Kenny Anthony. Medieval Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy. Volume 2

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the world. Later, partly as a result of criticism by his Franciscan colleague

Walter Chatton, Ockham gave up belief in Wctions. Names in mental

language, he came to think, were simply acts of thinking, items in an

individual person’s mental history.

Ockham accepted Scotus’ distinction between intuitive and abstractive

knowledge; it is only by intuitive knowledge that we can know whether a

contingent fact obtains or not. However, Ockham makes explicit a conse-

quence of the theory that is only implicit in Scotus. By his almighty power,

Ockham maintains, God can do directly whatever he currently does by

means of secondary causes. In the ordinary way, God makes me know

that a wall is white by making the white wall meet my eye; but if he

normally acts thus via normal sensory causation, he can make me have

the same belief in the whiteness of the wall without there being any

white wall there at all. This thesis obviously opens wider the breach in

epistemology that had been opened by Scotus, and broadens the road to

scepticism.16

These and other views of Ockham quickly gave rise to concern among

his Franciscan brethren, and in 1323 he was asked to explain to a provincial

chapter of the order his teaching about the Aristotelian categories. A year

later, in response to a denunciation from Oxford, Ockham had to face a

commission at the papal court in Avignon set up to examine his Sentences for

heresy. The commission, which consisted mainly of Thomists, and in-

cluded the former Oxford chancellor Lutterell, failed, after many months

of work, to produce a convincin g case against him.

However, Ockham’s stay in Avignon did give his philosophical career a

wholly new turn. The pope of the time, John XXII, was in conXict with the

Franciscan order on two issues concerning poverty: the historical question

whether Christ and his Apostles had lived in absolute poverty, and the

practical question whether the Franciscan order could legitimately own

any property. St Francis had held up an extreme ideal of poverty: the friars

were to own nothing, never touch money, and depend on alms for food,

clothing, and shelter. St Bonaventure, the reforming general of the order,

made a distinction between ownership (dominium, or lordship) and use (usus).

Franciscans could use property, but they could not own it, whether as

individuals or collectively as a religious order. In 1279 Pope Nicholas III

16 Ockham’s epistemology is discussed in Ch. 4 below.

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relieved the Franciscan order of the ownership of all the property made use

of by the friars, and assumed it into the patrimony of the papacy.

At the end of 1322 John XXII overturned this compromise, denouncing

the distinction between ownership and use—so far as concerned consum-

ables, at least—as a hypocritical fudge. In the following year he also

rejected the Franciscan teaching that Jesus and the Apostles had renounced

all ownership during their lives. Ockham was asked by Michael of Cesena,

the head of the Franciscan order, who was also in Avignon, to study the

papal decrees containing these denunciations. He came to the conclusion

that they were immoral, absurd, and heretical, and publicly denounced

them. With Michael he Xed from Avignon in 1328, shortly before a papal

bull was issued condemning their doctrines as heretical. The pair escaped

to Munich, where they came under the protection of Ludwig of Bavaria, an

enemy of John XXII, who had opposed his election as emperor.

Ludwig, excommunicated in 1324, had appealed to a general council,

using the quarrel with the Franciscans as a reason for denouncing the Pope

as a heretic. In 1328 he entered Rome, had himself crowned as emperor,

burnt John in eYgy, and installed an antipope. In Rome, Ludwig was joined

by another philoso phical ally, Marsilius of Padua, former rector of the

University of Paris. Marsilius had been forced, like Ockham, to Xee to the

protection of Ludwig because he had written a book containing a sustained

attack, not just on John XXII but on the papacy as an institution.

The work, Defensor Pacis (‘The Defender of the Peace’, 1324), became a

classic text of political philosophy. It begins with a denunciation of papal

interference in the aVairs of secular polities. The disorder, corruption, and

warfare endemic in Italy, Marsilius maintains, are all the result of papal

arrogance and ambition. In the course of the work he moves from local

issues to general principle.

