William of Ockham

The most powerful philosophical influence at work in early fourteenth-century Oxford was that of William of Ockham, doctor invincibilis, a Franciscan thinker of profound originality, whose opinions were condemned, first at Oxford and then, in 1326, at Avignon, whence he fled to find refuge at the court of the emperor Lewis IV. In Ockham's predecessor, Duns Scotus, who died in 1308, Oxford had known a philosopher whose speculations, extravagant though some of them were, are yet recognizable as a development from the thought of St. Thomas, in so far as Scotus was reluctant to admit a fundamental divorce between reason and faith, between philosophy and religion, but sought to embrace both in a single intellectual system. Ockham, who carried nominalism to its logical conclusion, abandoned all such attempts at reconciliation between human understanding and the mysteries of God. Relegated thus to the sphere of the incomprehensible, God became a remote and mysterious arbiter of the destiny of creation, an absolute Will, bound by no human concepts of reason or justice. Speculation on the nature and attributes of such a Being was futile, for God and his ways be­longed to a realm where reason had no place. Man's capacity for fruitful investigation was therefore limited to the sphere of his own experience. Since Ockham never presumed to question the truth of the Christian revelation, he came dangerously near to denial of the fundamental principle of all human thinking, that reality may not contradict itself. His teaching opened the door, however, to the layman and the scientist, for it pointed the way to free inquiry, untrammelled by theological presuppositions, into human history and the world of sight and sense; and it was consistent with the trend of his thought that at the court of Lewis IV be should have developed a fully secularist theory of the State. For religion, Ockham's teaching was deadly. To dismiss God from the sphere of human thought, was to jettison the painfully garnered wisdom of the theologians, and to reduce faith to superstition. Thomas Bradwardine, doctor profundus, an adherent of the Augustinian theology of grace, produced a counterblast to Ockham in his De Causa Dei contra Pelagianos; but this, like the work of the Dominican Robert Holcot, seems to have made little impression at the time; and when Wydif began to teach at Oxford in the sixties, the brand of nominalism favoured by Ockham was still the prevailing philosophical trend.

John Wyclif

John Wyclif, a Yorkshireman from the Lancastrian honour of Richmond, was a junior fellow of Merton in 1356, a master at Balliol in 1360, and a doctor of divinity by 1372, when he was probably just over forty years of age. Though his stature as a philosopher was almost certainly less than Ockham's or Bradwardine's, there can be no doubt that lie dominated the Oxford of his own day; he was flos Oxonie, 'holden of full many men the greatest Clerk that they knew then living'. The training of the schools was exacting and Wyclif must have been a very able man. His cast of mind was radical, like Ockham's, but his philo­sophical standpoint was very different. For Wyclif was a realist, who held that reality consisted only in ideas which, for him, meant archetypes in the mind of God. The divine mysteries, so far from lying outside the sphere of human reason, were fit sub­jects for intellectual wrestling; hoc investigari поп potest he regarded as unchristian counsel. Up to the lime when he took his doc­tor's degree there was little, except his intellectual eminence, to distinguish Wyclif from other scholars in the higher faculties. He drew the bulk of his income from two rural parishes which he held in succession, mainly as an absentee—Fillingham in Lincolnshire (1361-8) and Ludgershall in Buckinghamshire (1368-74)—and from the prebend of Aust in the collegiate church of Westbury-on-Trym which Urban V granted him in 1362. For a few months he was warden of Canterbury Hall, but the reassertion of monastic control there soon led to his expul­sion. He occupied lodgings in Queen's (though he was never a member of that college) and it is to this period of his life that we must assign such philosophical works as the De Logica, the De Compositione Hominis, and the Summa de Ente. His first important theological treatise, the De Incarnations Verbi, or De Benedkta Incarnatione, which almost certainly embodies a course of lec­tures delivered in the school of theology, may date from 1370. It is likely to have been shortly before he obtained his doc­torate in 1372 that Wyclif entered the service of the Grown as peculiaris clericus. This was not a full-time appointment; the new clerk's services were, so to say, 'retained', to be called on when needed. No doubt