Oxford and Avignon, 1317-1324
This chapter has no documents.
Everything else in this record is built from recovered materials - psalters hidden in walls, catalog entries, work journals, administrative records, the accumulated debris of people doing things that left traces. This chapter is different. It is a reconstruction - my attempt to show what it looks like when an idea enters a mind and begins to work on it.
I have chosen a Franciscan friar named Thomas, who is invented, studying under a man named William, who is not. I have tried to be fair to both.
The idea itself is historical. What it cost is historical. What it eventually produced is still unfolding.
— T.M., 1961
Thomas of Hexham was twenty-three years old when he first heard William of Ockham argue that universals do not exist.
He was sitting in the third row of a lecture hall in Oxford, in the autumn of 1317, and the argument was presented with a clarity that Thomas found both compelling and faintly alarming, the way you might find it alarming to watch a man demonstrate, with complete precision, that the floor you are standing on is thinner than you had understood.
The argument was this: when we say "horse," we do not refer to some ideal Horse that exists in a realm beyond the physical horses we can see and touch. We refer only to the particular horses we have encountered, and the word "horse" is simply a convenient tool for grouping them. The universal - the Form, the essence, the nature of Horse - is a fiction of the mind. A useful fiction, perhaps. But a fiction.
Thomas had encountered this argument before, in the form of objections to be refuted. He had refuted it in the standard ways, drawing on Aquinas and Augustine and the long tradition of realism that held the universals to be real - not merely in the mind but in things, and before things, in the mind of God. The refutations had seemed adequate.
Hearing Ockham make the argument directly, with his particular gift for compression and his absolute intolerance for imprecision, the refutations seemed less adequate.
Thomas wrote in his notebook: What if he is right?
Then he crossed it out.
He spent three years in Oxford before following Ockham to Avignon, where the Franciscans had been summoned to answer charges of heresy on a different matter - the poverty dispute, which seemed to Thomas less interesting than the philosophical question, though he understood they were connected in ways he had not yet fully worked out.
In Avignon he had more access to Ockham directly. They walked sometimes in the evenings, in the gardens near the Franciscan house, and Ockham would talk - not lecturing, just thinking aloud, which was in some ways more unsettling than the lectures because it was possible to see the arguments forming, to watch a mind of extraordinary precision working through the implications of its own positions.
One evening Thomas asked the question he had been carrying for three years.
"If the universals are not real," he said, "what is the basis of order?"
Ockham looked at him. He had a way of looking at questions that suggested he was determining whether they deserved to be answered.
"What do you mean by order?" he said.
"The ordering of things," Thomas said. "The ordering of society. The hierarchy - sacred and secular, each in its proper place, each reflecting something real about the nature of things. If the universals are fictions, if there is no real hierarchy of being, then the ordering of human society is also -"
"A convention," Ockham said. "Yes."
He said it without distress. As a man names a color - this is red, this is a convention, these are simply facts.
Thomas stopped walking.
"That troubles you," Ockham said, not unkindly. He had stopped too, and was looking at Thomas with something that might have been sympathy.
"Yes," Thomas said. "It troubles me."
"It should not," Ockham said. "Convention is not nothing. A convention agreed upon by the community of the faithful, authorized by the will of God as expressed through legitimate authority - this is real in every sense that matters. The ordering of the Church does not require a Platonic Form of Order to justify it. It requires only the will of God and the consent of the governed."
Thomas thought about this for a long time.
"And if the will of God is disputed?" he said. "And if the consent is withdrawn?"
Ockham was quiet for a moment. "Then," he said, "we are in the realm of politics."
Thomas returned to England in 1324. He was thirty years old. He spent the rest of his life as a parish priest in a village in Yorkshire, which was not what he had expected when he went to Oxford. He had expected to be a scholar. He became instead a man who baptized children and buried the dead and said Mass every morning in a small stone church that had been standing since before anyone in the village could remember.
He was not unhappy. He was, in the way of men who have set down a heavy question they could not answer, somewhat relieved.
But he never stopped thinking about the conversation in the garden.
He had seen, in that exchange, something he could not name at the time and only partly understood later. Ockham was not wrong, exactly. The arguments were too precise to be simply wrong. But there was something in the conclusion - the calm acceptance that order was convention, that hierarchy was agreement, that the structure of sacred and secular was a useful arrangement rather than a reflection of something real - that felt to Thomas like watching a man remove a load-bearing stone from a wall to demonstrate that the arch did not require it.
The arch did not fall. Not immediately. Not in Thomas's lifetime. Not for several generations after.
But he had seen the stone removed. He had watched the careful hands that removed it. And he had thought, standing in the garden in Avignon in the autumn of 1322: Something will have to hold the weight now. I am not sure what it will be.
William of Ockham died in Munich in 1347, during the Black Death, though probably not of it. He died unreconciled with the papacy, having spent the last twenty years of his life arguing, with great precision and considerable personal courage, for positions that would take two centuries to fully work their way through the bloodstream of European civilization.
He was not a villain. He was a man of extraordinary intelligence who followed his arguments where they led and trusted that the Church could absorb the implications.
He was not entirely wrong about this. The Church absorbed them.
The question Thomas asked in the garden - and if the consent is withdrawn? - took approximately five hundred years to answer.
The answer is what you see around you.
— T.M., 1961