Man of Spain: Francis Suarez. by Joseph H.

Fichter
Review by: Floyd N. House
American Sociological Review, Vol. 6, No. 6 (Dec., 1941), p. 903
Published by: American Sociological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2085775 .
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 BOOK REVIEWS 903
tion so satisfactory, for it sets up boundaries to thought. Schwer recognizes
this when he says: " . . . a Christian philosopher is bound by limits which
his philosophical thinking cannot pass. He must accept certain final truths
as already decided" (p. 66). The "Christian scientist" is similarly bound,
he cannot "move freely"; and, in addition, his attention area is limited
(although, on the other hand, he is sensitized to certain data).
In the third place, Schwer has several fine passages on the history of
social thought, particularly its Christian sources. Chapter Two is especially
good in this regard.
In general, the title of the book, Catholic Social Theory, reveals where its
value rests. It is not, as Schwer recognizes and as Mueller notes in the
Preface, a treatise on sociology and should not be taken for one.
J. MILTON YINGER
Ohio Wesleyan University
Man of Spain: Francis Suarez. By JOSEPH H. FICHTER,S.J. New York:
Macmillan, I940. Pp. viii+349. $2.50.
Francis Suarez (I548-i6I7), Spanish Jesuit theologian and writer on the
philosophy of law and government, was an outstanding representative-
perhaps the most outstanding representative-of a brilliant period in the
intellectual history of Spain. He was a younger contemporary of the better-
known French writer, Jean Bodin (I 530-I 596), and of his countryman Juan
de Mariana (1536-i623), who is classified with the sixteenth century anti-
monarchists, and to whose De Rege et Regis Institutione (i 598) certain works
of Suarez published in i6i2 and i6i3 bear some resemblance. Suarez shares
with his anti-monarchist predecessors and with a long line of scholastic
writers the credit of having laid down the doctrine of government by con-
sent long before it was enunciated in the American Declaration of Inde-
pendence. His Disputationes Metaphysicae (I597) has been described as
"the last great study of scholastic philosophy, [which] helped to prepare the
way for neo-scholasticism."
For a summary of Suarez' contributions to social thought, the ordinary
non-Catholic student will find Dunning's account in Political Theories:
From Luther to Montesquieu,and Wright's article on Suarez in Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences more useful than the present volume, which is an
interesting, readable, biography of the great Jesuit scholar, sympathetically
but candidly written by a Jesuit scholar of our day.
FLOYD N. HouSE
University of Virginia
La Verdad,La Ciencia y La Filosofia; (Tratado de Euristica Razonada). By
FRANCISCO JAVIER A. BELGODERE. Mexico: Francisco Marruenda, Li-
breria"Pharos,"I939. Pp. 262.
Acting on the assumption that where there is disagreement, there is also
ignorance, the author of this Treatise of Rational Heuristics seeks to prove
(a) the existence of Absolute Truth, and (b) that this Truth is necessarily
and eternally beyond the ken of man.

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