The Line from Suárez to Maritain By tracing this trajectory, Villey shows that modern secular philosophers like Hobbes and Locke did not invent subjective rights out of thin air. They merely secularized the legal architecture built by the late Catholic Scholastics. [1] When Jacques Maritain tried to rescue modern human rights by anchoring them back in Catholic personalism, Villey viewed it as a flawed endeavor. Maritain was using a vocabulary born from the baroque degradation of Thomism, mistaking a modern system of individualized claims for the classical natural law of Aquinas. [1]

Yes, looking closer at Michel Villey’s critique of the baroque Scholastics is essential to understanding how the concept of human rights was decoupled from traditional classical natural law. [1]

Villey (1914–1988), an influential French legal philosopher, argued that the modern crisis of law stems from a subtle but devastating intellectual shift that occurred between the high Middle Ages (Aquinas) and the Early Modern "Baroque" period. [1, 2]

The primary target of Villey's critique was the Second Scholasticism—specifically thinkers like the Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). Villey argued that these baroque theologians unwittingly laid the groundwork for modern secular individualism by redefining the core structure of justice. [1, 2, 3]

1. From "Answering Rightly" to "Arriving at the Right Answer"

The quote in your first prompt references Villey’s idea that the baroque Scholastics substituted a concern with answering rightly for a concern with arriving at the right answer.

• Aquinas (Answering Rightly): For Thomas, justice is a flexible, relational art. A judge or a community looks at a real-world situation to determine what is objectively fair (ius) to divide between specific parties. The focus is entirely on a sound, objective method of discovery. [1]
• The Baroque Scholastics (The Right Answer): Thinkers like Suárez, reacting to the Protestant Reformation and the colonization of the New World, felt a pressing need to solve unprecedented global, legal, and political crises. To do this, they treated natural law as a vast, highly rationalized system of ready-made moral rules stored in human reason. Instead of analyzing localized relationships to discover justice, they deduced complex moral codes to hand down. They prioritized getting a clean, comprehensive "answer" that fit the pressing political needs of their era. [1, 2, 3, 4, 6]

2. The Metamorphosis of Ius into Substantive Will

Villey argued that this shift transformed the law from an intrinsic cosmic order into an expression of supreme will. [1]

• God's Will as Law: In the baroque framework, natural law became a series of commands issued by God's absolute will, which human reason simply decodes.
• The Birth of Subjective Rights: Once law is understood as a manifestation of will rather than an objective proportion (analogon), the individual person is also granted a sovereign "will". Thus, ius (what is objectively just in a situation) was replaced by the facultas agendi—a subjective right or personal power to act that the individual commands against others. [1, 2, 3]

The Line from Suárez to Maritain

By tracing this trajectory, Villey shows that modern secular philosophers like Hobbes and Locke did not invent subjective rights out of thin air. They merely secularized the legal architecture built by the late Catholic Scholastics. [1]

When Jacques Maritain tried to rescue modern human rights by anchoring them back in Catholic personalism, Villey viewed it as a flawed endeavor. Maritain was using a vocabulary born from the baroque degradation of Thomism, mistaking a modern system of individualized claims for the classical natural law of Aquinas. [1]

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