Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  The central principle of Ockham’s thought, and the most consequential, was his denial of the reality of universals outside of the human mind and human language. Driving Aristotle’s stress on the ontological primacy of concrete particulars over Platonic Forms to its logical extreme, Ockham argued that nothing existed except individual beings, that only concrete experience could serve as a basis for knowledge, and that universals existed not as entities external to the mind but only as mental concepts. In the last analysis, what was real was the particular thing outside the mind, not the mind’s concept of that thing. Since all knowledge had to be based on the real, and since all real existence was that of individual beings, then knowledge must be of particulars. Human concepts possessed no metaphysical foundation beyond concrete particulars, and there existed no necessary correspondence between words and things. Ockham thereby gave new force and vitality to the philosophical position of nominalism (in its conceptualist version), which held that universals were only names or mental concepts and not real entities. Roscellinus had argued a similar position in the eleventh century, but it was from the time of Ockham that nominalism would play a central role in the evolution of the Western mind.

  In the generation before Ockham, another prominent Scholastic known as the “subtle doctor,” Duns Scotus, had already modified classical Form theories in the direction of the concrete individual by asserting that each particular had its own individual “thisness” (haeccitas), which possessed a positive reality of its own apart from the particular’s participation in the universal—or, more precisely, apart from its sharing in a common nature. This added formal quality of individuation Scotus saw as necessary to allow the individual an intelligibility on its own terms, apart from its universal form (otherwise the individual in itself would be unintelligible, perhaps even to the divine mind). He also saw this principle of individuation as a necessary recognition of the individual human free will and especially of God’s freedom to choose how he created each individual, rather than God’s or man’s being bound by the determinism of eternally fixed universals and necessary emanations from the First Cause. These modifications away from fixed universals and determinism in turn encouraged attention to observation and experiment—i.e., to study the unpredictable creation of a free God—and heightened the distinction between rational philosophy and religious truth.

  But whereas Scotus, like most of his predecessors back to Augustine, had assumed a direct and real correspondence between human concept and metaphysical existent, Ockham denied that correspondence altogether. Only concrete individual beings were real, and common natures (Scotus), intelligible species (Aquinas and Aristotle), or transcendent Forms (Plato) were conceptual fictions derived from that primary reality. A universal for Ockham was a term signifying some conceptualized aspect of a real, concrete individual being, and did not constitute a metaphysical entity in itself. A separate, independent order of reality populated by universals or Forms was expressly denied. Ockham thus moved to eliminate the last vestige of Platonic Forms in Scholastic thought: Only the particular existed, and any inference about real universals, whether transcendent or immanent, was spurious. So often and with such force did Ockham use the philosophical principle that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity” (non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem) that the principle came to be known as “Ockham’s razor.”8

  Hence, according to Ockham, universals exist only in the human mind, not in reality. They are concepts abstracted by the mind on the basis of its empirical observations of more or less similar individuals. They are not God’s pre-existing Ideas governing his creation of individuals, for God was absolutely free to create anything in any way he pleased. Only his creatures exist, not Ideas of creatures. For Ockham, the issue was no longer the metaphysical question as to how ephemeral individuals came from real transcendent Forms, but the epistemological question as to how abstract universal concepts came from real individuals. “Man” as a species signified not a distinct real entity in itself, but a shared similarity in many individual human beings as recognized by the mind. It was a mental abstraction, not a real entity. The problem of universals was therefore a matter of epistemology, grammar, and logic—not of metaphysics or ontology.

  Ockham, again following leads established by Scotus, also denied the possibility of moving from a rational apprehension of the facts of this world to any necessary conclusions about God or other religious matters. The world was utterly contingent on God’s omnipotent and indefinable will. Hence man’s only certainty derived from direct sensory observation or from self-evident logical propositions, not from rational speculations about invisible realities and universal essences. Because God was free to create or determine things according to his will, any human claim to certain knowledge of the cosmos as a rationally ordered expression of transcendent essences was altogether relativized. God could have created things in any way he arbitrarily wished, without the use of intermediaries such as the celestial intelligences of Aristotelianism and Thomism. There were two realities given to man: the reality of God, given by revelation, and the reality of the empirical world, given by direct experience. Beyond those, or between them, man could not legitimately claim cognitive access, and without revelation he could not know of God. Man could not empirically experience God in the same way he could the material object in front of him. Since all human knowledge was founded on the sensory intuition of concrete particulars, something beyond the senses, such as the existence of God, could only be revealed by faith, it could not be known by reason. The concept of an absolute divine being was only a subjective human construction, and could not therefore serve as a secure foundation for theological reasoning.

  In Ockham’s understanding, the determinism and necessary causes of Greek philosophy and science, which Aquinas sought to integrate with Christian faith, placed arbitrary limits on God’s infinitely free creation, and this Ockham vigorously opposed. Such a philosophy failed to recognize the real limits of human rationality. For Ockham, all knowledge of nature arose solely from what comes through the senses. Reason was a powerful tool, but its power lay only in relation to the empirical encounter with the concrete facts of “positive” reality. The human mind possessed no divine light, as Aquinas taught, by which the active intellect could move beyond the senses to a valid universal judgment grounded in absolute being. Neither the mind nor the world could be said to be ordered in such a coherently interconnected fashion that the mind knows the world by means of real universals that govern both knower and known. Because only particulars demonstrably exist, and not any transcendent relation or coherence between them, speculative reason and metaphysics lacked any real foundation.

