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45

SCHOLASTICISM
IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Spain as the bastion of late scholasticism

After the attacks of humanists, Ramists, reformers, and plain haters of
philosophy over much of two centuries, it is amazing that scholasticism
survived at all. Not only did it survive, it experienced a notable revival
throughout much of western Europe towards the end of the sixteenth
century and beginning of the seventeenth. Humanists and reformers were
by no means unanimous in opposing the medieval scholastics. More
important, the Iberian peninsula was comparatively unaffected by the
intellectual and religious ferment of most of the rest of Europe. The schools
of Spain and Portugal had a more or less continuous tradition of scholastic
philosophy, and the leading figures in the general revival of scholastic
thought round the end of the sixteenth century tend to be Spaniards like
Baiiez, Vasquez, and Suarez. In northern Europe the scholastic revival
looks more like a self-conscious and deliberate Aristotelian reaction to
Ramists, humanists, and the like, but the northerners of whatever religious
allegiance were happy enough to take guidance and inspiration from Spain.
New trends in late scholasticism
Although in obvious ways continuous with the main medieval tradition,
late scholasticism, whether in its Iberian form or in its northern revival,
shows certain very distinctive characteristics of its own which may be seen
as marking a transition to some of the most prominent themes of early
modern philosophy.
While these philosophers were nearly unanimous in rejecting medieval
nominalism (indeed, in the north this was another of the things they were
reacting against), Scotus, Ockham, and the later nominalistic tradition had
a very powerful influence on them. What is particularly notable is their
tendency to internalise order, to direct our attention away from an order
given in the external world and towards an internal order, the structure of
the mind and patterns in the way in which the mind acts. In what follows I
shall try to trace the result of this internalising of order in logic, in
metaphysics, and in the study of law and morals.

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Scholasticism in the seventeenth century 819

Late scholastic logic

It is hard to praise the late scholastics for their contributions to formal
logic.1 For reasons that are complex and a little obscure, progress and
inventiveness in formal logic dried up early in the sixteenth century. With
hindsight we can conjecture that the medieval logicians had gone about as
far as they could go without the mathematical tools of a later age. We find
no new contributions to formal logic in the treatises of the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, and medieval achievements are mis-
represented or not reported at all. Some of these treatises give little more
formal logic than a rather garbled treatment of syllogistic. Few include any
discussion of supposition theory at all, and those that do either give a very
truncated survey, as Sanderson does,2 or put together doctrines that would
have horrified their medieval predecessors.
In fact, these authors were not much interested in formal logic as such.
They were far more interested in the philosophy of logic and language
than in formal logic. On these matters, while they made few if any original
contributions, they carried on the medieval discussion at a high level of
competence and were the means of transmitting some of the characteristic
doctrines of medieval speculative grammar and the philosophical study of
language to the early modern period. This is a matter of some interest
because we can here trace the history of what Chomsky has called
'Cartesian linguistics' from the medieval logicians and grammarians to the
Cartesians themselves.3 Many of the logicians of the period also show some
Ramist influence in their concern for methodological questions. They are
sometimes accused of psychologising logic; but the genuine scholastics - as
opposed to the out-and-out Ramists or the 'mixts' who tried to combine
Aristotle and Ramus - were concerned about an ideal, inner order of
thought, fit to represent the most general formal characteristics of being. In
this their philosophy of logic was no more psychologistic than that of their
medieval predecessors.

The logic of John ofSt Thomas

A well-known logic of the period and the only one that has attracted much
attention in our time is that ofJohn of St Thomas. His logical works were
incorporated during his lifetime in his Cursus philosophicus Thomisticus,
although in his first editions he used such titles as Artis logicae pars prima, de

1. Thomas 1964, pp. 297-311.

2. Sanderson 1640.
3. Chomsky 1966. See Trentman 197s; 1976; also Kretzmann 1975.

dialecticis institutionibus, quas summulas vocant and pars secunda, de instrumentis

logicalibus ex parte materiae.* The 'first part' is a shorter text intended as an
introduction to logic; the 'second part* is a more extensive work for more
mature students of philosophy. It takes up such Aristotelian subjects as the
predicables, the ten categories, and demonstration, including of course an
account of necessary propositions and per se predication.
In his general logic John, unlike most of his contemporaries, includes a
relatively extensive treatment of supposition theory. He very insistently
claims to be a follower of Thomas Aquinas, and it is interesting to com-
pare what he gives of supposition theory with that of an earlier soi-disant
Thomist, Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419).5
John's divisions of supposition are the same as Ferrer's. He has not much
to say about natural supposition, which obtains in necessary propositions
and which Ferrer discussed at very considerable length, but he includes it in
his account, and he also defines simple supposition in the characteristic anti-
Ockhamist way as obtaining when a term stands for what it primarily and
immediately signifies.6 He had no objection whatever to assigning the
property of supposition to predicates as well as subjects. In this he was no
true follower of his master, Aquinas, if Ferrer was right.7 Worse yet, he
makes full use of what the medievals had called 'merely confused sup-
position', which Ferrer had argued does not occur — is, indeed, a merely
confused notion. Furthermore, John uses the notion exactly as Ockham
had done. So at least so far as supposition theory goes John of St Thomas
turns out to be a strange Thomist.8
Noam Chomsky has identified three principal doctrines that characterise
what he calls 'Cartesian linguistics'.9 First, there is a creative aspect of
human language that defies the possibility of mechanistic explanations and
distinguishes our use of language from animal behaviour generally.
Secondly, there are 'grammatical principles' that are universal to all human
languages in the sense that they stand as constraints on possible grammars
of natural languages. Thirdly, one can and must distinguish the deep
structure of language, shared with other rational beings who speak dif-
ferent languages, from the surface structures of these tongues. All these

