What's in a Name

This RockVolume 16, Number 8

October 2005

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What's in a Name?Nominalism is an idea that has had devastating consequences for our everydaylife.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 wasthe belief of a fourteenth-century Franciscan theologian. The second capturesthe heart of classical Protestant soteriology (the theology of salvation; seesidebar). The last is the essential position of postmodern deconstructionists.

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

What are universals?

In 1948, Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963), a professor of English at theUniversity of Chicago, published Ideas Have Consequences. Decrying themodern assault on language and objective truth, Weaver laid the blame forsuch attacks at the foot of William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347). The EnglishFranciscan, Weaver wrote, "propounded the fateful doctrine of nominalism,which denies that universals have a real existence. His triumph tended toleave universal terms mere names serving our convenience."

It may sound like a lot of ivory tower irrelevance, but the denial of universalshas had deadly consequences in our society. So what are these "universals"?

Whereas St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) had taught that man can know thetrue, objective essence of things, Ockham denied it was possible. AsBenjamin Wiker observed in Moral Darwinism (InterVarsity, 2002), Ockhambelieved 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 toparticular 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 everythingoutside the mind is completely individual: Reality cannot be comprehendedthrough the use of universal and abstract concepts but only through theempirical study of specific, individual objects. Historian and Benedictine monkDavid Knowles, in The Evolution of Medieval Thought, wrote that nominalismholds that "there is no such thing as a universal, and it is nonsense to speakof the thing known as present in an intelligible form in the mind of the knower."

Yes, it’s a complex idea—but the consequences are very real. By denying that

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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 subjectivityand prepared the way for further radical propositions in the realms of theologyand morality.

It makes sense: If God’s acts do not possess a logical, objective nature—asOckham and his disciples taught—then they are merely the result of agroundless divine will unconcerned with what humans call "reason" or "logic."If that is the case, obviously man cannot use his reason or logic to determinewhat 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 extentGod gave it value; God could have redeemed mankind just as easily bybecoming a stone, tree, or donkey. If there is no common, or universal, humannature, the Incarnation was not so much about the Logos taking on humannature as it was about God working as he wishes, in a manner unrelated toany sort of logic or reason.

Because of the arbitrary nature of reality, man cannot know the essentialnature of sin and grace. Thus, he has no way of knowing his state beforeGod—outside of intuition and inner experience. Besides, nominalism insisted,God can declare sin and grace to exist within man at the same time,regardless of man’s worthiness.

Apparently, Ockham was motivated by what he thought was proper humility before God’s greatness. He viewedThomistic realism (and its respect for Aristotelian logic) as an arrogant approach that claimed to understand God ina systematic and supercilious fashion. Unfortunately, however good his intentions were, Ockham set the foundationfor 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 andtheologian, stated in The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism that this connection to Ockham’s nominalism is the keyto the "negative elements" of the Reformation:

No phrase reveals so clearly the hidden evil that was to spoil the fruit of the Reformation thanLuther’s 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 isonly too evident, makes the mystery that lies at the root of Christian teaching either inconceivable orabsurd.

That "mystery" is divinization: the Catholic doctrine that God’s grace—his supernatural life—can infuse man andheal his wounded nature, especially through the sacraments. This belief was abhorrent to Luther, who believedsuch communion between God and man impossible, even b.asphemous. Justification, Luther taught, was not aninner change but a juridical or forensic reality, outward only and imputed by Christ. The justified man is still as sinfulas before, but he is "cloaked" in Christ’s righteousness.

Total depravity

Neither Luther nor John Calvin could conceive of man as somehow sharing in God’s divine nature, because man, intheir estimation, was totally depraved and incapable of any good. The nominalism of Ockham and his disciplescongealed in the teachings of these Protestant fathers, resulting in a skewed understanding of God and hisrelationship with man.

"What, in fact, is the essential characteristic of Ockham’s 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, allpossibility of real relations between beings, as well as the stable subsistence of any of them, and ends by denyingto 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 classicalProtestant 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 throughnominalist-colored lenses, grace was a quality external to man and therefore unknowable in any objective way.Grace is God’s 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 manner—imputed righteousness—in which noreal communication of the divine life occurs.

