Theological Origins of Modernity

300 notes to pages 22–26
7. William of Ockham, Predestination, God’s Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents,
ed. and trans. Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann, 2d ed.
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 13.
8. Th e divine creation of a universal would thus entail a performative contradiction.
Ockham I Sent. d. 2. q. 6.
9. God can sustain any one thing in existence without the necessity of the existence
of anything else in the universe. Funkenstein, Th eology, 135. See also André
Goddu, Th e Physics of William of Ockham (Leiden and Cologne: Brill, 1984).
10. On the ontological uniqueness of God as the nominalists understood him, see
Martin Tweedale, “Scotus and Ockham on the Infi nity of the Most Eminent Being,”
Franciscan Studies 23 (1963): 257–67.
11. On this point, see Jean Largeault, Enquête sur le nominalisme (Paris and Louvain:
Beatrice-Nauwelaerts, 1971), 154. God does not need universals since he can
understand everything individually by means of his cognitio intuitiva. Adams,
Ockham, 2:1036–56.
12. II Sent. q. 14–15; q. 17; q. 18; q. 22; q. 24; IV Sent. q. 3; q. 8–9. Th e principle has
several other forms. “No plurality should be assumed unless it can be proved by
reason, or by experience, or by some infallible authority.” Ord. I, d. 30, qu. 1. Also:
“One should affi rm no statement as true or maintain that something exists unless
forced to do so by self-evidence, that is, by revelation, experience, or logical
deduction from a revealed truth or a proposition verifi ed by observation.” I Sent.
d. 30 q. 1; III Sent. q. 8.
13. On the contingency of created things for Ockham, see I Sent. d. 35 q. 2; and II Sent.
q. 4–5.
14. Centiloquium theologicum conc. 6, 7a, ed. Philotheus Boehner (St. Bonaventure,
N.Y.: St Bonaventure University Press, 1988), 44.
15. Miethke, Ockhams Weg, 227, 275, 284; Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 164; Tweedale,
“Scotus and Ockham,” 265.
16. As severe as this position might seem, in one sense it ameliorates the Th omistic
doctrine of original sin since Ockham believes that no man intrinsically deserves
damnation. On this point, see Adams, Ockham, 2:1257–1337.
17. Ockham even asserts that God’s love of man is only a passage back to himself and
thus an act of self-love. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 174–77.
18. On this point see David Clark, “Ockham on Human and Divine Freedom,” Franciscan
Studies 38 (1978): 160.
19. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed., John McNeill, trans. Lewis
Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:162. On similar grounds, Hans
Blumenberg has argued that we should understand nominalism as the second
coming of Gnosticism. Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 127–36.
20. Henning Graf Reventlow, Th e Authority of the Bible and the Rise of the Modern
World (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 35.
21. Th ey wanted the pope, for example, to allow communal ownership of property.
22. Th ey believed that God was not bound by his past acts and could predestine individuals
as he wished. Adams, Ockham, 2:1201, 1257.