A Sketch of Nominalism in the Late Middle Ages by Heiko A,. Oberman

 

With his categories, Paul Tillich would have described this era as in search for new symbols of security. Exactly in this way has the former Marxist, Frantisek Graus, pointed to the Hussite revolution as the crisis, not of the monetary system, not a feudal or political crisis, but as the crisis of symbols of security; he thus explained the Hussite concern with the sacraments.

In this section, I should like to purse the late medieval effort to deal with one central aspect of the quest for new forms of security, namely, the bridging of the distance between sacred and the profane, one could say the elimination of the ontological opposition, the contrast and gap between the sacred and profane.

In view of the present state of scholarship, we have no grounds for assuming from the beginning a common thrust pervading all late medieval movements. We are therefore well-advised to deal successively with late medieval scholasticism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Whereas Renaissance scholarship  provides us –relatively speaking- with the fewest problems, in view of the surprising persistence and influence of Burckhardt’s modernity thesis, late medieval scholasticism is still largely known, when known at all, as a chapter in the history of philosophy. Its place among the creative forces of the time is rarely mentioned. When it is dealt with, it is usually adduced to show the confusion of the epoch, the despair of reason, the divorce between faith and daily experience, and the fearful clinging to the authority of the Church. Its own self-understanding and its views on the world, on man and his society are still largely terra incognita. Yet late medieval scholasticism is the heyday of Franciscan thought, impregnated by ideas transmitted by the Order most deeply involved in the crisis of the times.

To refer to this movement as nominalism or via moderna – in themselves problematic labels- is for two reasons more  appropriate than to name it Scotism in the fourteenth century, after Duns Scotus, and Ockhamism in the fifteenth century, after William  of Ockham. In the first place,’Scotism’ and Ockhamism’ suggest too strongly a merely academic setting, whereas the ideas of via moderna are on a wide scale absorbed by non-Franciscans, infiltrating even the doctrinally well-disciplined Dominican order and shaping thee piety of thousands of sermons preached all over Europe – a source still of largely untapped by scholarship. In the second place, nominalism proves to be the more comprehensive category, as the movement that not only survived, but even flourished long after Ockham and Ockhamism were condemned by the University of Paris in September, 1339 and again in December, 1340.

I regard it as beyond the ken of the historian to determine whether the rapid spread of nominalist ideas reflect the spirit of the times in its search for new securities or whether it was a real (co-) agent in bringing forth these ideas. But the movement is not sufficiently charted if the following elements are not taken into consideration.

 

1.     The insistence on God’s potentia ordinata can easily leave the impression that we are confronted here with an ‘establishment’ theology. After all, the nominalist point of departure is that God could have decreed –de potentia absoluta- to create another world, to choose other means of salvation, and to establish another order. As a matter of fact, de facto, de potentia ordinata, however, God has committed himself to this world, to this Church, to this order. To remind ourselves that we are moving here in the orbit of Franciscan theology, suffices to warn us against any conclusions to hastily drawn in this regard. The established reality de potentia ordinata is never divorced from the possibilities de potential  absoluta. By this, at every step, we are reminded that this, our world, is contingent, not an ontologically necessary outflow or reflection of eternal structures of being, but the result of a decree, a contract, a pactum Dei.

 

2.    Contingency is perhaps the best one-word summary of the nominalist program. This contingency is understood in two directions, embracing both the vertical relation God-world -man and the horizontal elation world-man-future. We cannot now pursue this second contingency which concerns the so-called question ‘De futuris contingentibus.’ When applied only to the future but also to the past, it provides for a truly scholarly basis of historical studies by its tendency to eliminate supernatural factors in the interpretation of the course of events.

Contingency should not be understood to mean unreliable, threatened by the alternatives de potentia absoluta. The contingency of creation and salvation means simply that they are not ontologically necessary. The point is that in the vertical dimension our reality is not the lowest emanation and level in the hierarchy of being which ascends in ever more real steps to the highest reality, God.

 

3.    Against the implication that our world is a mere reflection and shadow of higher levels of being, the nominalist insists on the full reality of our experienced world. Hunger for reality is so much the mark of nominalism, that it is a perhaps humorous but certainly a misleading tradition that bequeathed upon its opponents the name ‘realist’. What is often called Ockham razor, is the slashing away of the hierarchy of being, of ideas and concepts, which sheer speculation had invented.

 

4.    The protest against ‘wild speculation’ or against ‘vain curiosity’ is not merely a sign of anti-intellectualism. Admittedly this is not alien to the Franciscan tradition, and more generally it is a trend of the times. It is particularly noticeable in the beginning stages of the devotio moderna, which propagated the crusade into the interior and hence presented withdrawal as answer to the challenge of security.

 

In nominalist thought we encounter the sternest opposition to the claims of intellect and reason when not verified by the tests of experience. On this basis, nominalism provided the setting for modern science, replacing the authority-based deductive method with the empirical method. The combination of experientia and experimentum allowed for a fresh investigation, by trial and error,  such basic phenomena as movement and retardation. In this way the chain of causation is reduced to observable second causes, a major advance in the transition from the speculative law of nature to the observable laws of nature.

 

More generally it can be said that the underlying intention of nominalism is best described in terms of the medieval revolutions against the meta-categories that obfuscate reality. Just as it rejected metaphysics to establish physics, so nominalism ventured to strip theology of her distorting meta-theological shackles, with the result that the Scriptures and the prior decrees of God were emphasized at the expense of natural theology. In this attack on meta-categories I find the most revealing parallel with aspects of Italian humanism.

5 This sketch would be incomplete if in conclusion no mention were made of an emerging new image of God implied in the emphasis on God’s potential ordinate. God is a covenant God, his pactum or foedus is his self-commitment to become the contractual partner in creation and salvation. Here originates the Pelagianism* of the facere quod in se est (to do what is in one's self), which stands in the area of justification for the meager but  sufficient human moral efforts which  God has contracted, accepted or pledged to reward. In this emphasis on covenantal and not-necessary relationship between God and his world, as well as between God and his Church, man is no longer primarily a second cause moved by the prime mover and first cause. In the nominalist view man has become the appointed representative and partner of God responsible for his own life, society and the world, on the basis and within the limits of the treaty or pactum stipulated by God.

Because of the frontal attack upon traditional ontology and meta-categories nominalism could make the impression on contemporary ecclesiastical and secular authorities and did make the impression on the later interpreters that it merely enhanced the climate of crisis and accelerated the late medieval disintegration of stability and time-honored structures. Nominalism did call traditional truths and answers into question in order  to replace them with a new vision of the relationship between the sacred and the profane by presenting coordination as an alternative to subordination and partnership instead of the hierarchy of being.

 

 

*Pelagianism: the theological doctrine of Pelagius and his followers, in particular the denial of the doctrines of original sin and predestination, and the defense of innate human goodness and free will.