WEBVTT NOTE 4. The Late Spanish Scholastics (continued) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:07.280 7. The Learned Extremist, Juan de Mariana 2 00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:15.040 One of the last Spanish scholastics was a Jesuit, but not a Salamancon. He was the extremist 3 00:00:15.040 --> 00:00:25.640 contemporary of Molina and Suarez, Juan de Mariana, 1536-1624. Mariana was born near 4 00:00:25.640 --> 00:00:31.360 Father Toledo of poor and humble parents. He entered the great University of Alcala 5 00:00:31.360 --> 00:00:40.600 in 1553, shown as a student, and a year later was received into the New Society of Jesus. 6 00:00:40.600 --> 00:00:48.120 After completing his studies at Alcala, Mariana went to the Jesuit College at Rome in 1561 7 00:00:48.120 --> 00:00:54.540 to teach philosophy and theology, and after four years moved to Sicily to set up the theology 8 00:00:54.540 --> 00:00:58.340 program at the Jesuit College there. 9 00:00:58.340 --> 00:01:05.380 In 1569, Mariana moved to teach theology at the great University of Paris at the remarkably 10 00:01:05.380 --> 00:01:08.460 young age of 33. 11 00:01:08.460 --> 00:01:13.940 After four years, ill health forced him to retire to live in Toledo. 12 00:01:13.940 --> 00:01:20.700 Ill health, however, often does not necessarily mean a short life, and Mariana lived to the 13 00:01:20.700 --> 00:01:26.100 and then phenomenally ripe old age of 88. 14 00:01:26.100 --> 00:01:32.180 Fortunately Mariana's retirement was an active one and his great learning and erudition drew 15 00:01:32.180 --> 00:01:38.260 numerous persons from private citizens to state and ecclesiastical authorities to ask 16 00:01:38.260 --> 00:01:40.860 for his advice and guidance. 17 00:01:40.860 --> 00:01:45.380 He was able to publish two great and influential books. 18 00:01:45.380 --> 00:01:52.140 was a history of Spain written first in Latin and then in Spanish which went into many volumes 19 00:01:52.140 --> 00:01:59.140 and many editions in both languages. The Latin version was eventually published in 11 volumes 20 00:01:59.140 --> 00:02:05.100 and the Spanish in 30. The Spanish edition has long been considered one of the classics 21 00:02:05.100 --> 00:02:11.740 of Spanish style and it went into many editions until the mid-19th century. 22 00:02:11.740 --> 00:02:19.260 The other notable work of Mariana, De Rega, on kingship, was published in 1599, written 23 00:02:19.260 --> 00:02:27.060 at the suggestion of King Philip II of Spain and dedicated to his successor, Philip III. 24 00:02:27.060 --> 00:02:33.340 But monarchy did not fare well at the hands of the hard-hitting Mariana, a fervent opponent 25 00:02:33.340 --> 00:02:39.520 of the rising tide of absolutism in Europe and of the doctrine of such as King James 26 00:02:39.520 --> 00:02:45.360 The first of England that kings rule absolutely by divine right. 27 00:02:45.360 --> 00:02:51.360 Mariana converted the scholastic doctrine of tyranny from an abstract concept into a 28 00:02:51.360 --> 00:02:56.440 weapon with which to smite real monarchs of the past. 29 00:02:56.440 --> 00:03:02.280 He denounced such ancient rulers as Cyrus the Great, Alexander the Great and Julius 30 00:03:02.280 --> 00:03:09.200 Caesar as tyrants, who acquired their power by injustice and robbery. 31 00:03:09.200 --> 00:03:16.400 The scholastics, including Suarez, believed that the people could ratify such unjust usurpation 32 00:03:16.400 --> 00:03:22.520 by their consent after the fact, and thereby make their rule legitimate. 33 00:03:22.520 --> 00:03:27.340 But Mariana was not so quick to concede the consent of the people. 34 00:03:27.340 --> 00:03:33.680 In contrast to other scholastics who placed the ownership of power in the king, he stressed 35 00:03:33.680 --> 00:03:40.480 that the people have a right to reclaim their political power whenever the king should abuse it. 36 00:03:40.480 --> 00:03:48.680 Indeed, Mariana held that in transferring their original political power from a state of nature to the king, 37 00:03:48.680 --> 00:03:53.980 the people necessarily reserved important rights to themselves. 38 00:03:53.980 --> 00:04:00.980 In addition to the right to reclaim sovereignty, they retained such vital powers as taxation, 39 00:04:00.980 --> 00:04:08.140 The Right to Veto Laws and The Right to Determine Succession if the King Has No Heir 40 00:04:08.140 --> 00:04:14.260 It should already be clear that it was Mariana, rather than Suarez, who might be called the 41 00:04:14.260 --> 00:04:20.660 forebear of John Locke's theory of popular consent and the continuing superiority of 42 00:04:20.660 --> 00:04:22.980 the people to the government. 43 00:04:22.980 --> 00:04:29.180 Furthermore, Mariana also anticipated Locke in holding that men leave the state of nature 44 00:04:29.180 --> 00:04:52.700 The most fascinating feature of the extremism of Mariana's political theory was his creative 45 00:04:52.700 --> 00:04:57.380 innovation in the scholastic theory of tyrannicide. 46 00:04:57.380 --> 00:05:03.940 That a tyrant might be justly killed by the people had long been standard doctrine. 47 00:05:03.940 --> 00:05:08.300 But Mariana broadened it greatly in two significant ways. 48 00:05:08.300 --> 00:05:12.220 First, he expanded the definition of tyranny. 49 00:05:12.220 --> 00:05:18.700 A tyrant was any ruler who violated the laws of religion, who imposed taxes without the 50 00:05:18.700 --> 00:05:24.820 people's consent, or who prevented a meeting of a democratic parliament. 51 00:05:24.820 --> 00:05:32.740 All the other scholastics, in contrast, had located the sole power to tax in the ruler. 52 00:05:32.740 --> 00:05:40.580 Even more spectacularly, to Mariana, any individual citizen can justly assassinate a tyrant and 53 00:05:40.580 --> 00:05:44.780 may do so by any means necessary. 54 00:05:44.780 --> 00:05:50.340 Assassination did not require some sort of collective decision by the entire people. 55 00:05:50.340 --> 00:05:57.060 To be sure, Mariana did not think that an individual should engage in assassination lightly. 56 00:05:57.060 --> 00:06:02.460 First, he should try to assemble the people to make this crucial decision. 57 00:06:02.460 --> 00:06:09.660 But if that is impossible, he should at least consult some erudite and grave men, unless 58 00:06:09.660 --> 00:06:16.340 the cry of the people against the tyrant is so starkly manifest that consultation becomes 59 00:06:16.340 --> 00:06:18.020 unnecessary. 60 00:06:18.020 --> 00:06:25.220 Furthermore, Mariana added, in phrases anticipating Locke's and the Declaration of Independence's 61 00:06:25.220 --> 00:06:31.620 justification of the right of rebellion, that we need not worry about the public order being 62 00:06:31.620 --> 00:06:38.260 greatly disrupted by too many people taking up the practice of tyrannicide, for this is 63 00:06:38.260 --> 00:06:45.500 a dangerous enterprise, Mariana sensibly pointed out, and very few are ever ready to risk their 64 00:06:45.500 --> 00:06:48.020 and their lives in that way. 65 00:06:48.020 --> 00:06:54.760 On the contrary, most tyrants have not died a violent death, and tyrannicides have almost 66 00:06:54.760 --> 00:06:59.100 always been greeted by the populace as heroes. 67 00:06:59.100 --> 00:07:05.880 In contrast to the common objections to tyrannicide, he concluded, it would be salutary for rulers 68 00:07:05.880 --> 00:07:11.680 to fear the people, and to realize that a lapse into tyranny might cause the people 69 00:07:11.680 --> 00:07:23.080 Mariana has given us an eloquent description of the typical tyrant at his deadly work. 70 00:07:23.080 --> 00:07:29.680 He seizes the property of individuals and squanders it, impelled as he is by the unkingly 71 00:07:29.680 --> 00:07:35.260 vices of lust, avarice, cruelty and fraud. 72 00:07:35.260 --> 00:07:41.660 Tyrants indeed try to injure and ruin everybody, but they direct their attack especially against 73 00:07:41.660 --> 00:07:45.460 Most rich and upright men throughout the realm. 