William Ockham, Theologian: Convicted for Lack of Evidence

William Ockham, Theologian: Convicted for Lack of Evidence CONNOR J. CHAMBERS WHILE CHARGESOF "Pelagian" and "heresiarch" continued to circle around the character and legend of William Ockham long after the processes at Avignon had resulted in his excommunication on June 6, 1328, recent studies have revealed that the clerical complexity and personal intrigue surrounding the proceedings against Ockham played a more decisive role in his conviction.Z But personalities aside, and heretic or apostate, the fact remains that it was Ockham's suspicious doctrinal lectures upon the Sentences at Oxford which afforded the Oxonian Chancellor, John Lutterell, the opportunity to have Ockham summoned before the Papal Court then (p)residing at Avignon. Ockham had seemingly insulted (the now highly regarded) Aristotle with his wild notion of quantity, and his strange doctrine of a deceiving God provided Lutterell with just the cue to challenge Ockham's theological integrity. But the processes against him dragged on and off for almost four years, and Ockham's gradual entanglement with the deteriorating position of Michael of Cesena over the question of Franciscan poverty led to their joint flight from Avignon (with the Great Seal of the Order in tow) during the night of May 26, 1328, to seek refuge with the German Emperor, Louis of Bavaria. As Brampton remarked, Ockham's "subsequent excommunication on 6 June was for apostasy, and had no doctrinal connexion with the process, though John XXII was satisfied that Ockham's sudden and unexpected departure was owing to his sense of guilt_" 9 But if the lack of any evidence of William was adjudged by the Pope as sufficient grounds for his conviction (regarding the lesser question of Franciscan poverty), it must be kept in mind that the much larger historical question of Ockha~a's longstanding theological notoriety as a traditionally sinister "nominalistic" culprit was first and foremost the result of his theological teachings which have since greatly overshadowed (while pretextually attracting at the time) some of the "curia's" personalities at Oxford and Avignon. The location of theology in the classification of human knowledge was a lively and central problem during the course of thirteenth-century scholastic speculation. And the question had been raised more than a century earlier as to Cf., e.g., the recent study of C. K. Brampton, "Personalities at the Process against Ockham at Avignon, 1324-1326," Franciscan Studies, XXVI (1966), 4-25. Brampton, p. 4. [38H 382 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the possibility of employing the dialectical procedures of the newly discovered logical works of Aristotle in the sacred area of revealed truth. The enfranchisement of Aristotelian science in the succeeding century, however, reversed the question considerably, so that early fourteenth-century thinkers such as Ockham, who respected the established cognitive autonomy of the scientific categories of Aristotle , asked the inverted question of whether the contingent truths of revelation, accepted as they must be on faith, are congenial to scientific formulation. Ockham has been labeled the Venerabilis Inceptor, a pioneer in paving the via rnoderna. While surely Ockham's original logical insights presaged, e.g., many contemporary developments in symbolic logic, nevertheless his theological enterprise can be just as profitably grasped when viewed as an expansion or refinement of the Aristotelian via antiqua. Ockham's novel expansion of the Stagirite's rigorous canons of scientific procedure, however, consisted largely of his momentous discovery and explorations of whole new dimensions of logical predication opened up through his theories of signification and especially of supposition. How would an exacting theologian (or better, "theo-logician"), an unswerving epistemologist (or better, "epistemo-logician"), reply to the cardinal scholastic question of the permeability of the truths of faith by rational methods? Are revealed truths susceptible to analytic inclusion within the well-defined categorical methodology and requirements of a properly Aristotelian science? Two generations before Ockham, Thomas Aquinas found a solution to this vital "theo-logical" question in the notion of the "subalternation" of a lesser science to the principiating evidence of a higher one. Aquinas saw no ditticulty in the imputation of a properly scientific character to the creditive reasonings of the theologian. For Aquinas the nature or ratio of a science consists very simply in recognizing lesser known...