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Francisco Suarez

1. Online biographies and bibliographies
2. Suarez on Google Book Search
3. Suarez at UANL
4. Early editions
5. Other online texts
6. Secondary literature

(Suggestions for further material to add here would, of course, be welcome.)

Online biographies and bibliographies

The Catholic Encyclopedia has a short entry on Suarez. It at least provides a quick outline of his life; the summary of his philosophical positions strikes me as not the most useful.

If you read German, the Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexicon provides a short biography, as well as a lengthy bibliography of primary and secondary sources. The formatting of the bibliography, though, will ensure that you get a headache while reading it.

The best online bibliography is provided by Scholasticon. It is remarkably thorough. Scholasticon also provides a brief biography in French.

Suarez, of course, was a Jesuit. If you want to know more about Jesuits generally, a good place to start is Jesuitica.

Suarez on Google Book Search

Google Book Search has scanned a copy of the Vives edition of the Opera omnia and put most of it online. Given that print copies seem to be in scarce supply, this could be a very useful resource. Unfortunately, there are several problems that limit its usefulness. First, it is hard to actually find the books via searches. I have never yet managed to locate them by author or title searches, for example. The only way I have been able to get them to show up is by searching for strings of text from the body of the volumes. But this does not work well either, since the OCR misidentifies letters in close to half of the words. That, of course, points to a second limitation. A searchable text of Suarez would be very useful indeed, but, as it is, Google Book Search's copy does not really count as a searchable text even though it provides the option of seeing the pages in text rather than images. Third, even once one has located the volumes, the identifying information fails to indicate what volume you are looking at, so you actually have to load the pdf files (which are very large and hence slow) before being able to identify the volumes. Fourth, the automatic page turner was clearly having difficulties, since some of the volumes are missing many pages. Fifth, in at least once case (v. 25), dozens of pages are out of order. Sixth, some of the volumes for some reason are not still not accessible online, even though it looks like they have been scanned and it is clear that there are no copyright restrictions on them.

Of course, a number of these problems may well be rectified by Google at some point. But at the moment (Jul. 2008), there are some frustrating limitations to the usefulness of these scans. Still, they can be really useful on occasions where one does not have access to a print copy, especially since the entire volumes can be downloaded to one's hard drive. For texts that are available elsewhere online, I would recommend those over these (see next section). In an effort to overcome the difficulty in locating and identifying the volumes, I've provided a list of links below to each volume. As long as Google does not change the numerical identifiers for them, the following links should work (the titles in the parentheses, where included, indicate which works the given volume contains):

UPDATE: At least some of the problems noted above have been rectified. I have not had the time, however, to check systematically what has been solved and what has not.

There are also some scans of Francisci Suaresii ... Opuscula Sex Inedita available.

Suarez at UANL

Universidad Autonoma de Nuevo Leon's Coleccion Digital also has a scan of Suarez's Opera Omnia online: http://cdigital.dgb.uanl.mx/la/1080042136_C/1080042136_C.html. The advantages of UANL's scan over Google's are that (1) it is complete, (2) it is not missing pages (or at least I haven't noticed any yet), and (3) it is a higher resolution scan (and hence is useful in cases where the Google scan isn't legible). It also has some disadvantages: (1) the text can't be searched at all (as noted earlier, searching the text is far from satisfactory in Google, but, still, searches do occasionally turn up something useful), (2) the volumes are broken up into many files so that downloading a volume to your hard drive is much less feasible, and (3) perhaps the resolution of the scans is unnecessarily high, since the files are exceedingly large. Still, as the list of advantages should have made obvious, this is a very useful resource. Thanks to Daniel Novotny for alerting me to it.

Early editions

If you want to look at some of the early editions of Suarez, you're in luck. Good quality scans of a number of his works are available (notably, of the valuable 1597 edition of Disputationes Metaphysicae), thanks to several European libraries. I should note that I learned about a good many of the following texts from "An Analytic Bibliography of On-line Neo-Latin Texts." Should you be looking for any late medieval/early modern Latin texts, that should be one of the first places you look.

In addition to the texts to which I link here, I should note that The Digital Library of the Catholic Reformation includes scans of numerous early editions of Suarez. It also has the merit of allowing text searches. It is, however, a licensed resource, so of most use to those whose institution's library has a subscription.

Texts are arranged by publication date in the following list.

Commentariorum, ac disputationum in Tertiam partem Divi Thomae. Salamanca: John and Andreas Renaut, 1595.

