Salamanca School

Students in a classroom of the University of Salamanca, centuryXVII.

Statue of Francisco de Vitoria in Salamanca.

The expression School of Salamanca is used generically to designate the renaissance of thought in various areas carried out by an important group of Spanish university professors, but especially theologians, as a result of the intellectual and pedagogical work of Francisco de Vitoria at the University of Salamanca. There is no doubt that the influence of the School must have been felt in other nations, since many of the components of the School taught at universities outside of Spain.

It falls within the broader context of the Spanish Golden Age, in which there was not only an explosion of the arts, also in Salamanca, where the Salamancan literary school flourished, but also of the sciences, which is especially manifested in this school.

Due to the subsequent political evolution, Spain was not very interested in continuing along the paths marked out by the professors of Salamanca, its international recognition has been very late, since the Protestant nations (which are the majority among those who have written science from the 18th century) they must not have felt comfortable recognizing the modernity of some theologians who were leaders in the Council of Trent. However, little by little their work is being rescued from oblivion and, for example, in the 50s of the XX century, Joseph Alois Schumpeter claimed the contribution of the people from Salamanca to the origin of economic science (in the current of Spanish economic thought known as arbitrismo), to which must be added the extensive studies by Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson, on all the topics that the School touched on.

In that same decade, Luciano Pereña began the publication of his investigations on Suárez and Vitoria, from which, in 1972, the start of the publication of the monumental "Corpus Hispanorum de Pace" will take place.

Historical context

Martin de Azpilcueta.

Since the beginning of the XVI century, traditional conceptions of the human being and his relationship with God and the world had been shaken by the appearance of humanism, by the Protestant reform and by the new geographical discoveries and their consequences. The advent of the Modern Age brought about an important change in the concept of man in society. The School of Salamanca approached these problems from new points of view.

Francisco de Vitoria, Domingo de Soto, Luis de Alcalá, Martín de Azpilcueta (or Azpilicueta), Tomás de Mercado or Francisco Suárez, all of them natural law and moralists, are the founders of a school of theologians and jurists who carried out the task to reconcile the Thomist doctrine with the new social and economic order. The topics of study focused mainly on man and his practical problems (moral, economic, legal...), although it is far from a single doctrine accepted by all, as evidenced by the disagreements or even the bitter polemics between them, which demonstrate the intellectual vitality of the School.

Due to the breadth of topics covered, the convenience of distinguishing two schools has been raised, that of the salmanticenses and that of the conimbricenses (from the University of Coimbra). The first would begin with Francisco de Vitoria (c. 1483-1546), and reached its maximum splendor with Domingo de Soto (1494-1560), all of them from the Dominican order. The school of the conimbricenses would be formed by the Jesuits who, from the end of the XVI century, took over the intellectual baton from the Dominicans. Among the Jesuits we find names of the stature of Luis de Molina (1535-1600) and Francisco Suárez (1548-1617).

See also: Second scholasticism

Theology

In the Renaissance, theology was in decline in the face of the thriving humanism, with scholasticism converted into an empty and routine methodology. The University of Salamanca represented, from Francisco de Vitoria, a boom in theology, especially as a renaissance of Thomism, which influenced cultural life in general and in other European universities. The fundamental contribution of the School of Salamanca to theology may be the approach to the problems of society, which had previously been ignored, as well as the study of hitherto unknown issues. For this reason, the term positive theology was sometimes used to highlight its practical nature compared to scholastic theology.

Morality

At a time when religion (Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam...) permeated everything, analyzing the morality of acts was the most practical and useful study that could be done to serve society. That is why the original contributions in law and economics of the School of Salamanca were originally nothing more than concrete analyzes of the challenges and moral problems caused to society by the new situations.

Over the years, a series of responses to specific moral dilemmas was obtained. But since a casuistry could never be complete, a more general rule or principle was also sought. From here, probabilism began to develop, where the ultimate criterion was no longer the truth, but the security of not choosing wrong. Developed mainly by Bartolomé de Medina and continued by Gabriel Vázquez and Francisco Suárez, probabilism became the most important moral school of the following centuries.

Existence of evil in the world

A revolutionary idea among those developed by the people of Salamanca is that you can do evil even if you know God, and you can do good even if you don't know him. That is, morality does not depend on divinity. This was especially important when dealing with pagans, since the fact that they were not Christians did not mean that they were not good.

Vitoria provided a new image of divinity to try to explain the presence of evil in the world. The existence of this made it difficult to believe that God could be infinitely good and infinitely powerful at the same time.

