out the consequences in a long treatise on war which sits, of all places, inside his book on the virtue of charity, and the filing is not an accident: what one nation may do to another he treats as a question about love of neighbour. A war needs a just cause, and the only cause he will allow is a grave wrong that cannot be put right any other way. Ambition does not qualify. Neither does religion, and he says so at a moment when saying it cost something: unbelief by itself gives nobody the right to make war on unbelievers, and the emperor is not lord of the world. Two sides cannot both be fighting justly, though one of them may be honestly mistaken about which one it is. And because the harm a war does is certain while the good it may do is a guess, the burden of showing the cause lies on whoever draws the sword first. What he is doing here is the thing that got him called a founder of international law: he is describing a real legal order above the nations, binding on Christian and non-Christian princes alike, at a moment when Christendom had just stopped being one thing and a great many people had concluded that between nations there was nothing but strength.

(Q) "The human race, into howsoever many different peoples and kingdoms it may be divided, always preserves a certain unity, not only as a species, but also a moral and political unity (as it were) enjoined by the natural precept of mutual love and mercy; a precept which applies to all, even to strangers of every nation." + Source: On Laws and God the Lawgiver, Book II, chapter 19, section 9 (Williams, Brown and Waldron translation). This is his answer to the question of why there should be law between nations at all. Paul had told the philosophers of Athens that God made from one man every nation of mankind (Acts 17:26), and Suárez is drawing the legal consequence of it (T5).

(Q) "Secondly, in war, men are despoiled of their property, their liberty, and their lives; and to do such things without just cause is absolutely iniquitous, for if this were permissible, men could kill one another without cause." + Source: On Charity, Disputation XIII: On War, section IV (Williams, Brown and Waldron translation). He is giving his reasons for holding that there can be no just war without a legitimate cause, and this is the second of them. Hugo Grotius, the Dutch Protestant whose On the Law of War and Peace of 1625 founded the modern discipline, read Suárez and called him a theologian and philosopher of such depth that he hardly had an equal (T5).

What Came of His Work

(†) Protestant Europe taught his metaphysics for a century, and modern philosophy learned its terms from him. + Something strange happened to the Disputationes metaphysicae after 1597. The Lutheran and Reformed universities of Germany, which had no intention of taking anything else from a Jesuit, adopted it as their textbook, because there was nothing else of its kind and because it was arranged to be taught. For more than a hundred years, students on both sides of the Reformation learned what a cause is, what an essence is, and what it means for something to exist, out of the same book by the same Spanish priest. The effect on what came next is easy to miss and hard to overstate. Descartes cites him by disputation and section, the way a man cites a book that is open on his desk. Leibniz read him. And here is the irony of it: when the philosophers of the seventeenth century set about demolishing scholasticism, the scholasticism they had in their hands was largely his, and a good many of the words they swung at it were words he had defined. Some of his own positions travelled along with the vocabulary. One of them answers the question the schools called individuation, which is the question of what makes a thing this particular thing rather than another one just like it. Take two coins off the same press, identical in every feature you could name; the older answer was that they are two because they are stamped out of two different lumps of metal, so that matter is what does the dividing. Suárez answered that nothing needs to do the dividing. A thing is individual simply by being the very thing it is, and no ingredient has to be added to make it so. Another of his positions concerns the relation between what a thing is and that it is. A unicorn has an essence, a perfectly good description of what one would be, without existing anywhere at all, and some scholastics concluded from cases like that one that in a real creature the essence and the existence are two genuinely distinct items joined together. Suárez said no. In the creature there is one reality, and the mind is doing the distinguishing. Then he mostly vanished. For two centuries an educated reader could finish a degree in philosophy without hearing the name. That has reversed in the last few decades, and a good deal of current work on causation, free choice and the metaphysics of law now runs back through him, which is roughly what he would have expected of a book he wrote to be used rather than admired.