The state is a ‘perfect’ society, that is to say, one that is both supreme and

self-suYcient within its own sphere. 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 a form of tyranny. The laws of the

state derive their legitimacy neither from the will of the ruler nor directly

from God: they are given authority by the citizen s themselves. The actual

task of legislation may be delegated to particular bodies and institutions,

which may reasonably diVer from state to state. The prince is the executive

head of state: the citizens’ consent to his rule is best expressed if he is

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chosen by election, but there are other systems by which consent may

legitimately be manifested. An irregular or incompetent prince should be

removed from oYce by the legislature.

Marsilius’ book was extraordinarily inXuential. No writer on the papal

side was able to counter it at a similar level of philosophical sophistication. It

inXuenced Orthodox Catholics and heretics alike, right up to the Lutheran

reformation. Ockham was among the Wrst philosophers to exhibit its

inXuence, in a series of political treatises that he wrote during the 1330s.

These works are less systematic, and also less radical, than the Defensor Pacis .

The Wrst was the Work of Ninety Days, a lengthy tract written in haste in

1332. This was later followed by a Letter to the Franciscans and a set of Dialogues

on the relations between Church and State. Though polemical in intent,

these works are ‘recitative’, that is to say, they state (‘recite’) arguments

used by papal opponents in a manner that does not necessarily commit

Ockham himself to agreement with their conclusions. But by comparing

them with other works written in the Wrst person (‘assertive’ work s) we can

piece together Ockham’s own opinions.

The philosophical core of Ockham’s position on Franciscan poverty is a

theory of natural rights. He distinguishes between two classes of rights:

those that may be legitimately renounced (such as the right to private

property) and those that are inalienable (such as the right to one’s own

life). In the garden of Eden there was no such thing as property; after the

fall property rights were established by human law. Private ownership is

not in itself wrong, but, pace Pope John, it must be distinguished from use.

A host allows his guests to use the food and drink at his table, but he does

not confer the ownership of these things on his guests. The Franciscans

have a right to use the necessities of life, but this does not involve them in

any ownership, because it is only a moral right, not enforceable in any

court of law (OND 6. 260–71).

While Marsilius’ conceptions of government were shaped by conditions

in the Italian city-states of his time, Ockham’s are more inXuenced by the

structure of the Holy Roman Empire. The emperor, he says, derives his

power not from the pope, but from the people via the college of imperial

electors. The right to choose one’s ruler is one of the natural rights of

human beings. These rights can be exercised by setting up a hereditary

monarchy; but the tenure of a hereditary monarch depends on good

conduct, and if he abuses his power the people are entitled to depose him.

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Despite his quarrel with Pope John XXII, Ockham was much less hostile

than Marsilius to the papacy as an institution. However tyrannically they

behaved in practice, the popes, he maintained, did have a supremacy

deriving from divine law. They should, however, be regarded as consti-

tutional, not absolute, monarchs. They were answerable to general coun-

cils, which should themselves be constituted by locally elected churchmen.

Ockham was never reconciled with the papacy of his time. In 1331 John

XXII, in his late eighties, began to preach a doctrine that was universally

regarded as heretical: namely, that the souls of those who depart life in

good standing do not enjoy the beatiWc vision of God until they rejoin their

bodies after the Last Judgement. This, of c ourse, placed a new weapon in

the hands of his Franciscan opponents, and the Pope was forced to recant

on his deathbed in 1334. The new pope, Benedict XII, deWned that the souls

of the just, as soon as they die, or after a period in purgatory, see God face

to face. But Benedict did not repeal the condemnation of the dissident

Franciscans, and Ockham died during the Black Death, still under the ban

of the Church, in Munich in 1349.

The Reception of Ockham

Paris and Oxford were the two great universities of the high Middle Ages.

While Paris was undoubtedly the senior partner in the thirteenth century,

Oxford took the lead in the fourteenth century. It is a matter of scholarly

dispute how far Ockham’s inXuence was felt in either university. Certainly

it is an exaggeration to say that there was ever, even in Oxford, an

Ockhamist school, but on the other hand a number of Parisian thinkers

followed up and developed speciWc themes from his writings.