Vitoria explained this paradox by appealing to human free will. Since freedom is granted by God himself to each man, it is not necessary for man to act by always choosing the good. The consequence is that man can voluntarily cause evil.

Auxiliis controversy

Fray Luis de León.

This controversy broke out, at the end of the XVI century, between Jesuits and Dominicans about grace and predestination, it is that is, how can free will be reconciled with the omnipotence of God. In 1582 the Jesuit Prudencio de Montemayor and the Augustinian fray Luis de León spoke about human freedom in a public act. The Dominican Domingo Báñez considered that they gave him excessive weight and that they used terms that sounded heretical, for which he accused them before the Holy Office of Pelagianism. This doctrine extolled human free will to the detriment of original sin and the grace granted by God. The result of this skirmish was that Prudencio de Montemayor ended up removed from teaching and Fray Luis was prohibited from defending such ideas.

Báñez was accused before the Holy Office by Fray Luis de León of making Luther's mistake. According to this doctrine, which is at the base of Protestantism, man is corrupted as a consequence of original sin and cannot be saved on his own merits, only if God grants him grace. Báñez was exonerated.

However, this did not end the controversy, which Luis de Molina continued with his Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis (1588), relying on the Portuguese Jesuit Pedro de Fonseca, who was considered the best expression of the position of the Jesuits. The controversy continued for years and included an attempt by the Dominicans to get Pope Clement VIII to condemn Molina's Concordia. Finally Paul V in 1607 recognized the freedom of Jesuits and Dominicans to defend their ideas, forbidding any of them to be classified as heresy.

Law and justice

The legal doctrine of the School of Salamanca meant the end of medieval concepts of law, with the first great demand for freedom, unusual for Europe at the time. The natural rights of man became, in one way or another, the center of attention, both those related to the body (right to life, to property) and to the spirit (right to freedom of thought, to dignity)..

Natural law and human rights

The School of Salamanca reformulated the concept of natural law. This arises from nature itself, and everything that exists according to the natural order shares that right. The obvious conclusion is that, if all men share the same nature, they also share the same rights as equality or liberty. Since man does not live in isolation but in society, natural law is not limited to the individual. Thus, justice is an example of natural law that is realized within society. For Gabriel Vázquez (1549-1604) acting justly is a duty dictated by natural law.

Thus, in the face of the predominant conception in Spain and Europe of the American Indians as infantile or incapable, the great novelty would be the recognition of rights, such as the right to own their lands or to reject conversion by force.

Sovereignty

Francisco Suarez.

The School of Salamanca distinguished two powers, the natural or civil sphere and the supernatural sphere, which in the Middle Ages did not differ. A direct consequence of the separation of powers is that the king or emperor has no jurisdiction over souls, nor does the Pope have temporal power. They even proposed that the power of the ruler has its limitations. Thus, according to Luis de Molina, a nation is analogous to a mercantile society in which the rulers would be the administrators, but where the power resides in the set of those administered individually, when the previous idea was that the power of the society over the individual is greater than his over himself, since the ruler's power was an emanation of divine power, something that the people of Salamanca reject.

Thus, for example, the English crown maintained the theory of royal power by divine design (the only legitimate recipient of the emanation of power from God is the king), so that the subjects could only abide by their orders so as not to contravene said said plan. Faced with this, various members of the School argued that the people are the recipient of sovereignty, which transmits it to the ruling prince under various conditions. The most prominent in this regard was possibly Francisco Suárez, whose work Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae sectae errors (1613) was the best defense of the people's sovereignty at the time. Men are born free by their very nature and not slaves to another man, and they can disobey and even depose an unjust ruler. Like Molina, he affirms that political power does not belong to any specific person, but he differs from him by the nuance that he considers that the recipient is the people as a whole, not as a group of individual sovereigns.

For Suárez, the political power of society is originally contractual because the community is formed by the consensus of free wills. The consequence of this contractarian theory is that the natural form of government is democracy, while the oligarchy or the monarchy emerge as secondary institutions, which are just if they have been chosen by the people.

People's law and international law

Francisco de Vitoria was perhaps the first to develop a theory on the ius gentium ('law of nations') that can undoubtedly be described as modern. He extrapolated his ideas of a legitimate sovereign power over society to the international arena, concluding that this sphere should also be governed by fair rules that respect the rights of all. The common good of the world is of a higher category than the good of each state. This meant that relations between states had to go from being justified by force to being justified by law and justice. Some historians have contradicted the traditional version of the origins of international law, which highlights the influence of Hugo Grocio's De jure belli ac pacis, proposing Vitoria and, later, Suárez as precursors and, potentially founders of the field. Others, such as Koskenniemi, have argued that neither of these humanist nor scholastic thinkers founded international law in the modern sense, instead placing the origins in the post-1870 era.

