Order, freedom, and "kindness" Julian of Norwich on the edge of modernity

Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian

Modern attempts to pin down nominalism to the late Middle Ages have proved to be somewhat frustrating. The usual villain, the early-fourteenth-century theologian and philosopher William of Ockham, is perpetually being exonerated of the more exotic charges leveled against him. But at the risk of stumbling by running too quickly over this rocky terrain, let me focus on two features usually associated with nominalism: (1) the view that only individuals have positive ontological status (thus denying such status to universals such as "human being" and to relations such as "paternity") and (2) the distinction between the absolute and ordained powers of God (what God can do and what God in fact does do). The relationship between these two features of nominalism is not immediately apparent-and indeed some deny that there is any relationship-but I will venture to establish a connection and to try to relate it to the modern radicalization of human freedom.

First, "nominalism" itself is the view that in the statements "John is a human being" and "Mary is a human being" the term "human being" refers not to some really existing thing possessed by both John and Mary, but to a concept that can refer to diverse things (John and Mary), a concept that exists only and entirely in the mind of the one making the statement. Correlatively, in a statement such as "John is the father of Mary," the phrase "the father of" does not refer to some really existing thing in John (or in Mary), but solely to a concept. This view was undeniably held by Ockham and numerous other late medieval thinkers. Ockham writes: "the universal is one particular content of the mind itself, of such a nature as to be predicated of several things."12 And regarding the ontological status of relations, he says, "if we leave aside all authority and follow [just] natural reason, then it can be proved evidently that every created thing is absolute and that among creatures there are no relations outside the soul distinct from absolute things."13 Behind both of these denials stands the view that only singular, particular things are real, and concepts and relations are "beings of reason." So we find in nominalism a kind of radical metaphysical individualism. John and Mary are real; "humanity" and "paternity" exist only in the mind.14

More recent work on nominalism has stressed not its philosophical views on language and ontology, but rather its understanding of the theological distinction between God's "absolute power" (what it is possible for God to do) and God's "ordained power" (what God has in fact chosen to do). The issues here are extremely complex and it is possible to overstress the novelty of the views of Ockham and other nominalists on this question.15 However, while we find earlier figures such as Aquinas using this distinction (as in Summa theologiae I, Q. 25, a. 5), Ockham and later nominalists employ the distinction much more widely, using it to resolve a whole host of theological questions, such as whether a human being can be saved without created charity, whether God must save someone who has the gift of created grace, and, conversely, whether God can save someone who does not have the gift of created grace.16 In each of these cases, Ockham argues that, while certain things are possible for God in an absolute sense, God has bound himself to a particular order of things, so that, for example, one can be saved only if one has the gift of created grace. But this order of things has no intrinsic necessity and exists only because God has willed it to be as it is; God could presumably have willed it to be otherwise. Perhaps most famously, Ockham argues that God could, according to his absolute power, command someone to hate him, so that hatred of God would be a duty.17 Later nominalists, such as Gabriel Biel, went further than Ockham to claim not only that God could have willed a different order to the world, but that God can and does, through the exercise of his absolute power, suspend the world's actual ordering.18 Increasingly, God's will appears capricious.