In this paper I shall ask and try to respond to two questions. The first question is: why did William of Ockham go to Avignon?; the second is: what effect did his visit there have on him?

EST enim mihi per viros litterarurae egregiae evidenter ostensum, quod propter praedictos errores et haereses prae-dictus pseudo-papa haereticus, papatu privatus [et] ex-communicatus ipso iure absque omni nova sententia est censendus, quia in canones latae sententiae tarn generalium conciliorum quam summorum pontificum incidit manifeste. Ad quae probanda plura volumina sunt edita; et ego de haeresibus et erroribus memoratis et eis annexis de tenuitate ingenii mei scripsi manu mea quinquaginta sexternos de communi forma papyri, et adhuc habeo scribere quadraginta et amplius. Nam contra errores pseudo-papae praefati ‘posui faciem meam ut petram durissimam’ (Is. 50 7), ita quod nee mendacia nee falsae infamiae nee persecutio qualiscumque, quae personam meam corporaliter non attingit, nee multitudo quanta-cumque credentium sibi aut faventium vel etiam defendentium me ab impugnatione et reprobatione errorum ipsius, quamdiu manum, cartam, calamum et atramentum habuero, numquam in perpetuum poterunt cohibere. Ante enim quam omnes praedictos errores compossibiles fidei reputarem, totam fidem Christianam omnesque promissiones Christi de fide catholica usque ad finem saeculi duratura ac totam ecclesiam Dei in paucis, immo in uno, posse salvari putarem, et omnes alios Christianos contra fidem errare catholicam arbitrarer: ad instar Eliae prophetae, qui licet putasset se solum deicolam fuisse relictum, tamen fidem veram minime dereliquir, quamvis modo non ambigam multa millia virorum et mulierum genua fidei suae coram Baal nullatenus incurvasse.

On folio 3v of the manuscript are two annotations: 1) ‘This is the book of John Bloxham, a legacy of Master Simon Lambourne.’ 2) ‘This book is given to the house of scholars of Merton [College], there to remain guarded in the library, for such time as it shall be for the use and utility of the fellows of the house. It was bequeathed to the aforementioned John by Master Simon Lambourne. Pray for both of them.’

Ten years after, W.J. Courtenay’s statement that Ockham by potentia absoluta meant the whole possibilities ‘initially open to God’, and not by contrast an actual power of God of undoing or modifying what he has done, seems to have the consensum omnium. Yet in this Conference some attention has been devoted, on one hand, to the juridical tradition of the idea of potentia absoluta, and on the other to its ‘operationalization’: that is, to say it in short, the identification of potentia absoluta with the miracle, and of potentia ordinata with the communis cursus rerum. Heiko A. Oberman has stressed the relevance of this interpretation of the distinction for early Reformation thought, and suggested that such a meaningful shift (from a more ‘traditional’ view) had taken place since d’Ailly. The purpose of my communication is to call the attention to some links between the juridical tradition of the thirteenth century and the later ‘operative’ view of God’s absolute power. If a continuity exists, this is due, in my opinion, to the works of the Scotists.

When someone calls Ockham a philosophical skeptic, he is usually claiming that Ockham denied that our knowledge of the external world is based on certain apprehensions. To discuss this claim requires an understanding of Ockham’s doctrine of intuitive cognition. According to Ockham—and Scotus from whom he derived this view—knowledge of our internal states and the external world is acquired by an intuitive grasp of the facts of existence and presence. But Ockham criticized Scotus on intuitive cognition, holding that Scotus’ views must be modified because God is limited only by the principle of contradiction.

I want to discuss today some questions about enjoyment pursued at Oxford in roughly the second quarter of the fourteenth century by Ockham and four other philosophically acute theologians: Walter Chatton, Adam Wodeham, Robert Holkot, and Thomas Bradwardine. Each of these authors has claims to importance in the history of scholasticism. The numerous footnote references to Chatton in the beautiful new Ockham edition testify to his critical role in the development of his fellow Franciscan’s ideas. Marilyn Adams gives Chatton credit for forcing the Invincible Doctor to change his position on so pivotal a matter as the object of universal concepts. Chatton’s own writings continue this dialogue. Wodeham, also a Franciscan, was a student of Ockham’s and is currently regaining the reputation he once had as a major thinker in his own right.