  Without interior illumination or some other means of epistemological certainty such as Aquinas’s light of the active intellect, a newly skeptical attitude toward human knowledge was both inevitable and mandatory. Since only direct evidence of individual existents provided a basis for knowledge, and since those existents were contingent on a divine omnipotence that knew no determined bounds to its creative activity—anything was possible for God—then human knowledge was limited to the contingent and empirical, and was, finally, not necessary and universal knowledge at all. God’s will was not limited by the structures of human rationality, for his absolute volitional freedom and omnipotence could allow him to make what was evil good, and vice versa, if he so wished. There was no mandatory relation between God’s freely created universe and the human desire for a world of rational intelligibility. At best, only arguments of probability were legitimate. The human mind could make strict logical demonstrations on the basis of immediate experience, but that experience, being contingent on God’s free will, necessarily relativized the absolute certainty of the logic. And because Ockham’s ontology was exclusively of concrete individuals, the empirical world had to be viewed from an exclusively physical standpoint. The metaphysical organizing principles of Aristotle or Plato could not be derived from immediate experience.
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br />   Ockham therefore attacked the earlier Scholastics’ speculative theological rationalism as inappropriate to logic and science (employing unverifiable and superfluous entities like the Forms to explain individual beings), and dangerous to religion (presuming to know God’s reasons or to put limits of order and intermediate causes onto his direct free creation, while elevating pagan metaphysics vis-à-vis Christian faith). He thereby severed the unity so painstakingly constructed by Aquinas. For Ockham, there was one truth described by Christian revelation, which was both beyond doubt and beyond rational comprehension, and there was another truth comprising the observable particular facts described by empirical science and rational philosophy. The two truths were not necessarily continuous.

  In a sense, Ockham both opposed and fulfilled the secularistic movement of the previous century. He forcefully proclaimed a new form of the double-truth universe, with a religious truth and a scientific truth, effectively cutting the link between theology and philosophy. But the earlier secularists had argued for such a division because they were unwilling to restrict Greek and Arabic philosophy to a subordinate position when it conflicted with Christian belief. Ockham, by contrast, wished to preserve the preeminence of Christian doctrine—especially God’s absolute freedom and omnipotence as Creator—by firmly defining the limits of the natural reason. In doing so, however, Ockham negated Aquinas’s confidence that God’s creation would be warmly open to human efforts at universal understanding. For both Aquinas and Ockham, the human mind had to accommodate its intellectual aspirations to the fact that God’s reality and man’s rational knowledge were infinitely distant from each other. But where Aquinas left room for a rational knowledge that approached the divine mystery and enhanced theological understanding, Ockham saw the necessity of defining a more absolute limit. A positivist reason could be carefully and modestly employed in approaching the empirical world, but only revelation could illuminate the greater realities of God’s will, his creation, and his gratuitously bestowed salvation. There was no humanly intelligible continuity between the empirical and the divine.

  Ockham’s logical rigor was matched by his moral rigor. Against the worldly magnificence of the Avignon papacy, he endorsed a life of total poverty for true Christian spiritual perfection, following the example of Jesus, the apostles, and Francis of Assisi. For Ockham was himself a fervent Franciscan, whose religious conviction moved him even to risk excommunication by the pope if the latter’s policies seemed to conflict with Christian truth. In a series of fateful encounters with the papacy, Ockham not only upheld radical poverty against the secular wealth of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, he also defended the right of the English king to tax Church property (as Jesus, in “rendering unto Caesar,” had submitted to temporal authority), condemned the Church’s infringement on individual Christian freedom, denied the legitimacy of papal infallibility, and outlined the various circumstances in which a pope could be rightfully deposed. In the personal drama between Ockham and the Church were foreshadowings of an epochal drama to come.

  But it was on the philosophical level that Ockham’s impact was to be most immediately potent, for in his emphatic assertion of nominalism, the growing medieval tension between reason and faith began to snap. Paradoxically, the very intensity of Ockham’s allegiance to-God’s omnipotent freedom, combined with his acute sense of logical precision, led him to formulate a philosophical position remarkable for its modernity. In Ockham’s view, one could not assume that man’s mind and God’s were fundamentally connected. Empiricism and reason could give a limited knowledge of the world in its particulars, but no certain knowledge of God, for which only God’s Word could be a source. Revelation offered certainty, but could be affirmed only through faith and grace, not through natural reason. Reason should rightly focus on nature rather than God, because only nature provided the senses with concrete data upon which reason could ground its knowledge.

