A Babel of Pure Speech: When Nominalism Changed Theology (The Historical Heart of My Thesis, Part Two)

What is additionally important to emphasize about these shifts is that when this ability to consider nature “in itself” combined with the idea that God is like (or purely unlike) a human agent writ large, for many—and this despite the fact that consideration of the world “in itself” was often part and parcel of an emerging Franciscan piety—causality became merely extrinsic and a sort of zero-sum game:

Since, for univocity, finite being fully ‘is’ in its finitude, outside of participation, it becomes possible to think of infinite and finite causes each contributing distinct if unequal shares to any particular causal upshot, with a paradigm of flattened quantitative uniformity rather than levels of qualitative differentiation.  Thus the metaphor of two horses pulling one barge, explicitly refused by Aquinas [Contra Errores Graecorum, 23] was now embraced [Scotus, Quodlibetal Questiones, q.5] to describe the co-operation of God and creatures in bringing about finite created results, including that of human redemption.[1]

Though undoubtedly this is against Scotus’ good intentions, it is hard to avoid the conclusion with all this that he begins to “spatialize” God’s transcendence as a sort of “far-away-ness” in a manner alien to Augustine (to whom Scotus still attempts to defer) and Aquinas (with whom Scotus has many disagreements).  Yet the paradoxically related trend is that precisely because Scotus attempts to obtain clear, univocal reference to assure our God-talk (as we just saw with the “strong use” of the psychological analogy, for example) simultaneous to this “spatialized” distance, our terms are rendered transparent in their reference to God in a way previously unimaginable.  God became both “distant, yet without mystery,” to quote de Lubac’s memorable phrase.[2] 

Nominalism[3] radicalized many of the trajectories we have just spoken of in Scotus, in particular however we want to continue to focus on the theme of how participation in God broke down, and God’s transcendence became “exteriorized” as contrastive with immanence.  After the 1277 condemnation of Aristotelianism by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, and the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Kilwardby, omnipotence became the leading attribute emphasized of God (Aquinas, it should not go without note, was seen to bear the brunt of some of these charges).  Omnipotence thus served as a sort of “anti-Aristotelian” instrument, noting God is not limited in what he creates by the strictures of “form” or enteleceia, but rather He is radically unconstrained.  Voluntarism and nominalism thus go hand in conceptual hand: to affirm God’s omnipotence in the voluntaristic sense was to lay stress on the absoluteness of God’s will, thus denying the existence of rational universals (often termed “realism”) that would dictate the parameters of God’s activity.  There are no more forests, only individual trees; no deserts, just sand.  Thus created things were seen as utterly and immediately dependent in their individuality upon God’s will, rather than relating to God via universal forms of rationality. Universal categories were now only considered “names” produced in the mind by abstraction for the sake of heuristic convenience.  William of Ockham, born in England somewhere between 1280 and 1285, is the most commonly cited advocate for these views, though it is debated whether it is truly proper to call him a nominalist.  Louis Dupré offers a similar judgment of Ockham that was just given of Scotist univocity:

With Ockham (c.a. 1290-1349/50), the entire ontotheological synthesis [of unity of man, world, word, and God] began to disintegrate. … Ockham no longer takes such a built-in harmony between mind and nature for granted, which [he believes] subjects God’s ways of creation to human norms.  Even the assumption that the mind shares a universal form with the real, however deeply entrenched in the tradition, is abandoned. … Obviously [with this nominalist shift] the trust in the essentially rational quality of nature that had supported traditional epistemology, has collapsed.  Henceforth ideality belongs exclusively to the [human] mind.  By the same token, the transcendental factor [of God] ceases to function as an active constituent of the ontotheological synthesis.  For it had been precisely through the form [of appearance/existence of finite entities] that the finite had participated in the Infinite. … In late nominalist theology, the [forms of the world] lost this function, and the link with the divine became an external one [Emphasis added].[4]

