Kenny Anthony. An Illustrated Brief History of Western Philosophy
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spoken languages. In that sense it is true to say that for Ockham, only names are
universal; but we have to count among names not only the names in natural
languages, but the unspoken names of our mental language – a language which,
as Ockham describes it, turns out to have quite a strong structural similarity to
medieval Latin.
At different times in his career Ockham gives different accounts of the relation-
ship between the names of the mental language and the things in the world.
According to his earlier theory, the mind fashioned mental images or representa-
tions, which resembled real things. These ‘fictions’, as he called them, served as
elements in mental propositions, in which they took the place of the things they
resembled. Fictions could be universal in the sense of having an equal likeness to
many different things. Later, Ockham ceased to believe in these fictions; names in
the mental language were simply acts of thinking, items in an individual person’s
psychological history. These mental names occur in mental sentences (presumably
as successive stages of the thinking of the sentence); a thought, or sentence, is a
true thought or sentence if the successive names which occur in it are names of
the same thing. Thus the thought that Socrates is a philosopher is a true thought
because Socrates can be called both ‘Socrates’ and ‘philosopher’. It is not easy to
see, on this account, quite how to explain the truth conditions of a sentence such
as ‘Socrates is not a dog’; but Ockham, to his credit, goes to some trouble to deal
with the difficult cases.
Ockham is best known for something which he never said, namely ‘Entities are
not to be multiplied beyond necessity’. This principle, commonly called ‘Ockham’s
Razor’, is not found in his works, though he did say similar things such as ‘it is
futile to do with more what can be done with fewer’ or ‘plurality should not be
assumed without necessity’. In fact, the sentiment long antedated Ockham; but it
does sum up his reductionist attitude to the technical philosophical developments
of his predecessors. Sometimes this attitude enabled him to cut away fictional
entities; as often as not, it led him to overlook distinctions that were philosoph-
ically significant.
Ockham’s Political Theory
Ockham’s summons to Avignon did not lead to a condemnation for heresy,
even though a commission spent several years examining his Commentary on
the Sentences. However, his time there did give a wholly new turn to his career.
The Pope of the time, John XXII, was in conflict with the Franciscan Order on
two issues concerning poverty: the historical question whether Christ and the
Apostles had lived in absolute poverty, and the practical question of the owner-
ship of property by contemporary Franciscans. Ockham became involved in this
controversy, and made himself so unpopular with the Pope that, along with the
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head of his Order, Michael of Cesena, he had to flee from Avignon to Munich.
There they were taken under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ludwig
of Bavaria. According to legend Ockham said, ‘Emperor, defend me with your
sword and I will defend you with my pen’. Whether or not this is true, Ockham
was henceforth involved in the broader issues of the relationship between Pope
and Emperor, between Church and State.
In order to explain the questions at issue, we have to go back in time. The
conflict over the right to appoint bishops, which surfaced in the eleventh-century
quarrel between Pope Gregory VII and the Emperor Henry IV, was repeated more
than once in succeeding years. In England, as we saw, St Anselm when Archbishop
clashed with William II over the issue, and so did his successor Thomas Becket,
with Henry II – a conflict which led to his martyrdom and canonization, and to
the long train of Canterbury pilgrims.
The second major issue which set Church and State at odds was the taxation of
the clergy for secular purposes. At the end of the thirteenth century King Philip
the Fair of France wished to levy taxes on clerical property in order to finance his
wars with England. In a bull of 1296 Pope Boniface VIII sought to ban this,
though he had to relent when Philip, in retaliation, forbade the export of money
from France to pay Papal taxes. The controversy continued, and Duns Scotus,
who was in Paris at the time, was sent into exile for supporting the Papal party.
A pamphlet war followed. Giles of Rome, a follower of St Thomas, stated the
extreme Papalist position that the temporal power is subject to the spiritual power
even in temporal matters. John of Paris, in support of the king, argued that the
Pope was not the owner but only the custodian of ecclesiastical property, and that
he was subject to the superior authority of a General Council of the Church.
The most distinguished contributor to this debate was the poet Dante, who in
his De Monarchia restated the traditional conception of parallel authorities pursu-
ing temporal and eternal ends, each wielding a separate sword by divine command.
