CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
William of Getcha
WITH THE CLOSE OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, THE ERA
of the great medieval philosophical systems is over. This age of synthesis was marvelously also the age of criticism; the fourteenth century is very different, an age of disassociation, of dissolution, of fragmentation. The wheel turns slowly at first, but as the century progresses the angle grows steeper, until Reformation and Renaissance both appear at the Council of Constance in 1415. There the grave scandal of the Great Schism of the West (which had lasted from 1378 to 1417) led to the proclamation of the superiority of a General Council over the Pope. The Great
Schism, during which the rival Popes, at Rome and Avignon, had each been supported by whole nations and by separate saints, greatly weakened the power of the Papacy, while the burning of the Czech heretic, John Huss, by the Council of Constance, after he had been given a safeconduct to attend it and state his case, gave the cause of Reform its most sincere martyr.
The rise of the mendicant orders, of friars and preachers, Franciscan and Dominican, was but an ecclesiastical expression of the rise of the people. The Dominican Order was the first institution in Europe to be run on truly democratic lines: the more than 50,000 Dominicans had from their foundation representative government, with the Master-General elected by a simple majority. This may have come from the fact that St. Dominic was a Spaniard, for, on the Continent of Europe, the Spaniards had, in their
Cortes, the nearest thing to a parliament of any country.
The strong tide of mysticism which arose in the fourteenth century was partly caused by the miseries of the
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Hundred Years War, which decimated Europe, and caused people to turn more and more to an increasingly interior life as a refuge from exterior misery, and partly by the undermining of ecclesiastical authority, due to the Great
Schism, which led individuals to seek each his own separate, entirely personal and intimate individual relationship with God, without benefit of clergy. The famines and » plagues all over Europe, and the extended outbreak of the Black Death in England and in Germany, led to great discontent among the poor, and also to a scarcity of laborers, who thus became more important and valuable and were able to escape their feudal obligations, through the deaths of their masters from wars or plague, and through commerce, which helped establish a middle class. The rise of nationalism, the growth of lay claims, the multiplication of universities (all national or local in character, unlike
Paris or even Oxford in their heyday) led to an entirely different emphasis in philosophy.
Perhaps the best known of all the fourteenth century mystics is Meister (Master) Eckhart of Hochheim, near
Gotha. Born about 1260, he taught in Paris at the turn of the century, was called by Boniface VIII to Rome, and given the title of Doctor by the Pope himself. Later he returned to Cologne, but got into trouble with the Archbishop, who took proceedings against his doctrines, in 1326. Eckhart appealed to the Pope in 1327, and died in that year. In 1329 Pope John XXII condemned some of Meister Eckhart's statements, and later Martin Luther was warmly to commend him. In Eckhart's great Threepartite
Work, published at the end of the thirteenth century, mysticism and metaphysics mingle. He is an orthodox
Thomist in that he agrees that in God alone essence and existence are identical, but he goes on to say that God is pure affirmation, and that all negation is distasteful to him. God is the only existence, says Eckhart, and as God is all existence, nothing can exist apart from Him.
Another Dominican, Durandus of St. Pourcain (flourished 1312-died 1332) abandoned Thomism in spite of the instruction of the General Chapter of Saragossa, which in 1309 declared it to be the official doctrine of the Domin-
THE AGE OF BELIEF
ican Order. Durandus said relationship was a real form of existence, and three forms of being must be admitted: being in itself, being in another, being becoming another.
Durandus' view of relative reality brought him to a theory of knowing by which the soul and the intellect, far from being illuminated passively, are, on the contrary, very active. The soul's perfection is such that it need receive nothing from outside, it spontaneously adapts itself to whatever it encounters.
Durandus died as Bishop of Meaux, after having been called upon to judge William of Ockham's orthodoxy.
One of the most interesting and original figures of the early fourteenth century is Raymond Lully, a layman and a Franciscan tertiary. Born in Palma, Majorca, about 1235, he was "converted" in 1266, and thereafter devoted his life to the study of Arabic and to opposing the ideas of Averroés. He traveled to Tartary, to Armenia, to Africa, seeking the salvation of the Muslims by bringing them to Christ. He was a mystic, philosopher, linguist, poet and religious troubadour. Towards the end of the century he taught at Montpellier and Paris (1297-99, and 13091311) and died in 1315. He founded the first European school of Oriental languages at Miramar, in Majorca, to train men for the conversion of the paynim, and he claimed to have discovered a logical method, the Great Art, by which all knowledge was reduced to certain combinations of principles. "Since every science has its own principles," he wrote, "different from the principles of other sciences, the intellect longs and needs a general, universal science, which would contain and embrace all the principles of the other sciences, as the particular is contained in the universal." He also wrote "the Friend was asked 'what is the world?' and He replied 'for those who know how to read, it is the book where one may learn of my Beloved.' " To prove the Muslims wrong, Lully says it is only necessary to prove Catholicism true, and he set heroically about "proving" the Trinity, so much to his own satisfaction that he could write "I have proved the divine Trinity in such a manner that the human intellect cannot now reasonably suppose that it does not exist."
