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Nonconformist Church History: William of Ockham (1285-1347/9)
William of Ockham
(1285 - 1347 or 1349)
b. 1285, Ockham,
Surrey, England
d. 1347 or 1349,
Munich, Bavaria
“The Pope can be
convicted of heresy, if he solemnly defines an error against the faith
and asserts that it should be held by Christians.”
The small village of Ockham, a few miles from the place where the A3 meets the M25 today, was the birthplace of one of the most influential of all medićval thinkers, William of Ockham. He was among the first to produce reasoned arguments against the medićval patterns of church doctrine and authority, seeking to return to the patterns found in
the New Testament. Today, his name lives on in "Occam's razor," the name given to a logical principle that simplicity is preferable to complexity.
As a young man, William became a Franciscan friar. William's education among the Franciscans included logic, a subject that became a lifelong interest for him. Later, William studied theology at Oxford University, and by his early thirties, he was lecturing there on the
Four Books of Sentences of Peter Lombard, a leading 12th-century theologian. Lombard's work was by then well established and would remain the foundation of theological studies for several centuries. Nevertheless, William found much to disagree about in it, and eventually this difference of opinion led to him leaving Oxford in 1319 without having achieved his Master's degree. Oxford was riven with other tensions at the time as well: the Chancellor, John Lutterell, so upset his staff that they contrived his dismissal in 1322.
One of the significant matters of concern about Lombard's teaching for William was his interpretation of the Sacraments. Lombard stated that there were seven Sacraments, and took the view that each was not merely a visible sign of an invisible grace, but was in some sense the cause of that grace. William maintained the view of Augustine that the Sacraments were visible signs of invisible graces. This was in line with much of William's philosophical and theological outlook. Philosophically, William was one of the leading lights in the Nominalist school.
The Nominalist philosophers stressed the difference between the name of something and the concept for which that name stood, underlining especially the point that it was possible to have names for concepts which in themselves have no physical reality. This view was in contrast to the Realist school of thought, which held that there was a strong link between the name of something and its reality, and that if something had a name then it followed that it must represent something real. Although this is largely a technical difference, the effect of it is that the nominalist view tends towards simplicity, giving people the ability to use philosophical abstractions without having to argue over the point of whether those abstractions are meaningful outside the discussion in which they are used.
Another example in which this approach was significant for William of Ockham is the way in which God's grace acts. Before him, Thomas Aquinas had argued that grace brings about a change in the person who receives it, and it is this person who has been so changed acting together with God that gives God's grace its full expression. William cut through this argument, maintaining the God's grace does not require our co-operation to be effective.
William continued teaching in various establishments for a few years after leaving Oxford, until in 1324 he was summoned to Avignon by the Pope John XXII - the Papacy having moved from Rome to Avignon at the start of the fourteenth century. In Avignon, William's path and that of John Lutterell crossed again. Lutterell denounced William to the Pope, citing more than fifty errors in his criticism of the
Sentences. In spite of that, William continued to maintain many of his views. Though they were against the official line of the Church, the Pope took no action at that stage.
Matters of conscience for William came to a head in the winter of 1327-8 when he became caught up in a controversy between the Pope and a senior Franciscan called Michael of Cesena. The subject was the application of the rule of poverty within the Franciscan order. The Pope maintained that the Franciscans had no right to insist that their members renounced all their worldly possessions, because Jesus and the Apostles had not apparently done so. Michael of Cesena maintained that Jesus' teaching and the way he sent the apostles out did indeed demonstrate that worldly goods were an encumbrance and so the Franciscans were right to follow that rule. The differences were irreconcilable, and fearing for his life, Michael of Cesena fled from Avignon to the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor, Louis IV of Bavaria; William and another Franciscan who opposed the Pope on this issue went with him.
During late 1328, while under the protection of Louis IV, William was instructed by his superior within the order to follow the doctrines contained in several bulls issued by the Pope on the subject of poverty. Upon reading these, William was convinced that they provided evidence of the Pope's departure from scripture. The heresy as William saw it was of such a degree that it meant that John XXII had forfeited his mandate. Further pronouncements by the Pope in 1330-1 on what happened to the souls of the departed that were against both scripture and tradition merely confirmed for William the errant status of the Pope.
William developed the view that there was no infallible authority within the church other than that of Christ, as had been revealed in the Scriptures. William saw that if the Gospel made members of the church free, the Pope could not impose restrictions on them. It was incumbent upon all members of the church to defend the church against error, including if necessary the error of the Pope.
Once he expressed himself in these terms, William was excommunicated. Even so, he continued to maintain and develop these arguments during the rest of the
reign of John XXII and under his successors Benedict XII and Clement VI. Following his excommunication, William wrote a score of treatises demonstrating his views, among the best-known being
Opus Nonaginta Dierum (1330) - the Work of Ninety Days, which was primarily about the controversy over apostolic poverty, and
Compendium Errorum Papae (1338) - a List of the Pope's Errors.
William believed that civil and ecclesiastical authority should be kept separate. Too often for his liking, he perceived the Papacy behaving like a monarchy. In 1339, when king Edward III of England attempted to enforce land taxes against the church, William argued in favour of Edward III and against the supremacy of Pope Benedict XII in the matter.
William spent the remainder of his life in Bavaria. Sources differ about when he died, on the one hand reporting his death in 1347, and on the other suggesting that he may have died in a Munich convent in 1349, a victim of the Black Death.
The debate between the views of William of Ockham and Peter Lombard continued long after William's time, being still current when the European Reformation began to get under way. Among those influenced by William's theological works, and in particular by William's desire to test church doctrines against scripture, were John Wyclif, Jan Hus, Martin Luther and Philipp Melancthon.
Though it would not be justified to assert that Luther adopted all of William's views and concerns - after all, the two centuries that separate them provided ample fresh controversies of their own - it is reasonable to highlight the fact that several of the significant points that Luther did go on to make so tellingly had already been foreshadowed in William's work. If Luther is to be called the "Father of the Reformation," then one could argue that William of Ockham might merit the soubriquet, "Grandfather of the Reformation."
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