4. For bibliography see John of St Thomas 1955a.

5. Vincent Ferrer 1977.
6. A good account of these debates can be found in Pinborg 1972.
7. Vincent Ferrer 1977. Cf. Geach 1972; 1961, pp. 76-80. In fact, Aquinas was not consistent on this
point; see Vincent Ferrer 1977, p. 97, n. 1.
8. Cf. Vincent Ferrer 1977, pp. 43 and I4lf.
9. Chomsky 1966.

principles are clearly found in John of St Thomas' logic, but in this he was
only following the long tradition of medieval scholastic study of lan-
guage.10 Indeed, John's insistence that entia rationis of second intention are
the formal object of the study of logic is tantamount to the claim that logic
has to do with structures universal to all rational minds. The logician must
give an account of this internal order and relate it, on the one hand, to the
conventional sounds and marks we produce and, on the other, to the things
in the world we want to talk about. Nothing could be more 'Cartesian'.

Scholastic logics of the seventeenth century

We find the same thing wherever we look in scholastic logics of this period.
Franco Burgersdijck's Institutionum logicum libri duo was widely used
throughout northern Europe and in 1646 was translated into Dutch and
went into 'school editions' in the author's homeland.'' It presents little
formal logic and shows no logical originality. There are signs of Ramist
influence in its concern about questions of method, although its author
records his proper scholastic-revival disapproval of Ramus. On 'Cartesian'
principles, however, Burgersdijck is sound. Much the same can be said of
two other popular logics of the time, the Logica of the Polish Jesuit, Mar-
tin Smiglecki, and the Logicae libri quinque of the Anglican, Richard
Crakanthorpe.12
Much the same can be said of the earlier work of Seton, which was first
printed 'with Peter Carter's annotations' in 1572.13 As a formal logic it is
tedious and uninspired; as philosophy of language it faithfully records the
standard medieval doctrine. Likewise, Edward Brerewood in two logic
texts does little formal logic and none to deserve special notice, but he does
produce a quite interesting discussion of problems in the philosophy of
language that has much in common with Thomas of Erfurt's Grammatica
speculativa.1* A rather more interesting English logic of this period is
Robert Sanderson's Logicae artis compendium.15 Unlike most of his con-
temporaries, Sanderson gives a brief survey of supposition theory; he also
includes as an appendix an interesting survey of the history of logic, in
which he praises the logic of his medieval predecessors but not their Latin

10. Cf. Trentman 1975.

11. See Risse 1964, pp. 515-16, and Guerault 1968.
12. Smiglecki 1634; Crakanthorpe 1622.
13. Seton 1631; cf. Trentman 1976, pp. 180-1 and 184-5.
14. Brerewood 1614 and 1628; cf. Trentman 1976, pp. 187-8.
15. Sanderson 1640.

style. His account of the task of the logician is quite interesting.16 The
logician, using his own appropriate tools, can clarify and make explicit the
structures that may have been hidden in the idiomatic expressions of
everyday speech. This is good medieval doctrine; it also points ahead to
'Cartesian' linguistics in its concern with the inner order of mind and
mental acts.

Late scholastic metaphysics in general

The metaphysics of the late scholastics, like their logic, mixes old and new.
We may note the influence of Ockham and his followers on philosophers
who were by no means Ockhamists and indeed, regarded themselves as
Thomists, as well as the emphasis on the activity of mind and the internal
structure of mental activity. The metaphysics of Francisco Suarez was
particularly prominent and influential.

Suarez on essence and existence

The Suarezian idea that has occasioned the most interest and controversy
through the centuries is his understanding of the distinction between
essence and existence. Suarez inherited the question and its background
from his medieval predecessors. It was the old problem of understanding
the idea of creation and relating the belief in creation to a philosophical
analysis of created being. It is a tenet of orthodox Judaeo-Christian belief
that God exists by his own nature; it is in the very nature of what it means
to be God that God must exist. As it was put, in God essence and existence
are identical. What it means to be a creature is that this is true of no created
thing. For all created things essence must somehow be distinguished from
existence. But how? Suarez distinguishes three possible positions that one
might take in response to this question.'7 First, one can say that for finite
beings existence and essence are really distinct. Suarez expresses this option
in a way that requires its defender to hold that existence and essence are
distinct things; existence is a kind of object {rent quandam distinctam). He says
that this 'seems to be St Thomas' opinion', 18 but he is sure that it is the
opinion of a wide variety of later Thomists including Cajetan. The second
option holds that existence and essence are not really distinct; they are
formally distinct, i.e., existence can be regarded as a mode of essence.
Mention of the formal distinction suggests Scotus, and Suarez identifies
16. Ibid., p. 75.
17. Suarez 1965, 31, I; vol. II, pp. 224-8.
18. 'Haec existimatur esse opinio D. Thotnae'; cf. pp. 225-31.

