Philosophy After the System-Builders
Although the age of philosophers who devised great systems had passed, philosophy still had considerable strength, and in the fourteenth century it shook the whole edifice of Christian dogmatic belief. The change in the philosophers' viewpoint ended the domination of theologians and churchmen over philosophy. The first-rank thinkers now turned their attention to science, like Buridan, to economics, like Oresme, to the organization of the Church, like Nicholas of Cusa, or to politics, like Pierre Dubois and Marsilius of Padua. Intellectually these men stood fully level with Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus.
Thomists and Scotists
Scholastic philosophy, whether as a method of argument and justification or as an attempt to show the agreement of reason and religion, still held the northern universities. Aquinas was canonized in 1323, and from then on his Dominican followers, especially at Louvain and Cologne, counted it an honor to defend his ideas against every attack. The Franciscans, out of loyal opposition, preferred St. Augustine and Duns Scotus. A free-minded Dominican, Durand of Saint-Pourçain, shook his own order by turning to Scotus. At about thirty-eight (about 1308) he began writing a vast commentary which he finished in old age. As he progressed he set aside first Aristotle and then Aquinas, and placed reasoning above the authority and pronouncements of "any master, however famous and great." He remained an orthodox believer in theology, but by reviving Abelard's conceptualism he opened the way for William of Ockham's uncompromising nominalism: only individual things exist; abstract or universal ideas are constructed merely for convenience by mental perceptions. His friends called Durand the "resolute doctor"; his opponents called him the "hard Durand" and consoled themselves with the hope that hellfire would at last soften him.
The Life of William of Ockham
William of Ockham was harder still, but he did not wait to die by burning. His whole life was full of noise and heated controversy, cooled only by occasional imprisonment, or by being forced to write in scholastic style, which hid the heat of his ideas under a cover of formulas. In philosophy he accepted no authority but experience and reason. He stated his philosophical propositions with passion and, defending his views, stirred half of Europe to listen. His life, its events and its aims resembled Voltaire's, and perhaps, in influence, were as great.
Where and when he was born cannot be said with certainty; most probably in the late thirteenth century at Ockham in Surrey. He entered the Franciscan order in early childhood and, being a very bright boy, was sent to Oxford at twelve in the hope that he would become a shining light of the Church. At Oxford, and perhaps at Paris, he came under the influence of that shrewd Franciscan, Duns Scotus; for although he rejected Scotus's realism, he took from him the rational criticism of philosophy and theology and pushed it to the edge of a skepticism that annuls religious belief and scientific law alike. He taught six years at Oxford and perhaps also at Paris. Apparently before 1324, while still a novice in his twenties, he wrote a commentary on Aristotle and on Peter Lombard and the most influential of his books, the Summa of All Logic.
At first sight this book seems a tedious statement of logic, full of technical terms, a chain of lifeless definitions, divisions and subdivisions, abstractions, classifications and hair-splitting.
The Razor
Ockham knew the subject of "signification" thoroughly. He examined the inadequacy of the words and terms used in philosophy and spent half his time giving philosophical terms more precision and clarity. He loathed the Gothic edifice of mental abstractions, the work of medieval thought, built like a series of arches resting on one another. In his surviving works we do not find, in so many words, the proposition tradition calls "Ockham's razor": that entities are not to be multiplied without necessity. But the same principle appears repeatedly in his works in other words: plurality should not be posited without necessity; or, when we can explain something with fewer entities and causes, we should not elaborate in vain. The principle was not new. Aquinas had accepted it and Scotus had used it. But in Ockham's hands it became a deadly weapon for destroying hundreds of mysterious fancies and hundreds of great mental abstractions.