Wyclif's reasons for seeking such employment were partly financial. He had been disappointed of more than one hope of preferment and the exchange of Fillingham for the much less valuable Ludgershall looks like a manoeuvre to raise some ready cash. But his presence as a spectator in the parlia­ment of 1371, when the Church was under fire from mendicants as well as from the laity, suggests that he may also have wel­comed the prospect of addressing himself to a wider public than could be reached at Oxford. The government, for its part, could always find room for a well-trained university man and the arrangement worked out fairly satisfactorily for both. The king presented his clerk to the rectory of Lutterworth in Leicester­shire, which was equal in value to Fillingham, and three months later (July 1374) sent him on a diplomatic mission to Bruges, where it may have been hoped that his academic training would enable him to counter the subtle arguments of the papal agents. For this undertaking Wyclif received £60 in wages and expenses. But he was no diplomat; and by September he was back in Ox­ford where already he was deeply embroiled in more than one academic controversy—with the Carmelite, John Kenningham, who questioned the theological implications of his ultra-realist metaphysic, and with the Benedictines, William Binham and John Uhtred of Boldon, the Cistercian, Henry Crumpe, and the Franciscan, William Wodeforde, all of whom criticized his theories of lordship. For it is likely that before he went to Bruges, Wyclif had written the second part of his famous Determinate, an imaginary conversation in which seven lay lords argue the case against the papal tribute. This pointed the way to the two massive treatises, De Dominio Divine and De Dominio Сivili, which were the outcome of lectures delivered at Oxford between 1374 and 1376. The thought owes much to Fitzralph and is not markedly original; but at a time when anti-clerical sentiment was running high, the books attracted considerable attention though not, we may surmise, many readers—outside university circles. Wyclif's main contention that the exercise of all human lordship depends upon grace, or, in other words, that the sinful man has no right to authority or property, led him on to the specific conclusions that, if an ecclesiastic abuse his property, the secular power may deprive him; that pope and cardinals alike may err; that neither is essential to the true government of the Church; and that a worldly pope is a heretic who ought to be deposed. Such notions proved widely attractive—to John of Gaunt, who was at odds with the bishops and whose interest in Wyclif first becomes evident soon after the Good Parliament of 1376, to many Londoners, and to some of the mendicants, at both Oxford and Cambridge. Since Wyclif did not scruple to publish his opinions from the London pulpits, he began to seem dangerous; and after the failure of Courtenay's first attempt to have him silenced, a higher authority intervened. Some of Wyclif’s opponents had sent a list of his conclusions to the Curia and from these Gregory XI selected eighteen for censure and, in a series of bulls drafted in May 1377, ordered the archbishop and the bishop of London to present the offender before him within three months. Publication of these bulls in England was somewhat inexplicably delayed and in the meantime Wyclif took opportunity to present Richard II’s first parliament with a tract maintaining that in case of necessity the English govern­ment might lawfully detain money due to the pope. When, towards the end of the year, the contents of the bulls were made known, they were not well received by the university, whosi officers contented themselves with putting Wyclif under formal arrest pending further inquiry. He continued to lecture; and his treatise on the Bible, the De Veritate Sacrae Scripturae, was pub­lished in the spring of 1378. About the same time he was cited before an ecclesiastical court at Lambeth, but the intervention of the princess of Wales enabled him to escape with no more than a formal reproof; and in the autumn Gaunt brought him into the Gloucester parliament to deliver arguments against the privilege of sanctuary, in the Hawley-Shakell case. Wyclif was still an influential and widely respected figure; and, though his De Ecclesia (1378) and De Potestate Papae (1379) probably went beyond what most of his contemporaries, even among the anti-clericals, were prepared to accept, he had not yet finally repu­diated the papacy, as such. But his innate radicalism was fast driving him beyond the limits of prudence; from attacks on the authority of the priesthood he now passed to an attack on the main source of priestly influence and power. In 1379 he was delivering the lectures