Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

naked, sometimes both sexes together; `061247 Ulm alone had 168 such

Badestuben in 1489. In all Europe- not always excepting the

aristocracy- the same article of clothing was worn for months, or

years, or generations. Many cities had a water supply, but it

reached only a few homes; most families had to fetch water from the

nearest fountain, well, or spring. The air of London was befouled by

the odor of slaughtered cattle, till such carnage was forbidden in

1371. The smell of latrines detracted from the idyllic fantasies of

rural life. London tenements had but one latrine for all occupants;

many houses had none at all, and emptied their ordure into the yards

or streets. Thousands of privies poured into the Thames; a city

ordinance of 1357 denounced this, but the practice continued. In 1388,

prodded by several returns of the plague, Parliament passed the

first Sanitary Act for all England:

-

For that so much dung and filth of the garbage and entrails, as well

of beasts killed as of other corruptions, be cast and put in

ditches, rivers, and other waters... that the air is greatly corrupt

and infect, and many maladies and other intolerable diseases do

daily happen, as well to inhabitants... as to others repairing or

traveling thither... it is accorded and assented, That proclamation be

made... throughout the realm of England... that all they which do cast

and lay all such annoyances... shall cause them utterly to be

removed... upon pain to lose and forfeit to our Lord the King. `061248

-

Similar ordinances were promulgated in France about this time. In

1383 Marseille, following the example of Ragusa (1377), ordered the

isolation of plague-stricken persons for forty days- a quarantine.

Epidemics continued to occur- the sweating sickness in England

(1486, 1508), diphtheria and smallpox in Germany (1492)- but with

diminished virulence and mortality. Though sanitation was lax,

hospitals were relatively abundant; in 1500 England had 460, York

alone had sixteen. `061249

The treatment of the insane gradually passed from superstitious

reverence or barbaric cruelty to semi-scientific care. In 1300 the

corpse of a girl who had claimed to be the Holy Ghost was dug up and

burned by ecclesiastical order, and two women who expressed belief

in her claim perished at the stake. `061250 In 1359 the Archbishop

of Toledo commissioned the civil authorities to burn alive a

Spaniard who professed to be a brother of the Archangel Michael, and

to visit heaven and hell daily. `061251 Matters improved in the

fifteenth century. A monk named Jean Joffre, filled with compassion

for lunatics who were being hooted through the streets of Valladolid

by a mob, established there an asylum for the insane (1409); and his

example was followed in other cities. The hospital of St. Mary of

Bethlehem, founded in London 1247, was transformed into an insane

asylum in 1402, and the word Bethlehem, corrupted into Bedlam,

became a synonym for a place of insanity.

Confirmed lepers were still outcast from society, but leprosy almost

disappeared from Western Europe in the fifteenth century. Syphilis

took its place. Possibly a development of the gros verole previously

known in France, possibly an importation from America, *06033 it

appeared definitely in Spain in 1493, in Italy in 1495; it spread so

widely in France that it came to be called morbus gallicus; and some

cities in Germany were so ravaged by it that they begged exemption

from taxation. `061252 As early as the end of the fifteenth century we

hear of mercury being used in treating it. The progress of medicine

ran a brave race then as now with the inventiveness of disease.

V. THE PHILOSOPHERS

-

Though the age of the system-makers had passed, philosophy was still

vigorous; indeed in the fourteenth century it shook the whole dogmatic

structure of Christendom. A change of emphasis ended the sway of the

theologians in philosophy: the leading thinkers now took a major

interest in science, like Buridan, or in economics, like Oresme, or in

Church organization, like Nicholas of Cusa, or in politics, like

Pierre Dubois and Marsilius of Padua. Intellectually these men were

quite the equal of Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Siger de

Brabant, Bonaventura, and Duns Scotus.

