RUBIO, ANTONIO

Mexican scholastic philosopher; b. Villa de Rueda, Spain, 1548; d. Alcalá, 1615. At 21 Rubio entered the je suit novitiate. He studied at Colegio Máximo de Alcalá de Henares under Cardinal Francis Toletus and succeeded Hortigosa as philosophy professor at Colegio Máximo de San Pedro y San Pablo in Mexico (1576–1601). In 1594 he was awarded a doctorate at the University of Mexico. He was highly esteemed for his learning by Mexican authorities, and became Jesuit procurator in Rome (1601). Thereafter he taught at Alcalá, where the university "ordered … all students to follow the same philosophical program" as that of its illustrious Mexican master. He wrote Commentaria in universam Aristotelis Logicam (1605), called Lógica Mexicana and adopted as a textbook at Alcalá; Commentaria in libros Aristotelis de ortu et interitu (1619); and Commentaria in octo libros Aristotelis de physico auditu (1605). Besides several previous editions these works were published in five volumes at Lyon in 1625. The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., has a poetical work entitled Poeticarum Institutionum liber variis ethicorum christianorumque exemplis illustratus (Mexico 1605).

Rubio followed a sane thomism according to the Salamancan spirit of Dominic Soto and his teacher Toletus, especially on being and analogy and in physics. Though he concluded several works with the epilogue "to the praise and glory of … Blessed Thomas, whose teaching we follow," he was a personal thinker who maintained a rigorous philosophical attitude in weighing the reasons of the Angelic Doctor and who departed from him on several decisive points. Thus he denied the real distinction between essence and existence and the pure potency of matter. Actual existence is not a second act, ordered to the first act of the essence really distinct from it, but "is by nature in first act, an actual being extra causas, distinct by reason alone from … essence, and necessarily attributable to all real beings extra causas. " This divergence from traditional Thomism is heightened by giving partial subsistence to matter, which by nature exists as really distinct from form, as is clearly seen from the relation of matter to quantity. For his excellent grasp of Aristotle and his respectful commentaries on St. Thomas, Rubio deserves to be classed with his contemporaries Toletus, fonseca, suÁrez, valencia, and vÁsquez.

Bibliography: f. j. alegre, Historia de la provincia de la Compañía de Jesús de Nueva España, ed. e. j. burrus and f. zubillaga, 4 v. (new ed. Rome 1956–60).

[o. robles]