74 00:07:45.460 --> 00:07:50.900 They consider the good more suspect than the evil, and the virtue which they themselves 75 00:07:50.900 --> 00:07:53.980 lack is most formidable to them. 76 00:07:53.980 --> 00:07:59.020 They expel the better men from the commonwealth on the principle that whatever is exalted 77 00:07:59.020 --> 00:08:02.140 in the kingdom should be laid low. 78 00:08:02.140 --> 00:08:08.220 They exhaust all the rest so that they cannot unite by demanding new tributes from them 79 00:08:08.220 --> 00:08:15.260 by stirring up quarrels among the citizens and by joining war to war. 80 00:08:15.260 --> 00:08:21.140 They build huge works at the expense and by the suffering of the citizens. 81 00:08:21.140 --> 00:08:24.860 Whence the pyramids of Egypt were born? 82 00:08:24.860 --> 00:08:31.220 The tyrant necessarily fears that those whom he terrorizes and holds as slaves will attempt 83 00:08:31.220 --> 00:08:32.660 to overthrow him. 84 00:08:32.660 --> 00:08:51.660 Thus, he forbids the citizens to congregate together, to meet in assemblies, and to discuss the commonwealth altogether, taking from them, by secret police methods, the opportunity of free speaking and freely listening, so that they are not even allowed to complain freely. 85 00:08:51.660 --> 00:09:03.660 This erudite and grave man, Juan de Mariana, left no doubt what he thought of the most recent famous tyrannicide, that of the French King Henry III. 86 00:09:03.660 --> 00:09:15.660 In 1588, Henry III had been prepared to name as his successor Henry of Navarre, a Calvinist who would be ruling over a fiercely Catholic nation. 87 00:09:15.660 --> 00:09:25.060 Facing a rebellion by the Catholic nobles, headed by the Duc de Guise, and backed by the devoted Catholic citizens of Paris, 88 00:09:25.060 --> 00:09:34.060 Henry III called the Duke and his brother the Cardinal to a peace parley into his camp, and then had the two assassinated. 89 00:09:34.060 --> 00:09:38.860 The following year, on the point of conquering the city of Paris, 90 00:09:38.860 --> 00:09:47.860 Henry III was assassinated in turn by a young Dominican friar and member of the Catholic League, Jacques Clément. 91 00:09:47.860 --> 00:09:57.360 To Marianna, in this way, blood was expiated with blood, and the Duc de Guise was avenged with royal blood. 92 00:09:57.360 --> 00:10:04.360 Thus perished Clément, concluded Marianna, an eternal ornament of France. 93 00:10:04.360 --> 00:10:13.360 The assassination had similarly been hailed by Pope Sixtus V and by the fiery Catholic preachers of Paris. 94 00:10:13.360 --> 00:10:21.360 The French authorities were understandably edgy about Mariana's theories and, at his book, De Rega. 95 00:10:21.360 --> 00:10:32.360 Finally, in 1610, Henry IV, formerly Henry of Navarre, who had converted from Calvinism to the Catholic faith in order to become King of France, 96 00:10:32.360 --> 00:10:40.240 France, was assassinated by the Catholic resistor Ravillac, who despised the religious centrism 97 00:10:40.240 --> 00:10:44.840 and the state absolutism imposed by the king. 98 00:10:44.840 --> 00:10:50.900 At that point, France erupted in an orgy of indignation against Mariana, and the Parliament 99 00:10:50.900 --> 00:10:56.160 of Paris had de Rega burned publicly by the hangman. 100 00:10:56.160 --> 00:11:02.600 Before executing Ravillac, the assassin was questioned closely as to whether reading Mariana 101 00:11:02.600 --> 00:11:08.040 had driven him to murder, but he denied ever having heard of him. 102 00:11:08.040 --> 00:11:14.240 While the King of Spain refused to heed French pleas to suppress this subversive work, the 103 00:11:14.240 --> 00:11:20.320 General of the Jesuit Order issued a decree to his society forbidding them to teach that 104 00:11:20.320 --> 00:11:23.720 it is lawful to kill tyrants. 105 00:11:23.720 --> 00:11:29.480 This truckling, however, did not prevent a successful smear campaign in France against 106 00:11:29.480 --> 00:11:37.040 the Jesuit order, as well as its loss of political and theological influence. 107 00:11:37.040 --> 00:11:42.080 Juan de Mariana possessed one of the most fascinating personalities in the history of 108 00:11:42.080 --> 00:11:44.600 political and economic thought. 109 00:11:44.600 --> 00:11:51.600 Honest, gutsy and fearless, Mariana was in hot water almost all of his long life, even 110 00:11:51.600 --> 00:11:54.120 and for his economic writings. 111 00:11:54.120 --> 00:12:00.040 Turning his attention to monetary theory and practice, Mariana, in his brief treatise De 112 00:12:00.040 --> 00:12:08.560 Monetai Mutatione, on the Alteration of Money, 1609, denounced his sovereign, Philip III, 113 00:12:08.560 --> 00:12:14.560 for robbing the people and crippling commerce through the debasement of copper coinage. 114 00:12:14.560 --> 00:12:20.920 He pointed out that this debasement also added to Spain's chronic price inflation by increasing 115 00:12:20.920 --> 00:12:40.180 Mariana noted that debasement and government tampering with the market value of money could 116 00:12:40.180 --> 00:12:44.800 only cause grave economic problems. 117 00:12:44.800 --> 00:12:50.680 Only a fool would try to separate these values in such a way that the legal price should 118 00:12:50.680 --> 00:12:57.080 should differ from the natural. Foolish nay, wicked, the ruler who orders that a thing 119 00:12:57.080 --> 00:13:04.720 the common people value, let us say at five, should be sold for ten. Men are guided in 120 00:13:04.720 --> 00:13:11.480 this matter by common estimation founded on considerations of the quality of things and 121 00:13:11.480 --> 00:13:17.720 of their abundance or scarcity. It would be vain for a prince to seek to undermine these 122 00:13:17.720 --> 00:13:23.580 These Principles of Commerce, tis best to leave them intact instead of assailing them 123 00:13:23.580 --> 00:13:26.860 by force to the public detriment. 124 00:13:26.860 --> 00:13:33.820 Mariana begins de monetae with a charming and candid apologia for writing the book reminiscent 125 00:13:33.820 --> 00:13:40.500 of the great Swedish economist Nute Wicksell over two and a half centuries later. 126 00:13:40.500 --> 00:13:47.220 He knows that his criticism of the king courted great unpopularity, but everyone is now groaning 127 00:13:47.220 --> 00:13:56.220 are being under the hardships resulting from the debasement, and yet no one has had the courage to criticize the king's action publicly. 128 00:13:56.220 --> 00:14:05.220 Hence, justice requires that at least one man, Mariana, should move in to express the common grievance publicly. 129 00:14:05.220 --> 00:14:15.220 When a combination of fear and bribery conspire to silence critics, there should be at least one man in the country who knows the truth 130 00:14:15.220 --> 00:14:38.220 Mariana then proceeds to demonstrate that debasement is a very heavy hidden tax on the private property of his subjects, and that, pache, his political theory, no king has the right to impose taxes without the consent of the people. 131 00:14:38.220 --> 00:14:51.220 Since political power originated with the people, the king has no rights over the private property of his subjects, nor can he appropriate their wealth by his whim and will. 132 00:14:51.220 --> 00:15:01.220 Mariana notes the papal bull Coenadomini, which had decreed the excommunication of any ruler who imposes new taxes. 133 00:15:01.220 --> 00:15:14.220 Mariana reasons that any king who practices debasement should incur the same punishment, as should any legal monopoly imposed by the state without the consent of the people. 134 00:15:14.220 --> 00:15:28.220 Under such monopolies, the state itself, or its grantee, can sell a product to the public at a price higher than its market worth, and this is surely nothing but a tax. 135 00:15:28.220 --> 00:15:47.780 Mariana also set forth a history of debasement and its unfortunate effects, and he pointed out that governments are supposed to maintain all standards of weight and measure, not only of money, and that their record in adulterating those standards is most disgraceful. 136 00:15:47.780 --> 00:15:59.780 Castile, for example, had changed its measures of oil and wine in order to levy a hidden tax, and this led to great confusion and popular unrest. 137 00:15:59.780 --> 00:16:13.780 Mariana's book, Attacking the King's Debasement of the Currency, led the monarch to haul the aged 73-year-old scholar into prison, charging him with the high crime of Lee's Majesty. 