Eden Regained: William of Ockham and the Franciscan Return to Terrestrial Paradise

EDEN REGAINED: WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND THE FRANCISCAN RETURN TO TERRESTRIAL PARADISE This paper was written under the welcoming auspices of the George L. Mosse Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison during the academic year 2000-1. I wish to thank Prof. William J. Courtenay for his guidance and encouragement and Profs. John V. Fleming and William C. Jordan at Prince­ ton University for careful readings and very helpful suggestions toward the final version. Prof. David Woodward (Madison) and Mr. Zur Shalev (Princeton) have walked me through the terra incognita of medieval cartography in a series of fruitful scholarly encounters. Dedicated to the memory of my father, David Geltner. Three distinct paradigms of perfection, Eden, Heaven and Paradise, furnish the Christian tradition. This article charts the progression of appeals made to one of them, Eden, as a paradigm of such perfection within the context of the fourteenth-century Franciscan Poverty controversy, culminating with its unique and comprehensive invocation in William of Ockham’s Opus nonaginta dierum, cc. xiv and xvi-xviii. It will be shown that in this context the argument in support of the right to renounce property on the basis of the existential conditions in Eden had been new and surprisingly unfamiliar within the Franciscan tradition - a striking fact, especially in light of the vast reference made to the status innocentiae in many walks of the immediate cultural surroundings. Ockham’s argument, although not entirely original, sheds further light on the relations between the ‘academic’and ‘political’phases of his intellectual biography. It will be argued that the impetus of his attack against the deniers of an original state of possessionlessness is grounded to a large measure in his epistemology and interpretation of historical data as a form of memory, principles that he had developed well before his flight from Avignon. Accordingly, the second part of this article offers a brief discussion of Ockham’s argument as an occasion of his appreciation of man’s ability to know the past as past, and his assertion ofthe authenticity of scripture as history. Franciscan Studies, 59 (2001) 63 64 Gu y Geltn er I Eden occupies a noteworthy place in many realms of late medieval thought. Its theological significance as the manifestation of the apex of humanity, the status innocentiae, permeates much of the intellectual and artistic effort to come to terms with a superior moral and quasi­ metaphysical pre-lapsarian state. In historiography as in theology, medieval men have launched inquiries into earthly Paradise without exhibiting a particular conformity of approach. Thus, for instance, while some have endeavored to locate its precise geographical coordinates,1 others denied its corporeal existence, or shifted the focus of their investigation by taking symbolic or mystical approaches to the narrative of Genesis 1-3.2 Yet despite the fact that biblical Eden had been early and thoroughly assimilated into Christian thought and culture, already at the dawn of the Middle Ages Christian eschatology was emphasizing a new point of reference at the end of history; Christian neo-Platonism embraced the notion of a state enacted during and/or after a life of unique devotion;3and, finally, a growing psychological and theological 1Cf. Ranulph Higden, Polychronicon, x, in J. R. Lumby (ed.), Rolls Series, London 1866, xli, 1, p. 74; John Peckham, Quodlibeta Qmtmr I, q. ix, 11, in G. J. Etzkorn (ed.) Grottaferata: Quaracchi, 1989, p. 27. The tradition of the corporeality of Eden can be traced from Philo of Alexandria (Questions and Answers on Genesis, 1.12, R. Marcus (tr.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979, p. 8), through St. Augustine (De Genesi ad litteram, viii, 7, in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (henceforth CSEL), Vienna 1894, xxviii, pp. 241-2) and crystallizing in Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, xiv, iii, 2-3, (J. P. Migne (ed.) Patrologiae Cursus Completus Series Latina (henceforth PL), Paris 1850, lxxxii, p. 496). 2E.g., Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qu. cii, 2, 1; II-II, qu. clxiv, 2, 4-5. The Venerable Bede admitted the impossibility of locating earthly Paradise, yet warned that “nos tamen locum hunc fuisse et esse terranum dubitare non licet” (In Genesim, I, ii, 8, in Corpus Christianorum Series Latina (henceforth CCSL...