Scholasticism- both as a method of argument and exposition and as an

attempt to show the consistency of reason with faith- continued to

dominate the northern universities. Aquinas was canonized in 1323;

thereafter his fellow Dominicans, especially at Louvain and Cologne,

felt it a point of honor to maintain his doctrine against all

challenges. The Franciscans, as a loyal opposition, preferred to

follow Augustine and Duns Scotus. One unmoored Dominican, William

Durand of Saint-Pourcain, shocked his order by going over to the

Scotists. At thirty-eight (c. 1308) he began a vast commentary,

which he finished in old age. As he progressed he abandoned

Aristotle and Aquinas, and proposed to put reason above the

authority of "any doctor, however famous or solemn"- here was a

philosopher with some sense of humor. `061253 While remaining

overtly orthodox in theology, he prepared for the uncompromising

nominalism of Ockham by restoring the conceptualism of Abelard: only

individual things exist; all abstract or general ideas are merely

the useful shorthand concepts of the mind. William's friends called

him Doctor Resolutissimus; his opponents called him Durus

Durandus - Durand the Hard- and warmed themselves with the hope that

the fires of hell would soften him at last.

William of Ockham was much harder, but did not wait till death to

burn; his whole life was one of hot controversy, cooled only by

occasional imprisonment, and the compulsion of the times to phrase his

heat in Scholastic form. He admitted in philosophy no authority but

experience and reason. He took his theorems passionately, and set half

of Europe by the ears in defending his views. His life, adventures,

and aims prefigure Voltaire's, and perhaps his effect was as great.

We cannot say precisely where or when he was born; probably at

Ockham in Surrey, toward the end of the thirteenth century. While

yet young he entered the Franciscan order, and about the age of twelve

he was sent to Oxford as a bright lad who would surely be a shining

light in the Church. At Oxford, and perhaps at Paris, he felt the

influence of another subtle Franciscan, Duns Scotus; for though he

opposed the "realism" of Scotus, he carried his predecessor's

rationalist critique of philosophy and theology many steps further

to a skepticism that would dissolve alike religious dogmas and

scientific laws. He taught for six years at Oxford, and may have

taught at Paris. Apparently before 1324- while still a tyro in his

twenties- he wrote commentaries on Aristotle and Peter Lombard, and

his most influential book, Summa totius logicae - a summary of all

logic.

It seems at first sampling to be a dreary desert of logic-chopping

and technical terminology, a lifeless procession of definitions,

divisions, subdivisions, distinctions, classifications, and

subtleties. Ockham knew all about "semantics"; he deplored the

inaccuracy of the terms used in philosophy, and spent half his time

trying to make them more precise. He resented the Gothic edifice of

abstractions- one mounted upon the other like arches in superimposed

tiers- that medieval thought had raised. We cannot find in his

extant works precisely the famous formula that tradition called

"Ockham's razor": entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem -

entities are not to be multiplied beyond need. But he expressed the

principle in other terms again and again: pluralitas non est

ponenda sine necessitate - a plurality (of entities or causes or

factors) is not to be posited (or assumed) without

necessity; `061254 and frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per

pauciora - it is vain to seek to accomplish or explain by assuming

several entities or causes what can be explained by fewer. `061255 The

principle was not new; Aquinas had accepted it, Scotus had used

it. `061256 But in Ockham's hands it became a deadly weapon, cutting

away a hundred occult fancies and grandiose abstractions.

Applying the principle to epistemology, Ockham judged it needless to

assume, as the source and material of knowledge, anything more than

sensations. From these arise memory (sensation revived), perception

(sensation interpreted through memory), imagination (memories

combined), anticipation (memory projected), thought (memories

compared), and experience (memories interpreted through thought).