138 00:16:13.780 --> 00:16:33.780 The judges convicted Mariana of this crime against the king, but the pope refused to punish him, and Mariana was finally released from prison after four months on the condition that he would cut out the offensive passages in his work, and that he would be more careful in the future. 139 00:16:33.780 --> 00:16:42.780 King Philip and his minions, however, did not leave the fate of the book to an eventual change of heart on the part of Mariana. 140 00:16:42.780 --> 00:16:54.780 Instead, the king ordered his officials to buy up every published copy of De Monetai Mutatione they could get their hands on, and to destroy them. 141 00:16:54.780 --> 00:17:06.780 Not only that, after Marianna's death, the Spanish Inquisition expurgated the remaining copies, deleted many sentences, and smeared entire pages with ink. 142 00:17:06.780 --> 00:17:16.280 All non-expurgated copies were put on the Spanish index and these in turn were expurgated during the 17th century. 143 00:17:16.280 --> 00:17:27.780 As a result of this savage campaign of censorship, the existence of the Latin text of this important booklet remained unknown for 250 years 144 00:17:27.780 --> 00:17:37.780 and was only rediscovered because the Spanish text was incorporated into a 19th century collection of classical Spanish essays. 145 00:17:37.780 --> 00:17:47.780 Hence, few complete copies of the booklet survive, of which the only one in the United States is in the Boston Public Library. 146 00:17:47.780 --> 00:17:52.780 The venerable Mariana was apparently not in enough trouble. 147 00:17:52.780 --> 00:17:59.160 After he was jailed by the king, the authorities seized his notes and papers and found there 148 00:17:59.160 --> 00:18:05.960 a manuscript attacking the existing governing powers in the society of Jesus. 149 00:18:05.960 --> 00:18:12.560 An individualist unafraid to think for himself, Mariana clearly took little stock in the Jesuit 150 00:18:12.560 --> 00:18:18.720 ideal of the society as a tightly disciplined military-like body. 151 00:18:18.720 --> 00:18:25.920 In this booklet, Discurso de las Enfermedades de la Compaña, Molina smote the Jesuit order 152 00:18:25.920 --> 00:18:32.840 for and aft, its administration and its training of novices, and he judged his superiors in 153 00:18:32.840 --> 00:18:36.200 the Jesuit order unfit to rule. 154 00:18:36.200 --> 00:18:41.040 Above all, Mariana criticized the military-like hierarchy. 155 00:18:41.040 --> 00:18:46.600 The general, he concluded, has too much power, and the provincials and other Jesuits too 156 00:18:46.600 --> 00:18:47.600 little. 157 00:18:47.600 --> 00:18:54.000 Jesuits, he asserted, should at least have a voice in the selection of their immediate superiors. 158 00:18:54.000 --> 00:19:04.800 When the Jesuit general, Claudius Aquaviva, found that copies of Mariana's work were circulating in a kind of underground zamisdat, 159 00:19:04.800 --> 00:19:11.400 both inside and outside the order, he ordered Mariana to apologize for the scandal. 160 00:19:11.400 --> 00:19:19.400 The feisty and principled Mariana, however, refused to do so, and Aquaviva did not press the issue. 161 00:19:19.400 --> 00:19:30.400 As soon as Mariana died, the legion of enemies of the Jesuit order published the discursos simultaneously in French, Latin and Italian. 162 00:19:30.400 --> 00:19:34.400 As in the case of all bureaucratic organizations, 163 00:19:34.400 --> 00:19:50.400 The Jesuits then and since were more concerned about the scandal and not washing dirty linen in public than in fostering freedom of inquiry, self-criticism, or correcting any evils that Mariana might have uncovered. 164 00:19:50.400 --> 00:19:55.900 The Jesuit Order never expelled their eminent member, nor did he ever leave. 165 00:19:55.900 --> 00:20:04.900 Still, he was all his life regarded as a feisty troublemaker and as unwilling to bow to orders or peer pressure. 166 00:20:04.900 --> 00:20:18.900 Father Antonio Astrain, in his History of the Jesuit Order, notes that, above all, we must bear in mind that his, Mariana's, character was very rough and un-mortified. 167 00:20:18.900 --> 00:20:31.400 Personally, in a manner similar to the Italian Franciscan saints San Bernardino and Sant'Antonino of the 15th century, Mariano was ascetic and austere. 168 00:20:31.400 --> 00:20:40.400 He never attended the theater, and he held that priests and monks should never degrade their sacred character by listening to actors. 169 00:20:40.400 --> 00:20:49.400 He also denounced the popular Spanish sport of bullfighting, which was also not calculated to increase his popularity. 170 00:20:49.400 --> 00:20:56.400 Gloomily, Mariana would often stress that life was short, precarious and full of vexation. 171 00:20:56.400 --> 00:21:05.400 Yet, despite his austerity, Father Juan de Mariana possessed a sparkling, almost mancanesque wit. 172 00:21:05.400 --> 00:21:08.400 Thus his one-liner on marriage. 173 00:21:08.400 --> 00:21:16.400 Someone cleverly said that the first and the last day of marriage are desirable, but that the rest are terrible. 174 00:21:16.400 --> 00:21:21.400 But probably his wittiest remark concerned bullfighting. 175 00:21:21.400 --> 00:21:28.400 His attack on that sport met with the objection that some theologians had defended the validity of bullfighting. 176 00:21:28.400 --> 00:21:35.400 Denouncing theologians who palliated crimes by inventing explanations to please the masses, 177 00:21:35.400 --> 00:21:45.400 Mariana delivered a line closely anticipating a favorite remark by Ludwig von Mises on economists over three and a half centuries later. 178 00:21:45.400 --> 00:21:53.400 There is nothing how-so-ever absurd which is not defended by some theologian. 179 00:21:53.400 --> 00:22:00.400 8. The Last Salamancans, Lassius and De Lugo 180 00:22:00.400 --> 00:22:05.920 One of the last great Salamanquans was a Jesuit, but not a Spaniard. 181 00:22:05.920 --> 00:22:15.920 Leonard Lesius, 1554-1623, was a Fleming, born at Brecht, near the great city of Antwerp. 182 00:22:15.920 --> 00:22:23.520 During the 16th century, Antwerp had become the outstanding commercial and financial center of Northern Europe, 183 00:22:23.520 --> 00:22:26.720 a focus of trade from the Mediterranean. 184 00:22:26.720 --> 00:22:38.120 Lessius' parents had originally planned for him to become a merchant, but he entered the University of Louvain and was received into the Jesuit order in 1572. 185 00:22:38.120 --> 00:22:49.120 He taught philosophy for six years at the English College at Douai in France and then went to Rome for two years to study under Francisco Suarez. 186 00:22:49.120 --> 00:22:58.120 It was at Rome that Lesius became a Salamancon in spirit, and from then on struck up a friendship with Luis de Molina. 187 00:22:58.120 --> 00:23:05.120 Returning to Flanders, Lesius assumed a chair in philosophy and theology at the University of Louvain. 188 00:23:05.120 --> 00:23:16.120 In theology, Lesius took up the great Molinist cause of free will against a pro-determinist wing of theologians at Louvain. 189 00:23:16.120 --> 00:23:29.120 There he confronted the crypto-Calvinist Dr. Michael Debye, Chancellor of the University of Louvain, who had adopted the concept of predestination and salvation of the elect. 190 00:23:29.120 --> 00:23:47.120 Lessius also advanced the Suarezian view that original political power was conferred by God on the people, and hence he attacked the growing adherence to the divine right of kings, especially as put forth by King James I of England. 191 00:23:47.120 --> 00:24:00.120 Lessius' most important work was De Justicia et Jure, 1605, the same title as the works of Molina and de Báñez. 192 00:24:00.120 --> 00:24:10.120 The book was enormously influential, being published in nearly 40 separate editions in Antwerp, Louvain, Lyon, Paris and Venice. 193 00:24:10.120 --> 00:24:26.120 Not only was Lesius' knowledge of his predecessors encyclopedic, but he was renowned for his knowledge and analysis of contemporary commercial practices and contracts, and for his applications of moral principles to such practices. 194 00:24:26.120 --> 00:24:32.120 Lesius was consulted frequently on these matters by statesmen and church leaders. 