The Three Modes of Natural Law in Ockham: A Revision of the Text

THE THREE MODES OF NATURAL LAW IN OCKHAM: A REVISION OF THE TEXT The significance of the concept of natural law in Ockham's thinking can hardly be decided on a priori grounds.1 Only close attention to what he wrote can help towards an estimate. During the last forty years or so a central place in the lively if inconclusive debate about his views on this subject has been occupied by chapter six of book three of the second treatise of part three of his Dialogus. To it Max. A. Shepard drew attention in 1932 and Georges de Lagarde devoted almost a whole chapter of discussion in 19462. Father W. Kölmel's attempt in 1953 to rebut Lagarde's conclusions, though rightly insisting that IIusIIIae Dial. iii. 6 does not reveal the whole story, nevertheless concentrated most of its attention upon this text.3 When in the sixties Lagarde rehandled his Ockham volumes IIusIIIae Dial. iii. 6 still had a considerable part to play in his defence of his earlier views against Kölmel's criticisms.4 In his recent study of Ockham's political thought Professor McGrade engages in a lengthy tussle with this same passage; if only in passing, Professor 1 That seems to be the tendency, for example, of A. P. d'Entrèves, Natural Law (London, 1951), pp. 68-69, when he remarks on the Nominalist theory of ethics as an "insidious menace to the doctrine of natural law" and on Ockham as drawing out fully all the implications of "voluntarist ethics." 2 Max A. Shepard, "William of Occam and the Higher Law," American Political Science Review, 26 (1932), 1011-12; 27 (1933), 24, 32. Georges de Lagarde, La Naissance de l'Esprit Laïque au Déclin du Moyen-Age. Tom. VI. Ockham: La Morale et le droit (Paris, 1946), chapter 6, pp. 140-63. 8 W. Kölmel, 'Das Naturrecht bei Wilhelm Ockham,' Franziskanische Studien, 35 (1953), 39-85. For the reservations, cf. pp. 56, 76; for the discussion, PP- 55-76. 4 Cf. especially La Naissance de l'Esprit Laïque. Tom. V. Guillaume d'Ockham : Critique des structures ecclésiales (Paris/Louvain, 1963), pp. 1 12-19, 271, 286. 2?8H. S. OFFLER Gordon Leff has not failed to notice it.5 Of course, none of these scholars confined his attention to IIusIIIae Dial. iii. 6 or built his argument upon it exclusively: the early chapters of book i of the same treatise contain an important alternative definition of natural law, as Lagarde perceived, and the value of Ockham's Opus Nonaginta Dierum for the investigation of this problem has been indicated by Dr. J. B. Morrall and Professor Miethke, recently followed by Leff.6 Yet IIusIIIae Dial. iii. 6 remains, as Professor Francis Oakley has said, Ockham's "best known text on natural law."7 Modern scholarship has in fact endorsed the high opinion of this passage expressed by medieval annotators: "pulchra definitio iuris naturalis," or, as Pierre d'Ailly characterized it, "novam distinctionem de iure naturali valde bonam."8 In view of the strategic importance so generally attributed to this text we are left asking why modern interpretations of it have been so notably diverse. At least part of the answer lies in the deficiencies of the version which the commentators have used. Ultimately only one version is at issue. Shepard, Lagarde, Kölmel and Oakley rely on Goldast's edition of the Dialogus in vol. ii of his Monarchia Sancti Romani Imperii (1614; in vol. iii of later editions of the same work); McGrade and Leff have gone back to the Lyons edition of 1494 (reproduced in 1962). But Goldast offered no more than a reprint of the Lyons edition, which has thus provided all these scholars with the basis for their varied conclusions. Though both Lagarde and McGrade have also consulted manuscripts, neither seems to have pursued this line systematically or very far; Lagarde indeed, possibly not without irony, appears at one point to make rather light of textual problems.9 The result has been that the difficulties of inter8 A. S. McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 177-85; Gorden...