  Ockham left no bridge between human reason and divine revelation, between what man knows and what he believes. Yet his uncompromising emphasis on the individual concrete things of this world, his trust in the power of human reason and logic to ascertain necessary entities and to differentiate evidence and degrees of probability, and his skeptical attitude toward traditional and institutionally sanctioned ways of thinking all directly encouraged the scientific enterprise. Indeed, from such a dualistic starting point, science could be free to develop along its own lines with less fear of potential doctrinal contradiction—at least until the entire cosmology was called into question. It was not accidental that both Buridan and Oresme, two of the most original scientific thinkers of the late Middle Ages, worked in the Parisian nominalist school in which Ockham had been a central influence. Although Ockham’s interests lay principally in philosophy rather than natural science, his elimination of the fixed correspondence between human concept and metaphysical reality, and his assertion that all genuine existence was individual existence, helped open the physical world to fresh analysis. Now direct contact with concrete particulars could overcome the metaphysical mediation by abstract universals. Significantly, as the alliance of nominalism and empiricism represented in Ockham’s ideas spread through the universities in the fourteenth century (despite papal censure), Ockham’s way of philosophy was known as the via moderna, in contrast to Aquinas’s and Scotus’s via antiqua. The traditional Scholastic enterprise, committed to joining faith with reason, was coming to an end.

  Thus with the fourteenth century, the long-assumed metaphysical unity of concept and being began to break down. The assumption that the human mind knows things by intellectually grasping their inherent forms—whether through interior illumination by transcendent Ideas, as in Plato and Augustine, or through the active intellect’s abstraction of immanent universals from sense-perceived particulars, as in Aristotle and Aquinas—was now challenged. In the absence of that basic epistemological presupposition, the ambitiously comprehensive systems constructed by the thirteenth-century Scholastics were no longer possible. With the displacement of abstract speculation by empirical evidence as the basis of knowledge, the earlier metaphysical systems seemed increasingly implausible. The underlying medieval world view—Christian and Aristotelian—continued intact, but new, more critical interpretations now arose, thereby undoing the earlier synthesis and engendering a new intellectual pluralism. In many matters, probability replaced certainty, as empiricism, grammar, and logic began to supersede metaphysics.

  Ockham’s vision prefigured the path subsequently taken by the Western mind. For just as he believed the Church must be politically separated from the secular world for the integrity and rightful freedom of both, so he believed God’s reality must be theologically distinguished from empirical reality. Only thus would Christian truth preserve its transcendent sacrosanctness, and only thus would the world’s nature be properly comprehended on its own terms, in its full particularity and contingency. Herein lay the embryonic foundations—epistemological and metaphysical as well as religious and political—for coming changes in the Western world view to be wrought by the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment.

  And so it was that just as the medieval vision had attained its consummation in the work of Aquinas and Dante, the altogether different spirit of a new epoch began to arise, propelled by the very forces that had achieved the earlier synthesis. The great medieval masterworks had culminated an intellectual development that was starting to break into new territories, even if that meant stepping out of the Church’s established structure of education and belief. But Ockham’s precocious modernism was still ahead of its time. Paradoxically, the culture of this new era would receive its major initiating impulse not from the line of medieval Scholasticism, natural science, and Aristotle, but from the other pole of classical Humanism, belles lettres, and a revived Plato. For just as Aquinas had his contrasting philosophical successor in Ockham, so did Dante have his contrasting literary successor in Petrarch, born in the same decade Dante began writ
ing La Divina Commedia, at the start of the fourteenth century.

  The Rebirth of Classical Humanism

  Petrarch

  It was a pivotal moment in Western cultural history when Petrarch looked back on the thousand years since the decline of ancient Rome and experienced that entire period as a decline of human greatness itself, a diminishment of literary and moral excellence, a “dark” age. In contrast to this impoverishment, Petrarch beheld the immense cultural wealth of Greco-Roman civilization, a seeming golden age of creative genius and human expansiveness. For centuries, medieval schoolmen had been gradually rediscovering and integrating the ancient works, but now Petrarch radically shifted the focus and tone of that integration. Instead of Scholasticism’s concern with logic, science, and Aristotle, and with the constant imperative of Christianizing the pagan conceptions, Petrarch and his followers saw value in all the literary classics of antiquity—poetry, essays, letters, histories and biographies, philosophy in the form of elegant Platonic dialogues rather than dry Aristotelian treatises—and embraced these on their own terms, not as needing Christian modification, but as noble and inspirational just as they stood in the radiance of classical civilization. Ancient culture was a source not just for scientific knowledge and rules for logical discourse, but for the deepening and enrichment of the human spirit. The classical texts provided a new foundation for the appreciation of man; classical scholarship constituted the “humanities.” Petrarch set about the task of finding and absorbing the great works of ancient culture—Virgil and Cicero, Horace and Livy, Homer and Plato—not just to inculcate a sterile imitation of the past masters, but to instill in himself the same moral and imaginative fire that they had so superbly expressed. Europe had forgotten its noble classical heritage, and Petrarch called for its recollection. A new sacred history was being established, a Greco-Roman testament to be placed alongside the Judaeo-Christian.