this position with him. The third opinion is that existence and essence are
only mentally distinct (tantum ratione). According to Suarez, this opinion
was held by Alexander of Hales, Peter Aureoli, Durandus, Gabriel Biel,
and nominalists generally. Suarez asserts that the first two positions are false
and the third true, but true only if the terms are understood in the proper
sense. By 'existence' we must understand 'actual existence' and by 'essence*
'actually existing essence'.19 Understood in this way the existence and
essence of any created being can be regarded as mentally distinct or
mentally distinguishable. For Suarez, then, the distinction has its origin in
the mind; making such distinctions is one of the things that minds do. But
the mind is not at complete liberty to do what it pleases here; while it is
responsible for the distinction, something about the way things are with
finite beings in the world is the occasion for it to make the distinction. The
distinction itself is something that minds do, but their performing such an
action is somehow grounded in things; this is what he means by his
expression 'distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re'. 20

Suarez on individuals and universals

One of the major turning points in the history of western philosophy was
Scotus' formulation of the idea of intuitive cognition. The old problem of
individuation was, crudely, this: given the knowledge of universals, find
the individuals. After Scotus there was a new problem: given the knowl-
edge of individuals, find the universals. Suarez addressed the new problem,
and although he was sharply critical of Scotus, his doctrines of individuality
and universality show their influence throughout Suarez' discussion. All
actually existing things, immediately existing things as distinct from what
can exist only dependently in an individual object, are singular and
individual.21 Furthermore, they can be known in their individuality.
Suarez agreed with Scotus that to say that a thing is individual is to talk
about some thing (aliquid reale) in addition to the nature of the thing, which
is common to many, but he saw no reason for positing a special individ-
uator like the haecceitas to account for this individuality.22 The composite
of form and matter itself contains in its union its own principle of individu-
ation.23 As he puts it, 'the adequate principle of individuation is this matter

19. 31, 1, 13; vol. II, p. 228.

20. 31, 6, 23; vol. II, p. 250. Cf. 7, 1, 4—5; vol. I, p. 251.
21. 5, 1, 4; vol. I, pp. 146-7.
22. 5, 2, 8—9; vol. I, pp. I 5 0 - I .
23- 5, 3; vol. I, pp. 161-75.

and this form in union. The form alone is the sufficient and chief principle
so that the composite, as an individual thing of a certain species, can be
considered numerically one and the same thing'. 24 In many ways this
argumentation in Suarez curiously foreshadows the twentieth-century
debate about so-called bare particulars. Modern logical atomists have
argued that in order to account for the individuality of two things that are
identical in all their nonrelational properties one must posit individuators
that in themselves have no properties (hence their bareness) but ground the
individuality and thereby the distinctness of the things. But the idea of the
bare particular, like that of the Scotist's haecceitas, has a strangeness about it
that does not appeal to many philosophers.25
Suarez certainly did not regard himself as a nominalist. Nevertheless, it is
interesting to notice how close his position on this issue is to Ockham's.26
Again we see that at the heart of Suarez' doctrine there is a strong emphasis
on the activity of the mind. He insists that the unity of the universal is not a
real, extramental unity but a rational unity, a unity imposed by the mind.
But it would be quite wrong to conclude that there is little more than
Ockhamism in his doctrine. Suarez thought minds are no more at liberty to
impose whatever they will on external reality than they are to distinguish
existence and essence without some basis or grounding for the distinction.
Universal words are not names that refer to independent entities in the
world, but acts of minds have an ontological grounding in the structure of
external reality; once more in Suarez we meet the concept cumfundamento
in re.21 In his discussion of universals Suarez often appeals to Aquinas,
picking out for special attention Aquinas' insistence on the creativity of
minds to the possible neglect of other elements in his thought. In the game
whose rules had been drawn up by Scotus, Thomism can be made to look
very much like Ockhamism.
Suarezian individuals, then, are composites of form and matter that
contain in their unity their own principles of individuality. They can be
known directly by the mind, and the mind accounts for what they share
with each other by imposing on them its conceptual scheme, its acts of
universalisation. But its doing so has a ground in reality although not in the
existence of distinct, real things, i.e., extramental universals. Some have
24. ' . . . adaequatum individuationis principium esse hanc materiam et hanc formam inter se unitas,
inter quae praecipuum principium est forma, quae sola sufficit, ut hoc compositum, quatenus est
individuum talis speciei, idem numero censeatur'. 5, 6, 15; vol. I, p. 186.
25. See, e.g., Bergmann 1964.
26. His position is worked out in Dist. 6; vol. I, pp. 201-50. See especially sections 5 and 6; pp. 222-8.
27. 'Universalitas est per intellectum cum fundamento in re.' 6, 5, i; vol. I, p. 222.

said that Suarez gives the mind too much to do, so that he runs the danger,
if he does not indeed succumb to it, of letting the mind have such a creative
function that its hold on external reality is weakened if not lost entirely.
This is the burden of the complaint by some Thomists (whose best known
modern representative is Gilson) that Suarez is a philosopher of essence not
existence, that in contrast with Aquinas he is left with an 'essentialist'
metaphysics.28

