OCCAM (OCKHAM, OCKAM, OKAM, OCHAM), GUGLIELMO da. – English Franciscan, born at Occam (Surrey), around 1290, died probably at Munich in 1349–50. He studied at Oxford, where around 1310 he began the study of theology, and between 1315 and 1319 commented on the Sentences and the Bible as a bachelor. It does not appear that he ever attained the title of “magister regens,” which explains why he continued to be called by the title of “inceptor.”
Duns Scoto (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 emergence of that
via modernorum, along which O. boldly advanced until he became its foremost representative. These modernists of the 14th century polemicized especially against those who sought 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). Giovanni Lutterell, a follower of the via antiqua, having been removed from the office of chancellor of the University, appealed to the Pope in Avignon and, toward the end of 1323, denounced a list of errors drawn from O.’s commentary on Book I of the Sentences. The accused, having gone to the papal curia the following year to defend himself, opposed the copy of his work with his own autograph notebooks. Nevertheless, in 1326 a special commission censured 56 propositions, without, however, declaring him a heretic.
The trial was not over, and O. was ordered not to leave Avignon before it had been concluded. But in May 1327, Michele da Cesena (v.), minister general of the Franciscans, and Fra Bonagrazia da Bergamo, a leading figure in the “Question of Poverty,” arrived at the curia, the Englishman allowed himself to be persuaded by his confrères to flee and to join forces with them. This flight marks the beginning of a new period in his life and literary activity. On 9 June 1328 the three fugitives reached Ludovico il Bavaro at Pisa, where he was engaged in conflict with Pope John XXII (v.). O. is credited with having said to the Emperor: “Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo.” Three days earlier, in the bull of 6 June, the Pope had issued a severe condemnation against them, renewed on the following 5 April. Having interrupted his teaching of theology, O. plunged into the struggle that Michele da Cesena had undertaken with the Pope over the question of poverty, providing considerable assistance to the imperial cause, defended by Giovanni di Janduno (v.) Marsilio da Padova (v.), with whom the rebellious Franciscans eventually formed an alliance. The proclamation of Frankfurt of 8 August 1338 is considered to have been composed by him; it declared invalid all the canonical penalties inflicted by the Pope against the Emperor and maintained that imperial authority derives immediately from God.
But after 1340 the fortune of the Bavarian ruler also began to decline: deposed by the German princes, he died on 7 October 1347. Now deprived of all support, O. attempted to reconcile himself with the Church, sending to the Franciscan General Chapter held at Verona the seal of the Order that Michele da Cesena, upon his death, had entrusted to him. On 8 June 1349, Clement VI authorized Guglielmo Farinier, minister general of the Franciscans, to absolve him under certain conditions that were not excessively harsh. From that moment the documents make no further mention of him, and it is inferred that he died at the end of 1349 or in 1350, at Munich, if the information concerning his tomb in the Franciscan church of that city is accurate.
His writings may be divided into two distinct groups: philosophical-theological works and political-social works. The former belong, for the most part, and perhaps all of them, as Iserlofa maintains against the opinion of Father F. Böhner, to the period preceding his flight from Avignon. The latter, on the other hand, are certainly later. Belonging to the Oxford period are the Expositio aurea super ortem veterem (Bologna 1496: a transcription with brief commentaries on Porphyry’s Isagoge, the Categoriæ, and the Peribermeneias), the Tract. super. lib. Elenchorum, the Expos. super Physicum, 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), and the De sacram. altaris (in which he expounds his particular doctrines concerning substance and quantity). There is controversy regarding other minor writings and the Centiloquium theologicum (a list of one hundred propositions, partly paradoxical, derived from the doctrines of theologians).