"Nothing can be an object of the interior sense" (thought) "without

having been an object of the exterior sense" (sensation); `061257 here

is Locke's empiricism 300 years before Locke. All that we ever

perceive outside ourselves is individual entities- specific persons,

places, things, actions, shapes, colors, tastes, odors, pressures,

temperatures, sounds; and the words by which we denote these are

"words of first intention" or primary intent, directly referring to

what we interpret as external realities. By noting and abstracting the

common features of similar entities so perceived, we may arrive at

general or abstract ideas- man, virtue, height, sweetness, heat,

music, eloquence; and the words by which we denote such abstractions

are "words of second intention," referring to conceptions derived from

perceptions. These "universals" are never experienced in sensation;

they are termini, signa, nomina - terms, signs, names- for

generalizations extremely useful (and dangerous) in thought or reason,

in science, philosophy, and theology; they are not objects existing

outside the mind. "Everything outside the mind is singular,

numerically one." `061258 Reason is magnificent, but its conclusions

have meaning only in so far as they refer to experience- i.e., to

the perception of individual entities, or the performance of

individual acts; otherwise its conclusions are vain and perhaps

deceptive abstractions. How much nonsense is talked or written by

mistaking ideas for things, abstractions for realities! Abstract

thought fulfills its function only when it leads to specific

statements about specific things.

From this "nominalism" Ockham moved with devastating recklessness

into every field of philosophy and theology. Both metaphysics and

science, he announced, are precarious generalizations, since our

experience is only of individual entities in a narrowly restricted

area and time; it is mere arrogance on our part to assume the

universal and eternal validity of the general propositions and

"natural laws" that we derive from this tiny sector of reality. Our

knowledge is molded and limited by our means and ways of perceiving

things (this is Kant before Kant); it is locked up in the prison of

our minds, and it must not pretend to be the objective or ultimate

truth about anything. `061259

As for the soul, it too is an abstraction. It never appears in our

sensations or perceptions, external or internal; all that we

perceive is will, the ego asserting itself in every action and

thought. Reason itself and all the glory of intellect are tools of the

will; the intellect is merely the will thinking, seeking its ends by

thought. `061260 (This is Schopenhauer.)

God Himself seems to fall before this razor philosophy. Ockham (like

Kant) found no conclusive force in any of the arguments used to

prove the existence of deity. He rejected Aristotle's notion that

the chain of motions or causes compels us to assume a Prime Mover or

First Cause; an "infinite regress" of motions or causes is no more

inconceivable than the unmoved Mover or uncaused Cause of

Aristotle's theology. `061261 Since nothing can be known save

through direct perception, we can never have any clear knowledge

that God exists- non potest sciri evidenter quod Deus est. `061262

That God is omnipotent or infinite, omniscient or benevolent or

personal, cannot be shown by reason; much less can reason prove that

there are three persons in one God, or that God became man to atone

for Adam and Eve's disobedience, or that the Son of God is present

in the consecrated Host. `061263 Nor is monotheism more rational

than polytheism; there may be more worlds than one, and more gods to

govern them. `061264

What then remained of the majestic edifice of Christian faith, its

lovely myths and songs and art, its God-given morality, its fortifying

hope? Ockham recoiled before the ruin of theology by reason, and in

a desperate effort to save a social order based on a moral code

based on religious belief, he proposed at last to sacrifice reason

on the altar of faith. Though it cannot be proved, it is probable that

God exists, and that He has endowed each of us with an immortal

soul. `061265 We must distinguish (as Averroes and Duns Scotus had

advised) between theological truth and philosophical truth, and humbly

accept in faith what proud reason doubts.

It was too much to expect that this caudal appendage in honor of

"practical reason" would be accepted by the Church as atoning for

Ockham's critique of pure reason. Pope John XXII ordered an

ecclesiastical inquiry into the "abominable heresies" of the young

friar, and summoned him to appear at the papal court in Avignon.

Ockham came, for we find him, in 1328, in a papal prison there, with

two other Franciscans. The three escaped, and fled to Aiguesmortes;

they embarked in a small boat, and were picked up by a galley that

took them to Louis of Bavaria at Pisa. The Pope excommunicated them,

the Emperor protected them. William accompanied Louis to Munich,

joined Marsilius of Padua there, lived in an anti-papal Franciscan

monastery, and issued from it a torrent of books and pamphlets against

the power and heresies of the popes in general, and of John XXII in

particular.