Suarez on creation
The distinction between essence and existence, it was noted, was the result
of an attempt to provide a philosophical understanding of what is involved
in the theological doctrine of creation. This doctrine requires that, while it
is in God's nature necessarily to exist, created things exist contingently in
dependence on God's creative action. Furthermore, in his act of creation
God must not be thought to work with any kind of raw material and,
therefore, to bring about a kind of change in individual things. Creating
differs from making. Geach has expressed this difference succinctly in the
following way.29 When we mean to say that God (or anybody, A) makes
something, what we say can be expressed in the form
M — (3x) (A brought it about that x is an F)
To say however that something is created is to say
C — (Not M) and (A brought it about that (3 x) (x is an F))
Thomists maintain that their doctrine meets the principles expressed in this
analysis completely. Suarezians would deny that Suarez' doctrine of exist-
ing essences causes him the theological embarrassment of having provided
God with uncreated material to work with in creation or the philosophical
embarrassment of a proliferation of odd entities. A Thomistic critic would
maintain that if Suarezians insist that the actualised essence is just as
contingent and dependent on God's creative act as the Thomist's created
individual, they only push the difficulty back.30
What is at issue in this dispute can be usefully illuminated by making
some more modern comparisons. Suarez certainly insists that no created
being exists necessarily. We can think of essences abstracted from their
existence, but in actuality essence and existence cannot exist separately.
Indeed, for Suarez such a supposition makes no sense. Just as it is absurd to
suppose that essence without existence would leave some existing thing as a
28. Gilson 1952, pp. 96-120.
29. Geach 1969, pp. 75-85.
30. Gilson 1952, p. 104.

remainder, so it is absurd to suppose that before God brought it about that

there was this particular actually existing essence there was some part of it;
in denying the real distinction Suarez supposed that he was denying that
such part-whole talk makes sense. Nevertheless, one can think of essence in
abstraction from its existence.

Suarez on possibility and reality

This brings us back to another important Suarezian distinction. Suarez main-

tains that we can talk about being in two different ways, distinguished,
he claims, by the use of a noun (esse) and the use of a participle (ens). The
use of the noun signifies what has a genuine essence whether it actually
exists or not; the use of the participle indicates the act of existence, and by it
we understand that the thing in question actually exists.31 Moreover,
corresponding to this distinction between two ways to talk about being,
Suarez distinguishes two senses of the term 'real'. It can mean 'capable of
existing in the real world', i.e., possibly producible by a cause; something
real in this sense has 'objective potential being', which in turn means that
we can think of its possibly existing. The second sense of 'real', which
Suarez calls its 'proper' sense, is 'actually existing in the real world'. 32 All
this talk of worlds and the real world, actual beings and possible beings
reminds one of Leibniz, who was after all a great admirer of Suarez. It also
reminds one of Leibniz' modern followers who use the language of set
theory to talk about necessity, contingency, and possibility. It is no ac-
cident that some of these tools can easily be made to work with Suarez'
ideas.
We can think of a possible world as an overall state of affairs, the way
things can be or could have been. Obviously, things are and have been a
certain way, but they could have been different. There will be individual
beings that exist in the various possible worlds, some in all, others only in
some possible worlds. Suarez would maintain that God exists in all possible
worlds but Francisco Suarez, for instance, only in some. These beings have
properties in the various worlds, and the properties they have in the various
worlds may of course be described by propositions. In distinguishing his
two senses of'being', Suarez points out that a real essence signified by the
noun 'esse' is something that may not but could exist in the real world. By

31. Suarez 1965, 2, 4, 9; vol. I, p. 90.

32. 31, 2, 1; vol. II, p. 229. Also 31, 2, 10; vol. II, p. 232.

this he means to rule out two possibilities. First, a real essence must be
something that can be coherently thought; 'the round square', 'the thing
that both is F and is not F' cannot designate real essences. So the idea of
possibility utilised in his concept of objective potential being must, first of
all, mean what is in a broad sense logically possible; the round square exists
in no possible world. Secondly, Suarez means to rule out pure flights of
fancy. According to Suarez, fictional characters have no sort of being, not
even possible being,33 and things like the chimera are not possible beings.
Because certain properties are essential to the nature of what we call goats,
no goat can have a lion's head and a serpent's tail; therefore, no such things
can be truly said to exist in any possible world.
Real essences exist in possible worlds, but obviously not all of them exist
in the actual world. We can clearly think of objects that are describable in
logically coherent ways, are not fictional characters, are of such a nature
that they could exist in the actual world; but they do not. Do they yet have
some kind of being or reality? Such things are real in the sense of'having
objective potential being', not in the sense of'actually existing in the real
world'. But this is too quick, Suarez' critic will say. Surely everything that
exists in a possible world exists, is real, in that world; the so-called actual
world, which we may designate W + , is only one element in the set of
worlds W. Why should we give such prominence to one member of the
set? For any world, W, to say 'This individual x exists in W is tantamount
to saying 'X actually exists in W ; to say 'x exists in W + ' , therefore, is to say
'x actually exists in W + >. How does this give any preferred status to W + ,
which we have chosen to call the 'actual world'? It looks as if
(A) This is the actual world
is logically equivalent to
(B) This world is this world.
Plantinga's response to this kind of objection is very much to the point in
discussing Suarez. Plantinga argues that the objector's conclusion is based
on a mistake. B is obviously tautologically true; but if A means ' W + is the
actual world', it is contingently true. 34 This is exactly Suarez' point; God
has chosen to make this world the actual world, and there's an end on't.
Why he chose to create what he chose to create we shall never know and is
none of our business. As a matter of contingent fact he created the actual
world.

