SIXTEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY as a metaphysician he followed in the footsteps of Avicenna and Duns Scotus rather than those of Aquinas himself Paradoxically, much that was to pass for Thomism during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was closer to Suarezian metaphysics than to the Summa Contra Gentiles In political philosophy Suarez’s contribution was the De Legibus of 1621, which was the unacknowledged source of many of the ideas of betterknown thinkers In his own day he was most famous for his controversy with King James I about the divine right of kings, in which he attacked the theory that temporal monarchs derived their sovereignty directly from God King James had his book publicly burnt.9 Of the philosophical issues dividing the Catholic and Protestant camps in the sixteenth century none was more thorny than human free will, which had been proclaimed at the Council of Trent in opposition to Lutheran determinism and Calvinist predestinarianism The Jesuits made themselves champions of the libertarian account of human freedom Suarez and his Jesuit colleague Luis de Molina oVered a deWnition of free agency in terms of the availability of alternative courses of action—‘liberty of indiVerence’ as it came to be known ‘That agent is called free which in the presence of all necessary conditions for action can act and refrain from action or can one thing while being able to its opposite.’ Such a deWnition did ample justice to humans’ consciousness of their own choices and their attribution of responsibility to others But by comparison with more restrictive accounts of freedom, it made it very diYcult to account for God’s foreknowledge of free human actions, to which both Catholics and Protestants were committed Molina, in his famous Concordia (1589), presented an elaborate solution to the problem, in terms of God’s comprehensive knowledge of the actions of every possible human being in every possible world.10 Ingenious though it was, Molina’s solution was unpopular not only among Protestants but also among his Catholic co-religionists Dominican theologians, of whom the most vociferous was the Thomist Domingo Banez (1528–1604), thought that the Jesuit theologians were excessively exalting human freedom and derogating from divine power The dispute between the two religious orders became so bitter that in 1605 Suarez’s metaphysics is discussed at greater length in Ch and his political theory in Ch 10 Molina’s theory of ‘middle knowledge’ is reported in detail in Ch 10 19