"Determinatio Ecclesiae" and/or "Communiter Omnes Doctores": On Locating Ockham within the Orthodox Dogmatic Tradition

"DETERMINATIO ECCLESIAE" AND/OR "COMMUNITER OMNES DOCTORES": On Locating Ockham within the Orthodox Dogmatic Tradition William ofOckham was—and he wanted to be-a Catholic theologian. He was, to be sure many other things besides. He was a daring metaphysician , he was a penetrating logician, he was a vigorous polemicist and pamphleteer, he was an effective apologist for Franciscan poverty, he was an important political theorist, he an unsparing critic ofthe Papacy, he was an excommunicated refugee. One way or another, however, he was each of these in the accomplishment of his task as a Catholic theologian, and that was the presupposition for all his other tasks. In the words of my favorite passage from a twentieth-century philosopher who also was many other things besides, When you are criticising the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents of all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way ofputting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.1 At this Colloquium on William ofOckham it is, I suppose, the responsibility of the historian of the development of the Christian tradition to supply one of the most basic of those presuppositions by trying to locate him within the orthodox dogmatic tradition, within which, 1 Alfred North Whitehead, [Science and the Modern World] (1925; Mentor Edition: New York, 1952), pp. 49-50. 3^JAROSLAV PELIKAN whatever the judgment ofothers past and present may be, he staunchly and sometimes even stridently insisted that he stood. For Ockham, as for his predecessors and contemporaries, standing within the orthodox dogmatic tradition meant carrying on the theological enterprise—and, for that matter, all the other enterprises I have catalogued—in a continuous dialogue with the dead, or, to use their term, with the auctoritates. As I have suggested elsewhere in a discussion of how to interpret a florilegium, this use of auctoritates makes such a book "like a ransom note sent by a kidnappper." For while "the identification ofthe newspapers from which the individual words and letters have been clipped may become a clue to the date of the note and to the whereabouts and habits of the kidnapper," nevertheless "it is in the arrangement [and, I would add here, the manipulation] of the clippings, whatever their sources, that the meaning of the document lies."2 We for whom both the works of Ockham and the auctoritates he cites are now the stuff of historical research are, therefore, in the position of having to try to understand how our past interpreted its past—a scholarly enterprise for which, let me add with the profound appreciation that perhaps only someone who is engaged in a multi-volume work of intellectual history can fully sense, historians of ideas are now equipped for the first time, thanks to the scrupulous, tenacious, erudite, and Baskerville-like detective work of Father Gedeon Gal and his editorial colleagues, although I cannot repress the wish, having published volume 3 of The Christian Tradition in 1978 and volume 4 in 1984, that the project could have been completed a few years earlier! The theme for this address comes from that edition: "Quia tarnen determinatio Ecclesiae est in contrarium ... et communiter omnes doctores tenent oppositum, ideo teneo. . . "3 The determinatio Ecclesiae had been deposited in the documents ofthe Church's magisterium. It included the creeds ofthe Church and the authoritative dogmatic decrees of the approved councils, whichever those might be. As such, it was binding on all Catholic believers and normative for all Catholic theologians. Indeed, in his treatise De corpore Christi Ockham affirms this normative character of the Church's doctrinal legislation with the formula: "This is my faith, because this 2 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities (New Haven, 1984), p. 74. 3 Ockham, Quaest. in IV Sent., q. 9 (OTh...