So sola fide—faith alone—became the means of salvation because faith, for the Protestant fathers, is an innerquality, knowable through experience and intuition; it is not a sharing in God’s divine life.

"Similarly, and as radically," wrote Bouyer, "it follows that grace, to remain such, that is the pure gift of God—mustalways be absolutely extrinsic to us; also, faith, to remain ours, so as not to fall into that externalism that woulddeprive man of all that is real in religion, must remain shut up within us."

Radical individualism

This prepared the way for the radical individualism—what French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain called "theadvent of the self"—that became a distinguishing feature of Protestantism. In the moral realm this radical separationof faith and grace meant a severing of the moral act from its actual value. If God can impose any value he desiresupon a moral act arbitrarily, then it follows that man’s actions cannot possess any objective value relating to graceor the meriting of eternal life. Protestant theologian Alister McGrath summarized the Reformers’ view in his volumeon justification, Iustitia Dei (Cambridge University Press, 1998):

There is a fundamental discontinuity between the moral value of an act—i.e., the act, considered initself—and the meritorious value of an act—i.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 existsas 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 theologicaltheme of predestination. Calvin made it clear that God can be sovereign only if man is nothing, that is, totallydepraved 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 onjustification as well as that of Scripture, Church authority, and the sacraments. Without free will, man’s moral actionsmean nothing, so justification becomes a legal fiction, not a lifetime of growth in God’s divine life.

The Reformer from Geneva also took up Ockham’s view of the Incarnation, as McGrath noted in A Life of JohnCalvin (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990). Calvin "makes it clear that the basis of Christ’s merit is not located inChrist’s offering of himself," McGrath wrote, "but in the divine decision to accept such an offering as of sufficientmerit for the redemption of mankind (which corresponds to the voluntarist [nominalist] approach). For Calvin, ‘apartfrom God’s good pleasure, Christ could not merit anything’ [Institutes, II.xvii.i-iv]." McGrath also noted that "Calvin’scontinuity appears to be with the late medieval voluntarist tradition, deriving from Ockham of Ockham and Gregoryof Rimini."

The crucial break between each moral act (known by revelation) and its meritorious value (unknown and reliant onGod’s arbitrary will) is evident. So Calvin taught a distinct break between justification and sanctification. The formeris external, imputed, and eternal; the latter is internal and pertains to salvation as an evidence only shown by goodworks, a sign of perseverance, which the truly predestined saint will possess. Believers can know they are saved bythe 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 modernity’s view ofGod, man, and reality. Ockham’s focus on empirical knowledge played a vital role in Luther and Calvin lookinginwardly in search of faith. But it was not long before Enlightenment thinkers would cast aside the tenuous reality ofself-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 lookingto the immediate, concrete world around them. After all, if God does not want to have communion with man but onlydesires to show his sovereignty, what keeps man from turning his back on God and demonstrating his own powerand autonomy? While God, for the Protestant fathers, is free from any obligation to man, in the Enlightenment eraman 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 realityturned into the essential basis of knowledge. The difference was in the object of focus. The Reformers looked toGod, relying on intuitive, subjective experience. Later thinkers, relying on their own intuitive experiences, concludedthat man is autonomous and God is unnecessary. The former resulted in Lutheranism, Calvinism and a host ofsplintering groups. The latter resulted in all sorts of nasty "isms": empiricism, positivism, moral relativism, anddeconstructionism.


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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 theenvelope of nominalist-indebted thought. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote, "There areno facts, only interpretations"—a sentiment echoed in the common contemporary refrain: "There is no truth, onlyopinions."

In the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida’s work in deconstruction—which asserts that truth cannot be known andwords lack real meaning—was a type of hyper-nominalism. Derrida’s famous statement that "there is nothingoutside 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 matterhow 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 ofthe award-winning Envoy magazine. He and his wife Heather have one daughter, Felicity. Their conversion storyappears in Surprised by Truth 3.

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What's in a Name