Abstract
DeMeuse’s book succeeds admirably in presenting Francisco Suárez’s ecclesiology, a task difficult on two fronts. The first difficulty stems from the sheer volume of Suárez’s writings. The second comes from a prejudice against early modern Catholic ecclesiology, thought to be “rigid and institutional,” neglectful of the “Christological aspects of the Church” (179). D.’s book answers both these challenges with a thorough presentation of Suárez’s theology of the church drawn from sources spanning his oeuvre. In so doing he paints a rich, textured picture that forces a reevaluation of the standard view of work in this period.
Suárez is a capacious writer with a nearly unmanageable corpus. D. does manage, giving his reader a taste of this breadth without losing the thread of his tightly woven argument. He makes this argument over the course of four chapters that tease out Suárez’s thoughts on the church from both the obvious sources—his lectures De Ecclesia and the Defensio fidei—and less obvious ones—the De virtu et statu religionis, De sacramentis, De legibus, and De fide (14). The first chapter introduces Suárez on the nature of the church as a religio, a religious “way of life” (41). The church is the society of the faithful, a “moral body” (24), constituted “by a divine call” (36), and united by supernatural faith (30). Its boundaries are not spatiotemporal (34). They are marked instead by the promulgation of the New Law, internally by grace (37), and externally in the form of ecclesial governance (37–38).
Chapter 2 is the longest and most involved of the book. Suárez emerges as the ideal theologian, responsive to the tradition yet fearless in its application and extension. D. contrasts Suárez’s thought to that of his confrère, St. Robert Bellarmine, whose own definition of the church is often taken as representative of this period in Catholic ecclesiology (4–6). Bellarmine’s definition stresses the external marks of the church, without requiring “any internal virtue” (62). D. argues that Suárez instead presents a “hylomorphic, social, and incarnational” (100) account of the church in which faith, the “first created form of the Church” (74), is inextricably linked to the human beings that make her up, the church’s material cause (72). By foregrounding faith, Suárez opens himself to the objection that he advocates an invisible church (100). He himself says that “the whole Church is ‘per se invisible’” (100). D. shows that Suárez answers this objection; for him there is no “bifurcation between the ‘invisible’ and ‘visible’ Church” (104). The church manifests its formal cause by living out its distinctive way of life. The church can be seen, though it must be “discerned with prudence” (102). The signs grow more evident, with the visible reinforcing and strengthening the invisible and vice versa, “the more the members of the Church are united to Christ” (111).
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the church’s universal mission by investigating Suárez’s treatments of the marks of catholicity: “place, persons, time, and doctrine” (120). In chapter 3 D. stresses the need for doctrinal universality, which makes it possible for a society without physical, national, ethnic, or temporal boundaries to be held together synchronically and diachronically (122, 128). Uniformity in doctrine makes possible the diffusion of the Gospel to all peoples and is therefore, paradoxically, the source of the church’s diversity (131). Suárez’s church is essentially missional, with the desire and right to propagate itself (140). It accomplishes this, chapter 4 shows, through religious orders, most especially the Society of Jesus, which for Suárez offers “a near-ideal representation of the ecclesial society” (164). Bound together by a common faith, living the religio of the church in and through the religio of their particular religious community, the Society of Jesus mirrors the marks of the church’s catholicity and unity in Christ (167–8).
D.’s book is a delight to read. He has a knack for storytelling and for fine research. His narrative shows the vacuity of claims about a stuffy, desiccated, post-Tridentine Catholicism, and it functions as an argument that “expanding our figures and literary sources happily complicates the distorted image” (21). At a methodological level, D.’s work bears witness to the intimacy of history and theology. Not only can theology be historical, history can be theological. Careful historical investigation yields theological insights that teach us about the past and speak to us in the present. This book will primarily be of interest to researchers in the growing field of early modern Catholic theology. But D. has made clear that anyone who wants to think hard about the nature of the church, ecumenism, and religious life has much to learn from the sophisticated work of Suárez and the vast, undiscovered country of the theology from this epoch.