Justified True Belief

(●) The Franciscan logician who cut philosophy back to individual things, and spent his last nineteen years writing against a pope. + Almost everyone has used his rule and almost nobody knows his name. When a doctor tells you that one common illness explains all your symptoms and there is no need to suppose you have three rare ones at once, that is Ockham’s razor doing its ordinary daily work. It is the most widely used principle in the sciences that was named after a medieval friar. He was born in an English village, taught at Oxford, was hauled to the papal court at Avignon to answer for his lectures, and ended his life in Munich under the protection of an emperor the pope had excommunicated. In between he rebuilt logic, argued that nothing exists anywhere but particular things, insisted that God is free and owes the world nothing, and wrote some of the sharpest medieval arguments that no ruler on earth, pope or emperor, holds power without limit. Here is the signature fact. The sentence everyone quotes as Ockham’s razor, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity," appears nowhere in his surviving writings. It was fastened to his name centuries later. What he actually wrote was plainer and, as it happens, better.

(●) c. 1287 AD: Born in a Surrey village, and handed over to the Franciscans while he was still a boy. + Ockham is a village in Surrey, twenty-odd miles southwest of London, and it gave him the only surname he ever had. Nobody recorded the year he was born. Scholars work backward from the date he was ordained and land on 1287 or 1288, and the "c." in front of the year is doing real work: it is an estimate, not a record. What is certain is that he entered the Order of Friars Minor, the Franciscans, very young. Medieval families gave sons to religious orders at ten, eleven, twelve, and the boy would then be raised, fed, clothed and schooled by the order for the rest of his life. So the poverty that Francis of Assisi had made the mark of his followers was not a theory Ockham picked up as an adult and defended in a debate. It was the only life he had ever lived, which is worth remembering when the argument that eventually destroyed his career turns out to be an argument about whether Christ and the apostles owned anything.

(●) 1306 AD: Ordained subdeacon at Southwark, and sent up through the long training that made a theologian. + On 26 February 1306, in the church at Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, the Archbishop of Canterbury ordained a young Franciscan named William as a subdeacon. A subdeacon is not yet a priest and not yet a deacon. The order was the first rung of the ordained ministry proper, and a man could not receive it until he had reached the minimum age church law set, which is exactly why this one entry in an ordination register is worth so much to a biographer. It is the earliest hard date anyone has for him, and it is the reason the guess about his birth year is a reasonably good guess. Then came the schooling. A friar marked out for theology spent years first on grammar and logic, then on Aristotle, then on the Bible, and only afterward on the book that every theology student in Europe had to lecture through: the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a twelfth-century arrangement of the whole of Christian doctrine into four volumes of questions, with the answers of the fathers, the great teachers of the church’s first centuries, set beside each other so a student could see where they agreed and where they did not. Lecturing on the Sentences was the medieval equivalent of a doctoral thesis. It was where a young man showed the university what he actually thought.

(●) c. 1317 AD: He lectured on the Sentences at Oxford, and never got to sit in the chair he had earned. + Probably between 1317 and 1319, Ockham gave the required lectures at Oxford, and the room noticed. He disagreed with almost everyone, including John Duns Scotus, the most admired Franciscan thinker of the previous generation, and he did it with a young man’s relish. He then went back to the Franciscan house in London and spent the next several years writing at extraordinary speed: a full revision of his lectures on the first book of the Sentences, commentaries on Aristotle’s logic and physics, a treatise on predestination and God’s knowledge of the future, and the Summa Logicae, the most complete work of logic anyone had written in centuries (T1, T2). He had done everything required for the mastership in theology. He never received it, because by the time his turn came he was in trouble, and after that he was a fugitive. So the title that stuck to him was Venerabilis Inceptor, the Venerable Beginner, which sounds like praise and is really a technical description: an inceptor was a man qualified to begin as a master who had not begun. Europe’s most influential fourteenth-century philosopher was, on paper, a graduate student who never finished.

(●) 1324 AD: Summoned to Avignon, where a papal commission spent two years combing his lectures for heresy. + John Lutterell had been chancellor of Oxford until the university pushed him out, and he went to the papal court at Avignon in 1323 carrying a dossier. He had read Ockham’s lectures on the Sentences and drawn up a list of statements he thought dangerous: fifty-six of them. In May 1324 Ockham was ordered to Avignon to answer. Avignon, not Rome. That is worth pausing on, because it is not where a reader expects a pope to be. For most of the fourteenth century the popes lived in a walled palace in southern France, and the court around them was as much a chancery, an office of clerks drafting and filing letters, and a law court as it was a church. Pope John XXII appointed six theologians to examine the charges, Lutterell among them. In 1326 they reported fifty-one propositions they judged open to censure, and a second report cut the list to forty-nine and judged those forty-nine more harshly. Then nothing happened. No condemnation was ever pronounced, and Ockham was left in the city for four years, unable to leave, waiting on a verdict that never came. Anyone who has waited on a decision that simply refuses to arrive knows what those years did to him. He used them to read.

