William of Ockham

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alexanderjames

Puritan Board Sophomore
I could find very little about this man on the site already.

Following a survey of medieval church history I learned that William of Ockham seemed to hold divine illumination by faith in high regard and even opposed the authority of the Pope.

What else do we know about him? Are there any of his writings available in English that are worth an interested layman’s time?

(Among the scholastics I plan to read Anselm, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure themselves, God willing. Any others you would recommend to seek out to read? I know there’s Duns Scotus but he excites me less.)
 
He opposed the stronger monarchical claims of the pope. He did not oppose the papacy in principle. He was part of the conciliarist movement, which was good.

He's most known for rejecting universals or essences. The classic place to start is Coplestone, volume 3.
 
Ockham is known as the father of Western nominalism.

"William of Ockham was a key political player in a serious dispute between his religious order—the Franciscans—and the Pope. The details of this situation and the fascinating complexities of William’s stance cannot be explored here, but the end result of this situation is that William of Ockham became a powerful voice in late medieval Christendom advocating limiting the authority of the church to explicitly spiritual matters. Religious authority came to be seen as functioning legitimately only when it operated within the sphere of discretely religious and spiritual matters, a sphere strongly separated out from “real world” political, economic and legal matters. That is, nominalism—in breaking the Augustinian/ Thomist link between the Being of God and every particular created reality—separates out religion and the church from the ordinary real world. This has the end effect of creating the idea of a second tier of super-reality—the supernatural—that is of an entirely non-earthly nature. It is this supernatural sphere that secularism considers as the discrete realm of the church. In contrast, the first tier of reality becomes the un-spiritual realm of tangible nature which is the “secular” realm of politics, economics and science, and this is not the sphere of church authority." - Paul Tyson, Returning to Reality (Pg 74).

For instance, in conversations about science, you can not bring up God. Why? Because science is concerned with that which is "real". And by "real", these folks usually mean the tangible physical material world. The God-talk is your "super-natural" private religious life and shouldn't be influencing your life in the public secular "natural" world.

Paul Tyson is a Roman Catholic, but I couldn't disagree much with his evaluation of Ockham (at least of the Ockham he presented). I am open to correction on this.
 
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