O.’s philosophical and theological thought may be said to have been fully developed in the writings composed before his journey to Avignon. O.’s entire metaphysical system rests upon the new epistemological foundation that intuitive cognition precedes abstractive cognition, and that only the former apprehends the individual and infinitely varied properties of reality, without, however, reaching the intimate substance of things, which remains unknowable. Abstractive cognition has as its object only representations and universal concepts, elaborated by our spirit in order to organize the content of intuitive cognition (cf. Prol. in I Sent., Lyons 1495, q. 1). The universal therefore has no foundation whatsoever in reality (nominalism [v.]), which is wholly individual (ibid., dist. 2, q. 6; q. 8). From this epistemological doctrine, in addition to the denial of important traditional theses—agent intellect, cognitive species, universal essences, the principle of individuation (v.), and the distinction between essence and existence—there follows the impossibility of knowing the internal structure of a reality situated outside our consciousness, and the very principle of causality is thereby undermined (ibid., dist. 35, q. 2; q. 4). Indeed O., like other contemporary Franciscans, holds that God, at least de potentia absoluta, could give us an intuition of a nonexistent reality. Consequently, the very existence of God, his unity, and his other attributes cannot be rigorously demonstrated by 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 Faith, whose omnipotence lies at the center of reality, upon whose free will the chain of all beings depends, and who could have created worlds different from Aristotle’s. Similarly, no true demonstration of the spirituality, freedom, and immortality of the soul is 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, later also upheld by Descartes (Oeuvres, ed. Adam et Tannery, III, pp. 295–96; IV, pp. 165–70; IX, p. 192 ff.), raised delicate problems concerning transubstantiation ([v.]; V. EUCARISTIA).
From these principles O. himself and his followers, who at times improperly called themselves nominales, drew im-
portant consequences for the renewal of physics, eliminating occult qualities, promoting observation, and studying natural phenomena from a quantitative and mathematical point of view.
Although O.’s political writings take their motive from the upheaval within the Franciscan Order over the question of poverty and from the conflict between the Empire and the Papacy at a particular historical moment, he does not merely repeat the usual arguments drawn from the publicistic literature of the time; rather, motives emerge in them, as previously in the work of Marsilius of Padua, that go far beyond the contingent events from which they arose.
Among his political writings, 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 concerning the poverty of Christ) should be recalled; 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 magistruum et discipulum de imperatorum et pontificum potestate (composed between 1333 and 1334, it justifies the deposition of John XXII by Louis the Bavarian and discusses the infallibility of the Church, the relations between the Pope and the 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 endowed with authority by the decretals and civil laws, have, according to O., the same value in practical life that universal concepts have in speculative life. And just as the latter serve to unify and order experience, ever new in its inexhaustibility, so ecclesiastical institutions have no other function than to gather believers into visible unity and to instruct them and draw them closer to the sources of Revelation and Grace (the Sacraments) (Dial. inter mag. et disc., I, I, 5, chaps. 4–5; III, tr. 1, bk. 1, chap. 17, tr. 2, bk. 1, chap. 23, bk. 3, chap. 7; Brevil. de pot. papae, II, chaps. 17–19).
From this point of view, adopting 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 fullness of power possessed by the head of the Church which, in his view, would have transformed the evangelical law, which is a law of freedom, into a law of servitude, such as, according to St. Paul, was the ancient law (Dial., III, tr. 1, 1, 5–7, and 12). With this latter theory, his disagreement with the doctrine of the Church deepened and threatened to become irreparable—as it later became, when the reformers of the sixteenth century drew from Occamist theories the ultimate consequences that O. perhaps had not foreseen.
V. O., Innsbruck 1932; E. Moody, The logic of W. of O., London 1935. For further bibliography, cf. Baudry’s op. cit., pp. 295–306; G. A. De Brie, Bibl. philosophica, 1934–45, I, Brussels 1950, pp. 218–19. In particular, for the interpretation of O.’s thought, cf. Abbagnano, op. cit.; C. Gacon, G. d'O., 2 vols., Milan 1941; R. Gualluy, Philos. et théol. chez G. d'O., Louvain–Paris 1947 (particularly noteworthy); G. N. Buescher, The eucharistic teaching of W. O., Washington 1950; B. Nardi, G. di O., in Annuario dei Centenari, Milan 1950, pp. 549–56; id., Il problema della verità, Rome 1951, p. 37 ff. For scientific thought, fundamental are: A. Maier, An der Grenze von Scholastik u. Naturwissenschaft, Essen 1943; id., Die Vorläufer Galileis im 14. Jahrh., Rome 1949; id., Zwei Grundprobleme der scholast. Naturphilos. ibid. 1951. The works mentioned above concern not only O. but also the influence he exerted on later thought. Bruno Nardi