What's in a Name?

(This Rock: October 2005)

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What's in a Name?
Nominalism is an idea that has had devastating consequences for our everyday
life.
By Carl E. Olson
God could have redeemed us by becoming a donkey.
God justifies man, but man remains as sinful inwardly as before.
Words have no meaning but are merely text.
What do these statements have in common? Apparently little: The first was
the belief of a fourteenth-century Franciscan theologian. The second captures
the heart of classical Protestant soteriology (the theology of salvation; see
sidebar). The last is the essential position of postmodern deconstructionists.

"I am alone with God."

-- Herbert Goldsmith Squiers,
U.S. Army officer, diplomat in
China, Cuba, and Panama; his
last words upon receiving the last
rites.

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Yet the common intellectual source of the three statements is one of the most
powerful ideas that nobody talks about. It is an idea that has had a deep
influence on Western thought and has helped shape Christian theology and
Western thought for six hundred years. That idea is nominalism. If there was
ever a poster child for the remark that "ideas have consequences," it is
nominalism.

What are universals?

In 1948, Richard M. Weaver (19101963), a professor of English at the
University of Chicago, published Ideas Have Consequences. Decrying the
modern assault on language and objective truth, Weaver laid the blame for
such attacks at the foot of William of Ockham (c. 12851347). The English
Franciscan, Weaver wrote, "propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism,
which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended to
leave universal terms mere names serving our convenience."
It may sound like a lot of ivory tower irrelevance, but the denial of universals
has had deadly consequences in our society. So what are these "universals"?
Whereas St. Thomas Aquinas (122574) had taught that man can know the
true, objective essence of things, Ockham denied it was possible. As
Benjamin Wiker observed in Moral Darwinism (InterVarsity, 2002), Ockham
believed that "when we use the word dog there is really no universal entity,
essence, or dog-ness that we perceive. Dog is merely a name we apply to
particular things that happen to look alike. Hence, the name of his system,
nominalism, for the Latin nomen, name."
In other words, nominalism is a philosophical system claiming that everything
outside the mind is completely individual: Reality cannot be comprehended
through the use of universal and abstract concepts but only through the
empirical study of specific, individual objects. Historian and Benedictine monk
David Knowles, in The Evolution of Medieval Thought, wrote that nominalism
holds that "there is no such thing as a universal, and it is nonsense to speak
of the thing known as present in an intelligible form in the mind of the knower."
Yes, its a complex ideabut the consequences are very real. By denying that

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This Rock
Volume 16, Number 8
October 2005
Frontispiece
By Karl Keating
Letters
What About the Right to Die?
By Fr. Frank Pavone
Common Myths
By Fr. Frank Pavone
The Role of Deacons: Then
and Now
By Tim Drake
What Can and Can't Deacons
Do?
By Tim Drake
The Restoration of the
Permanent Diaconate at the
Second Vatican Council
By Tim Drake
Who Were the "Great" Popes
and Why?
By Fr. William Saunders
What's in a Name?
By Carl E. Olson
Soteriology: Catholic v.
Protestant
By Carl E. Olson
Mary, the Ark of the New
Covenant
By Steve Ray
Mary the Ark As Revealed in
Mary's Visit to Elizabeth
By Steve Ray

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there is any basis in reality for universals that every human mind can g.asp,
nominalism moved knowledge away from objectivity and toward subjectivity
and prepared the way for further radical propositions in the realms of theology
and morality.
It makes sense: If Gods acts do not possess a logical, objective natureas
Ockham and his disciples taughtthen they are merely the result of a
groundless divine will unconcerned with what humans call "reason" or "logic."
If that is the case, obviously man cannot use his reason or logic to determine
what is just or unjust. Natural law, then, is simply nonsense.
Ockham went so far as to say that the Incarnation had value only to the extent
God gave it value; God could have redeemed mankind just as easily by
becoming a stone, tree, or donkey. If there is no common, or universal, human
nature, the Incarnation was not so much about the Logos taking on human
nature as it was about God working as he wishes, in a manner unrelated to
any sort of logic or reason.
Because of the arbitrary nature of reality, man cannot know the essential
nature of sin and grace. Thus, he has no way of knowing his state before
Godoutside of intuition and inner experience. Besides, nominalism insisted,
God can declare sin and grace to exist within man at the same time,
regardless of mans worthiness.