A bit later in his analysis Dupré summarizes boldly that “without a radical rethinking of the theory of signification by the nominalists, doubt concerning the possibility of knowing reality as it is in itself might never have arisen [emphasis added].”[5]  This is perhaps too strong a claim, yet it nonetheless underscores some of the changes that occurred in nominalism and univocal predication.  Denys Turner cautions, “this intellectual shift [with Scotus] is not said to have been uniquely causal of subsequent developments in Western intellectual history, but only in the long run to have removed a conceptual barrier, set firmly in place by Thomas’ doctrine of analogy, standing in the way of development of a rationalist and secularist ideology.”[6]  But just so, Alasdair MacIntyre writes, for example: “For Aristotle an adequate characterization of the mind is the mind as achieving knowledge; for Augustine it is the mind as by itself incapable of knowledge but for some external source supplying what the mind cannot itself supply.  Withdraw divine illumination from the Augustinian scheme [via nominalism] and you have the mind in the predicament to be characterized by that late, solipsized Augustinian, Descartes…”[7] The world became a chaotic ocean of pointilated individualities whose mechanical operations could be understood in an a posteriori manner, but whose natures no longer spoke of either God’s purpose or order—merely the inscrutable tide of an absolute Will.  Michael Allen Gillespie writes regarding the anxiety nominalism caused: “Modernity came into being as the result of a series of attempts to find a way out of the crises engendered by the nominalist revolution,”[8] because

Nominalism sought to tear the rationalistic veil from the face of God in order to found a true Christianity, but in doing so it revealed a capricious God, fearsome in his power, unknowable, unpredictable, unconstrained by nature and reason, and indifferent to good and evil.  This vision of God turned the order of nature into a chaos of individual beings and the order of logic into a mere concatenation of names.  Man himself was dethroned from his exalted place in the natural order of things and cast adrift in an infinite universe with no natural law to guide him and no certain path to salvation.  It is thus not surprising that for all but the most extreme ascetics and mystics, this dark God of nominalism proved to be a profound source of anxiety and insecurity.[9]

Thus the double-bind of Ockham’s God: on the one hand He is dark, inscrutable, distant—not just from us but from the form of Christ himself—God could have become an ass or a stone, says Ockham, with the same result as becoming the Nazarene; on the other hand, as we saw with his Trinitarian theology, the Trinity itself has been rendered essentially unintelligible, a series of psychological propositions that now must be received in the form of curiously aloof (and maddeningly esoteric) assertions, since the psychological analogy’s link to scripture and salvation history in Augustine and Aquinas has been obscured, or better: rendered into fideistic affirmation rather than biblical argument within an anti-Arian (homoian) and anti-Sabellian polemical context.  And all of this in terms that (legitimately or otherwise) attempt to assert that they maintain an Augustinian pedigree.

A Forgetfulness, Which Appears As Memory

What is important to keep in mind regarding this complex and often ambiguous shift from ontology to epistemology is that many of the traditional terms for God—simplicity, omnipresence, omnipotence, goodness, First Cause—could remain the same, but their content and manner of employment radically rewrote their logic from the inside, despite still aping the prior surface syntax.[10]  It can then occur that precisely in the act of “remembering” the tradition and its terms, this memory, when inattentive to some of these shifts, is actually a forgetfulness.  To be sure, Christianity has perennially been beset both by its share of rationalisms and fideisms, and by those who view it necessary to find a space apart from God for created freedom.  What is unique to this emerging modern situation is that these positions become less the exception and more and more the rule—a rule of discourse, moreover, that is increasingly read back into the traditional sources it falsely believes itself to be commenting upon, perpetuating, or countering. That this is so is the burden of Kathryn Tanner’s brilliant work, God and Creation in Christian Theology. 