33. 31, 2, 2; vol. II, p. 229. Cf. Plantinga 1974, pp. 153-63.
34. Plantinga 1974, pp. 49-51-

The concept of natural law in late scholasticism

Both Suarez himself and also the other philosophers of the scholastic
revival are probably better known for their contributions to theories of
natural law than for their metaphysics. It has often been thought that their
doctrines of natural law developed in a more and more secularistic direc-
tion, culminating in Grotius' famous comment that the natural law would
still hold and oblige us even if God did not exist. But it is anachronistic to
read this sort of secularisation into Grotius, and those who do so often show
no awareness of the context of Grotius' remark or, indeed, of exactly what
he wrote. He certainly thought God required things and forbade others
because they were in and of themselves right or wrong, and he also thought
it makes no sense to say that God can change the natural law; but he tells us
that the speculation that, even if God did not exist, the natural law would
hold cannot be considered without the most profane wickedness (quod sine
summo scelere dari nequit)35 - hardly the remark of a secular moralist. Later
natural-law theorists may seriously have tried to secularise the theory; in
the period under consideration here the changes in natural-law theory
were different. In fact, they directly parallel the changes we have noted in
the philosophy of language and in metaphysics. Again we see the influence
of Scotus, Ockham, and the Ockhamist tradition on people who were at
some pains to refute Ockhamism, and we see the shift of interest from
order in external nature to an internal order in the minds of rational beings.
And it can also be claimed that few if any of the raw materials of this
philosophy of law and morals were original. Indeed, in the thought of
Thomas Aquinas (and in that of his followers down to the present) there
has always been a certain tension between the extent to which the precepts
of natural law are seen to be read off the order of external nature and the
extent to which minds are illuminated in an Augustinian fashion to know
them. The complex and difficult doctrine of synderesis is adequate testi-
mony to this tension. What happens in the period under consideration is
that the illumination theme tends to assume ever greater prominence at the
expense of confidence in finding the precepts of natural law in an external
order.

Richard Hooker on natural law

Of course, not everyone moved so far so quickly, and within the period
itself we can see this tension working itself out. A good place to start is with
35. Grotius 1853, Prolegomena.

Richard Hooker. Hooker is in many ways a typical product of the north-

ern scholastic revival. He has often been regarded as a transitional figure,
and so he is; but in comparison with others I shall consider shortly, like
Suarez, Holdsworth, and Grotius, he is a man who is constantly looking
back over his shoulder. To put it in his own language, we can say that he
would prefer to inquire 'into the causes of goodness' (by which he means
Aristotelian aitiai), but 'this present age full of tongue and weak of brain'
forces us to settle for second best.36 There is a theological as well as a
philosophical presupposition behind this. Hooker was explicitly reacting
against the doctrines of English Calvinists, who held a low view of the
possibilities for natural knowledge and whom C. S. Lewis aptly charac-
terised as Barthians.37 Luther was little better help; he thought our minds
had capacities sufficient only for recognising that we were sinners and
needed salvation. Melanchthon, who was an Aristotelian and in many
ways a kind of precursor to the later Aristotelian revival, was unable to
improve on this gloomy diagnosis by much. It is the theological problem
of the consequences of the Fall for human knowledge that sets the task for
later protestant defenders of natural law and provides the context of
Hooker's revival of natural law. What can the human mind know of law
and morals on its own without God's grace and revelation? He thinks we
should (in principle) be able to have something like an Aristotelian science
of morals, but it is uncertain how far he actually thought a demonstrative
science of morals a real possibility. He is content to argue that certain
general (mostly formal) principles of natural law are self-evidently known
to us. Otherwise we must go by 'signs and tokens to know good'. 38 As for
these signs and tokens, Hooker lays great stress on what he calls the
'universal consent of men', 39 that these Laws of Reason are generally
known - 'the world hath always been acquainted with them'. 40 In a later
age defenders of kinds of natural-law doctrine commonly appealed to the
supposed fact that all men agreed about certain obligations and pro-
hibitions, while opponents thought the discovery of apparent exceptions
constituted a refutation of such claims. Hooker, however, certainly did not
appeal to any nose-count, nor can one imagine him with a tally-board
recording responses to questionnaires. Indeed, he hedges his appeal to

36. Hooker 1977,1, viii, 2.

37. Lewis 1954, p. 449-
38. Hooker 1977,1, viii, 3.
39. Ibid.
40. I, viii, 9.

universality with a number of crucial qualifications. Children, innocents,

and madmen get no vote;41 indeed, it is those 'having natural perfection of
wit and ripeness ofjudgement' who are to be listened to. 42 It is those who
comprehend the principles of natural law by the light of natural under-
standing, Melancthon's lumen naturale and Aquinas' synderesis.
Hooker, however, has no truck with voluntarism; 'They err therefore
who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides
his will.' 43 We may not know the reason for the precepts of natural law,
but we are to be assured that there is one; God in his unsearchable counsel
knows the right and rational order of things, knows it to be good, and
consequently wills accordingly.
Suarez and Vasquez on natural law
The problem I have introduced was at the heart of the controversy
between Suarez and one of his countrymen, Vasquez, who like Hooker
had a hankering for an independently knowable external order. Vasquez
maintained that the natural law is identical with rational nature, by which
he meant that good acts are those that conform to the ideal nature of human
beings and bad acts are those that violate it. This nature is objectively
knowable and constitutes the foundation of all law and morals.44 Suarez
objected that all this is false to the meaning of the term 'law'. Law in itself is
a matter of will, and Suarez defines 'law' as 'an act of a just and right will by
which a superior wills to oblige his inferiors to do this or that'.45 Will,
therefore, is essential to the meaning of 'law', which definition identifies
Suarez' doctrine with the tradition of medieval voluntarism. But the
divine will is not the sole basis of morality. Will is essential to law, but
God's will attaches to what is intrinsically good and his prohibitions to
what is intrinsically bad in the nature of things. Gregory of Rimini had
held that the natural law is not prescriptive but demonstrative of the order
of things; Ockham (as Suarez interprets him) had held that good is simply
what God wills and God is free to attach his will to anything that can be
consistently described. Suarez aims at avoiding both extremes. Will is
essential to the concept of law, but God's will is not arbitrary; He wills
what is in the nature of things good.
41. I, vii, 4.
42. I, viii, 9.
43- I, "• 5-
44. Vasquez 1620, disp. 150, 3; cf. q. 94, ar. 2 and q. 94, ar. 5.
45. Suarez 1944,1, 5 , 2 4 , ' . . . actum voluntatis iustae et rectae, quo superior vult inferiorem obligare
ad hoc, vel illud faciendum.'