Disputationes Metaphysicae. Salamanca: John and Andreas Renaut, 1597. Vol. 1 / vol. 2. Another scan of vol. 2 is available here. Another scan of vol. 1 is available here.

Disputationes Metaphysicae, tomus posterior. [Mainz: Balthasar Lippius, 1600].

Disputationum de censuris in communi, excommunicatione, suspensione & interdicto, itemque de irregularitate tomus quintus additus ad tertiam partem D. Thomae. Coimbra, 1602.

De Deo Uno et Trino. Lyon: Horatius Cardon, 1607.

De virtute et statu religionis. Mainz, 1608. Vol. 1 / vol. 2.

Varia opuscula theologica. Lyon: Horatius Cardon, 1611.

Defensio fidei Catholicae et apostolicae adversus Anglicanae sectae errores. Coimbra: Didacum Gomez de Loureyro, 1613.

Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partem Divi Thomae tomus secundus. Mainz: Balthasar Lippius, 1616.

Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partem diui Thomae tomi quinque primus. Mainz: Balthasar Lippius, 1617.

Commentariorum ac disputationum in tertiam partem divi Thomae ; tomus tertius : qui est primus De sacramentis. Mainz: Balthasar Lippius, 1619.

De legibus ac Deo legislatore. Lyon, 1619.

De legibus ac Deo Legislatore. Lyon: Horatius Cardon, 1619.

Operis de Divina Gratia. Lyon: Jacob Cardon and Peter Cavellat, 1620.

Varia opuscula theologica. Lyon: Jacob Cardon and Peter Cavellat, 1620.

De Virtute et Statu Religionis ... tomus secundus. Mainz: Hermann Meresius, 1623.

De virtute et statu religionis. Mainz, 1624.

De virtute et statu religionis : tomus tertius de obligationibus quae religiosum constituvnt... Mainz: Hermann Meresius, 1625.

Ad Primam Secundae D. Thomae Tractatus Quinque Theologici. Lyon: Jacob Cardon, 1628.

Operis de religione tomus primus. Lyon: Jacob Cardon, 1630.

Operis de religione tomus secundus. Lyon: Jacob Cardon, 1630.

Pars Secunda Summae Theologiae de Deo rerum onmium creatore : in tres praecipuos tractatus distributa : quorum primus De Angelis hoc volumine continentur... Lyon: Jacob Cardon, 1630.

Operis de religione pars secunda : quae est De statu religionis ac tomus tertius in ordine complectens tractatum septimum ... : in decem libros distributum. Lyon: Jacob Cardon, 1632.

Operis de religione tomus quartus et ultimus : continens tractatus tres ... quibus totum opus completur et absoluitur. Lyon: Jacob Cardon, 1634.

Other online texts

Thanks to the work of Salvador Castellote, Jean-Paul Coujou, John P. Doyle, and Michael Renemann, the entire text of the Disputationes Metaphysicae is available in a searchable format. It is in html, so the files are a reasonable size and quick to work with. It is also in much, much better shape than the Google scan, which is especially plagued with missing and out of order pages. Still, there is the occasional error (see, e.g., my text of DM XIV.1 for examples of the kind of errors that need to be corrected), so if a sentence looks odd, it is worth checking it elsewhere. If possible, check it against the 1597 edition (see above), since it contains fewer errors than either this online text or the Vives edition.

Prof. Castellote also has texts of De Anima and De Generatione et Corruptione available on his website. The De Anima text is his critical edition. It is worth noting that this is in some sense not the same text as the De Anima in the Vives edition. Suarez started editing his De Anima commentary for publication at the end of his life but only got around to editing the first twelve chapters of the first book. The Vives edition incorporates that later material. On the assumption that Suarez might have changed some of his views in the intervening years, the resulting text may not be wholly coherent. Regardless of their respective merits, one should keep in mind that matters are not quite as straightforward as saying that Castellote's edition is a critical edition of the same text that is in the Vives edition.

Alfred Freddoso has several brief unpublished translations available: the preface to the DM, the introduction to DM I, and De Legibus book 2, chap. 6.

Robert Pasnau has a translation of DM XL, sect. 2 on his site.

Finally, I have put up a number of texts here.

Secondary literature

If you are looking for a particular piece on Suarez and do not have ready access to it, feel free to email me to see if I have it. I have built up a significant collection of secondary literature on Suarez and have a goodly number of pieces in PDF, including some that are rather difficult to obtain.