OCKHAM (Occam, Okam, Ocham), William of. - English Franciscan, b. at Occam (county of Surrey), around 1290, d. probably at Munich in 1349-50. He studied at Oxford, where around 1310 he began the study of theology, and between 1315 and 1319 he commented on the Sentences and the Bible, as a bachelor. He does not appear ever to have attained the title of "magister regens," which explains why he continued to be called by the title of "inceptor."
At Oxford Duns Scotus (v.) and Henry of Harclay had begun that process of critical revision of the old philosophical and theological doctrines of the preceding generation of masters and had given impetus to the opening of that via modernorum along which O. boldly advanced until he became its greatest representative. These modernists of the 14th cent. polemicize especially with those who seek in Aristotelian metaphysics the rational gratification of dogma and "qui intuntur de Aristotele heretico facere catholicum" (F. Pelster, Heinrich von Harclay, in Miscell. F. Ebrle, I, Rome 1924, p. 351). John Lutterell, a follower of the via antiqua, having been removed from the office of chancellor of the University, appealed to the Pope at Avignon and toward the end of 1323 denounced a list of errors drawn from O.'s commentary on the first book of the Sentences. The accused, having gone the following year to the papal curia to defend himself, set against the copy of his work his own autograph notebooks. Nevertheless in 1326 a special commission censured 56 propositions, without however declaring him a heretic.
The trial was not finished, and O. was enjoined not to leave Avignon before it was concluded. But in May 1327, when Michael of Cesena (v.), general of the Franciscans, and Bonagrazia of Bergamo, a protagonist in the "Question of poverty," arrived at the curia, the Englishman allowed himself to be persuaded by his confreres to flee and to make common cause with them. With this flight a new period begins in his life and in his literary activity. On 9 June 1328 the three fugitives reached at Pisa Louis the Bavarian, then at war with Pope John XXII (v.). It is attributed to O. that he said to the Emperor: "Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo." Three days earlier the Pope, by the bull of 6 June, had pronounced against them a severe condemnation, renewed on the following 5 April. Having interrupted the teaching of theology, O. plunged into the struggle that Michael of Cesena had engaged in with the Pope over the question of poverty, bringing great aid to the imperial cause, defended by John of Jandun (v.) and Marsilius of Padua (v.), with whom the rebel Franciscans ended by allying themselves. The proclamation of Frankfurt of 8 Aug. 1338 is believed to have been dictated by him, by which all the canonical penalties fulminated by the Pope against the Emperor were declared invalid and it was maintained that the imperial authority derives immediately from God.
But after 1340 the fortune of the Bavarian also turns toward its decline; deposed by the German princes, he dies on 7 Oct. 1347. Now deprived of every support, O. attempted to reconcile himself with the Church, sending back to the General Chapter of the Franciscans, held at Verona, the seal of the Order that Michael of Cesena, on dying, had entrusted to him. On 8 June 1349, Clement VI authorized William Farinier, general of the Franciscans, to absolve him on certain conditions that were not excessively harsh. From this moment he is no longer mentioned in the documents, and it is inferred that he died at the end of 1349 or in 1350, at Munich, if the reports about his tomb in the church of the Franciscans of that city are accurate.
His writings may be divided into two distinct groups: the philosophical-theological works and the political-social ones. The former belong, for the most part, and perhaps entirely, as Iserloh holds against the opinion of Fr. F. Böhner, to the period before the flight from Avignon. The latter, on the other hand, are certainly later. To the Oxford period belong the Expositio aurea super artem veterem (Bologna 1496: transcription with brief commentaries of Porphyry's Isagoge, the Categoriae and the Perihermeneias), the Tract. super. lib. Elenchorum, the Expos. super Physicam, the Summulae in libros Physicorum (Bologna 1491), the Quaestiones in IV libros super Sent. (Lyons 1495), the Quodlibeta septem (Paris 1487), the Summa totius logicae (ibid. 1488), the De sacram. altaris (where he sets out his particular doctrines concerning substance and quantity). There is controversy over other minor writings and over the Centiloquium theologicum (a list of one hundred propositions, in part paradoxical, derived from the doctrines of the theologians).