Knowledge Rooted in Experience
Applying the principle to the theory of knowledge, Ockham declared that there is no need to look for the source of knowledge of material things in anything beyond the senses. From the senses come memory (sensation revived), perception (interpretation of sensation through memory), imagination (composition of memories), foresight or insight (projection of memory), thought (comparison among memories), and experience (interpretation of memories through thought). "Nothing can be an object of the inner sense (thought) unless it has been an object of the outer sense (sensation)." This is the empiricism of Locke, set out three hundred years before him (the book's comparison). What we perceive outside ourselves are individual things: persons, places, objects, actions, shapes, colors, tastes, smells, pressures, temperaments and sounds. The words that signify these realities are called "terms of first intention" and refer directly to external facts and objects. From the perception and abstraction of what similar ideas received in this way have in common come general and abstract concepts such as man, virtue, height, sweetness, music and eloquence; the words for these are "terms of second intention" and relate to concepts derived from the first ideas. These general and abstract concepts cannot be tested by the senses; they are words, signs and names, extremely useful (and at the same time dangerous) for intellectual generalization in science, philosophy and theology. They are not essences or realities and do not exist outside the mind.
"Outside the mind everything is singular and, in number, one." Reason is splendid, but its conclusion is sound and meaningful only when it is tied to experience, that is, when it leads to the idea of individual things or the performance of individual acts. Otherwise the conclusion is void and may be nothing but misleading abstraction. From this very error, the confusion of ideas with things and of general concepts with realities, how much nonsense has been spoken and written! A general and abstract thought does the work of reason only when it ends in a definite judgment about a definite thing.
Skepticism About Metaphysics and God
With this nominalism Ockham enters the field of philosophy and theology with destructive daring. He declares that metaphysics and science alike are empty and baseless generalizations, because our experience concerns only individual things within a very, very narrow range of time and space, and it is only our conceit that grants universal and eternal validity to the general propositions and "laws of nature" we infer from that tiny empirical fact. Our knowledge is the creature of our instruments and of our methods of perceiving things (the book calls this Kant before Kant), and it is imprisoned in the jail of our mind and should not be taken for objective and final truth about anything.
The soul, too, is an abstraction and mental concept and never enters our sensation or perception, outer or inner; what we perceive is will, the "self" that enters into every act or thought. Thought and reason, for all their splendor, are instruments of will; reason is thinking will, will seeking its aims by means of thought (the book's comparison with Schopenhauer). Even God falls before this blade. Ockham (like Kant) finds none of the proofs offered for God's existence conclusive. He rejects Aristotle's argument that the chain of movers or causes obliges us to believe in a prime mover or first cause; in his view an "endless regress" of movers and causes is no less unwarranted than Aristotle's unmoved mover and uncaused cause. Since nothing is known except through direct perception, we can never obtain clear knowledge that God exists. God's omnipotence, infinity, omniscience, absolute goodness and personhood likewise cannot be proved by reason. In the same way the doctrines of three persons in one God, of God's appearing as man to atone for the disobedience of Adam and Eve, and of the Son's body in the consecrated bread, hold up even less under rational argument. Belief in one God is no more logical or rational than belief in many; for there may be several worlds, and so several gods to govern them.
Reason Yields to Faith
What then remains of the splendid edifice of the Christian religion, of its legends, songs and enchanting arts, of its morality, held to be a gift of God, and of the hope of forgiveness? Ockham, facing the ruins of theology that reason had made, recovered himself and tried in desperation to save from collapse the social order founded on moral laws, which themselves rested on religious belief. In the end he resolved to sacrifice reason before faith. Although God cannot be proved, God probably exists, and it is He who gave each of us an immortal soul. We must (like Averroës and Duns Scotus) distinguish religious truth from philosophical truth and, with complete humility and faith, accept what "meddlesome" reason does not accept.
Trial, Flight and Political Theory
To expect the Church to accept this appendage, added in honor of "practical reason" to atone for Ockham's critique of pure reason, was to expect too much. Pope John XXII ordered the "unpleasant heresies" of the young friar investigated and summoned him to appear before the papal court at Avignon. Ockham appeared, for in 1328 we find him in the pope's prison with two other Franciscans. But before long all three escaped to Aigues-Mortes, boarded a small boat, and were taken aboard a small sailing ship that carried them to Pisa and Louis of Bavaria. The pope excommunicated them; Louis took them under his protection. William went with Louis to Munich, joined Marsilius of Padua there, settled in a Franciscan monastery hostile to the pope, and from there poured out a flood of books and treatises against the power and heretical errors of popes in general and John XXII in particular.