In support of this via media Suarez offers an important, influential

argument. Aristotle contends in the Ethics (1107*8-27) that some actions or
passions do not admit of an extreme; they are described by names that in
and of themselves imply badness. Aristotle's examples are spite, envy,
shamelessness, adultery, theft, murder. If an action or passion is truly
described in one of these ways, there can be no debate about when, where,
how to perform the action or indulge the passion; it has already been
condemned in the description. Suarez attributes the same doctrine to a
wide variety of authors including the Ockhamist, Gabriel Biel.46 In
fact, Ockham himself gave a certain prominence to this Aristotelian
argument.47

Richard Holdsworth on natural law

An author who gives this argument a central significance in his doctrine of
natural law is Richard Holdsworth, a seventeenth-century English theolo-
gian. Holdsworth was very influential in his own time but has since been
almost entirely forgotten.48 Holdsworth was very much a product of the
scholastic revival, and although he was not only an Anglican but associated
with the Puritans, he readily acknowledged his debt to Suarez and other
scholastics. He went to some pains to try to explicate and use the scholastic
notion of synderesis, but he was unsatisfied either with an appeal to our
supposed awareness of an external order or with any sort of intuitionist
claim that we all really know in our hearts what is right and wrong. Rather
he appeals to Aristotle's argument and adds that anyone who can under-
stand a description expressed in terms of one of Aristotle's 'bad names'
must (assuming him to be in his right mind) be embarrassed and insulted.
Thus to call a person a perjurer, he claims, is to describe his actions in such a
way that the description is as good as an insult. Anyone truly so described is
properly insulted (or corrected, or brought to repentance). Here we see the
basis of natural law sought in a kind of linguistic fact, the fact that certain
concepts not only describe acts but imply a condemnation of anyone
whose doings can be truthfully described by them. As Holdsworth puts it,
this is in effect the voice of nature itself pronouncing judgement on one
who does these things (Natura ipsa clatnat quod malunt sit, Naturae Lex

46. Suarez 1944, II, vi, 11.

47. William Ockham 1495-6, III, 12, d. 16; cf. McGrade 1964, p. 190, and Trentman 1978, pp. 2 9 -
39-
48. See, e.g., Curtis 1959, and Hill 1965. Holdsworth's lectures were edited and put out by his nephew
after the restoration (Holdsworth 1661).

arguit.)*9 What this means, according to Holdsworth, is that natural law is

founded in the nature of things, but not in any natural order we can readily
observe around us; rather it is found in what he calls 'integral nature', an
ideal order, which has only left us its traces.50 These traces are to be found
in language, in concepts that all rational beings share whatever their
national languages. In this way natural law is an expression of the com-
munity of language users, which of course presupposes that all human
beings as such share certain concepts. This sharing constitutes a community
that in principle unites all human beings and provides them with a rather
tenuous link with integral nature; here, in Holdsworth's terminology, we
find the vestigia of ideal order.

Natural law and the order of nature

What has become of the external order of nature? Hooker, for all his
qualifications, still felt confident enough to assert'... God being the author
of Nature, her voice is but his instrument. By her from Him we receive
whatsoever in such sort we learn.' S1 The new scholasticism as represented
by such thinkers as Suarez and Holdsworth had far more in common with
another contemporary, John Donne, whose well-known lines express his
feeling about the effect of'new philosophy':
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply, and all Relation.52
In the response of the new scholastics to a picture of the world from which
all coherence was gone we see the themes I have been stressing come
together. As I have noted, Suarez, following the Ockhamist tradition,
insisted that will is essential to the concept of law. Likewise Holdsworth
rejects what he calls the traditional jurists' definition of natural law - that
natural law is what Nature, teaches all living beings. First, he insists that
natural law is essentially about prescriptions for human beings; secondly,
he is sceptical about Nature's directly teaching anything. We need our
reasons, expressed in our linguistic competence and use, to reflect an ideal,

49. Holdsworth 1661, lect. xxviii, pp. 247-8. It might be noted that it would be both anachronistic
and too crude to interpret this in terms of analyticity or, worse, some vague idea of what is 'true
by definition'; it is the nature of the acts in question that requires necessary connections in our
thought.
50. Holdsworth 1661, p. 246.
51. Hooker 1977,1, viii, 3.
52. 'The First Anniversarie* in John T. Shawcross (ed.), The Complete Poetry ofJohn Donne, New
York University Press, 1968, p. 278.

divinely ordered order to make sense of any kind of lawfulness.53

Incidentally, it should be obvious that the natural-law doctrines of these
authors do no violence to the principle of the autonomy of ethics under-
stood as the rule that ethical conclusions cannot be derived from admit-
tedly non-ethical premisses.54 Indeed, they insist that the right ordering of
rational wills is at the heart of the definition of law.
This account of the scholastic revival has in a way come full circle in that
we find the doctrine of natural law rooted in an internal order to be found
in what is innate in all minds. What is innate is an ordered conceptual
scheme shared by all rational beings, and this idea is explicated in terms of
the 'Cartesian' doctrines in the philosophy of language, inherited from the
logicians and speculative grammarians of the Middle Ages.