Gregory of Rimini, for instance, an Augustinian friar who taught in Paris

in the 1340s, accepted Ockham’s natural philosophy while dissenting from

his logic. Jean Buridan, a member of the arts faculty who was rector of the

Sorbonne in 1328 and 1340, shared Ockham’s nominalism, but he was

much more conWdent than Ockham that progress could be made in the

scientiWc exploration of the world. He reintroduced Philoponus’ theory of

impetus, and was the teacher of a distinguished generation of philosophical

physicists, including Nicole Oresme, who e xplored, without endorsing, the

hypothesis that the earth revolved daily on its axis. Like Ockham, Buridan is

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best known for something he never said. In discussing the freedom of the

will to choose between alternatives he is alleged to have said that a donkey

faced between two equally attractive bales of hay would be unable to eat

either: hence ‘Buridan’s Ass’ became a byword for indecision.

Two other French thinkers were much inXuenced by Ockham’s episte-

mology: the Cistercian John of Mirecourt, and a secular canon Nicholas of

Autrecourt, both of whom lectured in Paris in the 1340s, and both of whom

incurred academic and ecclesiastical censure for their radical opinions. In

1347 forty-one propositions taken from John’s writings were condemned by

the chancellor of the Sorbonne, and more than Wfty of Nicholas’ theses

were condemned by the papal legate. John defended his writings in an

apology; Nicholas recanted and continued his career.

John of Mirecourt’s epistemology was based on a development of

Ockham’s theory of assent. Assents may be evident or they may be given

with fear of error. Central truths of logic enjoy a supreme degree of

evidence, but there is also natural evidence, based on experience of the

world. Natural evidence cannot produce absolute certainty, except in the

case of one’s own existence, which cannot be denied without self-contra-

diction. One cannot attain similar certainty about the existence of any other

entity. Even God’s existence cannot be proved with certainty, since the

arguments for his existence are based on facts in the world involving only

natural evidence. Moreover, even if nothing other than myself existed, God

could, by a miracle, make it appear that there is a real world out there.

It will be seen that John came very close, in anticipation, to the position

Descartes reached at the beginning of his Second Meditation. Nicholas of

Autrecourt adopted an even more radical form of scepticism. If we deWne

intuitive awareness as involving a ‘judgement that a thing exists, whether

or not it does exist’, then we can never be certain that what appears to the

senses is true. We cannot be certain of the existence of the objects of the Wve

senses. One of the condemned propositions that he was made to recant ran

thus: ‘virtually no certainty can be obtained about things by natural

appearances’. However, Nicholas qualiWed this sceptical claim with the

remark that a modicum of certainty could be achieved in a short time if

only people turned their mind to things themselves and not to the reading

of Aristotle and his commentators (DB 553 V.).

Unlike John, Nicholas did not see ‘I think, therefore I am’ as oVering a

way out of the sceptical impasse—it certainly did not prove the existence of

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any substantive ego. Even ‘Here is an intellectual thought: therefore some

intellect exists’ was, he said, a far from evident argument. No form of causal

argument could bring certainty of the existence of anything of any kind.

Only the principle of non-contradiction, Nicholas concluded, will provide

a solid basis for knowledge: and such a basis will not let one get very far in

philosophy. ‘The existence of one thing’, ran one of his condemned

propositions, ‘can never be inferred or proved with the appropriate degree

of evidence from the existence of some other thing, nor can the non-

existence of one thing from the non-existence of another.’ Here it is not

Descartes, but Hume, who is brought to the mind of a reader of modern

philosophy.

Rightly or wrongly, the scepticism of Nicholas of Autrecourt was often

held up in later ages as an example of the horrible excess to which the

teaching of Ockham could lead. With equally dubious justice, he was

sometimes hailed by twentieth-century logical positivists as a distinguished

predecessor.

