Theological Origins of Modernity

chapter one
notes to pages 20–22 299
1. Umberto Eco brilliantly portrayed this confl ict and collapse in his novel, Th e
Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983).
2. On this point see Joseph Michael Incandela, “Aquinas’s Lost Legacy: God’s Practical
Knowledge and Situated Freedom” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1986),
82–83.
3. As we fi nd ourselves entangled in a struggle against antimodern forces that draw
much of their inspiration from Islam, it is important to recognize that the decisive
turn away from the medieval world in the direction of modernity was rooted
in a fear and rejection of Islamic infl uences on Christian thought. It is probably
not accidental that this fear arose in tandem with the actual military threat of
Islam to Europe itself. Ironically, as we will see below, the nominalist alternative
that arose in reaction to scholasticism was probably also indebted to Islamic
thought, although to a less philosophical and more “fundamentalist” strain of
Islam.
4. On this point see Edward Grant, “Th e Eff ect of the Condemnation of 1277,” in Th e
Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann et al.
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 537–39. It would probably be more
accurate to say that the condemnation focused primarily on those elements of
Aristotelianism that were most deeply infl uenced by Averroism.
5. One should not be misled by the fact that Ockham presents himself in the guise
of a traditional scholastic, in fact as a follower of the via antiqua. It is important
to remember the context within which he wrote and particularly his Th omistic
adversaries at Oxford. Th ey had no doubts about the revolutionary character of
his thought in spite of his eff orts to portray himself as a traditionalist. Indeed,
they denounced his thought as heretical. Contemporary scholars who are anxious
to demonstrate his orthodoxy are in part interested in defending his Catholicism
against the longstanding charge that he was the father or at least forefather of the
Protestant Reformation. Whether or not he was in part responsible for the Reformation,
there can be no doubt that his thought represents a metaphysical and
theological break with scholasticism. Perhaps the best secondary work on Ockham
is Jürgen Miethke, Ockhams Weg zur Sozialphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969).
For an excellent introduction to nominalism in English, see William Courtenay,
“Nominalism and Later Medieval Religion,” in Th e Pursuit of Holiness in Later
Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles Trinkaus and Heiko Oberman
(Leiden: Brill, 1974), 26–58. For an encyclopedic account of Ockham’s thought, see
Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1987). See also my Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995), 14–28.
6. Ockham I Sent. d. 43 q. 2, Opera philosophica et theologica, ed. Stephen Brown
(New York: Bonaventure Press, 1967). On this point, see A. B. Wolter, “ Ockham
and the Textbooks: On the Origin of Possibility,” Franziskanische Studien 32 (1950):
70–92; Miethke, Ockhams Weg, 139–40, and Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 161–62.