195 00:24:32.120 --> 00:24:43.120 On the theory of price, Lesius, like his scholastic forebears, held the just price to be that determined by the common estimate of the market. 196 00:24:43.120 --> 00:24:54.120 A legally fixed price could also be the just price, but in contrast to many of his fellow scholastics, for whom the legal price took precedence, 197 00:24:54.120 --> 00:25:01.620 Lesius pointed out several cases in which the market price would have to be chosen over the legal price. 198 00:25:01.620 --> 00:25:21.120 Following Juan de Medina, these were, first, when the market price is lower, and, second, when in change of circumstances of increasing or diminishing supply and similar factors, the authorities were notably negligent in changing the legal price. 199 00:25:21.120 --> 00:25:38.120 Even more strongly, even a private individual may request a price above the legal ceiling when the authorities are ill-informed about the commercial circumstances, which is likely, of course, to happen a good deal of the time. 200 00:25:38.120 --> 00:25:50.120 Attacking the cost of production theory of price, laissez points to market demand as the determinant of price, regardless of a merchant's expenses. 201 00:25:50.120 --> 00:26:18.120 But if the merchant's expenses have been greater, that is his hard luck, and the common price may not be increased for that reason, just as it need not be decreased even if he had no expenses at all. This is the merchant's situation, just as he can make a profit if he has small expenses, so he can lose if his expenses are very large or extraordinary. 202 00:26:18.120 --> 00:26:34.120 Leonard Lessius had an insight into how all economic markets are interrelated, and he analyzed and defended in turn the workings of foreign exchange, speculation, and the value of money and prices. 203 00:26:34.120 --> 00:26:43.120 In particular, Lessius engaged in the most sophisticated analysis he had achieved of the workings of wages and the labor market. 204 00:26:43.120 --> 00:26:55.120 Like other scholastics, he saw that wages were governed by the same supply and demand principles, and therefore by the same canons of justice as any price. 205 00:26:55.120 --> 00:27:01.120 In asking what is the minimum justifiable wage for any given occupation, 206 00:27:01.120 --> 00:27:11.120 Lessius declared that the existence of other people willing to perform the work at any given wage shows that it is not too low. 207 00:27:11.120 --> 00:27:19.120 In short, if a supply exists for the labor at that wage, how can it be unjust? 208 00:27:19.120 --> 00:27:27.120 Lessius also discovered and set forth the concept of psychic income as part of a money wage. 209 00:27:27.120 --> 00:27:32.120 A worker can be paid in psychic benefit as well as money. 210 00:27:32.120 --> 00:27:38.120 If the work brings with it social status and emoluments, the pay can be low, 211 00:27:38.120 --> 00:27:45.120 because status and associated advantages are, so to say, a part of the salary. 212 00:27:45.120 --> 00:27:54.120 Lesius also advanced the view that workers are hired by the employer because of the benefits gained by the latter, 213 00:27:54.120 --> 00:27:59.200 and those benefits will be gauged by the workers' productivity. 214 00:27:59.200 --> 00:28:05.080 Here are certainly the rudiments of the marginal productivity theory of the demand for labor 215 00:28:05.080 --> 00:28:11.760 and hence of wages, which was set forth by Austrians and other neo-classical economists 216 00:28:11.760 --> 00:28:14.680 at the end of the 19th century. 217 00:28:14.680 --> 00:28:21.120 Indeed, Lassie's sophisticated analysis of wages and the labor market were lost to mainstream 218 00:28:21.120 --> 00:28:28.620 in Economics until they were independently rediscovered in the late 19th century. 219 00:28:28.620 --> 00:28:34.280 Lesius also stressed the importance of entrepreneurship in determining income. 220 00:28:34.280 --> 00:28:41.600 This quality of entrepreneurial industry, of efficiently combining jobs, is rare, and 221 00:28:41.600 --> 00:28:48.980 therefore the able entrepreneur can acquire a much higher income than his fellows. 222 00:28:48.980 --> 00:28:54.860 This also provides a sophisticated analysis of money, demonstrating that the value of 223 00:28:54.860 --> 00:28:59.660 money is dependent on its supply and demand. 224 00:28:59.660 --> 00:29:06.300 More abundant money will make it less valuable either for buying goods or for an exchange, 225 00:29:06.300 --> 00:29:12.120 and a greater demand for money will cause the value of the currency to rise. 226 00:29:12.120 --> 00:29:18.900 For example, if great princes are in urgent need of money for war or other public purposes, 227 00:29:18.900 --> 00:29:22.900 or if a large quantity of goods come on to the market. 228 00:29:22.900 --> 00:29:28.820 For whenever money is urgently needed for matters of great moment, so is it more highly 229 00:29:28.820 --> 00:29:32.420 esteemed in terms of goods. 230 00:29:32.420 --> 00:29:38.260 In his application of moral principle to trade practice, lesseus had a liberating effect 231 00:29:38.260 --> 00:29:40.060 on trade. 232 00:29:40.060 --> 00:29:46.820 This was particularly true of usury, where lesseus, while formally continuing the traditional 233 00:29:46.820 --> 00:29:53.860 Prohibition was actually a highly influential force in its ongoing destruction. 234 00:29:53.860 --> 00:30:00.220 Lesius provided the most sweeping defense so far of the guaranteed investment contract, 235 00:30:00.220 --> 00:30:05.460 and he treated benignly even high rates of return on capital. 236 00:30:05.460 --> 00:30:11.100 He also removed all the remaining restrictions on lucrum cessans. 237 00:30:11.100 --> 00:30:16.900 First he widened the doctrine to apply not only to specific loans that would otherwise 238 00:30:16.900 --> 00:30:23.820 have been invested, but to any funds, since they are liquid assets that always might have 239 00:30:23.820 --> 00:30:25.860 been invested. 240 00:30:25.860 --> 00:30:33.900 Thus the pool of funds can as a whole be considered opportunity cost, foregone of investment, 241 00:30:33.900 --> 00:30:39.200 and therefore interest may be charged on a loan to that extent. 242 00:30:39.200 --> 00:30:52.880 As Lesius puts it, although no particular loan separately considered be the cause, all, however, collectively considered are the cause of the whole lucrum cessens. 243 00:30:52.880 --> 00:31:04.440 For in order to lend indiscriminately to those coming by, you abstain from business, and you undergo the loss of the profit which would come from this. 244 00:31:04.440 --> 00:31:10.260 Therefore, since all collectively are the cause, the burden of compensation for this 245 00:31:10.260 --> 00:31:17.600 profit can be distributed to single loans, according to the proportion of each. 246 00:31:17.600 --> 00:31:23.420 But this meant that Leonard Lesius justified not only businessmen or investors planning 247 00:31:23.420 --> 00:31:30.400 to invest their money, but also any people with liquid funds, including professional 248 00:31:30.400 --> 00:31:32.440 moneylenders. 249 00:31:32.440 --> 00:31:39.500 For the first time among scholastics, all loans by money lenders were now justified. 250 00:31:39.500 --> 00:31:45.880 With Leonard Leseas, then, the last of the barriers to interest or usury were smashed, 251 00:31:45.880 --> 00:31:51.060 and only the hollow shell of the formal prohibition remained. 252 00:31:51.060 --> 00:31:57.340 Leseas adds that the lender may charge interest even though a reserve of money is kept out 253 00:31:57.340 --> 00:32:01.780 of fear, and even if that fear is irrational. 254 00:32:01.780 --> 00:32:08.340 Note that to Lesius the important point was the reality of the lenders' subjective fears, 255 00:32:08.340 --> 00:32:12.340 not whether the fears are objectively correct. 256 00:32:12.340 --> 00:32:19.500 Furthermore, Lesius takes the Medina Molina assumption of risk argument for interest, 257 00:32:19.500 --> 00:32:25.380 about which they had tended to hedge in practice, and widens it greatly. 258 00:32:25.380 --> 00:32:29.660 All loans, he points out, carry risks of non-payment. 259 00:32:29.660 --> 00:32:35.740 A personal right is almost always joined with some difficulties and dangers. 