The immediate reception of Ockham in England was not uniformly

favourable. Even his close associates, such as Adam Wodeham and Walter

Chatton, adapted his teachings to make them more conformable to

mainstream scholasticism. Walter Burley, whose career overlapped with

that of Ockham, was one of the most signiWcant English thinkers of the

time. He took his MA at Oxford in 1301 and his doctorate in theology at the

Sorbonne in the early 1320s; he was a fellow of Merton and a diplomat in

the service of Edward III. He is best remembered for his treatise The Pure Art

of Logic (1328), which was one of the Wnest logical texts to survive from the

medieval period. In that work he defended the traditional view of sign-

iWcation and supposition against the criticisms of Ockham.17

The Oxford Calculators

The second quarter of the fourteenth century saw the development

among Oxford philosophers of a school that had a remarkable inXuence

on the history of physics. Foremost among the school was Thomas

Bradwardine (1295–1349), who was a fellow successively of Balliol and

17 See Ch. 3 below.

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Merton colleges, later confessor to Edwar d III, and eventually archbishop of

Canterbury. Other members of the school, such as William Heytesbury and

Richard Swineshead, were, like Bradwardine, fellows of Merton, so that

members of the group are sometimes known as the Mertonians. They

shared a taste for solving philosophical and theological problems by

mathematical methods, and so they are also called the Oxford Calculators,

after a treatise by Swineshead called the Liber Calculationum (1350).

Bradwardine, in 1328, published a work entitled De Proportionibus Velocitatum

in Motibus (‘On Proportions of Velocity in Motions’). In it he 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 theory quickly super-

seded Aristotle’s laws of m otion, and it was inXuential not only in Oxford,

but also in Paris, where it was adopted by Oresme. Other Calculators, too,

produced work of importance for natural philosophy, but they devoted

their mathematical talents to the solution of logical and theological prob-

lems rather than to physical research. Questions about maxima and

minima, for instance, were the germ of development towards the diVer-

ential calculus; but they were Wrst raised in connection with the question

what was the minimum, and what the maximum, length of time to be spent

in prayer to fulWl a command to pray night and day. The question of how to

measure non-quantitative qualities, such as heat and cold, was Wrst worked

out in the analysis of the growth of grace in the souls of the faithful and in

measuring the capacity for happiness of souls in heaven.

Many of the developments in physics originated as solutions to logical

puzzles, or sophismata. These were propositions whose content was ambigu-

ous or paradoxical, set as problems to be resolved by logic students, and

solved, or determined, by masters in the arts faculty. One of the most

ingenious sets of these sophismat a was produced, around 1328, by Richard

Kilvington, not himself a Mertonian, but closely associated with the other

Calculators as part of a research group assembled by Richard of Bury,

bishop of Durham and lord chancellor. Kilvington was not himself a

mathematician, but his sophismata were quickly given a mathematical form

by Heytesbury in his Regulae Solvendi Sophismata (1335), in which he worked

out the theory of uniform acceleration.

Sophismata fell into disrepute at the Renaissance, but they came into

fashion again in the twentieth century. At a time when France was a

republic, Bertrand Russell inquired about the truth- value of ‘The king of

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France is bald’. His investigation led to a very in X uential logical analysis of

deWnite descriptions. Similarly, Kilvington in his sophismata sets out a scen-

ario, for instance, that Socrates is as white as it is possible to be, and that

Plato, hitherto not white, is at this moment beginning to be white. He then

inquires into the truth-value of ‘Socrates is whiter than Plato begins to be

white’. A natural reaction might be to say that this sentence, so far from

being either true or false, is not even well-formed; but Kilvington patiently

spells out what one might mean by it, and in the course of expounding it

and similar puzzle questions oVers an analysis of concepts of degree, ratio,

and proportion.