The practical issues were determined, however, less by philosophical argument
than by main force. In 1303 Philip the Fair sent troops to kidnap Pope Boniface
in Anagni, with a view to having him tried by a Council in France. Though he
failed in this attempt, he succeeded, when Boniface died shortly after, in securing
the election to the Papacy of a French cardinal. The new Pope, Clement V, in
1309 transferred the Papacy to Avignon, where it remained for seventy years.
It was a third great clash between Church and State which drew in Ockham.
The Avignon Pope who condemned the radical Franciscan teaching on apostolic
poverty, John XXII, had previously intervened in a disputed Imperial election
and opposed the eventually successful candidate, Ludwig IV. In 1324 the Pope
excommunicated Ludwig, who in response appealed to a General Council to
condemn the Pope as a heretic because of his attitude to the Franciscans. In 1328
Ludwig entered Rome, had himself crowned Emperor, burned John in effigy,
and installed an antipope. His senior adviser in Rome was Marsilius of Padua,
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author of the recent Defender of the Peace, one of the most significant works on
political philosophy to appear in the Middle Ages.
Marsilius had written the book at Paris, where he had briefly been rector of the
University; on its appearance he had had to flee, like Ockham, to the protection
of Ludwig. In the book, he mounted a sustained attack on Papal and ecclesiastical
interference in what he regarded as the legitimate province of autonomous and
self-sufficient states. The disorder, corruption, conflict and warfare endemic in
Italy, Marsilius maintains, are all the result of Papal arrogance and ambition. But
he takes his stand not just on local issues, but on general principle, and trawls
through the Bible and Aristotle and classical and patristic authors to prove that
the state is a ‘perfect’ society, that is to say one which is both supreme and self-
sufficient within its own sphere.
For Marsilius there are two types of government: rule by the consent of the
ruler’s subjects, and rule against their will; only the former is legitimate, and the
latter is tyranny. The laws of the state derive their authority from the citizens, or
from the better sort among them; states may delegate the actual task of legisla-
tion to bodies or institutions, which may legitimately have a different form in
different states. The prince is the executive head of the State; the citizens’ consent
to his rule finds its best expression if he is an elected officer, but there are other
legitimate ways in which consent may be manifested. An irregular or incompetent
prince should be removed from office by the legislature.
Neither Christ nor the Apostles, Marsilius insists, made any claim to temporal
power, and there is no Scriptural authority for Papal claims to supremacy. The
Church consists of the whole community of Christian believers, and the institution
which best reflects its structure is a General Council. But even a General Council
may only enforce its decisions with the approval of the temporal authorities, and
if heresy is to be prosecuted, it must be by the State and not by the Church.
Ockham was in sympathy with many of Marsilius’ views, but he had reserva-
tions about some of them, and in any case he was a much less systematic political
thinker. His political writings are polemical pamphlets rather than textbooks of
political theory. Thus, the conflict with the Pope over apostolic poverty led
Ockham to formulate a theory of natural rights, and to distinguish between two
classes: rights which may legitimately be renounced (such as the right to private
property) and those which are inalienable (such as the right to one’s own life).
Ockham’s most important contribution to the debate on the work of Church and
State is his Dialogues, which is again a compilation of various pamphlets. Whereas
Marsilius’ conception of government is clearly shaped by conditions in the Italian
city-states of his time, Ockham’s immediate concerns are much more directly
focused on the Holy Roman Empire.
The Emperor derives his power, he insists, not from the Pope, but from the
people, through the medium of the imperial electors. What goes for the Emperor
goes, mutatis mutandis, for other temporal sovereigns. The right to choose one’s
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rulers is one of the natural rights of human beings. Peoples if they wish can
exercise these rights by setting up a hereditary monarchy; but if such a monarch
abuses his power, the people are entitled to depose him.
Ockham’s hostility to the Papacy is much less radical than Marsilius’. He has no
doubt that de facto Papal supremacy has been exercised in a tyrannical way; but
he is willing to allow a de jure supremacy, which he envisages as a constitutional
monarchy. The Papal power should be controlled by General Councils, which
would resemble the representative assembly of a parliamentary democracy, with
members elected by local parishes and religious communities.