(†) His account of where a king’s power comes from outlived the king who burned it. + James I burned the Defensio fidei, and burning it did nothing. The argument was already out, and the men who wanted to defend the divine right of kings found they had to answer it rather than ignore it. Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha is the clearest case. Filmer sets out to refute Bellarmine and Suárez by name, and his whole system is built to block their premise: if Adam and the patriarchs held kingly authority as fathers, then men were never born free, and power never sat in any community for a people to hand over. That is precisely the claim Suárez had denied out of Genesis 1:26 (T4). When John Locke wrote the first of his two treatises on government, the book he was answering line by line was Filmer’s, and the position he was defending against it, that political authority begins with a free community and is held in trust, had been argued in Latin at Coimbra before Locke was born. The other line runs through the law of nations. Vitoria had opened the subject and Suárez gave it its theory; Grotius, writing as a Protestant in a Europe exhausted by religious war, built the modern discipline on ground those two had cleared. It is a strange inheritance. Two Catholic Spaniards and a Dutch Calvinist, arguing from the same conviction that there is a law above the nations because God made one race of men, and that a prince who ignores it is not sovereign but a bandit.

(†) His answer on grace and freedom became the Jesuit position, and it is argued to this day. + Paul V had ruled in 1607 that both the Dominican and the Jesuit accounts could be taught and that neither could be called heresy. Within a few years the Jesuits had settled on the version Suárez had worked out, and congruism, rather than Molina’s bare original, is what the order taught its students for the next three hundred years. Historians still argue about how binding the order’s own instruction on the point actually was. That it was Suárez’s shape of the doctrine which prevailed, nobody argues about. The doctrine at the centre of it, middle knowledge, went quiet for a long time and then came back. Philosophers of religion in the last fifty years, Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig among them, have put it to work against some of the hardest objections a Christian ever has to face: how God can know the future without thereby making it happen, why a world containing free creatures who sin might still be the best world God could do, how prophecy and prayer are supposed to work if the future is genuinely open to us. Critics press what is called the grounding objection. Suppose a man is never in his life offered a bribe. What could possibly make it true, right now, that he would have refused one, when there is no refusal anywhere, in him or in the world, for that truth to rest on? The argument is live, and Christians in good standing stand on both sides of it. Suárez would recognize it immediately. It is his question, in his terms, still unfinished.

(†) Where he went wrong: he gave the church a power over kings, and a knife a use, that the New Testament does not give them. + The Defensio fidei is two books at once. One of them is the argument about consent that outlived him. The other is a defence of two claims that belong in his ledger just as squarely. - The deposing power. Suárez held that the pope, though he has no direct temporal rule, no armies and no taxes of his own to levy over a kingdom, has an indirect power over Christian princes in the things that touch religion, and that this power reaches as far as deposing a heretical king and releasing his subjects from their allegiance. He argued it from the precedents: Gregory VII and Henry IV, Innocent IV and Frederick II. However those precedents are read, the doctrine puts one bishop in the position of a court of appeal over the civil order of every Christian nation, able to unmake a king and to tell a farmer in that king’s fields that his oath no longer binds him. It is hard to square with a kingdom that is not of this world (John 18:36), or with weapons of warfare that are not of the flesh (2 Corinthians 10:4). Protestants said so at the time. So, just as loudly, did the Gallicans of France, who were Catholics themselves and held that the king’s authority inside his own kingdom was not the pope’s to touch. - Killing a tyrant. He is more careful here than his enemies allowed, and fairness requires saying where the care lies. He affirmed the Council of Constance’s condemnation of private assassination, and he held that a lawful king who rules badly may not be killed on any private man’s authority. What he allowed was narrower. A usurper with no title at all may be resisted and killed, because his continued grip on the community is itself an act of war against it, and a king who has been lawfully deposed has become a private man like any other. The trouble is that the qualification is thinner than it looks the moment somebody else gets to decide who counts as a usurper, and Suárez published it in 1613, three years after a Catholic assassin had put a knife into Henri IV of France. Both of the Frenchmen who had killed a king in that generation believed they were doing God a service. When one of his own disciples drew a sword in his defence, the Lord told him to put it back (Matthew 26:52). This is a real fault and not a misunderstanding, and it belongs in his ledger. It should not be made to carry more than it weighs. He was not writing a warrant for anyone with a grievance; he was a careful man reasoning inside a Christendom that had recently come apart, in which the question of who could restrain a prince who broke faith with his own people had become genuinely urgent and no one had a good answer. He got the question right. On this part of the answer, the church he served eventually stopped following him.