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Whatever happens in history is temporal, and must follow the same sequence of birth, through growth, to death. This is as true of philosophical systems as it is of individuals, and the particular expression of each idea has its decline as it had its heyday or its incipience. The beginning of the end came for scholastic philosophy around
1320, when many theologians began to fear for the future of religion itself amidst the complications of the conflicting systems. Duns Scotus had corrected Bonaventura,
Aquinas had straightened out Albert, but then along came a flurry of minor clerics: of the Dominicans, some were
Thomists, some more or less avowed Averroists; some Franciscans were Scotists, but each was bent upon demolishing the other's theories.
One of the reactions to the aggravated fragmentation, to the constant sharpening and whittling of truth that went on, was a "back to the Gospel" movement that wished to divorce finally faith from reason, and to separate completely mind and soul. Nicolas of Autrecourt, for example, who was condemned in 1346 and fied, as did many others,
_ from the Papal jurisdiction to the court of Emperor Lewis of Bavaria, said that in so far as the evidence is concerned, these propositions, that God exists, and that God does not exist, signify absolutely the same thing. Another Nicolas, of Cusa, writing about a hundred years later (in 1433, at the height of the Great Schism) found the world in great danger of becoming as unthinkable as God.
And with the atomization of philosophy and theology went a breakdown of the principle of the single emperor, that relic of Roman times, into that of a plethora of nation-states. The various fourteenth century thinkers each propounded their own varieties of attack on the given scholastic positions, but it is William of Ockham who stands, if any single man can claim such a position, at the end of the Middle Ages as the great iconoclast, clearing the encumbered ground and preparing a beach-head for the philosophers of the Renaissance, for such men as Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes.
A great deal of work has recently been done on William of Ockham, and many of the "facts" hitherto believed
THE AGE OF BELIEF
about him have been proved false, thanks to the researches of Messrs.
Hofer, Etienne Gilson and Léon Baudry.
Ockham was born in the Surrey village of that name about 1300, and the first certain historical mention of him was in 1324. In 1322 Pope John XXII declared the Franciscan doctrine of absolute poverty to be. heretical. William of Ockham was suspected of having written in favor of this heresy; other of his writings, too, fell under suspicion, and he was called from Oxford to Avignon, where Pope
John XXII was in exile, to plead his cause. At that time he was a bachelor of the University of Oxford, and a Franciscan. As he never went further with his studies, he was known as inceptor venerabilis or the "venerable bachelor" by his admirers. It has been proved that he never was a pupil of Duns Scotus, as had been thought. But he did say, in his Dialogue, that the innovations of St. Thomas Aquinas, the theory especially of the unity of form, caused
"an almost infinite scandal" at Oxford. He began early to write logic, and was very "antimodern." He wrote a commentary on Aristotle's Physics, of which several manuscripts remain, but his most famous work is the Quodlibets.
After a bachelor at Oxford had finished commenting on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, he might not teach for two years, but might take part in the Quodlibet discussions, and might preach. These Quodlibets were sort of free-forall discussions and Ockham's seven Quodlibets show us something of his razorlike mind. Indeed, a razor is the name applied to his most famous principle, that "entities are not to be multiplied without necessity." This principle, which Robert Grosseteste had assumed as the lex parsimoniae, or law of economy, was derived from Aristotle, who stated it as a pragmatic principle. "That is better and more valuable," wrote Grosseteste, "which requires fewer, other circumstances being equal; which necessitates the answering of a smaller number of questions for a perfect demonstration .
. As Aristotle says in Book V of the Physics, nature operates in the shortest way possible." The Franciscans after Grosseteste had leaned heavily on this
"principle," which was quoted by Duns Scotus, Durandus
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of St. Pourcain and William of Ockham's contemporary, Peter Aurioli (d. 1322).
Among Ockham's early works, composed at Oxford, was an Exposition on Aristotle's Physics, in which several of Ockham's most original and famous ideas appear. It served as a sketch for the Commentary on the Sentences which got him into so much trouble later. In this Exposition Ockham explains that some authors have said that things possess a common nature, and that the idea of such a common nature plus some new concept individualizes in creatures, and this makes them universals, or rather universalizes them in the intellect. Intelligence cannot perceive this common quality or nature; indeed intelligence cannot know an individual directly, as an object, but only by reflection, by a reflex action, at second bounce, as it were. This, Ockham said, is nonsense: by no twist of the intellect can a man be a goat, or Socrates at home when he is walking on the street. No more can the intellect make the mobile immobile; the perishable, the eternal; or the singular, universal. Only individuals are real, singly; there is no such thing as an individual universalized. The object of scientific enquiry or research is always the individual, never the universal, and the object perceived exists before the act of perceiving it. Nothing, Ockham says, exists before knowledge of an object except the object that is known; and the object of the senses and of the intelligence must be the same.