The Oxford Calculators
When Ockham died of the Black Death in Munich in 1349 it was a quarter of a
century since he had left Oxford. During the period, the University had become
the unquestioned intellectual centre of scholastic philosophy. It would be wrong
to envisage it simply as a battleground for warring schools of thought, Thomists
against Scotists, nominalists against realists and so on. During this period, Aquinas
was not much followed in Oxford, even by Dominicans, and Scotism was not
dominant even though in the first half of the fourteenth century the leading
thinkers were Franciscans. Even Ockham left behind no characteristic nominalist
school in Oxford. It was in France that nominalists like John of Mirecourt and
Nicholas of Autrecourt took to lengths of extreme scepticism his teaching that
God’s unlimited power rendered suspect human claims to any certain knowledge
of absolute truth.
Between 1320 and 1340 a group of vigorous and independent thinkers in
Oxford authored developments in various parts of the curriculum. Many writers
published logical treatises, expanding the traditional logic into many new areas,
exploring especially propositions about motion and change, expansion and con-
traction, measurement and time. The most important of the logical writers was
Walter Burley, whose Pure Art of Logic marked a high point in the formalization
of logic in the Middle Ages.
Formalization became important in theology too: it reached a point where
theology can almost be said to have become mathematized. Problems of maxima
and minima, and questions whether continua are infinitely divisible and infinitely
extendible, which might be thought to be the province of the mathematical
scientist rather than the theologian, are first worked out in the analysis of the
growth of grace in the souls of the faithful and in measuring the capacity for
infinite beatitude of the Saints in heaven.
Whether or not these inquiries assisted the progress of theology, they were to
prove most valuable in the study of physics. This was already apparent in the
development, especially at Merton College, of a new mathematical physics. The
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method of inquiry of these Oxford ‘calculators’ was the presentation and solution
of sophismata, logical puzzles and paradoxes. A proposition such as ‘Socrates is
infinitely whiter than Plato begins to be white’ was presented and analysed, and
assessed for possible truth and falsity. Bizarre as this method might seem to the
modern reader, it was in the course of resolving these sophismata that notions of
mathematical ratio and proportions were evolved. Moreover, the new notions
were given diagrammatic representation by line segments, which proved useful in
measuring the interaction of motion, time, and distance. In this way the foundation
was laid for the revolution in physics associated with much better known names
such as that of Galileo.
One of the foremost of the Merton Calculators was Thomas Bradwardine, who
developed a theory of ratios which he used to present a theory of how forces,
resistances, and velocities were to be correlated in motion; this quickly superseded
Aristotle’s laws of motion, not only in Oxford, but also in Paris, where it was
adopted by Oresme. Bradwardine was also a representative of another new tend-
ency of the Oxford of the mid-fourteenth century, a revival of Augustinianism.
Augustine had, of course, always been an authority to be quoted with reverence;
but now scholars began to pay more attention to the historical context of his
writing, and to take most interest in his later, anti-Pelagian work. Bradwardine, in
his massive De Causa Dei, presented an Augustinian treatment of the issues
surrounding predestination and freedom. Theological interest at this period had
moved away from Trinitarian and Christological issues to such topics as grace and
freedom and the limits of omnipotence. If you can resist sin for a single hour,
does that mean you can resist it for a lifetime? Can God command that he be
hated? What if God were to reveal to someone their future damnation?
John Wyclif
In the generation after Bradwardine (who died in 1349 shortly after becoming
Archbishop of Canterbury) the most significant figure in the Augustinian revival
was John Wyclif. Between 1360, when Wyclif was Master of Balliol, and 1372,
when he took his DD, he produced a substantial corpus of philosophical writing.
The most important part of it was a Summa de Ente, which included a treatise on
universals, designed to vindicate realism against the criticism of the nominalists.
Wyclif’s favourite examples of universals are species (such as dog) and genera
(such as animal). A realist can define genus simply as what is predicated of many
things which are different in species. A nominalist has to entangle himself in a
complicated circumlocution: ‘A genus is a term which is predicable, or whose
counterpart is predicable, of many terms which signify things which are specific-
ally distinct.’ The nominalist cannot say that it is essential to a term to be actually
predicated: perhaps there is no one around to do any predicating. He cannot say
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that any particular term – any particular sound or image or mark on paper – has
to be predicable; most signs do not last long enough for multiple predication.