Inside the Ark

By Steve Ray
Step by Step
Google versus the Pope
By Kenneth J. Howell
Fathers Know Best
The Real Presence
Brass Tacks
The Complex Relationship
between Scripture and Tradition
By Jimmy Akin
Damascus Road
Reincarnation Meant My Loved
Ones Would Cease to Exist
By Joanna Bogle
Classic Apologetics
The Authenticity of the Gospels
By Walter Devivier, S. J.
Quick Questions
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Apparently, Ockham was motivated by what he thought was proper humility before Gods greatness. He viewed
Thomistic realism (and its respect for Aristotelian logic) as an arrogant approach that claimed to understand God in
a systematic and supercilious fashion. Unfortunately, however good his intentions were, Ockham set the foundation
for some of the most powerful and mistaken ideas of the Protestant revolt.

Mystery destroyed
Heiko A. Oberman, a leading Luther scholar (and admirer), admitted in Luther: Man between God and the Devil that
"Martin Luther was a nominalist; there is no doubt about that." Rev. Louis Bouyer, a former Lutheran pastor and
theologian, stated in The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism that this connection to Ockhams nominalism is the key
to the "negative elements" of the Reformation:
No phrase reveals so clearly the hidden evil that was to spoil the fruit of the Reformation than
Luthers saying that Ockham was the only scholastic who was any good. The truth is that Luther,
brought up on his system, was never able to think outside the framework it imposed, while this, it is
only too evident, makes the mystery that lies at the root of Christian teaching either inconceivable or
absurd.
That "mystery" is divinization: the Catholic doctrine that Gods gracehis supernatural lifecan infuse man and
heal his wounded nature, especially through the sacraments. This belief was abhorrent to Luther, who believed
such communion between God and man impossible, even b.asphemous. Justification, Luther taught, was not an
inner change but a juridical or forensic reality, outward only and imputed by Christ. The justified man is still as sinful
as before, but he is "cloaked" in Christs righteousness.

Total depravity
Neither Luther nor John Calvin could conceive of man as somehow sharing in Gods divine nature, because man, in
their estimation, was totally depraved and incapable of any good. The nominalism of Ockham and his disciples
congealed in the teachings of these Protestant fathers, resulting in a skewed understanding of God and his
relationship with man.
"What, in fact, is the essential characteristic of Ockhams thought, and of nominalism in general," Bouyer asked,
"but a radical empiricism, reducing all being to what is perceived, which empties out, with the idea of substance, all
possibility of real relations between beings, as well as the stable subsistence of any of them, and ends by denying
to the real any intelligibility, conceiving God himself only as a Protean figure impossible to apprehend?"
The nominalist fragmentation between substance and nature became the cornerstone for two principles of classical
Protestant theology: total depravity and sola fide.
Man, being totally depraved, lacks any free will and the ability to know what is right. For Luther, looking through
nominalist-colored lenses, grace was a quality external to man and therefore unknowable in any objective way.
Grace is Gods divine favor and belongs to God alone. Luther believed that if God did infuse man with his divine life,
then God would be joined to man and obligated to him in a manner incompatible with his sovereignty and

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omnipotence. Man can have no part in grace except in an outward mannerimputed righteousnessin which no
real communication of the divine life occurs.
So sola fidefaith alonebecame the means of salvation because faith, for the Protestant fathers, is an inner
quality, knowable through experience and intuition; it is not a sharing in Gods divine life.
"Similarly, and as radically," wrote Bouyer, "it follows that grace, to remain such, that is the pure gift of Godmust
always be absolutely extrinsic to us; also, faith, to remain ours, so as not to fall into that externalism that would
deprive man of all that is real in religion, must remain shut up within us."

