William of Ockham

William of Ockham (c.1285–1347), philosopher, theologian, and polemicist. A native of Ockham in Surrey, he joined the Franciscan Order and taught at Oxford. In 1323 he was denounced at Avignon for teaching dangerous doctrines. He was summoned there and a commission censured 51 propositions from his writings, but no formal condemnation followed. In 1327 the Minister General of the Franciscans instructed Ockham to examine the Papal constitutions in the dispute on Franciscan poverty; Ockham concluded that John XXII had taken up heretical positions. In 1328 he fled from Avignon and joined Louis of Bavaria. Excommunicated and expelled from his Order, he wrote polemical works against the Pope and in favour of the Imperial policy.

Ockham was a vigorous, critical, and independent thinker, and he contributed to the development of formal logic. He eliminated the notion, then generally accepted, of the existence of universals. Only individual things exist, and they are directly apprehended by the mind. On the theological side much of his thinking was determined by his resolute attempt to do away with anything that limited God's omnipotence. He considered that the doctrine of eternal ideas in the Divine mind, in accordance with which the world was created and ordered, limited God's freedom. But God's omnipotence cannot be philosophically proved; it has to be accepted on faith through revelation. He also criticized the traditional proofs of God's existence as not philosophically demonstrable.

Ockham's radical criticism of the prevailing belief in the reality of universals, his grounding of human knowledge in intuitive cognition, and his rethinking of the relation of theology to philosophy prepared the ground for a more scientific approach to reality. His philosophical and theological influence pervaded the university world from c.1340; he was acknowledged as a mentor by G. Biel and M. Luther and universally as the inspirer of Nominalism. His political theories played an important part in the development of the Conciliar Movement. In CW, feast day, 10 Apr.