260 00:32:35.740 --> 00:32:42.700 In a careful analysis of lender's risk, Lesias pointed out that a greater risk and a greater 261 00:32:42.700 --> 00:32:49.740 charge would be incurred by lending to someone not known to the lender, or whose credit is 262 00:32:49.740 --> 00:32:51.460 doubtful. 263 00:32:51.460 --> 00:32:53.420 But that is not all. 264 00:32:53.420 --> 00:33:00.020 Sir Leonard Laissez contributed his own new and powerful weapon against the usury ban, 265 00:33:00.020 --> 00:33:07.500 a new title or justification for interest. The new justification, prefigured only by 266 00:33:07.500 --> 00:33:16.100 the neglected Zumenhardt, was carentia pecuniae, charging for lack of money. Laissez pointed 267 00:33:16.100 --> 00:33:22.080 out quite cogently that the lender suffers the lack of his money, the lack of his liquidity 268 00:33:22.080 --> 00:33:27.520 during the term of the loan, and therefore he is entitled to charge interest for this 269 00:33:27.520 --> 00:33:29.800 economic loss. 270 00:33:29.800 --> 00:33:37.220 In short, Lesius saw perceptively that everyone derives utility from liquidity from the possession 271 00:33:37.220 --> 00:33:43.280 of money, and that being deprived of this utility is a lack for which the lender may 272 00:33:43.280 --> 00:33:47.020 and will demand compensation. 273 00:33:47.020 --> 00:33:54.060 Pesius pointed out that unexpected situations can and do arise, which could be met far more 274 00:33:54.060 --> 00:34:01.020 effectively if one's money were in one's possession and not absent for a period of time. 275 00:34:01.020 --> 00:34:09.340 Time, in short, can and should be charged for for that reason, for it can never be obtained 276 00:34:09.340 --> 00:34:16.140 that the merchants do not value a long-term concession higher than a short-term one. 277 00:34:16.140 --> 00:34:22.340 And those who are deprived of their money value more the lack of their money for five months 278 00:34:22.340 --> 00:34:27.900 than the lack of it for four, and the lack of it for four more than three. 279 00:34:27.900 --> 00:34:34.220 And this is partly because they lack the opportunity of gaining with that money, partly because 280 00:34:34.220 --> 00:34:37.900 their principal is longer in danger. 281 00:34:37.900 --> 00:34:44.380 Furthermore, Lesius points out that bills of exchange or rights to future money are 282 00:34:44.380 --> 00:34:52.940 are always at a discount compared to cash. This discount is, of course, the rate of interest. 283 00:34:52.940 --> 00:34:59.420 Lesius explains, this is a matter of common experience in that money provides the means 284 00:34:59.420 --> 00:35:05.820 to a multitude of things which those rights do not provide. Therefore, they may be bought 285 00:35:05.820 --> 00:35:08.880 at a lower price. 286 00:35:08.880 --> 00:35:15.280 Lesius also notes that merchants and exchangers daily determine the price of the lack of money 287 00:35:15.280 --> 00:35:22.640 on the Antwerp bourse, averaging about 10 percent, and foreign exchanges of inestimable 288 00:35:22.640 --> 00:35:28.120 value to the economy would perish if such prices could not be charged. 289 00:35:28.120 --> 00:35:36.040 Thus, for Lesius, the price for a lack of money is established on organized loan markets. 290 00:35:36.040 --> 00:35:42.020 But to the extent that a loan market exists, there is no need to justify each merchant's 291 00:35:42.020 --> 00:35:49.600 loan on the basis of his particular opportunity cost or deprivation of funds. 292 00:35:49.600 --> 00:35:55.780 That price, which becomes the just price, is set on the loan market. 293 00:35:55.780 --> 00:36:02.280 As Lesius puts it, moreover, any merchant seems able to demand this price, even though 294 00:36:02.280 --> 00:36:07.280 So there is no gain of his that stops because of his loan. 295 00:36:07.280 --> 00:36:13.860 This is the just price for the privation of money among merchants, for the just price 296 00:36:13.860 --> 00:36:20.940 of an article or obligation in any community is that which is put upon it by that community 297 00:36:20.940 --> 00:36:27.000 in good faith for the sake of the common good in view of all the circumstances. 298 00:36:27.000 --> 00:36:46.000 Therefore, even if, through the privation of money for a year, there is no gain of mine that stops, and no risk of capital, because such a price for just causes has been put upon this privation, I may demand it, just as the rest do. 299 00:36:46.000 --> 00:37:01.000 With Carinthia Pecuni, I, therefore, Leonard Lesius delivered the final blow to smash the usury prohibition, while unfortunately still retaining the prohibition in a formal sense. 300 00:37:01.000 --> 00:37:15.000 It is no wonder that Professor Noonan, the great scholar of the scholastics on usury, holds Lesius to be the theologian whose views on usury most decidedly mark the arrival of a new era. 301 00:37:15.000 --> 00:37:21.720 More than any predecessor, he would probably have felt completely at ease in the modern 302 00:37:21.720 --> 00:37:24.840 financial world. 303 00:37:24.840 --> 00:37:33.240 The last Salamancan was the Jesuit cardinal Juan de Lugo, 1583 to 1660. 304 00:37:33.240 --> 00:37:39.160 De Lugo takes the Salamanquans into the 17th century, the century of the decline of Spanish 305 00:37:39.160 --> 00:37:41.600 power in Europe. 306 00:37:41.600 --> 00:37:47.300 After studying law and theology at Salamanca, De Lugo went to Rome to teach at the Great 307 00:37:47.300 --> 00:37:54.900 Jesuit College. After teaching theology in Rome for 22 years, De Lugo was made a cardinal 308 00:37:54.900 --> 00:38:01.060 and became a member of various influential church commissions in Rome. A learned and 309 00:38:01.060 --> 00:38:06.800 comprehensive theoretician, De Lugo has been called the greatest moral theologian since 310 00:38:06.800 --> 00:38:13.640 Aquinas. Author of a book on psychology and another on physics, De Lugo's masterwork 311 00:38:13.640 --> 00:38:22.640 in the area of law and economics was De Justicia et Jure published in 1642. This work went 312 00:38:22.640 --> 00:38:28.480 through numerous editions during the 17th and 18th centuries, its last edition having 313 00:38:28.480 --> 00:38:36.600 appeared as late as 1893. In his Theory of Value, this culminating work of the Salamancon 314 00:38:36.600 --> 00:38:43.120 in School displayed a subtle and advanced subjective utility explanation. 315 00:38:43.120 --> 00:38:49.440 The prices of goods, de Lugo pointed out, fluctuate on account of their utility in respect 316 00:38:49.440 --> 00:38:56.660 of human need, and then only on account of estimation, for jewels are much less useful 317 00:38:56.660 --> 00:39:01.980 than corn in the house, and yet their price is much higher. 318 00:39:01.980 --> 00:39:08.860 Here De Lugo once again comes very close to the late 19th century marginal utility explanation 319 00:39:08.860 --> 00:39:13.940 of value and to solving the value paradox. 320 00:39:13.940 --> 00:39:19.140 Corn is higher than jewelry in use value but is cheaper in price. 321 00:39:19.140 --> 00:39:26.420 The answer to this paradox is that subjective estimates or valuations differ from objective 322 00:39:26.420 --> 00:39:46.980 Subjectivity, de Lugo goes on, means that the estimation or valuation is going to be 323 00:39:46.980 --> 00:39:51.860 conducted by imprudent as well as prudent men. 324 00:39:51.860 --> 00:39:57.100 No rationality or economic man assumptions here. 325 00:39:57.100 --> 00:40:04.540 In short, the just price is the market price determined by demand and consumer valuations. 326 00:40:04.540 --> 00:40:10.100 And if the consumers are foolish or judge differently than we do, then so be it. 327 00:40:10.100 --> 00:40:14.860 The market price is a just price all the same. 328 00:40:14.860 --> 00:40:20.580 In his discussion of merchants' activities, De Lugo adds to the previous opportunity cost 329 00:40:20.580 --> 00:40:27.800 concept of mercantile expenses, for a merchant will only continue to supply a product if 330 00:40:27.800 --> 00:40:35.080 the price covers his expenses and the rate of profit he could earn in other activities. 331 00:40:35.080 --> 00:40:39.680 In his theory of money, Cardinal de Lugo follows his confrères. 