Domingo Báñez facts for kids
Domingo Báñez (also Dominico Bannes Mondragonensis) (29 February 1528 in Valladolid – 22 October 1604 in Medina del Campo) was a Spanish Dominican and Scholastic theologian. The qualifying Mondragonensis sometimes attached to his name seems to refer to the birthplace of his father, Juan Báñez, at Mondragón in Guipúzcoa.
Contents
Life
Education and teaching
Báñez was born at Medina del Campo, in the province of Valladolid.
At fifteen he began to study philosophy at the University of Salamanca. Three years later he took the Dominican habit at the Convent of St. Stephen, Salamanca, and made his profession 3 May 1547. During a year's review of the liberal arts and later, he had the afterwards distinguished Bartolomé de Medina as a fellow student. Under such professors as Melchior Cano (1548–51), Diego de Chaves (1551), and Pedro Sotomayor (1550–51) he studied theology, laying the foundations of the erudition and acquiring the acumen which later made him eminent as a theologian and an exponent and defender of Thomistic doctrine. Báñez next began teaching, and under Domingo Soto, as prior and regent, he held various professorships for ten years. He was made master of students, explaining the Summa to the younger brethren for five years, and incidentally taking the place, with marked success, of professors who were sick, or who for other reasons were absent from their chairs at the university. In the customary, sometimes competitive, examinations before advancement he is said easily to have carried off all honours. Báñez taught at the Dominican University of Avila from 1561 to 1566. About 1567 he was assigned to a chair of theology at Alcalá, the ancient Complutum. It appears that he was at Salamanca again in 1572 and 1573, but during the four scholastic years 1573-77 he was regent of St. Gregory's Dominican College al Valladolid, a house of higher studies where the best students of the Castilian province were prepared for a scholastic career. Elected Prior of Toro, he went instead to Salamanca to compete for the chair of Durandus, left vacant by Medina's promotion to the chief professorship. He occupied this position from 1577 to 1580. After Medina's death (30 December 1580) he appeared again as competitor for the first chair of the university. The outcome was an academic triumph for Báñez and he was duly installed in his new position amid the acclamations of professors and students. There he laboured for nearly twenty years. His name acquired extraordinary authority, and the leading schools of orthodox Spain referred to him as the proeclarissimum jubar-- "the brightest light"—of their country.
Works
It has been contended that Báñez was at least virtually the founder of present-day Thomism, especially in so far as it includes the theories of physical premotion, the intrinsic efficacy of grace, and predestination irrespective of foreseen merit. To any reader of Bañez It is evident that he would have met such a declaration with a strenuous denial. Fidelity to St. Thomas was his strongest characteristic. [...] He singles out for special animadversion the views in which his professors and associates dissent even lightly from the opinions of the Angelic Doctor.
Báñez's zeal for the integrity of Thomistic teaching could brook no doctrinal novelty, particularly if it claimed the sanction of St. Thomas's name. In the voluminous literature of the De Auxiliis and related controversies, the cardinal tenets of Thomism are ascribed by its opponents to a varied origin: Gerhard Schneeman, the Rev. Father De Regnon, S. J. and the Rev. Father Gaudier, S. J. are probably the foremost modern writers who designate the Thomists as Bannesians. But against them appears a formidable list of Jesuits of repute who were either Thomists themselves or authorities for other opinions. Suárez, for instance, credits Medina with the first intimations of physical premotion and elsewhere admits that St. Thomas himself once taught it. Toletus and Pererius considered as Thomistic the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which was the work (1566) of three Dominican theologians. The Rev. Victor Frins S. J., gives it as his opinion that whilst Medina and Pedro de Soto (1551) taught physical predetermination, the originator of the theory was Francisco de Vitoria, O.P. (d. 1546). The Dominicans Ferrariensis (1576), Cajetan (1507), and John Capreolus (d. 1436) are also accredited Thomists in the estimation of such authorities as the Jesuits Martin Becanus and Azorius, and the theologians of Coimbra. Molina, strangely enough, cites the doctrine of a "certain disciple of St. Thomas"—supposedly Báñez—as differing only in words from the teaching of Duns Scotus, instead of agreeing with that of Aquinas. These striking divergences of opinion of which only a few have been cited would seem to indicate that the attempt to father the Thomistic system on Báñez has failed.
The development of Thomistic terminology in the Dominican school was mainly due to the exigencies not only of the stand taken against Molina and the forbidden propositions already mentioned, but of the more important defense against the attacks and aberrations of the Reformers. The "predetermination" and "predefinition" of Báñez and his contemporaries, who included others besides Dominicans, emphasized, on the part of God's knowledge and providence, a priority to, and independence of future free acts, which, in the Catharino-Molinistic theories, seemed to them less clearly to fall under God's causal action. These terms, however, are used by St. Thomas himself. The words "physical premotion" were meant to exclude, first a merely moral impulse and, secondly, a concurrence of the Divine causality and free will, without the latter's subordination to the First Cause. That such terms, far from doing violence to the teachings of their great leader, are their true expression, has, of course, been an unvaried tenet of the Thomistic school. One of the presiding officers of the Congregatio de Auxiliis, Cardinal Madruzzi, speaking of Báñez in this connection, said: 'His teaching seems to be deduced from the principles of St. Thomas and to flow wholly from St. Thomas's doctrine, although he differs somewhat in his mode of speaking.'
See also
In Spanish: Domingo Báñez para niños
