BRAMMART, JOHANNES. - Carmelite theologian, born at Aachen in the fourteenth century and died at Cologne on 8 September 1407. He taught at Paris and Cologne, and from 1384 to 1404 was provincial of his Order in the Low Countries.
His adherence to nominalism did not prevent him from maintaining the rationality of faith, denying that it was in conflict with reason; yet it had a baneful effect on other points of his theology. Thus, for B., evidence for the existence of God is not supplied by the arguments from motion and causality, but only by the intuitive vision of God, a vision that is not sufficient for beatitude and is absolutely impossible together with sin and eternal unhappiness. The beatific vision is the fruit of the merits of Christ, finite yet extendable to an infinite number of men, and the reward of our virtuous acts, whose supernatural object does not differ essentially from the natural one. This thought of his is preserved in a commentary on the Liber Sententiarum, which has come down to us in manuscript in two copies: one is kept in the National Central Library of Florence, II, 11, 281, the other in the Cistercian monastery of Wilhering (Austria), ms. 87.