Page 64 - God's Church through the Ages - Student Textbook

without original sin (the Immaculate Conception). He also argued that the Incarnation was not dependent on the
fact that man had sinned, that will is superior to intellect and love to knowledge, and that the essence of heaven
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consists in beatific love rather than the vision of God. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II on March 20, 1993.

th
As you see, by the 11 Century, the Roman Catholic Church had proclaimed that Mary was conceived without sin
and was now a mediator between man and God. Heaven was love and Jesus Christ did not come to resolve the
sin issue with man.

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William of Ockham, c. 1285-1347 The Franciscan friar William of Ockham was an
influential philosopher, logistician, ethicist, and theologian who lived from about 1287 to
1347. Ockham (also spelled Occam) is a contraction of the name of the village William
grew up in—Oak Hamlet. As a child, he was trained in logic and natural philosophy at
London Greyfriars; later, he studied theology at Oxford. He did not finish Oxford before
returning to London Greyfriars where he developed and wrote many of his philosophical
works. While there, an unknown adversary accused William of heresy, and he was called
to the papal court at Avignon, France, to defend himself.

In Avignon, William of Ockham finished one of his major works, Quodlibetal Questions, or Quodlibets. The Latin
word quodlibet meant “any whatever,” so Ockham’s book dealt with a broad range of topics as he pondered
issues in logic, ontology, philosophical psychology, morality, and theology. William was acquitted of the charges
of heresy and was asked to investigate whether or not Pope John XXII’s insistence that Jesus’ disciples did not
have to live in poverty, at the mercy of the generosity of others, was biblical. Ockham’s conclusion was that the
pope was not only wrong but that he was stubbornly, heretically wrong in the face of facts. This conclusion led
other Franciscans to determine that John was not a legitimate pope. Ockham fled to Munich, Bavaria, along with
the pope’s Franciscan accusers; Ockham lived out the rest of his life under the protection of the Holy Roman
Emperor.

William of Ockham wrote treatises on theology, morality, logic, and politics, including the politics of the church.
In metaphysics, William of Ockham is considered a nominalist in that he denied metaphysical universals—that is,
general terms such as dog are meaningless apart from the actual thing we call a “dog.”

Ockham is most widely known today for a principle named after him: “Ockham’s Razor”: “For nothing ought to
be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident or known by experience or proved by the authority of
Sacred Scripture” (Sent. I, dist. 30, q. 1). This razor shaves away complicated and extraneous explanations any
time a simpler explanation will suffice. Ironically, coming from one who championed logic so heavily, Ockham’s
Razor is not a logical law but a philosophical guideline—a handy reference that is true in general, but not an
absolute. It basically states that we should not try to justify or explain the existence of anything beyond what is
necessary—we should not try to over-complicate things or assume unneeded hypotheticals. And, in the end, the
only necessary thing is God.

Such thinking was part of a turning point in Western thought. Where earlier philosophers such as Thomas
Aquinas believed theology could be determined through reason, John Duns Scotus and, later, William of Ockham
thought not. Philosophy, the natural sciences, and other studies were well served by reason, but God is neither
defined nor confined by reason. Ockham and his followers believed in the Divine Command Theory, which states
a rule is good if God gives the rule. “Goodness” and “morality” are determined by what God commands, not by
any intrinsic quality the rule possesses or the outcome of following the rule. It is a happy result of God’s nature
that the rules He gives are for our benefit.

54 https://www.britannica.com/biography/Blessed-John-Duns-Scotus
55 https://www.gotquestions.org/William-of-Ockham.html
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