In the autumn of 1363 Wyclif returned to Oxford to take lodgings at Queen’s College and begin his formal training in theology. The Oxford of that day was supposedly dominated by the nominalistic philosophy and theology of Ockham and of his disciples, although not exclusively so. After a period of initial and vehement opposition to Ockham in the 1320s, it has been assumed that Ockham’s thought attracted a group of fervent disciples and influenced many others. The principal Ockhamists of the next generation, or what is sometimes called ‘the English school of nominalism,’ are identified in almost any textbook of medieval philosophy as being Robert Holcot and Adam Wodeham. On occasion other names are added: William Crathorn, Thomas Buckingham, William Heytesbury, and John Dumbleton. The areas of discipleship vary, but those most frequently mentioned are: a nominalistic metaphysics, an epistemology of intuitive cognition, a terminist logic, a nominalistic physics, and a semi-Pelagian soteriology. Although an actual head-count is rarely provided, it is taken for granted that by 1335 many Oxford authors were sympathetic to Ockham and that Ockhamist teaching was not effectively displaced by the countervoices of Fitzralph and Bradwardine, a situation that lasted until Wyclif’s campaign against Ockham and the ‘doctors of signs’.

As is well known to Ockham scholars, much of Ockham’s career as a teacher of theology in the years from ca. 1317-24 involved an ongoing debate with his confrère Walter Chatton. The latter’s commentary on the Sentences is conceived as a defence of his own interpretation of Duns Scotus, from which standpoint Chatton undertakes what is virtually a point-by-point rebuttal of Ockham, with nearly equal attention to the views of Peter Aureol. What has not received much attention is the frequency with which a third scholar is Chatton’s target. This is the secular theologian, Richard Campsall, who often appears in the commentary as an unnamed quidam, and who was probably the most impressive philosopher at Oxford in the years just before Ockham began his lectures on the Sentences. Campsall’s name is nearly forgotten today; indeed, as far as it is possible to judge on the basis of our relatively meagre knowledge of late fourteenth-century thought, before the end of the century Campsall’s fame had faded, and most of his important insights were already being assigned to others—chiefly to Ockham.

Since the appearance of the studies of Pierre Duhem at the beginning of this century, much research has been done on natural philosophy at Oxford and Paris in the mid-fourteenth century. In the last decades of what Anneliese Maier has called the ‘classical century of natural philosophy’ both universities seem to have been chiefly influenced by two major schools of thought. In Paris, John Buridan was followed by Nicole Oresme, Albert of Saxony, Themo Judaicus, and Marsilius of Inghen; in Oxford, Thomas Bradwardine led a group of philosophers, which roughly included William Heytesbury, Richard Swineshead, John Dumbleton, and Richard Kilvington. (It is, however, to be noted that both in Oxford and in Paris it is difficult to determine the degrees of dependance.) It has been shown that these two schools influenced one another, in particular concerning the teachings of Thomas Bradwardine.

Oxford scholarship in the fourteenth century, focusing on Ockham and Wyclif, is a topic which might have been ideally chosen to appeal to the late and much lamented Beryl Smalley and, had she lived to participate in the Oxford Conference proceedings, it is hard to imagine that this would not have been in a very real sense her conference. Regretfully however, it had to become the occasion for the publication of her volume of memorial essays, to which the present collection must appear in some sense as a sequel. I hope that the following pages can be seen as my own personal tribute to a great scholar who, unlikely as it may seem, I was privileged for a quarter of a century to be able to regard as a friend and correspondent. Her immediate and instinctive kindness to a very awkward young student is something to be remembered with very warm personal gratitude. I had been working on the publicists of the first half of the fourteenth century, and had been inclined to draw a line after Ockham: she encouraged me to continue into the later part of the century and attempt to deal with Wyclif. He became a common bond between us, despite the great differences in our particular interests, attitudes and approach. She would occasionally remind me that someone whose working life was spent in Cambridge and London had no business to be dealing with Oxford scholarship and had little hope of understanding it properly. This is, of course, very true. Oxford philosophy tended to be Aristotelian and nominalistic: its theology, we are told, neoplatonic, Augustinian, realist. Yet when they left Oxford to find positions at the royal and papal courts, the Aristotelian nominalists might end up as exponents of papal supremacy, whereas it was the allegedly Augustinian realists who are to be found maintaining the rights of the crown. It is all very mysterious, very Oxford, and I shall not attempt to solve these problems here. Instead, I shall turn to the safer prospect of comparing and contrasting an aspect of the political theory of the more mature Ockham and the not so young Wyclif.

Wyclif has long had a reputation as an extreme determinist. One of the doctrines for which he was condemned by the Council of Constance was the proposition that everything happens by absolute necessity. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries his career was seen as a warning by orthodox theologians, and one of the reasons why he was a bogey-man was because he was held to be an extreme necessitarian. At Louvain theologians, in order to avoid the pitfalls of Wycliffism, went so far as to toy with three-valued logic.

In the course of the editorial introduction to my edition of Wyclif’s De Universalibus I drew attention to several enigmatic references in the text of Wyclif’s De Actibus Animae, and suggested that these should be taken as allusions to a lost philosophical summa. In that introduction it was impossible to include a full examination of this suggestion. Here I want to return to the question, a question which, apart from the intrinsic interest of the references, also sheds some light on Wyclif’s manner of working.