The ius gentium gradually diversified. Francisco Suárez, who already worked with well-defined categories, distinguished between ius inter gentes and ius intra gentes. While the ius inter gentes, which would correspond to modern international law, was common to most countries (because it is a positive, non-natural law, it does not have to be mandatory for all the peoples), the ius intra gentes or civil law is specific to each nation.

Justification of wars

Since war is one of the worst evils that man can suffer, the members of the School reasoned that it cannot be resorted to under any condition, but only to avoid a greater evil. Even a regular agreement is preferable, even if it is the powerful party, before starting a war. Examples of just war are:

• In self-defence, whenever you have chances of success. If beforehand it is doomed to failure, such a war would be a useless bloodshed.
• Preventive war against a tyrant who is about to attack.
• War of punishment against a guilty enemy.

But a war is not only legal or illegal due to the triggering reason, it must meet a whole series of additional requirements:

• It is necessary that the answer be proportional to evil, if more violence is used than is strictly necessary, it would be an unjust war.
• The ruler is the one who must declare war, but his decision is not enough to begin it. If the population is opposed, it is illegal. Of course, if the ruler wants to wage an unjust war, it is preferable to put it down and judge it.
• Once the war has begun, you can't do everything in it, like attacking innocents or killing hostages, there are moral limits to acting.
• All options for dialogue and negotiations before a war is required, only war is lawful as a last resort.

Expansionist wars are unjust, of looting, to convert infidels or pagans, for glory, etc.

Conquest of America

Melchor Cano.

In this era of early colonialism in the Modern era, Spain was the only European nation in which a large group of intellectuals considered the legitimacy of a conquest instead of trying to justify it on traditional grounds. It was known as the fair titles controversy, one of whose episodes was the Valladolid Board (1550-1551), a famous debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas in which several disciples of Vitoria, already dead, also participated: Domingo de Soto and Melchor Cano (both from the University of Salamanca) and Bartolomé de Carranza (from the University of Valladolid), all of them (like Sepúlveda and Las Casas) Dominicans.

Francisco de Vitoria had begun his analysis of the conquest by discarding the illegitimate titles. He was the first who dared to deny that the bulls of Alexander VI (collectively known as the Donation Bulls ) were a valid title of ownership of the discovered lands. Neither were the universal primacy of the emperor, the authority of the Pope (who lacks temporal power) nor a compulsory submission or conversion of the Indians acceptable. They could not be considered sinful or unintelligent, but were free by nature and legitimate owners of their property. When the Spaniards arrived in America they did not carry any legitimate title to occupy those lands that already had an owner.

Vitoria also analyzed whether there were reasons that would justify some kind of domain over the discovered lands. She found up to eight legitimate domain titles. The first one that she points out, perhaps the fundamental one, is related to communication between men, who together constitute a universal society. The ius peregrinandi et degendi is the right of every human being to travel and trade in all corners of the earth, regardless of who is the ruler or what the religion of each territory is. Therefore, if the Indians did not allow free transit, the attacked had the right to defend themselves, and to keep the territories they obtained in that war.

The second title refers to another right whose obstruction was also a just war cause. The Indians could voluntarily reject the conversion, but not prevent the right of the Spaniards to preach, in which case the situation would be analogous to that of the first title. However, Vitoria points out that even if this is a cause of a just war, it is not necessarily convenient for it to happen because of the deaths it could cause.

The following titles, of much lesser importance, are:

• If the pagan sovereigns force the converts to return to idolatry.
• If there is a sufficient number of convert Christians they can receive from the Pope a Christian ruler.
• If there is tyranny or harm done to innocent people (accredited).
• Because of partners and friends attacked, such as the tlaxcaltecas, allies of the Spaniards but sojuzgados, with many other peoples, by the Aztecs.
• The last legitimate title, although qualified by Vitoria himself of doubt, is the lack of fair laws, magistrates, agricultural techniques, etc. In any case, it would always be with Christian charity and for the usefulness of the Indians.

These legitimate and illegitimate titles did not please King Carlos I as it meant that Spain had no special right, so he tried unsuccessfully to stop theologians from expressing their opinions on these issues.

Other issues

Jerónimo Castillo de Bobadilla wrote a treatise on administration and justice: Policy for corregidores and lords of vassals, in times of peace and war and for ecclesiastical and secular judges, commission judges, aldermen, lawyers and other officials public, within the liberal idea of the School.