(Hence the talk of ‘counterparts’.) Having begun his definition by trying to
identify genus with a term (that is, a sound or a mark on paper), the nominalist
in the end has had to abandon his pretence that species and genus are mere signs
and admit that specific difference is something belonging not to the signs but to
the things signified. When we talk of species and genus, Wyclif insists, we are not
talking of ink blots on paper; if we were we could change a man into a donkey by
altering the significance of a term. But of course we cannot alter the species and
genus of things by fiat, as we can alter the meanings of words.
Wyclif’s argument for his realism is essentially simple. Anyone who believes in
objective truth, he maintains, is already committed to belief in real universals.
Suppose you are aware that one individual A resembles another individual B.
There must be some respect C in which A resembles B. But in ‘seeing that A
resembles B in respect C’ is the same thing as ‘seeing the C-ness of A and B’; and
that involves conceiving C-ness, a universal common to A and B. So anyone who
can make judgements of likeness automatically knows what a universal is.
Wyclif’s enthusiasm for real universals takes him far beyond the narrow ground
of logic and metaphysics into that of ethics and politics. All the sin that reigns in
the world, he claims, is caused by intellectual and emotional error about universals.
Nominalism leads to preferring the lesser good to the greater and to valuing
one’s individual self over the humanity of one’s fellow humans. From this early
metaphysical germ he was later to develop a full-fledged theory of communism.
In 1374 Wyclif was briefly enrolled in the service of the English king and
invited to take part in controversy on that perennial topic, the right of secular
rulers to tax the clergy. In his book On Civil Dominion he propounded two
startling theses: a man in sin has no right to ownership of property; a man who is
in a state of grace possesses all the goods of the universe.
The first thesis is proved briskly. You cannot justly possess a thing unless you
can use it justly. But every one of the actions of a sinner is unjust; therefore, no
sinner can use anything justly or possess it justly.
The second thesis takes rather more proving. A just man is an adoptive son of
God, and so is lord of God’s realm. When God gives grace, he gives himself and
all that is in himself: and in him is the ideal reality of all creatures, to which their
actual existence is a mere accessory. But if each Christian in grace is lord of all, it
is only on condition that he shares his lordship with all others in a state of grace.
All the goods of God should be common. This is proved thus. Every man should be
in a state of grace; and if he is in a state of grace, he is lord of the world and all it
contains. So every man should be lord of the universe. But this is not consistent with
there being many men, unless they ought to have everything in common. Therefore
all things should be in common.
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Despite their radical implications, Wyclif’s writings on dominion do not seem
to have caused him trouble, initially, with his superiors. The secular authorities
used them in support of the disendowment of the clergy, and did not take them
seriously in respect of the laity. The ecclesiastical authorities were temporarily
hamstrung, because from 1378 the church was in schism, with two rival Popes,
one in Rome and one in Avignon, each claiming the supreme authority and each
hurling anathemas at the other. Stimulated by this latest scandal, Wyclif launched
a series of attacks on the Papacy which went beyond the censures of Ockham and
Marsilius.
Figure 21 A portrait of Wyclif in an illuminated manuscript from Bohemia.
(National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague)
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What led to Wyclif’s downfall, however, was not his assault on the Papacy,
but his teaching on the Eucharist. When he denounced the Popes and questioned
the validity of Papal claims he could find sympathizers even among the higher
clergy; when he called for the disendowment of the Church, many laymen and
begging friars found his words congenial; but when he renounced the doctrine of
transubstantiation, friars, noblemen and bishops all turned against him, and even
his own University of Oxford expelled him. He died, at liberty but in disgrace,
at Lutterworth in 1384.
The schism in the Church continued for many years: the most valiant attempts
to reconcile the rival Papal lines in Rome and Avignon led only to the creation of
a third dubious Papacy in Pisa. It was not until 1415 that the Council of Constance
secured the election of a Pope who was recognized throughout Christendom.
Simultaneously the Council turned to the long delayed business of dealing with
Wyclif’s heresies (which had by this time spread, with dramatic political effect, to
Bohemia). His doctrines had been banned in Oxford a few years previously; now
an enormous list of Wycliffite tenets was condemned by the universal Church.
Wyclif was best known in later times as the author, or at least the inspirer,
of the first complete translation of the Bible into English. On the basis of this
and his writings against transubstantiation and against the Papacy he was hailed
as the Morning Star of the Reformation. But he was equally the Evening Star of
scholasticism. For centuries his philosophical work remained unread. Protestant
writers were repelled by its scholastic subtlety; Catholic writers preferred to
concentrate on scholastics who made a more orthodox end. In recent years, the
publication of his major treatises has made clear that this last of the Oxford
scholastics was a considerable philosophical thinker, worthy to make a third to
Scotus and Ockham.