soon to be embodied in his De Eucharistia. Debates of the type to be found in this book were as old as the schools themselves. Philosophers and theologians of many genera­tions had discussed the relation of accidents to substance, the significance of the words of consecration, the nature of Christ's presence in the sacrament of the altar. There was nothing to call for comment in the mere fact that yet another Oxford school­man found himself in difficulties over the annihilation of sub­stance. The much more eccentric theological opinions of John Uhtred of Boldon, for example, aroused little attention because expression of them was confined to the precincts of the schools and because their author was prepared to bow to ecclesiastical authority. What made Wyclif’s denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation a cause of scandal was his position as a public figure, a well-known critic of abuses in the Church and a man with very powerful friends. Worst of all was his refusal to recant and the apparent readiness of some of his academic colleagues, not only to listen to him with respect, but even to subscribe his teaching. It was by a very narrow majority that a council of Oxford theologians, convened by the chancellor, William Bar­ton, condemned as erroneous and contrary to catholic teaching twelve propositions which Wyclif was alleged to have defended in his lectures on the eucharist. When the news of this sentence was brought to him, he is said to have appeared confused; but he stoutly declared that neither the chancellor nor anyone else could persuade him to alter his opinions; and it was consistent with his long-standing bias against ecclesiastical authority that he should have decided to appeal against the condemnation, not to any academic or ecclesiastical body, but to the king—'like a heretic, adhering to the secular power in defence of his error. Since the king was a child, и must have been to the duke of Lancaster and to the princess of Wales that Wyclif was look­ing for support; but it was no part of Lancaster's anti-clerical programme to offer open challenge to the catholic faith. So far as is known, Wyclif's appeal received no formal answer; but Gaunt is said to have approached him privately and forbidden him to speak further on such matters. Wyclif was not deterred, however, from publishing in May 1381 his openly heretical Confessio.

It was peculiarly unfortunate for him that these interchanges should have coincided so nearly with the Peasants' Revolt; for subverters of all kinds became suspect at a time of general sub­version. The shocking murder of Archbishop Sudbury could be read as a judgement on the pastor who. confronted with danger­ous heresy, had shown himself so negligent a guardian of flock; and there were many ready to believe that John Ball had learned his tricks from Wyclif. Towards the end of the year he found it prudent to withdraw to Lutterworth; and Courtenay, who succeeded Sudbury at Canterbury, was able to ride to vic­tory on the tide of reaction following the revolt. In May 1382 a synod of eminent theologians, heavily weighted with mendi­cants, met at the London convent of the black friars to consider twenty-four propositions extracted from Wyclif's writings, touch­ing the eucharist, confession, papal jurisdiction, lordship, and grace. Parliament was in session and Wyclif bad already sub­mitted to it a memorandum on ecclesiastical endowments, pay­ments to Rome, and other topics likely to gain a sympathetic hearing from the commons. We do not know what reception was accorded to this document; but the Black friars synod, after four days' deliberation, interrupted by an earthquake (variously interpreted as indicative of the divine reaction to its proceedings), unanimously condemned as either heretical or erroneous all the opinions submitted to it. Wyclif himself, how­ever, was not named. For юте reason, probably because Lan­caster spoke for him behind the scenes, it was decided not to submit him to formal trial. But as a suspected heretic, he was forbidden to preach and teach in his old university and he may even have given some kind of undertaking to refrain from preaching and teaching elsewhere. Apart from an abortive attempt to bring him to Rome, he was left to linger on at Lutter­worth suffering, it is thought, from the effects of a paralytic stroke. But his pen was never more active. Helped by his friend and secretary, John Purvey, he poured forth a stream of pam­phlets, sermons, and treatises, the most important of which, the Trialogus, makes it plain that his zeal had not abated nor his opinions changed. He died on the last day of 1384, still in com­munion with the Church of Rome, and his bones were left to lie in peace at Lutterworth for another forty years.