332 00:40:39.680 --> 00:40:45.540 The value or purchasing power of money is determined by the quality of the metal content 333 00:40:45.540 --> 00:40:53.620 of Coins, the Supply of and the Demand for Money. De Lugo also set forth the idea that 334 00:40:53.620 --> 00:41:00.080 money moves from the area of its lower to that of its higher value. 335 00:41:00.080 --> 00:41:06.400 On usury De Lugo provided a mixed bag. On the one hand he draws back from the clear 336 00:41:06.400 --> 00:41:12.880 implications of laissez-faire and others that the usury ban should become a hollow shell. 337 00:41:12.880 --> 00:41:18.680 For that reason, he refuses to accept Laissez's willingness to have the lender charge for 338 00:41:18.680 --> 00:41:22.840 lack of money during the period of the loan. 339 00:41:22.840 --> 00:41:30.120 On the other hand, de Lugo widens still further the powerful pro-usery weapons of risk and 340 00:41:30.120 --> 00:41:32.400 lucrum cessans. 341 00:41:32.400 --> 00:41:39.240 He broadens the concept of risk to include explicitly every loan, for, as he puts it 342 00:41:39.240 --> 00:41:41.360 with remarkable bluntness, 343 00:41:41.360 --> 00:41:50.000 Where today is there to be found a debt so placed in safety that in security it equals ready cash? 344 00:41:50.000 --> 00:41:55.600 But that, of course, justifies the charging of interest on every loan. 345 00:41:55.600 --> 00:42:06.080 De Lugo also widens lucrum cessan still further, for he allows the lender to include not only probable profit foregone from a loan, 346 00:42:06.080 --> 00:42:11.280 but also the expectation of remote profit foregone. 347 00:42:11.280 --> 00:42:16.980 Also, the lender in charging interest may calculate the profit he would have made by 348 00:42:16.980 --> 00:42:21.320 re-investing the lost profit on a loan. 349 00:42:21.320 --> 00:42:30.400 In sum, De Lugo asserts sweepingly that Lucrum Cessans is the general title for purging usury. 350 00:42:30.400 --> 00:42:32.600 9. 351 00:42:32.600 --> 00:42:34.440 The Decline of Scholasticism 352 00:42:34.440 --> 00:42:43.080 16th century Spain has well been called the Indian summer of scholasticism. 353 00:42:43.080 --> 00:42:49.120 After that, its decline, not only in Spain but throughout Europe, was rapid. 354 00:42:49.120 --> 00:42:55.080 Part of the reason was a stubborn clinging to the form of the prohibition of usury. 355 00:42:55.080 --> 00:43:01.040 A ban which had made little sense, either by natural or divine law, and which entered 356 00:43:01.040 --> 00:43:06.720 Christian thought, quite late in the day, was clung to and strengthened in an almost 357 00:43:06.720 --> 00:43:10.220 perpetual irrational frenzy. 358 00:43:10.220 --> 00:43:15.740 The systematic weakening of the usury ban by some of the finest minds in Christendom 359 00:43:15.740 --> 00:43:21.240 had the beneficial effect of sanctioning the charging of interest, but at the long-run 360 00:43:21.240 --> 00:43:26.500 cost of discrediting the scholastic method itself. 361 00:43:26.500 --> 00:43:33.740 By clinging to the outer husk of banning usury as a mortal sin, while at the same time finding 362 00:43:33.740 --> 00:43:40.240 increasingly sophisticated ways of allowing merchants and finally professional money lenders 363 00:43:40.240 --> 00:43:46.980 to get around the ban, the scholastics opened themselves to unfair charges of evasion and 364 00:43:46.980 --> 00:43:49.240 hypocrisy. 365 00:43:49.240 --> 00:43:56.020 The deadly assault on scholasticism came from two contrasting but allied camps. 366 00:43:56.020 --> 00:44:03.140 One was the rising groups of Protestants without, and crypto-Calvinists within, the Church, 367 00:44:03.140 --> 00:44:08.620 who denounced it for its alleged decadence and moral laxity. 368 00:44:08.620 --> 00:44:14.940 Protestantism, after all, was in large part a drive to cast off the sophisticated trappings 369 00:44:14.940 --> 00:44:21.340 and refined doctrine of the Church, and to go back to the alleged simplicity and moral 370 00:44:21.340 --> 00:44:24.840 purity of early Christianity. 371 00:44:24.840 --> 00:44:30.800 Indeed the very emblem of this hostility was the Jesuit order, the devoted spearhead of 372 00:44:30.800 --> 00:44:36.280 the Counter-Reformation, that order which had taken up from the faltering Dominicans 373 00:44:36.280 --> 00:44:40.920 the torch of Thomism and scholasticism. 374 00:44:40.920 --> 00:44:48.040 The second camp of enemies of scholasticism was the rising group of secularists and rationalists, 375 00:44:48.040 --> 00:44:53.320 men who might be Catholics or Protestants in their private lives, but who mainly wanted 376 00:44:53.320 --> 00:45:00.100 to get rid of such alleged excresences on modern life as the political application of 377 00:45:00.100 --> 00:45:04.360 religious principles or the prohibition of usury. 378 00:45:04.360 --> 00:45:10.040 Consequently, the crypto-Calvinists attacked the Jesuits for weakening the prohibition 379 00:45:10.040 --> 00:45:15.480 of usury, while the secularists attacked them for keeping it. 380 00:45:15.480 --> 00:45:20.840 Neither wing of the opposition was impressed with the brilliance of the scholastic arguments 381 00:45:20.840 --> 00:45:28.920 to justify usury, nor with the entire scholastic and Jesuit enterprise of casuistry, that is, 382 00:45:28.920 --> 00:45:35.320 of applying moral principles, both natural and divine, to concrete problems of daily 383 00:45:35.320 --> 00:45:37.080 life. 384 00:45:37.080 --> 00:45:42.560 One might think that the task of casuistry should be deemed an important and even noble 385 00:45:42.560 --> 00:45:43.560 one. 386 00:45:43.560 --> 00:45:49.680 If general moral principles exist, why shouldn't they be applied to daily life? 387 00:45:49.680 --> 00:45:57.240 Both sets of opponents rapidly succeeded in making the very word casuistry a smear term, 388 00:45:57.240 --> 00:46:03.680 for the one a method of weaseling out of strict moral precepts, for the other a method 389 00:46:03.680 --> 00:46:09.920 of imposing outdated and reactionary dogmas upon the world. 390 00:46:09.920 --> 00:46:15.800 Why despite the great work of Zumenhardt and others did the Catholic Church persist in 391 00:46:15.800 --> 00:46:23.160 and keeping the formal ban on usury for two centuries thereafter, probably for the same 392 00:46:23.160 --> 00:46:28.840 reason that the Church has always tended to maintain stoutly that it never changes its 393 00:46:28.840 --> 00:46:33.080 doctrines while it keeps doing so. 394 00:46:33.080 --> 00:46:39.600 Changing content within an unchanging formal shell has long been characteristic not only 395 00:46:39.600 --> 00:46:45.680 of the Catholic Church but of any long-lived bureaucratic institution, whether it be the 396 00:46:45.680 --> 00:46:52.420 Church or the constitutional interpretations of the Supreme Court of the United States. 397 00:46:52.420 --> 00:46:59.000 The two-pronged alliance against scholasticism outside and within the Catholic Church cut 398 00:46:59.000 --> 00:47:02.640 far deeper than the quarrel over usury. 399 00:47:02.640 --> 00:47:08.960 At the root of Catholicism as a religion is that God can be approached or apprehended 400 00:47:08.960 --> 00:47:17.320 through all the faculties of man, not simply through faith but through reason and the senses. 401 00:47:17.320 --> 00:47:24.520 Protestantism and especially Calvinism sternly put God outside man's faculties, considering, 402 00:47:24.520 --> 00:47:31.720 for example, sensate embodiments of man's love for God in painting or sculpture as blasphemous 403 00:47:31.720 --> 00:47:38.400 idolatry to be destroyed in order to clear the path for the only proper communication 404 00:47:38.400 --> 00:47:43.320 with God, Pure Faith in Revelation. 405 00:47:43.320 --> 00:47:50.360 The Thomist stress on reason as a means of apprehending God's natural law and even aspects 406 00:47:50.360 --> 00:47:59.240 of divine law was reviled by a sole Protestant emphasis on faith in God's arbitrary will. 407 00:47:59.240 --> 00:48:05.280 While some Protestants adopted natural law theories, the basic Protestant thrust was 408 00:48:05.280 --> 00:48:12.280 opposition to any natural law attempts to derive ethics or political philosophy from 409 00:48:12.280 --> 00:48:14.960 the use of man's reason. 410 00:48:14.960 --> 00:48:22.060 For Protestants, man was too inherently sinful and corrupt for his reason or his senses to 411 00:48:22.060 --> 00:48:25.900 be anything but an embodiment of corruption. 