Radical individualism
This prepared the way for the radical individualismwhat French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain called "the
advent of the self"that became a distinguishing feature of Protestantism. In the moral realm this radical separation
of faith and grace meant a severing of the moral act from its actual value. If God can impose any value he desires
upon a moral act arbitrarily, then it follows that mans actions cannot possess any objective value relating to grace
or the meriting of eternal life. Protestant theologian Alister McGrath summarized the Reformers view in his volume
on justification, Iustitia Dei (Cambridge University Press, 1998):
There is a fundamental discontinuity between the moral value of an acti.e., the act, considered in
itselfand the meritorious value of an acti.e., the value that God chooses to impose upon the act.
Moral virtue imposes no obligation upon God, and where such obligation may be conceded, it exists
as the purely contingent outcome of a prior uncoerced divine decision.
Calvin systematized this discontinuity by basing his Institutes of the Christian Religion around the central theological
theme of predestination. Calvin made it clear that God can be sovereign only if man is nothing, that is, totally
depraved and lacking any free will.
It has been said that for the Protestant fathers justification was the article of faith upon which the Church either
"stand or falls." But their denial of free will is actually the key article of faith, as it informed their position on
justification as well as that of Scripture, Church authority, and the sacraments. Without free will, mans moral actions
mean nothing, so justification becomes a legal fiction, not a lifetime of growth in Gods divine life.
The Reformer from Geneva also took up Ockhams view of the Incarnation, as McGrath noted in A Life of John
Calvin (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Calvin "makes it clear that the basis of Christs merit is not located in
Christs offering of himself," McGrath wrote, "but in the divine decision to accept such an offering as of sufficient
merit for the redemption of mankind (which corresponds to the voluntarist [nominalist] approach). For Calvin, apart
from Gods good pleasure, Christ could not merit anything [Institutes, II.xvii.i-iv]." McGrath also noted that "Calvins
continuity appears to be with the late medieval voluntarist tradition, deriving from Ockham of Ockham and Gregory
of Rimini."
The crucial break between each moral act (known by revelation) and its meritorious value (unknown and reliant on
Gods arbitrary will) is evident. So Calvin taught a distinct break between justification and sanctification. The former
is external, imputed, and eternal; the latter is internal and pertains to salvation as an evidence only shown by good
works, a sign of perseverance, which the truly predestined saint will possess. Believers can know they are saved by
the signs of their works, all the while knowing that those works possess little, if any, actual value in the eyes of God.

Seeds of skepticism
Like a stream growing as it flows from a mountain into a valley, nominalism has helped shape modernitys view of
God, man, and reality. Ockhams focus on empirical knowledge played a vital role in Luther and Calvin looking
inwardly in search of faith. But it was not long before Enlightenment thinkers would cast aside the tenuous reality of
self-enclosed faith and begin searching for data and evidence in a new way.
Instead of looking to the detached and unknowable God of nominalism, intellectuals and theologians began looking
to the immediate, concrete world around them. After all, if God does not want to have communion with man but only
desires to show his sovereignty, what keeps man from turning his back on God and demonstrating his own power
and autonomy? While God, for the Protestant fathers, is free from any obligation to man, in the Enlightenment era
man became equally autonomous, free from any obligation to God and his natural law.
What the Protestant revolt and later modernity had in common was that a subjective, individualistic view of reality
turned into the essential basis of knowledge. The difference was in the object of focus. The Reformers looked to
God, relying on intuitive, subjective experience. Later thinkers, relying on their own intuitive experiences, concluded
that man is autonomous and God is unnecessary. The former resulted in Lutheranism, Calvinism and a host of
splintering groups. The latter resulted in all sorts of nasty "isms": empiricism, positivism, moral relativism, and
deconstructionism.

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Summarized, the move toward subjective and intuitive knowledge, opposed to abstract and universal knowledge,
led to increasingly radical philosophical propositions. G. W. F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx pushed the
envelope of nominalist-indebted thought. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900) wrote, "There are
no facts, only interpretations"a sentiment echoed in the common contemporary refrain: "There is no truth, only
opinions."
In the twentieth century, Jacques Derridas work in deconstructionwhich asserts that truth cannot be known and
words lack real meaningwas a type of hyper-nominalism. Derridas famous statement that "there is nothing
outside the text" was a denial that words refer to a reality beyond them.
Like a constantly mutating virus, nominalism lives on. Yes, ideas do have consequences. And bad ideas, no matter
how well-intentioned, have bad consequences.

Carl E. Olson is the editor of IgnatiusInsight.com, the co-author, with Sandra Miesel, of The Da Vinci Hoax (Ignatius,
2004), and the author of Will Catholics Be "Left Behind"? (Ignatius, 2003). From 2002 to 2004 he was the editor of
the award-winning Envoy magazine. He and his wife Heather have one daughter, Felicity. Their conversion story
appears in Surprised by Truth 3.

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