Luis de Molina

Luis de Molina (1535–1600) was born at Cuenca and entered the Society of Jesus at Alcalá at eighteen. He studied at Coimbra, taught philosophy there, and then held the chair of theology at Évora, where for twenty years he lectured on Thomas's *Summa*. In 1590 he went home to Cuenca to prepare his lectures for the press, and in 1600 he was called to Madrid to a new Jesuit chair of moral theology. He died there that October, on the day the Roman *Congregatio de auxiliis* reported against his book.

The book was the *Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis* (Lisbon, 1588), the work of thirty years. To reconcile grace with human freedom it gave God a *scientia media*, a knowledge of what each free creature would do in any circumstance, prior to any decree. Báñez and the Dominicans answered that this made God's will wait on the creature's, and the quarrel *de auxiliis* ran in Rome for a decade until Paul V closed it in 1607 without condemning either side. Molina's *De iustitia et iure* carried the same exactness into contracts, prices and money.

None of his works is in the library yet.