The doyen of the Calculators, Thomas Bradwardine, was also a heavy-

weight theologian. He was the leading representative of another Oxford

fourteenth-century tendency, a revival of Augustinianism. Of course,

throughout the whole medieval period Augustine had been an authority

to be treated with reverence and quoted no less frequently than Aristotle.

But these neo-Augustinians like Bradwardine and his Irish contemporary

Richard Fitzralph (chancellor of Oxford in 1333 and later archbishop of

Armagh) began to pay more attention to the historical context of August-

ine’s work and to take greater interest in his later writings against the

Pelagians. Bradwardine, in his massive De Causa Dei, presented an August-

inian treatment of the issu es surrounding divine foreknowledge, future

contingent propositions, and human freedom.

John Wyclif

The most distinguished Wgure of this Augustinian renaissance was John

Wyclif (1330?–1384), who was also a leader of the realist reaction against the

nominalism of the Ockhamists. In the middle years of the century he was

by far the most prominent Wgure in the university. His life exhibited a

pattern that recurs in the history of Oxford and is illustrated also by John

Wesley and John Henry Newman. In the middle of the fourteenth, the

eighteenth, and the nineteenth centuries the most signiWcant event in the

religious history of the university was the defection of a favourite son from

the religious establishment.18

18 See R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), 66.

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Like Wesley and Newman, Wyclif was a Wne Xower of the Oxford schools,

a man who stood out among his contemporaries for learning and austerity

of life. Like them, he formed around himself a group of disciples, and

seemed likely to dominate, by his personal inXuence and reputation, the

course of the university’s thought and practice. Like them, he took a

doctrinal step which alienated his closest theological allies and vindicated

the suspicions of his critics. Exiled from Oxford as they were exiled, he

carried on his religious mission elsewhere, casting only a rare nostalgic

glance at the distant spires of the home of his youth and promise.

Wyclif went to Oxford in the 1350s and though from time to time

distracted by public service—at one time engaged in an embassy, at

another oVering an expert opinion to parliament—he spent his life mainly

John Wyclif, as

shown in an

illuminated initial of

a 1472 Bohemian MS.

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100

in teaching, preaching, and writing. Between 1360, when he was master of

Balliol, and 1372, when he took his DD, he produced a philosophical Summa

whose most important volume is a treatise on universals, designed to

vindicate realism against nominalist sophistry. In his maturity he wrote a

theological Summa which began with two books of banal orthodoxy, moved

through several books of hardy innovation, passed into overt heresy, and

ended in barren polemic. The volumes of this work covered the whole

range of medieval theology. Three of them dealt with issues of law and

property, and proposed the controversial theses that evil clerics should be

disendowed and that even laymen, if sinners, had no right to ownership of

property. Several other volumes, on Church, king, and papacy, analysed

the structure of the Christian Church and society, castigated abuses, and

proposed reforms. In one of his latest works, on the Eucharist, he presented

a novel interpretation of the Mass, the centre of medieval spirituality.

One of Wyclif’s most startling innovations was his proposal for com-

munism, based on his theory of dominium, or ownership. He argued thus. On

the one hand, someone who is in sin has no right to property. You can

only possess something justly if you can use it justly; but no sinner can use

anything justly because all his actions are sinful. On the other hand, if you

are in a state of grace, as an adoptive son of God you inherit the whole

realm of God. But if each Christian in grace is lord of all, he must share his

lordship with all other Christians in 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 a number of men, unless they ought to have everything in

common. Therefore all things should be in common.

Surprisingly, Wyclif’s writings on dominion, radical though they were, did

not seem to have caused him trouble with the authorities during his

lifetime. The secular authorities used them in support of the taxation of

the clergy, and ignored their implications with regard to the laity.

However, the increasing hardihood of Wyclif’s speculations made his

position in Oxford less and less tenable. When he denounced the popes and

questioned papal claims, he could Wnd sympathizers—at a time when a

disgraceful schism was splitting Christendom in two—even among the

higher clergy. When he, a secular priest enjoying several beneWces, called

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101