RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Occam
tion and operation of the sacraments. The operation is described in a manner usual in Franciscan theology; grace does not reside in them, but they
are signs that God, in accordance with
4. Doctrine his institution, will accompany their
of Christ administration with his grace. Grace
and the is taken in a twofold sense, an infused
Sacraments, quality of the mind by which man is
enabled to act according to God's will, and divine acceptation, " the gratuitous will of God." Following Scotus again, Occam is conscious of strong objections to the doctrine of the necessity of an infused " habit " of grace; and it is quite clear that the retention of it in his system is due merely to submission to authority. Under the head of the sacraments, his fullest treatment is given to the Eucharist, where he follows the consubstantiation theory which after Scotus was becoming common. Neither Scripture nor reason contradicts the possibility of the substance of bread, not merely the accidents, remaining together with the substance of the body of Christ; nor is transubstantiation taught in Scripture. He goes at considerable length into the question of the possibility of the presence of Christ in the sacrament. For him as a nominalist, quantity is a thing which has no existence in itself, but only the res quanta. Now quantity can increase or diminish, and thus a thing may be without quantity, like a mathematical point; this is the manner in which the body of Christ exists in the sacrament of the altar. In this way he comes to agree with Thomas Aquinas, that the body of Christ is present " after the manner of substance, not after that of quantity " (Summa, III., lxxvi. 1); the criticism of Duns Scotus, that a substance without attributes is unthinkable, is avoided by the assertion that quantity is not an essential property of substance. While to some extent he prepared the way for Luther's teaching on the Lord's Supper, the difference between his doctrine of ubiquity and Luther's must not be overlooked. As to the sacrament of penance, like most of the later scholastics, Occam lays most stress on the absolution. Since, as shown above, sin effects no " real " change in the soul, its destruction consists in the non-imputation of guilt. This might have been brought about, had God so willed, by an internal act of repentance on the part of a sinner having proper dispositions. Sin being an act of the will, the detestation of it by the same will is the appropriate means for its destruction, and in fact necessary, contrary to the view of Scotus that God gives his grace to the sinner through the sacrament without either attrition or contrition. But the essence of the sacrament, according to Occam, lies in the deliverance of the sinner from the guilt of sin by God through the agency of the priest.
In the important questions as to the external organization of the Church and its relation to the State, two principal motives guided Occam to his
conclusions. Accusing John XXII. of 5. Church attempting to subjugate or destroy the and State, empire and to prove erroneous and
illicit the thorough-going poverty of the Franciscans, he met him by attempting on the one hand to make a sharp distinction between the
Church and the world, and on the other by showing the limitations and errors of the official ecclesiastical authorities. Like Marsilius of Padua, he contends that the papal power extends only to spiritual things. The apostles were subject to the secular authorities of their time and were far from claiming any temporal jurisdiction. Even the necessity of the papacy may be called in question; and if so, much less is there any necessary dependence of the emperor on the pope. The choice of the electors makes an emperor, who needs no papal confirmation. The relation of pope and emperor is discussed not only from the standpoint of the historic civil law, but from that of natural law as well. The idea of natural law had come down from the ancients to both canonists and civilians, as a criterion of the justice of positive enactments; the popes had employed it often enough against civil rulers, and now it was turned against themselves. The trouble with this criterion, however, was that it was too elastic; it could be stretched to include the most revolutionary conclusions in both Church and State. Occam undoubtedly believed in the logical validity of his critical statements; but a complete overturning of the ecclesiastical organism was as far from his temperament as the creation of a new system of Scriptural theology. He never strove for anything more than a certain amelioration of existing conditions within the circle of the system, and his most reasonable demands went to pieces on the positivism of the nominalist. He was anything but timid; but he went on criticizing and constructing, and then doubting once more both his critical and his constructive work.
IV. Survey of Occam's Position: The foregoing review of Occam's theological and constitutional opinions shows how on the one hand the newer criticism of traditional doctrines and ordinances was becoming ever more minute and more difficult to deal with, and on the other the ecclesiastical positivism was hardening into more inflexible formulas. In Occam's hands theology became increasingly skeptical, negative, and unfruitful. He really dug the grave of scholasticism, which perished of the accumulation of dialectical subtlety and negation. The further it got away from active church life, the more dreary and unprofitable did its speculations appear, until an imperative demand arose for a theology that should be practical and alive, Augustinian and Scriptural. But nominalism won an external victory. Occam's doctrine remained the " modern " theology up to the time of Luther. The " last of the scholastics," Gabriel Biel (q.v.), had nothing better to offer his disciples than a CoUectorium ex Occamo; and after Gregory of Rimini had combined Occam's nominalism with the Augustinian teaching on sin and grace, the name of the English friar stood high with those who looked for a " modern " scientific theology. Luther calls him " my dear master," and proclaims with pride " I am of the Occamist faction." As a philosopher, he won a decided victory, even over his greater teacher Scotus, and became the pioneer of modern epistemology; as a theologian he enforced the critical method of Scotus on generations to follow; and as a constitutionalist he furnished a leaven in his
Occam Odo