BOOK REVIEWS 645

Some of the last papers in this book take us outside Protestant Germany. Marc R.
Forster examines the Catholic areas of the country after 1650. He traces the triumph of
the great families of prince-bishops, such as the Schönborns, but shows that, from the
second half of the seventeenth century, the force of confessionalisation began to wane
before ‘the tendency to employ the tools of persuasion and propaganda, combined with
increased bureaucratization’. The élites became more inclined towards tolerance and
the peasantry and townspeople more and more imbedded in Catholic culture, ‘a
dynamic Baroque religiosity with strong elements of popular participation that caused
confessional loyalties to be internalized by the wider population’. With papers on the
situation in France and England, and with Gordon Bruce’s article on John Dury’s
mission to the Swiss Reformed Churches, an episode that ‘brings into relief the fluidity
of religious positions during the prevailing orthodoxy and the central place occupied by
personal contact and friendships in confessional relations’, we leave Germany
altogether, and the concept of confessionalisation is examined in a still broader context.

The Warburg Institute, London Alastair Hamilton

On Creation, Conservation & Concurrence, Metaphysical Disputations 20–22. By Francisco

Suarez (translated and introduction by A. J. Freddoso). Pp. cxxiii, 267,
St Augustine’s Press, Indiana, 2002, $45.00.

Still largely unknown to English speaking readers, Francisco Suarez (1548–1617) is at

last beginning to receive the recognition that he deserves. Arguably one of the leading
intellectuals of his day, his contributions to philosophy and theology helped to shape
the form and content of the Catholic Counter Revolution. Suarez’s influence extended
from philosophy to politics where his criticisms of royal power led to the public
burning of his works in London and Paris. Love him or hate him, the intellectual
clarity which he applied to his work gave his writings a power and significance which
meant that they could not be ignored.
Yet less than 400 years later, Suarez is all but forgotten by mainstream philosophy and
theology. The reasons for this lie largely in the medium of his thought. Suarez learned his
theology from Thomas Aquinas and thoroughly imbued the scholastic format of
expression which he used as the vehicle for his thought. Unfortunately scholasticism
became one of the very defining characteristics of what many protestant figures thought
was wrong with the pre-reformation church, and so whilst Protestant writers had to take
Suarez’s ideas seriously, they quickly lost interest in his actual writings.
Amongst Catholic writers Suarez faired better, but ironically the revival of Thomism
marked the beginning of a decline in his significance. Initially Suarez’s writings drew
attention because of their ability to explain Aquinas’ work, but as more emphasis came
to be put upon retrieving Thomas and stripping his thought from the layers of
commentary and gloss that commentators had put upon it, commentators such as
Suarez began to be less read. With the tendency for many Catholic theologians to
abandon Thomism itself, during the period following Vatican II (1965), Suarez’s writings
have seemed less and less relevant. And so they have become less and less appreciated.
Freddoso takes a different view of the matter and presents a Suarez of subtlety who
demonstrates his ability to engage with the very questions that interest contemporary
philosophers and theologians. Allowed to speak for himself in one of the few English
translations of any of his works, Suarez’s philosophical perspicuity and theological
clarity is once again clear for all to see.
With his writings running to 28 large volumes of the Vives edition, Suarez’
output was prodigious and the overwhelming majority of it still remains in Latin. This
646 BOOK REVIEWS

translation focuses on the small part of Suarez’ Metaphysical Disputations which

deals with divine (efficient) causation. This is a significant portion of his thought as
it has a direct bearing on theological questions about God’s creation and conserv-
ation of the world, and about God’s knowledge of future contingent events.
Controversial in his own day, and still very much debated today, this portion of
Suarez’s work will be of direct interest to contemporary students of the philosophy of
religion.
In this volume Freddoso has combined a clear accurate translation with over 100
pages of introductory notes, in which he sets Suarez within his intellectual and
historical context. The translation is colloquial and presents Suarez’s thought in very
readable sentences such as where he is rendered as saying, ‘ . . . as I see it, this proof is
utterly evident to a well-disposed intellect . . .’ (p. 115). The notes are also detailed and
intended to engage fully with contemporary analytic philosophical concerns,
particularly those about causation.
Suarez insisted strongly that every single action depends on God utterly, for its
origination and production, but yet there was still room for free will. In his view God’s
role is one of ‘concurrence’, as divine causation and human agency occur
simultaneously, or ‘concurrently’ as he himself preferred to put it. Precisely what
concurrence is meant to be was a much debated issue in his own day and it still
remains a difficult idea to unpack. For concurrence to take place it means that an
action has both God and the agent as equally and directly responsible for the action,
although responsible in their own particular respects. Taking the general Jesuit
concern with what he and his colleagues took to be an almost Predestinarianism in
contemporary Dominican theology, he insisted very strongly upon the agent
continuing to have the freedom to refrain from acting when bringing about an
event. So God’s causal role in concurrently willing the event that a human agent
brings about must be conditional upon the agent’s freely deciding to will the act,
otherwise the agents freedom would be removed.
Although concurrence sounds initially as if it will explain how God and humans can
be acting in bringing about the same event, ultimately it is unclear whether it ever
manages to resolve the logical problem that lies at the heart of all accounts of divine
‘foreknowledge’. For an act to be genuinely human and carry moral responsibility the
logical priority in initiating the act must lie with the human agent. For an act to be
genuinely ‘caused’ by God, or ‘causally foreknown’ in some sense, the logical priority
seems to have to lie with God. What makes the problem of divine foreknowledge such
an intractable problem is how to reconcile what seem to be competing claims for
logical priority. This remains a problem for contemporary philosophers and it is not
clear that Suarez’ approach provides a solution.
If, on Suarez’s account, God’s decision to concurrently will a specific act into
actuality depends upon his knowledge of what the human agent wants to will, then
Suarez is indeed defending the freewill of the agent but at the cost of making the
agent’s will logically prior to God’s own will. And this of course, as his Dominican
critics were quick to point out, makes it very difficult to reconcile concurrence with an
utterly immutable God who knows future free acts by causing them.
Freddoso gives a clear translation and explanation of Suarez, and we should be
grateful if he was doing nothing more than making a significant Latin text available in
English. Nevertheless he goes on to argue that Suarez’s insights have implications
for contemporary philosophers and the problem of divine knowledge of future
contingents. Whether he is right in this additional claim is less evident, but as a result
of this translation it is at least now possible for contemporary students to explore the
matter for themselves.

Cambridge Rory Fox