She writes regarding the modern perplexity to Christianity’s claims of God’s power with the simultaneous assertion of human accountability and freedom.  These claims, she notes, “to the modern mind seem recondite and unfamiliar, disquieting in their attempt to bring together obvious incompatibles.”[11]  Yet the specific acuity of this perplexity is not a perennial problem but “arise[s] historically … with a certain body of interrelated presumptions that form the framework for modern discussion of the topic … problems of intelligibility arrive on the scene as an earlier tradition of Christian discourse in Christian theology is subtly but quite significantly transformed: a modern interpretive frame skews the sense of traditional Christian claims about God and the world.”[12]  Thus she argues in a chapter ominously entitled “The Modern Breakdown of Theological Discourse,” that the tradition’s various ways of remaining faithful in speaking of the “non-competitive transcendence” of God with the freedom of creatures, breaks down precisely in “the modern theologian’s own attempt to take up the tradition of Christian discourse and continue it in a form appropriate for a contemporary audience.”  Such discourse, “is skewed by improper inferences that a modern cultural context promotes.”[13]  What are some of these modern cultural contexts?  Note the similarity of her general prognosis with the claims stemming from Scotus and Ockham above, which it behooves us to quote at length:

For the modern interpreter, what one gets when one strips away [theological] contexts is not an abstraction, the world viewed apart from its real relations with divinity and a community of human knowers.  One is left with the world as it is in its own integrity as an already constituted fact[14] … Modern methods of inquiry ‘work over’ concrete phenomena.  A blueprint or framework of assumptions determines in advance what sort of thing may count as suitable data  …the origin of this framework as a kind of selective emphasis for particular purposes tends to be occulted … a modern framework of assumptions is [then] not considered historically conditioned … what is important for purposes of calculation becomes the ‘really real’, to which are optionally and externally appended [theological qualities] which are not similarly serviceable.  The philosophical conundrums of modern times (skepticism, mind/body dualism, the fact/value split, the … problem of free will) are [the] result from the tendency of modern methods of inquiry to hypostasize severally, as real and essentially independent ‘things’ those logical aspects of concrete phenomena [the tradition saw as pieces of a continuum of discourse within theology proper] … different aspects of the same concrete phenomena become disparate sorts of thing, exclusive of one another and therefore, difficult to hold together.  A ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ syndrome befalls modern discourse: once the egg breaks, the king’s men cannot quite get everything back together again.  Intractable problems arise concerning the possibility of interrelating [what are now seen as] fundamentally independent and antithetical spheres of being.[15]… Modern methods [then] are liable to undercut the entire structure of theological discourse [of the tradition], so that traditional claims about God’s sovereignty and creature’s powers becomes incoherent, and [what once were necessary and complimentary theological positions] become mutually exclusive alternatives[16]… God’s transcendence [now] tends to be defined negatively viz-a-viz an already given factuality [of the world].  This violates our rule for talk of God’s transcendence and thereby suggests the incompatibility of that transcendence with God’s immediate involvement with the world.  God is [in the modern view] simply not what the world is; too close a connection with it would seem to threaten a transcendence of that sort…God is imprisoned [in modernity] by a transcendence negatively defined: God is either isolated over against a basically self-sufficient nexus of created causes and effects, or may operate in the way a finite being would within a single causal order shared with others … The otherness of God in power and purpose [now] suggests distance.  God would not seem in the main, therefore to be present or influential [or if he was, it would be precisely by dislodging claims to human freedom or violating natural causality].  The world is de-sacralized, disenchanted, men and women are abandoned by God, left to the devices of their own making.[17]

The length of this citation can hopefully be forgiven if we keep an eye on the interesting nature of its claims.  In sum: in modern discourse God, world, and man, are all separated and seen as pieces of a puzzle for theologians, philosophers, and (later on) natural scientists to put back together, with part of that process now to be seen as giving precedent to one or another “piece” as it interacts with the others.  An obverse implication of this is that the “pieces” (God, world, humanity) can now be constituted and theorized in discrete units that then must be conceptually related.  This in some sense allows the possibility for purely “secularized” accounts of the world and humanity to secretly control theistic discourse, since they are (supposedly) the most self-evident.[18]   In turn, this affects the perception of “classical” theistic discourse, retrojecting these modern fragmentations as latent within, say, Augustine, or Aquinas: if they said God is immutable, we now read this as God being stoic and distant to the world; if they said God is simple as opposed to worldly complexity, we read this to mean God is somehow an empty and abstract “something, we know not what” to quote Locke’s view of substance, etc. … More importantly all of these claims are being made in circumvention of Christology, via a philosophical God-construct, rather than complex dialectical commentary on scripture. In the words of Tanner: “We can conclude, then, that those who dispute the coherence of the traditional claims are similarly misconstruing them.”[19]  This analysis is already quite parallel to the several accounts given above of Scotus, Ockham, and the transition from “Divine Names” to “Divine Attributes,” (in part this is no surprise, as Tanner includes Scotus, Ockham, and the post-nominalist legacy in general in her historical narrative).  But look also how Tanner’s prognosis parallels one given by Michael Allen Gillespie, who, as we saw already, has recently taken up the task in his book The Theological Origins of Modernity to narrate Modernity not as “secular” (understood as “not religious”) but as the various theological negotiations responding to the “dark God” of Ockham’s voluntarism:

