CARAMUEL LOBKOWITZ, JUAN DE. - Spanish theologian and scholar, b. in Madrid on 23 May 1606, d. in Vigevano on 8 Sept. 1682. His first teacher was his father, Count Lorenzo, a cultivator of astronomical sciences; later he learned the Oriental languages under the guidance of Giovanni Ezron, a native of Syria.
The liveliness of his intelligence appeared as soon as he was past infancy. At the age of 11 he gave to the press his first writing: Caramuelis primus calamus (Madrid 1617); at 15 he obtained his degree in philosophy; at 17 he entered the convent of the Spina of the Cistercian Order, in the diocese of Palencia.
To complete his studies of theology and to learn the other sciences, which were to make of him an encyclopedist admired by the whole world, he was sent first to Salamanca, where he also taught; then to Louvain, where in 1638 he received his doctorate in theology. Sent, shortly afterward, as visitor of the Cistercian houses in England, Ireland and Scotland, he carried out his mission with such zeal and wisdom as to be named grand prior of the Military Order of Calatrava. On his return to Louvain he had occasion to read the writings of Jansenius, was the first to point out their errors and refuted them. He then traveled preaching through Belgium and Germany, especially the diocese of Mainz, where he converted many heretics.
A most skillful architect, trained also in the military art, C. in 1635 freed the city of Louvain from the siege of the duke of Orange and in 1648, with a corps of ecclesiastical volunteers, the city of Prague from the Swedes. Ferdinand III conceived such esteem for him that he charged him with visiting the fortresses of all Hungary and with preparing the plans to put them in efficient order, and named him minister of state. The archbishop card. Ernst Adalbert von Harrach also wanted him as his vicar general. At the same time he discharged the functions of court preacher, aulic counselor and abbot of the Cistercian abbeys of Monserrat and Vienna. In 1655 Alexander VII, who had known him during his nunciature at Cologne, called him to Rome to be a member of the Congregations of Rites and of the Holy Office, and in 1657 named him bishop of Campagna in the kingdom of Naples. In Sept. 1673 he was transferred to Vigevano, a small diocese then, but well endowed, as a place of well-merited rest. C. did not rest there, but continued his prodigious activity, reforming things and customs. At Vigevano there still remain, as monuments of his architectural competence, the facade of the Cathedral and the arrangement of the ducal square with the great staircase leading to the castle.
C. was truly an extraordinary and most erudite man, a knower of twenty-four languages. His contemporaries called him "C. magnus." He wrote more than 70 works treating of every science and every art, especially of theology, of civil and military architecture.
His love of paradox sometimes dragged him, in his writings, into rash dogmatic assertions and into excessively lax opinions in morals, so as to earn from St. Alphonsus the title of "lavistarum facile princeps." Indeed his work Apologema pro antiquissima et universalissima doctrina de probabilitate (Lyons 1663) was placed on the Index (1664) and he had to recant before the Pope and was obliged to eliminate several propositions from his Theologia fundamentalis (Frankfurt 1651). Among his principal works, almost all forgotten and in part lost, those deserving to be remembered are: Hierarchia ecclesiastica (Prague 1653); Cabalae theologicae excidium (Rome 1656); Theologia intentionalis (Lyons 1664); Theologia praeterintentionalis (ibid. 1664); Theologia regularis (ibid. 1665); Logica moralis seu politica (Vigevano 1680); Critica philosophica (ibid. 1681).
Bibliography5 works
Lucio Ubezio