As he had in his metaphysics outdone the skepticism of Scotus, so

now in his practical theory Ockham carried to daring conclusions the

anticlericalism of Marsilius of Padua. He applied his "razor" to the

dogmas and rites that the Church had added to early Christianity,

and demanded a return to the simpler creed and worship of the New

Testament. In a pugnacious Centiloquium theologicum he brought

before the tribunal of his reason a hundred dogmas of the Church,

and argued that many of them led logically to intolerable absurdities.

If, for example, Mary is the Mother of God, and God is father of us

all, Mary is the mother of her father. `061266 Ockham questioned the

Apostolic Succession of the popes, and their infallibility; on the

contrary, he urged, many of them had been heretics, and some had

been criminals. `061267 He advocated a lenient treatment of heresy,

proposing that all expression of opinion be left free except for the

dissemination of conscious falsehood. `061268 What Christianity

needed, he thought, was a return from the Church to Christ, from

wealth and power to simplicity of life and humility of rule. The

Church should be defined not as the clergy alone but as the whole

Christian community. This entire fellowship, including the women,

should choose representatives, including women, to a general

council, and this council should choose and govern the pope. Church

and state should be under one head. `061269

The state itself should be subject to the will of the people, for in

them, is vested all final sovereignty on the earth. They delegate

their right of legislation and administration to a king or emperor

on the understanding that he will enact laws for the welfare of all.

If the common good requires it, private property may be

abolished. `061270 If the ruler commits a great crime, or is guilty of

negligence so extreme that it threatens the survival of the state, the

people may justly depose him.

We know little of Ockham's fate. The beer of Munich could not

console him for the lost wine of Paris. He compared himself to John

the Evangelist on Patmos, but he dared not leave the protective

orbit of the Emperor. According to a Franciscan chronicler the rebel

in his final years signed a recantation of his heresies. Perhaps the

reconciliation of Louis with the Church made this advisable; and

William may have come to feel that to question the truth of a

religion's dogmas is jejune. He died of the Black Death in 1349 or

1350, still in the prime of life. `061271

Long before his death he was recognized as the most forceful thinker

of his age, and the universities shook with disputes over his

philosophy. Many theologians accepted his view that the basic tenets

of the Christian religion could not be proved by reason; `061272 and

the distinction between philosophical truth and religious truth was as

widely spread in the fourteenth century as is today the tacit truce

between scientific inquiry and religious ministrations. At Oxford a

school of Ockhamists took form, called itself the via moderna (as

Abelard had called his conceptualism 300 years before), and smiled

at the metaphysical realism of Scotus and Aquinas. `061273 The

modernists were especially victorious in the universities of Central

Europe; Huss at Prague and Luther at Erfurt were taught nominalism,

and may have been conditioned by it for their revolt. At Paris the

university authorities forbade (1339-40) the teaching of Ockham's

views, but many of the students, and some masters, acclaimed him as

the standard-bearer of free thought, and more than once the opposed

factions, as in our times, fought with words and fists in the cafes or

the streets. `061274 It was probably in reaction against Ockhamism

that Thomas a Kempis condemned philosophy in The Imitation of

Christ.

Ockham played a part, if only as a voice, in the uprising of the

nationalist state against the universalist Church. His propaganda

for ecclesiastical poverty influenced Wyclif, and his assaults upon

the papacy, as well as his constant appeal from the Church to the

Bible and early Christianity, prepared for Luther, who ranked Ockham

as the "chiefest and most ingenious of Scholastic doctors." `061275

His voluntarism and individualism expressed in advance the heady

spirit of the Renaissance. His skepticism passed down to Ramus and

Montaigne, perhaps to Erasmus; his subjectivist limitation of

knowledge to ideas foreshadowed Berkeley; his attempt to rescue

faith through "practical reason" anticipated Kant. Though

philosophically an idealist, his emphasis on sensation as the sole

source of knowledge gave him a place in the procession of empirical

English philosophy from Roger and Francis Bacon through Hobbes, Locke,

Hume, Mill, and Spencer to Bertrand Russell. His occasional sallies

into physical science- his perception of a law of inertia, his

doctrine of action at a distance- stimulated thinkers from Jean

Buridan to Isaac Newton. `061276 The general effect of his work,

like that of Duns Scotus, was to undermine the basic assumption of

Scholasticism- that medieval Christian dogma could be proved by

reason. Scholasticism maintained till the seventeenth century a pallid

post-mortem existence, but it never recovered from these blows.