In der letzten Zeit haben zwei bedeutende Wyclif-Forscher, G. A. Benrath und B. Töpfer, übereinstimmend bemerkt, dass man noch weit davon entfernt sei ‘Wyclif’s place in history’ besrimmen zu können. Meiner Meinung nach trägt auch die Tatsache dazu bei, dass die bisherige Forschung viel mehr Aufmerksamkeit den wichtigen ecclesiologischen und sozialkritischen Ansichten Wyclifs widmete, wobei die eigentlichen philosophischen Werke des doctor evangelicus eher vernachlässigt wurden. Das betrifft sogar die schon früher herausgegebenen Schriften. Einige wichtige philosophische Schriften von Wyclif’sind aber erst in der allerletzten Zeit zur Edition vorbereitet worden und standen sogar noch nicht im Jahre des 600. Todestages ihres Autors zur Verfügung. Es handelt sich besonders um die drei grössten und in ihrer Zeit am meisten verbreiteten Traktate des grundlegenden philosophischen Werkes von Wyclif—der Summa de ente, die Traktate De Untversalibus (I, 6), De Tempore (I, 7) und Deldeis (II, 5). Sie blieben auch deshalb weni-ger bekannt.

Wyclif’s theological doctrines are reasonably familiar and I do not intend to dwell upon them unduly here. They had their focus in his concepts of the Church, the Bible and the eucharisr, and they were the outcome of a singular combination of a metaphysics of realism—the belief in the reality of universal essences or natures, such as genera and species, and including being itself as the most universal essence of all—and an apostolic or evangelical view of Christian life, modeled on the life of Christ and his disciples, as one of purely spiritual mission and temporal renunciation. It was that combination which made Wyclif’s religious beliefs distinctive, and it is that which I wish to consider here.

Nowadays it is widely realized that much discussion concerning the nature of the Church and of government in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was fuelled by the conceptions of hierarchy that are found in the writings of Denis the pseudo-Areopagite. Denis was invoked and quoted in varied and conflicting ways in consideration of questions concerning the structure and the unity of the Church, the relationships between bishops, mendicants and the papacy, the location of the state of perfection within the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the relationship between temporal and spiritual jurisdiction. From the treatises on the Celestial and on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy was derived knowledge of the arrangement of the angelic society in heaven into nine orders. They constituted an exemplar for the corresponding arrangement into nine orders of the Church Militant on earth. So an examination of the hierarchical structure of the contemporary Church seemed to require an understanding and an interpretation of the celestial hierarchy, and that entailed knowledge of the teachings of Denis. The basic propositions were familiar to many before the composition of the Bull Unam Sanctam in which they are enshrined: St. Paul has written that the powers that be are ordained of God, that is, they are arranged or constituted into an ordering, for they are not equal. To Paul’s disciple on the Areopagus in Athens were ascribed the treatises in which this ordering was elaborately explained in the light of the principle that every spirit belongs to an order or grade which forms part of a continuous hierarchy, so that the lower orders are connected to the highest ones, not directly but by the intermediate orders. Denis himself typically wrote of the differences between created beings in terms of the degree to which these unequal beings participate in the divine light which shines progressively less strongly the further it is transmitted down the orders in the hierarchy. Many medieval readers seized upon the implications of this for the exercise of jurisdiction, secular as well as spiritual. Denis’s angelology had been given a political and social extension by writers such as Alan of Lille who died in 1203 and William of Auvergne whose Magisterium divinale was written from about 1223 onwards. The role played by Denis’s writings and ideas in the debates and polemics concerning lay as well as ecclesiastical power continued to be a substantial one in the fourteenth century.

In a rather unusual opening to one of his sermons John Wyclif remarks:

Origen encouraged readers of the Bible to try to penetrate beneath the literal meaning to deeper truths which lay hidden in the figurative and metaphorical senses. Augustine and Gregory the Great made it a commonplace in the mediaeval West that the literal sense is only one of several possible intepretations of a given passage, and that the figurative meanings are full of spiritual riches, and bring the reader closer to the Divine Author’s intentions. For Origen the Bible, taken spiritually, is the ultimate source of truth. The same high doctrine of the spiritual sense is apparent in the rules of Tichonius the Donatist, to which Augustine gave such lasting currency. Tichonius sees his rules as ‘keys’ to open up and ‘lamps’ to reveal the secrets hidden above all in the treasury of truth. He is interested in clarifying the spiritual senses.

All monks are deceitful, greedy, lecherous, gluttonous, hypocritical, and blasphemous. They despoil the poor, injure the church, and pervert the Bible. Their monasteries should be seized and the lands distributed to the needy.