Hugo Grotius on natural law

As a final example of the new scholastic doctrine of natural law, we can
turn to Grotius. Much that he says in the Prolegomena to his Dejure belli et
pads sounds very like the theories of Suarez and Holdsworth I have just
discussed. The idea of natural law or natural right is based not on general
ideas of order in nature but on an analysis of human nature. Human beings
naturally desire to live in society. This is no news; everybody in the
scholastic tradition would have agreed with Plato and Aristotle about this.
Grotius accounts for it, however, by appealing to the fact that language-use
is a differentia of human beings, and society is based on linguistic
community. Furthermore, Grotius' arguments about the species-specific
characteristics of language use are almost identical to Descartes'.55 One can
see that the raw materials for the new scholasticism were all very old. It was
the proportion, the emphasis, that was new, but this produced a distinc-
tively different-looking result, a result that looks much more like what we
call early modern philosophy.

The survival of scholasticism in the universities

Obviously the transition from medieval to modern philosophy was neither
so smooth nor so evident as this may suggest. First, at least some Aris-
totelian texts continued to hold a prominent place in the curriculum
for a very long time. How seriously they were taken and how they were

53. Holdsworth 1661, pp. 239-40.

54. Cf. a similar point made about Aquinas in Donagan 1969.
55. Grotius 1660; cf. Descartes, Rene (1897 & 1913). Discours de la mtlhaie in Charles Adam and Paul
Tannery, Oeuvres de Descartes, vol. vi, Cerf, pp. 56-9.

read and studied we shall soon consider. Secondly, many of the formalities
of medieval scholastic university training - the lecture, the disputation,
other scholastic acts or exercises — continued to be observed, at least after a
fashion, until quite recent times; indeed, their traces are obviously still with
us. Thirdly, the works of medieval philosophers continued to be printed
and came out in new editions. Fourthly, and most important, despite
superficial continuities, the most influential and most read scholastic works
in the seventeenth century and thereafter were not Aristotelian texts, nor
the works of medieval scholastics, but the new textbooks. They were the
main vehicle for transmitting scholasticism to the succeeding centuries.
This may be a cause for lament, since what was criticised as medieval
scholastic doctrine may often have been a demonstrably garbled account
by a seventeenth-century textbook-writer.
Little need here be said about the continuation of Aristotelian texts in
university curricula. The texts prescribed tended often to be Aristotle's
scientific works rather than what we should call the philosophical works,
although the Nkomachean Ethics turns up with some frequency in lists of
prescribed books. Whether the logical works do or do not appear de-
pended perhaps on the degree to which the institution prescribing the
books had been influenced by Ramism. Aristotle's philosophical works
were rarely allowed to speak for themselves, however. In most lists of
prescribed books or directions for students drawn up in the seventeenth
century Aristotelian works are accompanied by some of the new textbooks
to 'explain' them. One suspects that while lip service was given to Aristotle
for a long time, it was the explanations by textbook-writers that were read.
The continued reprinting of works by medieval scholastic authors poses
a similar problem. Even leaving out of account reprints in Roman
Catholic countries, where the influence of the commitments of religious
orders was instrumental, the number of new editions and reprints through-
out the seventeenth and into the eighteenth century is astounding. Who
read these books? They generally do not appear in reading-lists for stu-
dents. Of course, they were available in university libraries, and we know
from catalogues of personal libraries that they were evidently bought by
individual scholars. Yet they seem not to have influenced them very much.
One example might help to make this point. Ockham's Summa logicae
appeared in a new printing in Oxford in 1675,56 but it is very hard to find
any evidence that the book found perceptive readers who made much of its

56. Printed by O. Walker, Oxford.

contents. Formal logic was in a dreary state; Sanderson, perhaps the best of
a bad lot, gives only a very superficial treatment of supposition theory.57
Furthermore, there is little trace in the period of the medieval theory of
consequences; the formal logic is once again syllogistic, not infrequently
garbled. What then did people make of the medieval texts that kept
coming out in new editions? Very little, it seems. They were too busy
reading the new textbooks.

The shift from scholastic commentaries to modern treatises

Where medieval philosophers had commonly worked out their doctrine in
the course of commentaries, either on the works of Aristotle or on the
Sentences of Peter Lombard, the scholastics of the early seventeenth century
took to writing systematic treatises on their own. Suarez' Disputationes
metaphysicae was a prominent example of the new style, a work that aimed
at a systematic treatment of the subject, full of references to other philos-
ophers, to be sure, but organised according to its author's view of a
methodical, systematic presentation of the subject rather than as a com-
mentary on what others had written. The Disputationes metaphysicae hardly
looks like a text for beginners, but the systematic style could easily be used
both for general and purportedly exhaustive treatments of a subject and for
introductions aimed at beginning students. One of the most popular
writers of such textbooks in northern Europe was Franco Burgersdijck,
who produced texts on every branch of philosophy which were very
widely read in the seventeenth century. Another such person was
Bartholomew Keckermann. It was authors like these who were most
widely read and who represented scholasticism to most people in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately, not only were they
not very original, they did not always understand or adequately transmit
the doctrine they had inherited from the Middle Ages.
The best way to get an impression of what in fact was being read in the
universities of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is to examine
a guide for students. An excellent one for our purposes is the Directionsfor a
Student in the Vniversitie by Richard Holdsworth.58 We know that the