VI. THE REFORMERS

-

While ibn-Khaldun was founding sociology in Islam, Pierre Dubois,

Nicole Oresme, Marsilius of Padua, and Nicholas of Cusa were

developing kindred studies, less systematically, in Christendom.

Dubois served Philip IV of France as Ockham and Marsilius served Louis

of Bavaria, by aiming intellectual broadsides against the papacy,

and singing doxologies to the state. In a Supplication du peuple de

France au roi contre le pape Boniface (1308), and in a treatise De

recuperatione terre sancte ( On the Recapture of the Holy Land,

1305), the ardent lawyer recommended that the papacy should shed all

its temporal possessions and powers, that the rulers of Europe

should repudiate the papal authority in their realms, and that the

French Church should divorce itself from Rome and submit to secular

authority and law. Moreover, proceeded Dubois, all Europe should be

united under the French king as emperor, with his capital at

Constantinople as a bastion against Islam. An international court

should be established to adjudicate the quarrels of nations, and an

economic boycott should be declared against any Christian nation

that should open war against another. Women should have the same

educational opportunities and political rights as men.

No one seemed to pay much attention to these proposals, but they

entered into the intellectual currents that undermined the papacy. Two

centuries after Dubois, Henry VIII, who doubtless had never heard of

him, followed his program, and Wyclif's, in religion; and in the early

nineteenth century Napoleon set up for a moment a united Europe

under French leadership, with the pope a captive of the state.

Dubois belonged to that rising legal profession which aspired to

replace the clergy in administering the government. He won his battle;

we live in the heyday of his victory.

Oresme, who stirred so many pools, wrote toward 1355 one of the

clearest and most straightforward essays in all economic literature-

On the Origin, Nature, Law, and Alterations of Money. The money of a

country, he argued, belongs to the community, not to the king; it is a

social utility, not a royal perquisite; the ruler or government may

regulate its issue, but should make no profit from minting it, and

should maintain its metallic quality undebased. A king who dilutes the

coinage is a thief. `061277 Moreover, bad money (as "Gresham's Law"

would say two centuries later) drives good money out of circulation;

people will secrete or export good coin, and the dishonest

government will receive in its revenues only its depreciated currency.

These ideas of Oresme were not merely ideals; he taught them, as

tutor, to the son of John II. When his pupil became Charles V, the

young King, after one desperate devaluation, profited from his

teacher's instruction by restoring the shattered finances of

war-ridden France to a sound and honest basis.

Marsilius of Padua was of more volatile temperament than Oresme:

an uncompromising individualist proud of his intellect and courage,

and making his political philosophy an inextricable part of his hectic

life. Son of a notary in Padua, he studied medicine at the university;

probably he owed some of his anticlerical radicalism to the atmosphere

of Averroistic skepticism that Petrarch found and denounced there in

the same generation. Passing to Paris, he became for a year rector

of the university. In 1324, with the minor collaboration of John of

Jandun, he composed the most remarkable and influential political

treatise of the Middle Ages- Defensor pacis (The Defender of Peace).

Knowing that the book must be condemned by the Church, the authors

fled to Nuremberg and placed themselves under the wing of the

Emperor Louis of Bavaria, then at war with the pope.

They could not have expected so lusty a fighter as John XXII to take

calmly their bellicose defense of peace. The book argued that the

peace of Europe was being destroyed by strife between state and

Church, and that peace could be restored and best maintained by

bringing the Church, with all her property and personnel, under the

same Imperial or royal authority as other groups and goods. It was

(ran the argument) a mistake for the Church ever to have acquired

property; nothing in Scripture justified such acquisition.

Like Ockham, the authors defined the Church as the whole body of

Christians. As the Roman people, in Roman law, was the real sovereign,

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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