JUAN DE CARAMUEL LOBKOWITZ. - 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 student of astronomical sciences; subsequently he learned Oriental languages under the guidance of Giovanni Ezron, a native of Syria.
His lively intelligence became apparent even before childhood had passed. At the age of eleven, he published his first work: *Caramuelis primus calamus* (Madrid 1617); at fifteen he earned a degree in philosophy; at seventeen he entered the Cistercian monastery of La Espina in the diocese of Palencia.
To complete his theological studies and acquire the other sciences that would make him an encyclopedic figure admired throughout the world, he was sent first to Salamanca, where he also taught; then to Louvain, where in 1638 he earned a doctorate in theology. Soon after, he was sent as visitor to the Cistercian houses in England, Ireland, and Scotland, and carried out his mission with such zeal and wisdom that he was named Grand Prior of the Military Order of Calatrava. Upon returning to Louvain, he had occasion to read the writings of Jansenius, whose errors he was the first to detect and refute. He then traveled through Belgium and Germany, especially the diocese of Mainz, converting many heretics through his preaching.
A highly skilled architect, trained also in the military arts, in 1635 he liberated the city of Louvain from the siege of the Prince of Orange, and in 1648, with a corps of ecclesiastical volunteers, he delivered the city of Prague from the Swedes. Ferdinand III held him in such high esteem that he entrusted him with inspecting the fortresses of all Hungary and preparing plans to fortify them, and appointed him Minister of State. Cardinal-Archbishop Ernest of Harrach also appointed him his vicar general. At the same time, he served as court preacher, imperial counsellor, and abbot of the Cistercian abbeys of Montserrat and Vienna. In 1655, Alexander VII, who had known him during his nunciature in Cologne, summoned him to Rome to serve on the Congregations of Rites and the Holy Office, and in 1657 named him Bishop of Campagna in the Kingdom of Naples. In September 1673 he was transferred to Vigevano, a small but well-endowed diocese, as a place of well-earned rest. Yet Caramuel did not rest there, but continued his prodigious activity, reforming both things and customs. In Vigevano there still remain, as monuments to his architectural skill, the façade of the Cathedral and the arrangement of the ducal square with the grand staircase leading to the castle.
Caramuel was truly an extraordinary and most erudite man, master of twenty-four languages. His contemporaries called him “C. magnus.” He wrote more than seventy works treating every science and every art, especially theology, civil and military architecture.
His love of paradox sometimes led him, in his writings, to rash dogmatic assertions and excessively lax moral opinions, so much so that St. Alphonsus gave him the title of “laxiastrum facile princeps.” Indeed, his work *Apologema antiquissima et universalissima doctrina de probabilita* (Lyons 1663) was placed on the Index (1664), and he had to clear himself before the Pope and was obliged to remove several propositions from his *Theologia fundamentalis* (Frankfurt 1651).
Among his principal works, almost all now forgotten and partly lost, the following deserve mention: *Hierarchia ecclesiastica* (Prague 1653); *Cabalae theologica 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).