412 00:48:25.900 --> 00:48:32.680 Only pure faith in God's arbitrary and revealed commands was permissible as a groundwork for 413 00:48:32.680 --> 00:48:34.880 human ethics. 414 00:48:34.880 --> 00:48:40.600 But this meant that for Protestants there was also very little natural law groundwork from 415 00:48:40.600 --> 00:48:44.160 which to criticize actions of the state. 416 00:48:44.160 --> 00:48:51.000 Calvinism and even Lutheranism provided little or no defenses against the absolutist state 417 00:48:51.000 --> 00:48:58.900 which burgeoned throughout Europe during the 16th century and triumphed in the 17th century. 418 00:48:58.900 --> 00:49:05.860 If Protestantism opened the way for the absolute state, the secularists of the 16th and 17th 419 00:49:05.860 --> 00:49:08.020 centuries embraced it. 420 00:49:08.020 --> 00:49:14.420 Shorn of natural law critiques of the state, new secularists such as the Frenchman Jean 421 00:49:14.420 --> 00:49:22.620 Baudin embraced the state's positive law as the only possible criterion for politics. 422 00:49:22.620 --> 00:49:28.700 Just as the anti-scholastic Protestants extolled God's arbitrary will as the foundation for 423 00:49:28.700 --> 00:49:35.020 for Ethics, so the new secularists raised the state's arbitrary will to the status 424 00:49:35.020 --> 00:49:39.740 of unchallengeable and absolute sovereign. 425 00:49:39.740 --> 00:49:46.740 On the deeper level of the question of how we know what we know, or epistemology, Thomism 426 00:49:46.740 --> 00:49:53.340 and scholasticism suffered from the contrasting but allied assaults by the champions of reason 427 00:49:53.340 --> 00:49:55.780 and empiricism. 428 00:49:55.780 --> 00:50:03.460 In Thomist thought, reason and empiricism are not separated but allied and interwoven. 429 00:50:03.460 --> 00:50:09.860 Truth is built up by reason on a solid groundwork in empirically known reality. 430 00:50:09.860 --> 00:50:15.700 The rational and empirical were integrated into one coherent whole. 431 00:50:15.700 --> 00:50:21.340 But in the first part of the seventeenth century, two contrasting philosophers managed between 432 00:50:21.340 --> 00:50:27.240 In them the fatal sundering of the rational and the empirical that continues to plague 433 00:50:27.240 --> 00:50:31.420 the scientific method until the present day. 434 00:50:31.420 --> 00:50:43.580 These were the Englishman Francis Bacon, 1561-1626, and the Frenchman René Descartes, 1596-1650. 435 00:50:43.580 --> 00:50:49.700 Descartes was the champion of a desiccated mathematical and absolutely certain reason 436 00:50:49.700 --> 00:50:56.520 divorced from empirical reality, while Bacon was the advocate of sifting endlessly and 437 00:50:56.520 --> 00:51:00.940 almost mindlessly through the empirical data. 438 00:51:00.940 --> 00:51:07.460 Both the distinguished English lawyer who rose to become Lord Chancellor, Lord Verilam, 439 00:51:07.460 --> 00:51:13.980 Viscount of the Realm, and corrupt judge, and the shy and wandering French aristocrat 440 00:51:13.980 --> 00:51:21.480 agreed on one crucial and destructive point, the severing of reason and thought from empirical 441 00:51:21.480 --> 00:51:29.420 data. Hence from Bacon there stemmed the English empiricist tradition steeped mindlessly in 442 00:51:29.420 --> 00:51:36.800 incoherent data, and from Descartes the purely deductive and sometimes mathematical tradition 443 00:51:36.800 --> 00:51:43.880 of Continental Rationalism. All this was, of course, an assault on natural law, which 444 00:51:43.880 --> 00:51:52.080 had long integrated the rational and the empirical. As a corollary to, and intermingled with, 445 00:51:52.080 --> 00:51:59.020 this basic and systematic change in European thought in the early modern period, the 16th 446 00:51:59.020 --> 00:52:05.880 and especially 17th centuries, was a radical shift in the locus of intellectual activity 447 00:52:05.880 --> 00:52:08.940 away from the universities. 448 00:52:08.940 --> 00:52:15.020 The theologians and philosophers who wrote and thought on economics, law, and other disciplines 449 00:52:15.020 --> 00:52:21.400 of human action during the medieval and renaissance periods were university professors. 450 00:52:21.400 --> 00:52:28.460 Paris, Bologna, Oxford, Salamanca, Rome, and many other universities were the milieu and 451 00:52:28.460 --> 00:52:33.960 arena for intellectual output and combat during these centuries. 452 00:52:33.960 --> 00:52:39.120 And even the Protestant universities in the early modern period continued to be centers 453 00:52:39.120 --> 00:52:42.060 of natural law teaching. 454 00:52:42.060 --> 00:52:47.960 But the major theorists and writers of the 17th and then the 18th centuries were almost 455 00:52:47.960 --> 00:52:49.920 none of them professors. 456 00:52:49.920 --> 00:52:56.080 They were pamphleteers, businessmen, wandering aristocrats such as Descartes, minor public 457 00:52:56.080 --> 00:53:02.200 officials such as John Locke, churchmen such as Bishop George Barclay. 458 00:53:02.200 --> 00:53:07.560 This shift of focus was greatly facilitated by the invention of printing, which made the 459 00:53:07.560 --> 00:53:13.640 publication of books and writings far less costly and created a much wider market for 460 00:53:13.640 --> 00:53:16.280 intellectual output. 461 00:53:16.280 --> 00:53:22.280 Printing was invented in the mid-15th century, and by the early 16th century it became possible 462 00:53:22.280 --> 00:53:27.780 for the first time to make a living as an independent writer, selling one's books to 463 00:53:27.780 --> 00:53:30.660 a commercial market. 464 00:53:30.660 --> 00:53:36.860 This shift from university professors to private lay citizens meant, at least for that era, 465 00:53:36.860 --> 00:53:43.500 a move away from traditional modes of learning and thought towards a more diverse spectrum 466 00:53:43.500 --> 00:53:47.540 of idiosyncratic individual views. 467 00:53:47.540 --> 00:53:53.180 In a sense, this acceleration of diversity went hand in hand with one of the most important 468 00:53:53.180 --> 00:53:58.860 impacts of the Protestant Reformation on social and religious thought. 469 00:53:58.860 --> 00:54:05.060 For in the long run, far more important than such theological disputes as over free will 470 00:54:05.060 --> 00:54:11.780 versus predestination, and over the significance of communion, was the shattering of the unity 471 00:54:11.780 --> 00:54:14.060 of Christendom. 472 00:54:14.060 --> 00:54:19.060 Luther and even Calvin had no intention of fragmenting Christendom. 473 00:54:19.060 --> 00:54:24.980 On the contrary, each set out to reform a unified Christian church. 474 00:54:24.980 --> 00:54:30.260 But the consequences of their revolution was to open Pandora's box. 475 00:54:30.260 --> 00:54:36.220 Whereas frictions and heresies had before been either stamped out or accommodated within 476 00:54:36.220 --> 00:54:43.180 the church, now Christianity split apart in literally hundreds of different sects, some 477 00:54:43.180 --> 00:54:49.060 quite bizarre, each propounding different theologies, ethics, and prescriptions for 478 00:54:49.060 --> 00:54:51.440 social life. 479 00:54:51.440 --> 00:54:57.200 While the variegated strains of social thought stemming from this break within Christianity 480 00:54:57.200 --> 00:55:04.440 included rationalists and individualist groups such as the Levellers as well as absolutists, 481 00:55:04.440 --> 00:55:10.280 the value of the resulting diversity must be offset by the unfortunate fading away of 482 00:55:10.280 --> 00:55:15.440 scholasticism and Thomism from Western thought. 483 00:55:15.440 --> 00:55:20.840 The severing of the unity of European thought was intensified by the shift during these 484 00:55:20.840 --> 00:55:34.200 in the Middle Ages, all intellectuals, jurists and theologians in Europe wrote in Latin, 485 00:55:34.200 --> 00:55:39.800 even though, of course, the spoken language in each country was the vernacular. 486 00:55:39.800 --> 00:55:45.960 This meant that for scholars and intellectuals there was only one language, and, in a sense, 487 00:55:45.960 --> 00:56:07.800 In the Middle Ages, only Italian authors wrote from time to time in Italian as well as Latin. 