The philosophical and theological thought of O. may be said to have been completely developed in the writings composed before the journey to Avignon. The whole metaphysical system of O. rests on the new epistemological basis, that intuitive knowledge precedes abstractive knowledge, and that only the former grasps the individual and infinitely varied properties of the real, without however reaching the intimate substance of things, which remains unknowable. Abstractive knowledge has as its object only representations and universal concepts, elaborated by our spirit in order to order the content of intuitive knowledge (cf. Prol. in I Sent., Lyons 1495, q. 1). The universal therefore has no foundation in reality (nominalism [v.]), which is entirely individual (ibid., dist. 2, q. 6; q. 8). From such an epistemological doctrine, besides the denial of important traditional theses: agent intellect, cognitive species, universal essences, principle of individuation (v.), distinction between essence and existence, there is deduced the impossibility of knowing the internal structure of a reality placed outside our consciousness, and the principle of causality itself remains undermined by it (ibid., dist. 35, q. 2; q. 4). Indeed O., like other contemporary Franciscans, holds that God, at least de potentia absoluta, could give us the intuition of a non-existent reality. Therefore the very existence of God, his uniqueness, and the other attributes cannot be rigorously demonstrated with arguments drawn from Aristotelian physics and metaphysics (Quodl., I, q. 1; cf. ibid., VII, 17-23). The God of Aristotle is not the God of the Faith, whose omnipotence is at the center of reality, on whose free will the chain of all beings hangs, and who could have created other worlds different from that of Aristotle. Similarly, a true demonstration of the spirituality, freedom and immortality of the soul is not possible (Quodl., I, 10).
In bodies, quantity and extension are identified with the very essence of the extended thing (In IV Sent., 4 and 7; De sacr. Altaris, prol., c. 16, 26 and 28; Exp. aurea; Lib. praedic., de quantit.; Quodl., IV, 25, 30 and 32). This doctrine, upheld later also by Descartes (Oeuvres, ed. Adam et Tannery, III, pp. 295-96; IV, pp. 165-70; IX, p. 192 ff.), raised delicate problems as regards transubstantiation ([v.]; see also EUCHARIST).
From these principles O. himself and his followers, who were sometimes improperly called nominales, drew important consequences for the renewal of physics, eliminating occult qualities, giving impetus to observation and studying natural phenomena from the quantitative and mathematical point of view.
Although O.'s political writings take as their starting point the schism within the Franciscan Order over the question of poverty and the conflict between the Empire and the Papacy at a particular historical moment, he nevertheless does not limit himself to repeating the usual arguments drawn from the polemical literature of the time; rather, there emerge in them, as already in the work of Marsilius of Padua, themes that go well beyond the contingent events that occasioned them.
Among the political writings, mention should be made of the Opus nonaginta dierum (composed in three months during 1333; it discusses certain bulls of John XXII and defends the doctrine of Michael of Cesena on the poverty of Christ); the other polemical writings: De dogmatibus papae Johannis XXII (1334); Contra Johannem XXII (1335); Compendium errorum Papae (1338); Breviloquium de potestate papae (ed. L. Baudry, Paris 1937); and principally the Dialogus inter magistrum et discipulum de imperatorum et pontificum potestate (composed between 1333-34; it justifies the deposition of John XXII by Louis the Bavarian and discusses the infallibility of the Church, the relations between Pope and Council, the authority of the Pope and of the Empire, etc.); Allegationes de potestate imperiali (1338); Octo quaestiones super dignitate et potestate papali (1340-42; both against the doctrine of the Pope's authority over the Emperor). Ecclesiastical institutions, like political institutions, both of them armed by the decretals and by civil laws, according to O. have in practical life the same value that universal concepts have in speculative life. And just as these serve to unify and to order experience, ever new in its inexhaustibility, so ecclesiastical institutions have no other function than that of gathering the faithful into a visible unity and of instructing them and bringing them closer to the sources of Revelation and of Grace (the Sacraments). But the religious life of Christianity springs from the fervor of the believer in the effort to realize within himself the kingdom of God, that is, from the assistance promised by Christ to the «communitas fidelium» (Dial. inter mag. et disc., I, I, 5, chaps. 4-5; III, tr. 1, l. 1, chap. 17, tr. 2, l. 1, chap. 23, l. 3, chap. 7; Brevil. de pot. papae, II, chaps. 17-19).
From this point of view, adopting as his own the doctrines of the «spirituals», with whom O. had met at Avignon, he combats the twofold thesis of the supremacy of the Papacy over the Empire and of the plenitude of the power of the head of the Church which, in his view, would have transformed the evangelical law, which is a law of liberty, into a law of servitude, such as, according to St. Paul, the ancient law was (Dial., III, tr. 1, 1, 5-7, and 12). With this latter theory his dissent from the doctrine of the Church grew deeper and risked becoming irreparable, as it became later when the reformers of the 16th century drew from Ockhamist theories the extreme consequences perhaps not foreseen by O.
Bibliography17 works
Bruno Nardi