Matter, Ockham continues, and form, cannot be known by us in themselves. We can only know them in the relations and oppositions they have with each other. We are unable ever to form simple concepts, propter sibi, as such, but only composite concepts. And if this is so with regard to sensible objects, to things whose reality we can ascertain from their properties, and whose nature we can infer, how much more so with regard to God, none of whose attributes we can experience, none of whose attributes can be the object of our experiment? God, it will be argued, is in relation to the world as a cause to its effect, and by knowing the effect, we can know the cause. This is an error. For actions are caused by individual agents. All causes are individualized realities, and differ each from alk ined OLS
'THE AGE OF BELIEF
the other, as knowledge of Plato from that of Socrates, and we can never arrive at a knowledge of the cause by an analysis of the effect, unless we have grasped the cause by a previous intuition. Divine nature is thus unintelligible to us. Indeed, we cannot know certainly that God is, and all the customary proofs are only arguments as to the probability of His existence, and nothing more. (Averroés for this reason blamed Avicenna for having said that the metaphysician can prove the existence of isolated substances. )
This theory, of course, flatly contradicted St. Thomas, who insisted that man can arrive at a certain proof of the | existence of one God by reason alone without the help — of revelation. And if that position of St. Thomas' is denied, we arrive, as Bertrand Russell has emphasized in all his
| writings, at agnosticism: we cannot know God exists. — Either we can assume His existence, and incline to theism,
Or we can assume His nonexistence and incline to atheism; but in either case, we are agnostics; we cannot know, we can never know.
As Frederick Copleston has pointed out, in his A History of Philosophy, Vol. III (Burns, Oates, 1953),
"Tf by 'God' one means the absolutely supreme, perfect, unique and infinite being, Ockham did not think that the existence of such a being can be strictly proved by the philosopher. If, on the other hand, one means by 'God' the first conserving causes of this world, without any certain knowledge about the nature of that cause, Ockham did think that the existence of such a being can be philosophically proved. But as this second understanding of the term
'God' is not all that is usually understood by the term, one might just as well say, without further ado, that Ockham did not admit the demonstrability of God's existence."
This position of Ockham follows naturally and logically from that of Peter Abelard, and although we do not know how much Ockham was aware of his debt, or how consciously he derived from his tenth-century predecessor, the sequence is absolutely clear, and the Church, threatened in its basic assumption by both, was well aware of its danger. For if reason cannot, unaided by revelation,
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arrive at a knowledge of the existence of God, but only at belief in Him, then, since (as Aquinas proved) the object of science and that of faith can never be the same, all we can have of God is faith. It follows then, since there is no evident necessity for belief in God that you "pays your penny and you takes your choice," for faith is something you can take or leave.
It is probable that the boldness of Ockham's views was the reason he never got his doctorate, for, since he constantly repeated himself, it may be said that by 1324, when the Papacy took alarm at his theories, his fundamental position was already clear, and the future development of his thought obviously adumbrated. In 1324 Ockham was summoned to Avignon to defend his views before John
XXII, and it is particularly interesting that Durandus of St. Pourcain, one of the men to whom he is nearest in thought, was one of the men to whom his writings were given after John Lutterell had brought them from Oxford to Avignon in 1323.
John Lutterell denounced the Commentary on the Sentences in which Ockham referred approvingly to Peter
Aurioli. Peter was a papal nominee, who had attended the lectures of Duns Scotus, and was a disciple of St. Augustine, and a refuter of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom he regarded as an innovator. Peter was a special favorite of John XXII, who had made him Bishop of Aix, the next
See to Avignon. Like Ockham, Peter Aurioli said that the notion of species had no other content than "the qualitative resemblances between various beings." The multiplicity of beings in the same species is "meaningless." And Peter
Aurioli goes almost as far as Ockham in denying any "extramental value to abstract knowledge; normally intuitive knowledge, sensible or intellectual, presents us with a real and existing object." But Peter does admit that God could
"in the absence of real beings, create in sensation and intellectual intuition a content which would give us the illusion of its existence." Both Durandus and Peter Aurioli denied the distinction between essence and existence.
Ockham was not, however, then condemned. He remained four years at Avignon, and, it must be supposed,
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THE AGE OF BELIEF
there continued to develop the two major principles of his philosophy: that beings must not be multiplied without necessity, and that there is no real distinction between material substances.