488 00:56:07.800 --> 00:56:13.660 But the Protestant Reformation gave tremendous impetus toward the abandonment of Latin, since 489 00:56:13.660 --> 00:56:19.820 Since Protestants felt it vital for the Christian masses to read and study the Bible in language 490 00:56:19.820 --> 00:56:22.340 they could understand. 491 00:56:22.340 --> 00:56:28.260 Martin Luther's famous translations of the Bible into German in the 16th century inspired 492 00:56:28.260 --> 00:56:33.020 a rapid change toward writing in the national language. 493 00:56:33.020 --> 00:56:39.740 As a result, since the 16th and 17th centuries, economic, social and religious thought began 494 00:56:39.740 --> 00:57:00.860 10. Parting Shots, The Storm Over the Jesuits 495 00:57:00.860 --> 00:57:07.480 While the inspiration for creative and outstanding scholastics was played out, the 17th century 496 00:57:07.480 --> 00:57:14.360 We saw the influence of scholasticism continue in Spain and spread to other countries. 497 00:57:14.360 --> 00:57:20.120 The great champion and disseminator of the Salamanca School was, of course, the Jesuit 498 00:57:20.120 --> 00:57:21.200 Order. 499 00:57:21.200 --> 00:57:27.520 In Spain and elsewhere, the Jesuits produced a huge number of manuals on moral theology 500 00:57:27.520 --> 00:57:34.040 for the use of confessors, in which they discussed, among other matters, the application of theological 501 00:57:34.040 --> 00:57:38.340 and Moral Principles to the Ethics of Business. 502 00:57:38.340 --> 00:57:47.820 The most important instance was the pious father Antonio de Escobar e Mendoza's 1589-1669, 503 00:57:47.820 --> 00:57:52.260 Theologiae Morales 1652. 504 00:57:52.260 --> 00:57:58.680 This extremely popular work was reprinted in 37 editions in a brief period of time, 505 00:57:58.680 --> 00:58:04.680 was also translated and published in France, Belgium, Germany and Italy. 506 00:58:04.680 --> 00:58:11.680 Escobar's work was basically a restatement of two dozen previous books on moral theology, 507 00:58:11.680 --> 00:58:16.680 mainly by such Spanish writers as Molina, Suarez and De Lugo. 508 00:58:16.680 --> 00:58:23.680 He repeated the Salamanca emphasis on common estimation, scarcity and the supply of money 509 00:58:23.680 --> 00:58:26.680 as determinants of market price. 510 00:58:26.680 --> 00:58:31.680 The Salamanca School was particularly influential in Italy. 511 00:58:31.680 --> 00:58:39.680 There, the Genoese philosopher and jurist Ziggismundo Scaccia, circa 1568 to 1618, 512 00:58:39.680 --> 00:58:46.680 published a Tractatus de Comercius et Cambius in 1618, 513 00:58:46.680 --> 00:58:53.680 which was reprinted often in Italy, France and Germany down to the middle of the 18th century. 514 00:58:53.680 --> 00:59:00.680 Scotchia's Tractatus repeated the price and foreign exchange theories of the Salamanquans, 515 00:59:00.680 --> 00:59:05.440 including Covarrubias, Aspilqueta, and Lesius. 516 00:59:05.440 --> 00:59:11.080 Other prominent neo-Salamanquans in Italy were the Jesuit Cardinal Giambattista de Luca 517 00:59:11.080 --> 00:59:21.360 1613-1683, who published his multi-volume Theatrum Veritatis et Justitiae in Rome in 518 00:59:21.360 --> 00:59:42.160 In France, however, the influential Escobar manual ran into a storm of abuse for its sophisticated 519 00:59:42.160 --> 00:59:45.880 permissive attitude toward usury. 520 00:59:45.880 --> 00:59:52.320 The abuse was led by an influential crypto-Calvinist group within the French Catholic Church that 521 00:59:52.320 --> 00:59:59.400 raised a furious row about the alleged moral laxity of the Jesuit order. 522 00:59:59.400 --> 01:00:04.660 The assault on the Jesuits and on their devotion to reason and the freedom of the will had 523 01:00:04.660 --> 01:00:10.640 begun in Belgium and was accelerated towards the end of the 16th century by Dr. Michael 524 01:00:10.640 --> 01:00:18.520 Charles de Bay, Chancellor of the Great University of Louvain. Bay and Bayanism launched a furious 525 01:00:18.520 --> 01:00:25.920 intramural warfare within Louvain against Leonard Lassius and the Jesuits on the faculty. 526 01:00:25.920 --> 01:00:31.360 Chancellor de Bay managed to convert most of the Louvain faculty to his creed, which 527 01:00:31.360 --> 01:00:39.560 adopted the Calvinist creed of predestination of an elect. In France, the absolutist pro-royalists 528 01:00:39.560 --> 01:00:50.560 The Jesuits began a bitter campaign against the Jesuit order, which they linked with the Catholic Leagueers and the assassination of the centrist and pro-Calvinist Henrys. 529 01:00:50.560 --> 01:01:01.560 In particular, the attorney Antoine Arnoule, defending royal absolutism to the hilt, petitioned for the expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 530 01:01:01.560 --> 01:01:08.560 angrily declaiming that they were the worst enemies of the sacred doctrine of the divine right of kings. 531 01:01:08.560 --> 01:01:23.560 Arnaud was originally employed to press the case against the Jesuits by the University of Paris and its theological faculty of the Sorbonne, which had also been swept by the Crypto-Calvinist tide. 532 01:01:23.560 --> 01:01:33.560 In the early 17th century, two disciples of Michael Debye, both former students of the Jesuits, took up the cudgels for his cause. 533 01:01:33.560 --> 01:01:43.560 Most important was Cornelius Janssen, founder of the neo-Calvinist Janssenist movement, which became extremely powerful in France. 534 01:01:43.560 --> 01:01:55.560 Janssen, like many openly Protestant theologians, demanded to go back to the moral purity of St. Augustine and of the Christian doctrines of the 4th and 5th centuries. 535 01:01:55.560 --> 01:02:05.560 If Jansen was the theoretician of the movement, his friend, the Abbé Saint-Séran, was the brilliant tactician and organizer. 536 01:02:05.560 --> 01:02:16.560 With the help of Mère Angelique, Superior of the Nuns of Port-Royal, Saint-Séran gained control of these influential nuns. 537 01:02:16.560 --> 01:02:17.560 Nones. 538 01:02:17.560 --> 01:02:24.560 Mère Angélique was the daughter of Antoine Arnault, and indeed a dozen of the Port-Royal 539 01:02:24.560 --> 01:02:29.120 nuns were members of the powerful Arnault family. 540 01:02:29.120 --> 01:02:34.720 One of the Port-Royal nuns was the sister of the brilliant young philosopher, mathematician 541 01:02:34.720 --> 01:02:42.240 and French stylist Blaise Pascal, and young Pascal took up the Jansenist cause with a 542 01:02:42.240 --> 01:02:49.120 The witty and blistering attack on the Jesuits, particularly Escobar, for his alleged moral 543 01:02:49.120 --> 01:02:53.240 failure in being soft on usury. 544 01:02:53.240 --> 01:03:00.840 Pascal even coined a popular new term, Escobarderie, with which he denounced the important discipline 545 01:03:00.840 --> 01:03:05.720 of casuistry as being evasive quibbling. 546 01:03:05.720 --> 01:03:12.780 Another victim of Pascal's poison pen was the austere French Jesuit Etienne Bonnet. 547 01:03:12.780 --> 01:03:20.680 In his Summe de Pêche, 1639, Bonnet extended the weakening of the usury ban by going so 548 01:03:20.680 --> 01:03:28.160 far as to justify interest charges higher than the maximum rate permitted by royal decree. 549 01:03:28.160 --> 01:03:33.080 For, after all, the debtors entered into them willingly. 550 01:03:33.080 --> 01:03:41.320 Moreover, Boni's trenchant voluntarism defended the usury contract on another incisive ground. 551 01:03:41.320 --> 01:03:46.880 Since it is licit for a lender to hope for a borrower to give him a free gift, it should 552 01:03:46.880 --> 01:03:53.800 also be licit for the lender and the borrower to make such a definite pact beforehand. 553 01:03:53.800 --> 01:04:01.480 How can making a contract for something be evil if hoping for the result is permissible? 554 01:04:01.480 --> 01:04:13.480 The Jesuits permit such justifications by voluntary choice, and then, of course, all assaults on usury and other free market activities must go by the board. 555 01:04:14.480 --> 01:04:29.480 Although the Jansenists were eventually condemned by the Pope, Pascal's scurrilous rampage against the Jesuits had considerable effect in helping to end the reign of scholastic thought, at least in France.