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X
RENAISSANCE PHILOSOPHY
The Renaissance
There is no hard and fast line dividing the Medieval Period from the Renaissance,
still less a date which can be assigned when the one ended and the other began.
The developments which were characteristic of the Renaissance took place at
different speeds in different spheres, and at different times in different regions.
The impact of these changes on philosophy was fragmented and scattered, so that
its history follows no clear line. Indeed, from many a university history course,
one would gain the impression that after Ockham philosophy hibernated during
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, not to emerge until the time of Descartes
when it rose again in totally altered form.
This is an exaggeration. What is true is that the great medieval universities
no longer produced philosophers of the calibre of Paris in the thirteenth century
and Oxford in the fourteenth. The figures of significance in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries are scattered around Europe, members of communities of many
different kinds, or solitary thinkers enjoying the patronage of a local magnate.
None of them achieved, or deserved, the lasting international significance of the
greatest medieval philosophers. In the seventeenth century, when philosophers of
the first rank are again to be found, we find that none of them achieved their
fame as university professors.
Paris and Oxford, in their great days, had both been international universities.
The universal use of Latin made academic communication and exchange easy, and
those teachers who belonged to the mendicant orders enjoyed access to a con-
tinental network of communities. By the end of the fourteenth century this was
changing. In all the countries of Europe vernacular literature began to thrive, and
though Latin remained the language of academia, it was no longer the vehicle
for the most vigorous expression of thought. In England, for instance, Wyclif’s
colleagues began to write and preach in English, and English was the chosen
medium of the best minds among his contemporaries such as Chaucer, Langland,
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and Gower. The hundred years’ war between England and France isolated Oxford
from Paris, and each university went its separate way, impoverished.
Political changes went hand in hand with linguistic ones. The central authority
of the Papacy was fatally weakened by the Great Schism. The Holy Roman
Emperor was effectively Emperor only of Germany and Austria. At the Council of
Constance, which re-established a single Papacy, the assembled delegates set a
new precedent by voting in individual national groups. By the end of the fifteenth
century, after periods of internal turmoil and civil strife, powerful, independent,
centralized monarchies established themselves in England, Spain, and France.
Northern Italy consisted of a set of vigorous, autonomous city-states, ruled by
hereditary oligarchies or plutocratic dynasties. The Popes, re-established now in
Rome without competition after the Avignon exile and the long schism, were
rulers of a swathe of the central part of Italy. For years to come they devoted much
of their energy to the affairs of this statelet. Their authority over the universal
Catholic Church did not regain its strength until after half of Europe had been
lost to Protestantism at the Reformation.
It was in Italy, and especially in Florence and Rome, that the Renaissance first
flowered. The aspect of it which was seen as central at the time was the revival of
ancient classical learning. This was ‘humanism’, not in the sense of a concern with
the human race, but in the sense of a devotion to ‘humane letters’. This meant,
in practice, a preference for pagan Latin authors over Christian Latin authors, and
an ambition to read Greek authorities in the original rather than in translation.
The latter ambition was fostered by two political events. The battered Greek
Empire of Constantinople, under constant pressure from the Ottoman Turks,
needed military aid from Western Christians, and in 1439 Pope Eugenius IV and
the Byzantine Emperor and Patriarch signed an act of Union between the Eastern
and Western Churches at Florence. This Union, like its predecessor of 1274, was
short-lived, but the contact with Greek scholarship had lasting effects. When, in
1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks, refugee scholars brought to the West not
only their own knowledge of classical Greek, but also precious manuscripts of
ancient authors. The Pope of the time, Nicholas V, a bibliophile on a grand scale,
left at his death some 1,200 Greek and Latin manuscripts, which made him the
effective founder of the Vatican Libary.
Free-will: Rome vs. Louvain
One of the humanists at the court of Nicholas was Lorenzo Valla, the author of
an influential manual of Latin elegance, which was critical of the style of the Vulgate,
the standard Latin translation of the Bible. A skilled philologist, Valla proved in
1441 that the Donation of Constantine, on which for centuries the Popes had
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