Ockham was very careful to protect his audacious theories with constantly recurring phrases such as "I believe
| everything that the Church explicitly believes and nothing else"; "I am ready to submit my reason to the authority of the Church, and to believe with my heart and teach with my tongue all that the Church teaches." He probably would have escaped formal condemnation of his theories successfully all his life, in view of the similarity of his views with those of two such highly placed and regarded men as Durandus and Peter Aurioli, had it not been for his actions.
In 1322, John XXII had declared the Franciscan doctrine of absolute poverty, and in 1328 Michael of Cesena, the General of the Order, heretical. Ockham fled to the Emperor Louis of Bavaria in Pisa, where another Franciscan, Marsilius of Padua, had taken refuge earlier. In 1328 Marsilius, Michael and Ockham were all excommunicated. Ockham, who had declared in the most famous of his works, On the Sacrament of the Altar, that whenever there was a dispute between theologians, "recourse was to be had to the Pope," and indeed, seemed to maintain that the Pope was above even a General Council (a dogma not defined by the Church until the nineteenth century) now said the Pope was a heretic—a position taken, under somewhat similar circumstances, in the 1950's by the Jesuit
Father Feeney. Ockham's writings after his flight were largely political: he and Marsilius of Padua are the two major political theorists of the later Middle Ages, but | Ockham's greatest philosophical works were written in the peace of Oxford before his stormy political career began. He went with Louis of Bavaria to Munich and stayed there. His tone then became very shrill against the Pope, and although his antipapal views were never as extreme as those of Marsilius of Padua, they reached a climax in 1334, After the death of Louis of Bavaria, in 1348, he asked to be reinstated in his order, and begged the Pope's pardon but hoped he would not be required
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WILLIAM OF OCKHAM
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>. a to come to Avignon to make his submission in person "as it was not easy for him to come"—an understatement, as his political opinions would have probably made it impossible for him to travel safely. On June 8, 1349, the Pope gave authority for the absolution of William of Ockham and his companions, though it is not known whether he received this pardon before his death. But as he is buried in the Franciscan chapel in Munich, next to Michael of Cesena, it is likely that he perished in the Black Death in 1349, after being released from the excommunication.
Pierre Duhem, writing in 1909 (Etudes sur Leonardo da Vinci) regards Ockham's "natural philosophy" as aforerunner of the mathematico-mechanical world-view of Descartes and Newton. Of Ockham's theory of motion he says "the affirmation that the continuation of the local motion does not need any moving cause is the law of inertia itself, formulated by Descartes and at the time of Ockham too new to be admitted."
Herewith follow some definitions from Stephen Chak Tornay's translations from William of Ockham (contained in his Studies and Sentences, published by the Open Court
Publishing Co., 1938).
From the Expositio Aurea:
{ Any imaginable thing which exists by itself without any addition is singular and numerically one. Every science begins with individuals. From sensation, which gives only singular things, arises memory, from memory experience, and through experience, we obtain the universal which is the basis of art and science. }
From The Sentences of Peter Lombard:
{ It is possible to have intuitive knowledge, both sensitive and intellectual, of a thing which does not exist
. This intuitive vision, whether sensitive or intellectual, is an absolute thing, distant in place and subject from the seen thing object, therefore vision can remain after, say, the star has been destroyed ...
It is clear too, that our intellect, in our present state,
THE AGE OF BELIEF
does not know merely sensory things, but particularly and intuitively knows some intelligible things too, which by no means are objects of the senses. To these belong acts of intellect, acts of will, pleasure, sorrow and the like, which one can experience as internal without their being sensory or objects of the senses. } From the Quodlibets:
{ Every universal is one singular thing and is universal only by the signification of many things. }
From the Sentences once more:
{ I am enquiring now, whether this universal . . . is something real from the part of the thing which is outside of the soul, All whom I meet agree by saying that the entity which is somehow universal is really in the individual, although some say that it is distinguished only formally, and some that it is not distinguished at all according to the nature of the thing, but only according to reason. All these opinions coincide in that the universals are allowed to exist somehow away from the thing, so that their universality is held to be really present in the singular objects themselves. This latter opinion is simply false and absurd. Against it this is my case. There is no unitary, unvaried or simple thing in a © multiplicity of singular things, nor in any kind of created individuals, together and at the same time. If such a thing were allowed, it would be numerically one, therefore it would not be in many singular objects nor would it be of their essence. But the singular and the universal thing are by themselves two things, really distinct and equally simple, therefore if the singular thing is numerically one, the universal thing will be numerically one also...
If humanity were different from particular individuals and a part of their essence, one and the same invariable thing would be in many individuals, and so this same numerically one and invariable thing would be at different places, which is false. In the same way, that same invariable thing would, say, be condemned in Judas and saved in Christ, and hence, there would be something condemned and miserable in Christ, which is absurd.