SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Pope Paul III in 1540 In addition to the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience taken by all members of religious orders, the Jesuits took a further vow of unquestioning loyalty to the papacy Its members soon distinguished themselves in educational and missionary work in many parts of the world In Europe they were happy to risk martyrdom in the Counter-Reformation cause; in America, India, and China they showed more sympathy with indigenous religions than many other Christian proselytizers, Catholic or Protestant In philosophy and theology in the universities they were soon able to compete with the long-established religious orders such as the Franciscans and Dominicans They promoted a new and, as they saw it, improved version of scholasticism Whereas medieval scholastics had based their university lectures upon canonical texts such as the works of Aristotle and the Sentences of Peter Lombard,8 Jesuits in universities began to replace commentaries with selfstanding courses in philosophy and theology By the early seventeenth century this pattern was adopted by Dominicans and Franciscans, and this led to a sharper distinction between philosophy and theology than had been common earlier The pioneer of this movement to reform philosophy into independent textbook form was the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez, whose Disputationes Metaphysicae (1597) were the Wrst such systematic treatment of scholastic metaphysics Born in Granada in 1548, Suarez joined the Society of Jesus in 1564 and spent the whole of his professional life as a university professor, lecturing at six diVerent universities in Spain and in the Jesuit college in Rome He was a devout and erudite man, and in terms of sheer intellectual power he has a strong claim to be the most formidable philosopher of the sixteenth century In the history of philosophy, however, he does not have a place commensurate to his gifts, for two reasons First, most of his work is a restatement and reWnement of medieval themes, rather than an exploration of new territory Second, as a writer he was not only proliWc, leaving behind a corpus that Wlls twenty-eight volumes, but also prolix and tedious In so far as he had an inXuence on subsequent philosophy, it was through the writings of lesser but more readable imitators The two areas in which he was, indeed, inXuential were metaphysics and political philosophy He had a great reverence for St Thomas Aquinas, but See vol II, p 56 18