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Cassius, who are all three equally traitors, the first against Christ, the other two against Caesar. Dante’s thought is interesting, not only in itself, but as that of a layman; but it was not influential, and was hopelessly out of date.
Marsiglio of Padua ( 1270-1342), on the contrary, inaugurated the new form of opposition to the Pope, in which the Emperor has mainly a role of decorative dignity. He was a close friend of William of Occam, whose political opinions he influenced. Politically, he is more important than Occam, He holds that the legislator is the majority of the people, and that the majority has the right to punish princes. He applies popular sovereignty also to the Church, and he includes the laity. There are to be local councils of the people, including the laity, who are to elect representatives to General Councils. The General Council alone should have power to excommunicate, and to give authoritative interpretations of Scripture. Thus all believers will have a voice in deciding doctrine. The Church is to have no secular authority; there is to be no excommunication without civil concurrence; and the Pope is to have no special powers.
Occam did not go quite so far as Marsiglio, but he worked out a completely democratic method of electing the General Council.
The conciliar movement came to a head in the early fifteenth century, when it was needed to heal the Great Schism. But having accomplished this task, it subsided. Its standpoint, as may be seen already in Marsiglio, was different from that afterwards adopted, in theory, by the Protestants. The Protestants claimed the right of private judgement, and were not willing to submit to a General Council. They held that religious belief is not a matter to be decided by any governmental machinery. Marsiglio, on the contrary, still aims at preserving the unity of the Catholic faith, but wishes this to be done by democratic means, not by the papal absolutism. In practice, most Protestants, when they acquired the government, merely substituted the King for the Pope, and thus secured neither liberty of private judgement nor a democratic method of deciding doctrinal questions. But in their opposition to the Pope they found support in the doctrines of the conciliar movement. Of all the schoolmen, Occam was the one whom Luther preferred. It must be said that a considerable section of Protestants held to the doctrine of private judgement even where the State was Protestant. This was the chief
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point of difference between Independents and Presbyterians in the English Civil War.
Occam’s political works * are written in the style of philosophic disputations, with arguments for and against various theses, sometimes not reaching any conclusion. We are accustomed to a more forthright kind of political propaganda, but in his day the form he chose was probably effective.
A few samples will illustrate his method and outlook.
There is a long treatise called “Eight Questions Concerning the Power of the Pope.” The first question is whether one man can rightfully be supreme both in Church and State. The second: Is secular authority derived immediately from God or not? Third: Has the Pope the right to grant secular jurisdiction to the Emperor and other princes? Fourth: Does election by the electors give full powers to the German king? Fifth and sixth: What rights does the Church acquire through the right of bishops to anoint kings? Seventh: Is a coronation ceremony valid if performed by the wrong archbishop? Eighth: Does election by the electors give the German king the title of Emperor? All these were, at the time, burning questions of practical politics.
Another treatise is on the question whether a prince can obtain the goods of the Church without the Pope’s permission. This is concerned to justify Edward III in taxing the clergy for his war with France. It will be remembered that Edward was an ally of the Emperor.
Then comes a “Consultation on a matrimonial cause,” on the question whether the Emperor was justified in marrying his cousin.
It will be seen that Occam did his best to deserve the protection of the Emperor’s sword.
It is time now to turn to Occam’s purely philosophical doctrines. On this subject there is a very good book, The Logic of William of Occam, by Ernest E. Moody. Much of what I shall have to say is based on this book, which takes a somewhat unusual view, but, I think, a correct one. There is a tendency in writers on history of philosophy to interpret men in the light of their successors, but this is generally a mistake. Occam has been regarded as bringing about
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* See Guilleimi de Ockham Opera Politica, Manchester University Press, 1940.
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the breakdown of scholasticism, as a precursor of Descartes or Kant or whoever might be the particular commentator’s favourite among modern philosophers. According to Moody, with whom I agree, all this is a mistake. Occam, he holds, was mainly concerned to restore a pure Aristotle, freed from both Augustinian and Arabic influences. This had also been, to a considerable extent, the aim of Saint Thomas; but the Franciscans, as we have seen, had continued to follow Saint Augustine much more closely than he did. The interpretation of Occam by modern historians, according to Moody, has been vitiated by the desire to find a gradual transition from scholastic to modern philosophy; this has caused people to read modern doctrines into him, when in fact he is only interpreting Aristotle.
Occam is best known for a maxim which is not to be found in his works, but has acquired the name of “Occam’s razor.” This maxim says: “Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity.” Although he did not say this, he said something which has much the same effect, namely: “It is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer.” That is to say, if everything in some science can be interpreted without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it. I have myself found this a most fruitful principle in logical analysis.
In logic, though apparently not in metaphysics, Occam was a nominalist; the nominalists of the fifteenth century * looked upon him as the founder of their school. He thought that Aristotle had been misinterpreted by the Scotists, and that this misinterpretation was due partly to the influence of Augustine, partly to Avicenna, but partly to an earlier cause, Porphyry’s treatise on Aristotle Categories. Porphyry in this treatise raised three questions: (1) Are genera and species substances? (2) Are they corporeal or incorporeal? (3) If the latter, are they in sensible things or separated from them? He raised these questions as relevant to Aristotle’s Categories, and thus led the Middle Ages to interpret the Organon too metaphysically. Aquinas had attempted to undo this error, but it had been reintroduced by Duns Scotus. The result had been that logic and theory of knowledge had become dependent on metaphysics and theology. Occam set to work to separate them again.
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* E.g., Swineshead, Heytesbury, Gerson, and d’Ailly.
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For Occam, logic is an instrument for the philosophy of nature, which can be independent of metaphysics. Logic is the analysis of discursive science; science is about things, but logic is not. Things are individual, but among terms there are universals; logic treats of universals, while science uses them without discussing them. Logic is concerned with terms or concepts, not as psychical states, but as having meaning. “Man is a species” is not a proposition of logic, because it requires a knowledge of man. Logic deals with things fabricated by the mind within itself, which cannot exist except through the existence of reason. A concept is a natural sign, a word is a conventional sign. We must distinguish when we are speaking of the word as a thing, and when we are using it as having meaning, otherwise we may fall into fallacies such as: “Man is a species, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is a species.”
Terms which point at things are called “terms of first intention”; terms which point at terms are called “terms of second intention.” The terms in science are of first intention; in logic, of second. Metaphysical terms are peculiar in that they signify both things signified by words of first intention and things signified by words of second intention. There are exactly six metaphysical terms: being, thing, something, one, true, good. * These terms have the peculiarity that they can all be predicated of each other. But logic can be pursued independently of them.
Understanding is of things, not of forms produced by the mind; these are not what is understood, but that by which things are understood. Universals, in logic, are only terms or concepts predicable of many other terms or concepts. Universal, genus, species are terms of second intention, and therefore cannot mean things. But since one and being are convertible, if a universal existed, it would be one, and an individual thing. A universal is merely a sign of many things. As to this, Occam agrees with Aquinas, as against Averroes, Avicenna, and the Augustinians. Both hold that there are only individual things, individual minds, and acts of understanding. Both Aquinas and Occam, it is true, admit the universale ante rein, but only to explain creation; it had to be in the mind of God before He could create. But this belongs to theology,