Economy

Perhaps the aspect that has recently made this School most famous is for its research on economics. The final endorsement of the name Salamanca School of Economists came from Joseph Schumpeter in his History of economic analysis (1954), although many economic historians already used the name before he. Schumpeter studied scholastic doctrine in general and Spanish doctrine in particular, and praised the high level of economic science in Spain in the XVI century. According to the aforementioned economist, this school was the group that most deserves the title of founder of economic science. The School of Salamanca did not manage to elaborate a complete economic doctrine, but it established the first modern economic theories to face the new problems that had arisen. Unfortunately, there was no follow-up from the late 17th century , and many of his contributions were forgotten to be rediscovered decades later.

Although no direct influence has been found, the Salamanca School has been compared many times with the Austrian School.

Background

In 1517 Francisco de Vitoria, then at the Sorbonne, was consulted by Spanish merchants based in Antwerp about the moral legitimacy of trading to increase personal wealth. From a current point of view, it can be said that it was a consultation on the legality of the entrepreneurial spirit. From then on and for years to come, Vitoria and other theologians paid attention to economic matters. They moved away from already obsolete positions and tried to replace them with new principles drawn from natural law.

The natural order is based on the free circulation of people, goods and ideas, so that men can get to know each other and increase their feelings of brotherhood. This implied that the merchants were not only not morally reprehensible, but that they carried out an important service for the general welfare.

Private Property

Luis de Molina.

Diego de Covarrubias.

With the flourishing of the mendicant orders in the 13th century began a movement that, with increasing force, insisted in poverty and the brotherhood of men, deploring the accumulation of wealth in the Church. The mendicant orders considered the possession of goods and private property as, at least, morally objectionable. Against them, the Dominicans in general, and Thomas Aquinas in particular, had defended that private property is, in itself, a morally neutral human institution (even though the Dominicans are a mendicant order).

The members of the School of Salamanca agreed that private property has the beneficial effect of stimulating economic activity, and with it the general welfare. Diego de Covarrubias (1512-1577) considered that the owners not only had property rights over the property but also, which is already a modern trait, they had the exclusive right to the benefits that could be derived from the property, even though these could benefit community. In any case, he specified that in times of great need all things are common.

Luis de Molina (1535-1601) considered it an institution with positive practical effects since, for example, goods were better cared for by an owner than if they were communal property.

Money, value, price and fair price

The most complete and methodical developers of a theory of value were Martín de Azpilicueta (1493-1586), Luis de Alcalá (1490-1549) and Luis de Molina (1535-1600). Interested in the effect of the precious metals that arrived from America, Martín de Azpilcueta verified the fact that in countries where they were scarce, the prices of goods are lower than those of countries with an abundance of these metals. The precious metal, like one more commodity, has less purchasing value the more abundant it is. In this way, he developed a theory of value-scarcity, a precursor of the quantity theory of money, in his work Manual of confessors and penitents (1556) and its appendices Resolving commentary on usuras and Resolving changes commentary, anticipating, and in a more complete way, the Answers to the paradoxes of Monsieur de Malestroit (1588) by Jean Bodin.

The predominant theory of value up to that time was a medieval theory of the cost of production as a fair price. The Franciscan Luis de Alcalá, Diego de Covarrubias and Luis de Molina developed a subjective theory of value and price that is that, since the utility of a good varies from person to person, its fair price will be the one reached mutually. agreement on free trade (without monopoly, deceit or government intervention).^{[citation needed]}

This interpretation does not imply that they identified in all cases the fair price of the merchandise with any competitive price, nor were they opposed to the legal fixing of the prices of some merchandise considered basic.

The doctors of the School of Salamanca received from the medieval scholastics a theory of the value of change based on the idea that the price of things is not determined according to its intrinsic perfection or its nature... but taking into account its need for human beings (indigentia). But then we must say that, following Thomas Aquinas, they did not understand that necessity in a subjective sense, but objective.

In relation to the fair price of merchandise, Francisco de Vitoria points out the necessary and fundamental distinction between things that are necessary for life and those that are not:

"There are two kinds of things that can be sold. There are some that are necessary for the good march of things and for life, and for them one cannot demand more than they are worth, and it is not good to say that the one who wants is not made injurious, for in this case one does not give a decision of all volunteers, but there is a coercion, because the need compels him; as if one who has need in one way, asks for wine to drink, and the other does not want to give it, Francisco de Vitoria

The theory of value of the doctors of the School of Salamanca, according to Paradinas, could be summarized in three points:

1o.- The value of change of things does not depend on your need understood in a subjective or utilitarian sense, but objective.