57. Sanderson 1640.

58. Holdsworth, Richard (1648?), Directions for a Student in the Vniversitie, Emmanuel College
(Cambridge) MS 48; reprinted in H. F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, 1061,
University of Illinois Press, vol. 11, pp. 623-55. Cf. Bodleian MS Rawlinson D200; in a forth-
coming paper I argue that its ascription of the work to John Merryweather is mistaken.
Trentman, J. A. 'The Authorship of the Seventeenth-century Cambridge Directionsfora Student
in the Vniversitie', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society.

Directions not only represents university education during its author's

lifetime but also for at least fifty years after his death. When Josiah Barnes
(1654-1712), Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge University from
1695 until his death, wrote his own directions and advice to students,59 in
the middle of it he copied out the whole of Holdsworth's Directions as
giving the essence of what he had to say. What Holdsworth prescribed was
clearly still being followed or at least urged sixty years later.
It is interesting to note how similar in certain general principles and
presuppositions the Directions is to the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum of 1599. Both
show the influence of humanism in their emphasis on the study of ancient
languages and, further, their emphasis on writing and speaking 'good'
Latin, i.e., the Latin of Cicero and Quintilian. With this a wide range .of
Greek and Latin literature is prescribed. And, of course, both include much
moral and religious counsel. For both, however, the study of philosophy is
rooted firmly in scholastic Aristotelianism. Holdsworth supposes that the
serious student will read all of Aristotle (in Greek, of course) and all of both
of Aquinas' Summae, but what is much more interesting is how he thinks
these things should be read and where his real emphasis lies. Concerning
philosophical controversies (the successors of the medieval disputations),
which are to be a primary concern of the third year of university study,
Holdsworth writes, 'The reading of Aristotle, will not only conduce much
to your study of Controversy, being read with a Comentator, but all so help
you in Greeke, & indeed crown all your other learning, for he can hardly
deserve the name of a Scholar, that is not in some measure acquainted with
his works.' 60 The important phrase here is 'being read with a Comentator',
and much more space is given in the Directions to the commentators than to
Aristotle and medieval scholastics put together. It is useful here simply to
note who some of these authors were. In logic Burgersdijck is most highly
praised, but we are directed also to Brierwood, Eustachius, Smiglesius,
the Complutenses and the Conimbricenses, Crakanthorpe, Kecker-
mann, Molinaeus, and Sanderson.61 In ethics Burgersdijck again, Golius,

59. Emmanuel College (Cambridge) MS 179.

60. Holdsworth 1648 (?), p. 33.
61. Brerewood (Brierwood) 1614 and 1628. Eustachius (a Sancto Paulo) (1609), Summaphilosophiae
quadripartita, Paris. Smiglesius: Smiglecki 1634. Complutenses: the Carmelite professors of the
University of Alcala (formerly Complutum) published a Cursus Artium there in 1624; the author
of the Logic was Diego de Jesus. Conimbricenses: a similar group-venture produced by the Jesuit
professors at the university of Coimbra in Portugal; they wrote a variety of commentaries
and a Cursus philosophicus. Crakanthorpe 1622, Keckermann, Bartholomew (1613), Systema
Syslematum, Hanover. Molinaeus: du Moulin, Pierre (1603), Elementa logica, Antwerp, Sanderson
1640.

Eustachius, Morisanus;62 in metaphysics Scheibler, Fonseca, Eustachius,

Suarez, 'or the like'.63 These were the authors that both students and
teachers of philosophy read. And there is abundant evidence that the spirit
and even many of the details of the Ratio studiorum and Holdsworth's
Directions were widely characteristic of university training in western
Europe into the eighteenth century. The pity is that scholasticism was not
represented in the universities either by the best medieval philosophers or
even very often by the more interesting late scholastics. Indeed, Holds-
worth himself wrote more interesting things than many of the authors he
recommends to students.64 Instead scholasticism was transmitted to later
generations by philosophical hacks like Burgersdijck and Keckermann or
ill-tempered clerics like Crakanthorpe. It is little wonder that real scholastic
insights were misunderstood and that Aristotelian scholasticism was often
'refuted' by ignoratio elenchi.

62. Burgersdijck,Franco (1623), Idea Morati Phihsophiae,Leyden. Golius,Theophilus (1631), Epitome

doctrinae moralis, Argentorati (i.e. Strasbourg). Eustachius 1609. Morisanus: Morisan, Bernard
(162s), Commentarii et disputationes in Hbros logicos, physicos, el ethicos Aristotelis, Frankfort.
63. Scheibler, Christoph (1628), Philosophia compendiosa, Oxford. Fonseca, Petrus da (1577),
Commentariorum ...in libra metaphysicorum Aristotelis, R o m e . Eustachius 1609. Suarez 1965.
64. Holdsworth was, however, very reluctant to see his writings published. The only thing to come
out in his lifetime was his sermon "The Valley of Vision', which was printed as a pamphlet after,
he says, he was three times begged to allow its distribution. It appeared in more permanent form
shortly after his death in Holdsworth, Richard (1651), The Valley of Vision, London.