Calle de Francisco Suárez

No one would have bet on the novice who joined the Society of Jesus in 1564. He was rejected at first for seeming dim, and only admitted on trial. That boy from Granada, born in 1548, became the most influential theologian of his order and one of the great names of scholasticism after Thomas Aquinas. Francisco Suárez taught in Segovia, Valladolid, Rome, Alcalá, and Salamanca before settling at the University of Coimbra, where he spent nearly twenty years. His contemporaries called him Doctor Eximius, the exceptional doctor, and his work filled dozens of volumes of metaphysics, theology, and law. From this comes his most lasting mark. Suárez held that the power to govern comes from God but is placed in the people, not in the king by direct line, an idea that centuries later fed the Spanish American independence leaders trained in Jesuit classrooms. When he wrote against the religious claims of James I, his treatise was publicly burned in London. He died in Lisbon in 1617.