2o.- The fair price of the things necessary for life, if there is no fraud or deception, determines the “common estimate” only if there are many sellers and buyers, that is, if there is true competition between those who sell and those who buy.

3o.- The price of things necessary for human life can and must be legally established.

Interest

Usury (as any loan with interest was called at that time) had always been highly frowned upon by the Church. The Second Lateran Council (1139) condemned that the payment of a debt be greater than the capital lent; the Council of Vienna (1307) explicitly prohibited usury and described as heretical any legislation that tolerated it; the early scholastics disapproved of charging interest.

In the medieval economy, loans were the consequence of necessity (bad harvest, fire in the workshop) and, under these conditions, it could not be less than morally reprehensible to charge interest for it. In the Renaissance, the greater mobility of people led to an increase in trade and the appearance of appropriate conditions for entrepreneurs to start new and lucrative businesses. Since the loan was no longer for self-consumption but for production, it could not be seen in the same light.

The School of Salamanca found various reasons that justified charging interest. In the first place, under the aforementioned conditions, the person who received the loan obtained a benefit at the expense of the money obtained. On the other hand, interest could be considered as a premium for the borrower's risk of losing his money. There was also the issue of opportunity cost, as the borrower lost the ability to use the money elsewhere. Finally, and one of the most original contributions, was the consideration of money as a commodity for which a benefit can be received (which would be interest).

Martín de Azpilcueta also considered the influence of time. Other things being equal, it is preferable to receive an amount now than to receive it in the future. For it to be more attractive, it needs to be older. In this case, the interest supposes the payment of time.

This topic was also addressed by Bartolomé de Medina and Mancio de Corpus Christi (known as Master Mancio) in their Treatise on usury and changes.

Other sciences

Other members of this School also dealt with the natural sciences. Domingo de Soto himself studied the free fall of bodies and the astronomer Jerónimo Muñoz who studied the supernova in 1572, was a supporter of the Copernican system and Galileo apparently took advantage of some of his calculation methods. The Portuguese mathematician Pedro Nunes (Petrus Nonius) was a professor at Salamanca between 1538 and 1544.

The School of Salamanca in America

The University of San Marcos de Lima was created on May 12, 1551, following the model of the University of Salamanca, and professors trained in Salamanca taught there, such as Pedro Gutiérrez Flores, rector of the University (1580-1581); Francisco de León Garavito, First Law professor and also rector of the University (1601-1602) and Alonso Velázquez, oidor of Lima and professor, who brought to the Indies the spirit of renewal that flourished in Salamanca.

The Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico was created by royal decree of September 21, 1551. Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz, a great opponent of slavery, founded the chair of Institute at that University on January 24, 1553.

Members

There is discussion about which authors can be assigned to the name of the Salamanca school, or if one can speak of a Salamanca school in the first place, but the consensus revolves around the name of Francisco de Vitoria, considered a central figure of the movement. From him, authors refer to three stages, counting in the first the pupils of Vitoria and their pupils, in the second contemporaries from Salamanca who had no direct relationship with him and in the third external figures influenced by this current.

First group

Second group

Third group

Additional bibliography

• AlvesAndré Azevedo (2010). The Salamanca School (Major Conservative and Libertarian Thinkers), edited by John Meadowcroft, Continuum International Publishing
• Haro Aullion, Pedro, ed. (2020), The Schools of Salamanca and Universalist, Madrid, Recension (Monographic number, vol. 3), Madrid. [1]
• Belda Plans, Juan (2000). The School of Salamanca. B.A.C. ISBN 978-8479144722.
• Decock, Wim (2013). Theologians and Contract Law. The Moral Transformation of the Ius Commune (c. 1500-1650), Boston/Leiden, Brill/Nijhoff, ISBN 978-90-04-23284-6
• Decock, Wim (2016). Spanish Scholastics on Money and Credit: Economic, Legal and Political Aspects. In: W. Ernst - D. Fox (eds.), Money in the Western Legal Tradition, Oxford, OUP, 267-283.
• Poncela González, Angel, ed. (2015). The School of Salamanca. Philosophy and Humanism before the modern world. Verbum Editorial. ISBN 97884907418.
• Velasco Sánchez, José Tomás (2017). The School of Salamanca. Concept, members, problems, influences, survival. Bubok Publishing, S.L. Madrid. ISBN 978-84-686-6627-3.