The nominalist revolution was an ontological revolution that called being itself into question … It …gave rise to a new ontology, a new logic, and a new conception of man, God, and nature.  All succeeding European thought has been shaped by this transformation.  While nominalism undermined scholasticism, it was unable to provide broadly acceptable alternative to the comprehensive view of the world it had destroyed.  Some retreat from radical nominalism was thus probably inevitable.  On the basic ontological point, there was no turning back—all, or almost all succeeding forms of thought accepted the ontological individualism that nominalism had so forcefully asserted.  With respect to the other elements of metaphysics, however, there was considerable variation, although these variations themselves were constrained by the structure of metaphysics itself [emphasis added].  In fact … succeeding thinkers focused not on the fundamental ontological question [of the difference of God from creatures] but on the ontic question of the priority or primacy of particular realms of being within metaphysica specialis.  The deepest disagreements in the period between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries were thus not ontological, but ontic, disagreements not about the nature of being but about which of the three realms of being—the human, the divine, or the natural—had priority.  To put it simply, post-scholastic thinkers disagreed not about being itself, but about the hierarchy among the realms of being … Modernity, as we more narrowly understand it, was the consequence of the attempt to resolve this conflict by asserting the ontic priority not of man or God but of nature.[20]

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[1] Milbank, Beyond Secular Order, 46.

[2] For the full quote, cf. De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 177-178: “The God of ‘classical ontology’ is dead you say?  It may be so; but it does not worry me overmuch.  I have no inclination to defend the petrified constructions of Wolf… The god of several modern theodicies which weigh and measure him rather than defend him, the God who can hardly say “I AM” any longer, the God who tends to be no more than the ‘universal harmony of things’ who rules over a beyond where ‘everything is the same as here,’ the God imprisoned ‘within the limits of reason,’ who no longer intervenes in the world, who is really nothing but the projection of natural man, who is distant yet without mystery, [emphasis added] a God made to our measure and defined according to our rules . . . a God in fact whose thoughts are our thoughts and whose ways are our ways: such a God has proved very useless in practice and has become the object of a justified ressentiment.  And when man at last decided to get rid of him altogether in order to enter into his own inheritance, he was only a shade, reduced to the narrow limits of human thought.”

[3] For a brief introduction cf. Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, 19-44.

[4] Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 39-40.

[5] Ibid., 80.

[6] Denys Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 126.

[7] MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 110.

[8] Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, 15.  This is the thesis that drives Gillespie’s book as a whole.

[9] Ibid., 29.

[10] Though we cannot go into it here, a fantastic and lengthy case study in the transformations of omnipresence, omnipotence, and providence from scholasticism through Ockham to the seventeenth century can be found in Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 23-279.

[11] Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology, 6.

[12] Ibid., 4.

[13] Ibid., 122.

[14] Ibid., 125.

[15] Ibid., 128-130.

[16] Ibid., 152.

[17] Ibid., 158-159.

[18] Cf. Charles Taylor’s discussion of what he terms “Closed World Structures”: the shift to a modern, foundationalist epistemology operates as a “Closed World Structure,” because it skews our world-picture in terms of immanence precisely in how it structures knowledge of God: “This [foundationalist epistemology] can operate as a CWS because it is obvious that the inference to the transcendent is now at the extreme and most fragile end of a chain of inferences; [in this way] it becomes the most epistemically questionable.” (A Secular Age, 558).

[19] Tanner, God and Creation., 163.

[20] Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, 16-17.