Just as in metaphysics he had gone beyond the skepticism of Scotus, so now, in his practical theory, he carried the anti-clerical movement of Marsilius of Padua to weighty conclusions. He applied his "razor" to the beliefs and rites the Church had added to early Christianity and demanded a return to the simple faith and worship set down in the New Testament. In a combative treatise, the Hundred Sayings on Theology (as the book names it), he called hundreds of the Church's dogmas before the court of reason and showed that many were logically unacceptable absurdities. For example, if Mary is the mother of God and God is the father of us all, Mary included, then Mary is the mother of her own father (the book's example). He examined the worship of the popes' succession to the apostles and the claim of their infallibility, argued the contrary, and showed that many popes had been heretics and some criminals. He favored milder treatment of heretics and proposed that all opinions, except deliberately frivolous ones, should be free to be expressed.
He thought that what Christendom needed was a return from the Church to Christ, and from wealth and power to simplicity of life and humility in government. The Church should not be reduced to the clergy but understood as the whole community of Christendom. All members of this community, women included, should elect representatives, women included, to form a general council, which should choose the pope and give him orders. Church and state should be under a single head.
The state itself should be subject to the will of the people, because the final government of the earth has been entrusted to them. They delegate their right to administer and legislate to a king or emperor on condition that he issue laws for the welfare of all. If the public good demands it, private property should be abolished. If the ruler commits a great crime or neglects affairs so that the existence of the state is endangered, justice commands that the people depose him.
Death and Influence
We know little of Ockham's fate and end. Munich beer could not replace Paris wine and console him. He compared himself to John the Apostle, but did not dare leave the emperor's safe shelter. According to a Franciscan chronicler, the upheaval of his last years led him to retract his blasphemous heresies. Perhaps Louis's reconciliation with the Church caused this; perhaps William came to think that doubting the truth of religion was the mark of an empty mind. In any case, still in the prime of life, he died of the Black Death of 1349 or 1350.
Long before his death he had been recognized as the most influential thinker of his time, and the universities trembled with the debate over his philosophy. Many theologians shared his view that the basic principles of Christianity cannot be proved by reason, and belief in the distinction between philosophical and religious truth was as common in the fourteenth century as the tacit compromise between scientific research and religious preaching in our own. At Oxford a school of his followers formed and called itself the "new way" (as Abelard's conceptualism had been called three hundred years earlier) and smiled mockingly at the realism of Scotus and Aquinas in matters of metaphysics. These moderns, especially in the universities of central Europe, were triumphant. Hus at Prague and Luther at Erfurt taught nominalism, and perhaps this very philosophy led them toward their revolutions. The authorities of the University of Paris forbade the teaching of Ockham's views (1339–1340), but many students and some teachers hailed him as the standard-bearer of free thought, and opposing groups, as in our own day, came to blows with words and fists in the cafés and streets. It is supposed that Thomas à Kempis's attack on philosophy in the Imitation of Christ was a reaction to his philosophy.
Even if we regard Ockham as no more than a speaker, he made a great contribution to the rise of the national state against the universal Church. His preaching of a return to spiritual poverty influenced Wycliffe, and his vigorous attacks on the popes, together with his repeated appeals from the Church to the Bible and early Christianity, prepared the way for Luther, who called him the "most authoritative and genuine master of scholastic philosophy." His belief in the primacy of will and of the individual foretold the bold spirit of the Renaissance. His skepticism reached Ramus, Montaigne and probably Erasmus; his belief that knowledge is confined to the ideas of the mind anticipated Berkeley's theory; and his appeal to "practical reason" to preserve religion recalls Kant. Though philosophically he counts among the idealists, his emphasis on sensation as the only source of knowledge gives him a high place in the chain of English empirical philosophy that begins with Roger Bacon and Francis Bacon and runs through Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill and Spencer to Bertrand Russell. His incidental inquiries in physics, his grasp of the law of necessity, and his theory of action at a distance spurred thinkers from Jean Buridan to Isaac Newton. The general effect of his works, like those of Duns Scotus, was to undermine the basic assumption of scholastic philosophy, that the principles of the Christian religion can be proved by reason. Although scholasticism lived on until the seventeenth century as a dim existence after death, it never stood upright again after those blows.