William of Ockham

Life

William was born around 1287 in the village of Ockham in Surrey, England. Some accounts place his birth around 1285. The name "William of Ockham" means "William from Ockham." He entered the Franciscan Order at a young age and studied theology at the University of Oxford, where he wrote a commentary on the Sentences, the standard theological textbook of the Middle Ages. After his teaching was denounced, he was summoned in 1324 to Avignon, then the seat of the papal court, to undergo examination. Although certain of his propositions were identified as problematic, he is reported never to have been formally condemned as a heretic.

While in Avignon, he examined the controversy over "apostolic poverty" at the request of Michael of Cesena, minister general of the Franciscan Order. Apostolic poverty was the claim that Christ and the apostles owned no property. Ockham concluded that Pope John XXII, who had rejected this claim, was in error. On May 26, 1328, he fled Avignon with Michael and others and placed himself under the protection of the Holy Roman Emperor Louis IV, who was then in conflict with the pope. In June of the same year he was excommunicated (expelled from the communion of the Church) for leaving Avignon without permission. He subsequently lived in Munich, and after Michael's death in 1342 he led the exiled friars. According to his epitaph, he died in Munich in April 1347. Other accounts place his death in 1348 or 1349.

Work and Contributions

• Nominalism: The theory that universals are "names only." Ockham held that universal concepts such as "human" or "father" are merely concepts or names in the mind, and that only individual things actually exist.
• Ockham's razor: The principle that "plurality should not be posited without necessity." It refers to a method of reasoning that cuts away any premise not strictly required for an explanation.
• Faith and reason: He held that God's omnipotence surpasses the limits of human reason. Accordingly, he emphasized that one must approach God through faith and the will rather than through rational demonstration.
• Church and state: During his Munich period he devoted himself to political writings on the extent of papal and imperial authority, and he criticized the temporal power of the papacy.

Influence on the Korean Church

No direct influence of Ockham on the Korean church has been documented. In the fifteenth century, however, the school of thought known as the "modern way" (via moderna) regarded Ockham as a principal authority. The theology of Gabriel Biel, a leading theologian of this school, influenced Martin Luther, who studied at Erfurt. For this reason, Ockham is mentioned in the Korean church chiefly in discussions of the intellectual background of the Reformation. Denominational media also discuss him when introducing nominalism, as in a humanities column in the Korea Christian Press (Hanguk Gidok Gongbo).

Assessment

Within Protestantism, some regard Ockham as one of the currents that anticipated the Reformation, given his criticism of papal power and his emphasis on faith. Luther once said that he belonged to the Ockhamist school. Yet Luther condemned as Pelagianism this school's soteriology as transmitted through Biel—namely, the idea that a person can prepare himself by his own powers to receive grace. In Catholicism, he is treated, together with Duns Scotus, as a leading representative of late Scholasticism. Having sharply criticized the systems of earlier theologians such as Thomas Aquinas, he is regarded as a figure standing at the threshold between medieval and modern thought.