Suárez, Francisco

Francisco Suárez was born in Granada, the son of a wealthy Granadian family and a nephew of Francisco de Toledo, the future Jesuit cardinal. He was the second of eight brothers and sisters, from which six devoted themselves to religion. He went to Salamanca to study Canon Law in 1561, entered the Jesuit Order in 1564, and at that year and until 1570 studied at the same university Philosophy for 2 years and Theology for other 4 years. In Salamanca, he was pupil of some members of the second generation of the so-called “School of Salamanca” founded by Francisco de Vitoria, among them the Dominican Mancio del Corpus Christi, a direct disciple of Vitoria, and the Augustinian Francisco de Guevara. The members of the school, Vitoria included, although declared followers of Aquinas, were strongly influenced either by nonorthodox Thomist interpreters (such as Cajetan) or by Scotistic or even nominalist tendencies (Prieto López 2013).