Appraisement of a figure at once so controversial and so inac­cessible to posterity must necessarily be hazardous. Most of the English works formerly ascribed to Wyclif are now known to be of doubtful authorship. His Latin works—bulky, discursive, and repetitive—make difficult and, for the most part, unattrac­tive reading; and little of the man himself comes through to us from any of them. Moreover, there has been inevitable reaction against centuries of protestant hagiology; many modern his­torians tend to minimize Wyclif's importance and to question his motives and methods, some of which seem, indeed, to have been far from admirable. Determined pursuit of his own material interests comes out unmistakably in such matters as the warden-ship of Canterbury Hall, or the Lincoln canonry which he failed to secure. Inconsistency between precept and practice may be detected in his absences from his cures, his too frequent exchanges of benefices and his neglect of his duties at Westbury-on-Trym; and it is sad defence for one claiming the title of re­former to urge that these were the common practices of the age. Little in the way of personal heroism was called for in the man whose friendship with the great ensured his immunity from danger; and, so far from seeking martyrdom, Wyclif seems to have been at some pains to avoid it. Not even his enemies could charge him with the grosser sins; but it is hard to believe that he was amiable. No coterie of devoted disciples, but only the faithful Purvey, sustained his declining years; and the harsh censoriousness of much of his writing reflects unpleasantly upon the author. His love for Oxford must, indeed, be set to his credit. But his narrowly theological outlook, his distaste for music, art, romance—'jeestis of battles and fals cronycles'—and for all secular learning, is none the less repellent for having been shared by many of his orthodox contemporaries. As a practical re­former, Wyclif showed himself conspicuously maladroit. By temper and conviction an adherent of the secular power, and fortunate in his lay patrons, he deliberately threw away the ad­vantages he enjoyed, his theological extravagances and, above all, his attack on the sacramental system of the Church, making it impossible for those who had been willing to support him to continue to do so. Infinitely less sensitive than Hus to the climate of contemporary opinion, Wyclif seems to have been incapable of effective organization of his resources. His movement did little to promote reform in England and may even have tended to delay it.

Is his reputation, then, entirely spurious? Such a conclusion is possible only if we take no account of his religious convictions; for not even his prolix Latinity can altogether conceal the strength and sincerity of his faith. The driving-force of all his thought and teaching was his devotion to the Incarnate Christ, his longing to bring men face to face with him, as verissime fratrem nostrum, homo cum aliis. Almost everything in contemporary reli­gious practice that offended him, from ecclesiastical endowments to the doctrine of transubstandation, offended him because it seemed to blur or distort this vision of the human Jesus. More and more he himself found the Christ he was seeking in the gos­pels and missed him in the Church. Though never a schismatic in intention, his aim being to purify the Church, not to divide it, his remarkable sense of history persuaded him of the novelty of many of the Roman claims; and his search for what he saw as the inward truth of his religion drove him inexorably on to the conclusion, 'quod ecclesia Romana potest errare in articulis fidei'—and so to cross a bridge between two worlds. Wyclif’s reputation among protestants has never really rested either on his personal character or on his positive achievement. It was over 300 years ago that Thomas Fuller wrote of him, 'I intend neither to deny, dissemble, nor excuse, any of his faults. We have this treasure (saith the Apostle) in earthen vessels; and he that shall endeavour to prove a pitcher of clay to be a pot of gold will take great pains to small purpose.' Fuller and his fellow-protestants revered the medieval doctor evangelicus as a prophet of the Reformation; and not without good reason, for such, indeed, he was. By his repudiation of papal and ecclesiastical authority, his confidence in the sole sufficiency of Holy Scripture, both as a revelation of the Christ and as a rule of life for every man, and his demand for a Bible open to the people, Wyclif anticipated the most fundamental protestant convictions. For good or for ill these convictions were to mould the character and help to deter­mine the destiny of the English-speaking peoples throughout the world. The man who first set them forth was in a very real sense the spiritual ancestor of Bunyan, and Baxter, and Whitefield. Whatever his faults and whatever his limitations, he has a title to his countrymen's respect.