(●) 1328 AD: He slipped out of Avignon by night, over a quarrel about whether Christ had owned anything. + The quarrel that finished him was not about logic. The Franciscans held that Christ and the apostles had owned nothing, either singly or in common, and that the friars imitated them by using food, books and buildings without owning any of it. John XXII decided this was false, and in a series of rulings he declared the Franciscan position erroneous and then heretical. Michael of Cesena, the Minister General of the whole order, was called to Avignon over it, and he asked Ockham to read the papal documents and give a judgment. Ockham read them. He concluded that the pope had taught heresy, and that a man who teaches heresy publicly and will not be corrected is no longer the head of the church. On the night of 26 May 1328 he and Michael and two other friars took horses and rode for the coast. They reached Pisa and the protection of Louis of Bavaria, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was in his own long fight with the same pope. On 6 June they were excommunicated. A later tradition has Ockham greeting the emperor with "defend me with the sword, and I will defend you with the pen." No contemporary records it, and it has the tidy ring of a story improved in the telling, but it describes the next nineteen years accurately enough.

(●) c. 1330 AD: He settled in Munich and wrote political theory for the rest of his life. + He never wrote another line of logic. Everything from Munich is polemic and political theory, and there is a great deal of it: the Work of Ninety Days, a line-by-line answer to the pope’s bulls on poverty (a bull is a formal papal letter, named for the bulla, the lead seal that hung from it on a cord); the enormous unfinished Dialogue, cast as a conversation between a student and a master, which asks who decides what is heresy and what happens when the deciders are wrong; the Eight Questions on the Power of the Pope; and the Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government, which is the clearest short statement of his politics (T5). The odd thing about these books is how little they read like the work of a man settling scores. He argues, patiently and at wearying length, from Scripture, from canon law (the church’s own body of law, the rules and decisions by which it governed itself), from the fathers, and he is careful to state the case against himself first. He also kept insisting, from under an excommunicated emperor’s roof, that he was a Catholic Christian and that the church could not fail, however badly its officers might.

(●) 1347 AD: He died in Munich, unreconciled, just before the plague reached the city. + Louis of Bavaria died of a stroke on a bear hunt in October 1347, and Ockham had gone a few months earlier, on 9 or 10 April, at about sixty. He was buried in the Franciscan church in Munich. Older accounts put his death in 1349 and had the Black Death take him; the earlier date now rests on better evidence, and the plague arrived in Munich after he was already gone. Whether he made peace with Rome at the end is not settled. A formula of submission drawn up for him survives, nobody knows whether he ever signed it, and historians have argued for a century about what it shows. He died still under the sentence pronounced against him in 1328, and it is worth saying plainly that he had never claimed to be anything but a Catholic Christian. What he could not have foreseen is how completely he would win the argument he lost. Within fifty years his way of doing philosophy had a name, the via moderna, the modern way, and universities from Paris to Prague were teaching it. The man with no degree became the master of a curriculum.

What He Taught

(T1) Nothing exists anywhere but individual things. + Put three dogs in a room: a spaniel, a terrier, and something large and hopeful from the shelter. You call all three of them dogs, and you are not making that up, because they really are alike. So here is the question medieval philosophers argued about for three centuries. Is there some further thing, dogness, that the three of them share, over and above the three animals? Something real, one thing, present in each? Plato had said yes, and put it in an eternal world above this one. Aristotle had said yes, and put it inside each dog. Ockham said no. There is the spaniel, the terrier, and the shelter dog, and that is the complete inventory of the room. What is universal is not a fourth thing standing behind them; it is a concept in your mind, a natural sign that stands for many things at once, the way the word "dog" on a page stands for many without being a dog. This position is called nominalism, from the Latin nomen, name, and Ockham is its most famous defender, though he was making a sharper claim than the label suggests: the universal concept is not an arbitrary label we agreed on, it is produced in us naturally by meeting the things themselves. That can sound like a quarrel about words, and it is not one. If the only realities are individuals, then everything general is something a mind does, and a mind has to meet the individuals first. That is a short road to two conclusions Ockham drew hard: that you cannot work out what the world is like by sitting still and reasoning about natures (T2, T3), and that God, who is not a member of any class, is not going to be captured by the categories we abstract from creatures (T4).

(Q) "Every universal is one singular thing, and it is not a universal except by signification, because it is a sign of several." + Source: William of Ockham, Summa Logicae I, chapter 14 (translated from the Latin: quodlibet universale est una res singularis, et ideo non est universale nisi per significationem, quia est signum plurium; the whole of Part I is translated by Michael Loux as Ockham’s Theory of Terms, 1974). The chapter is titled "On the common term ‘universal’ and its opposite, ‘singular’," and the sentence is his whole position in one line. A universal is itself one particular thing, a concept in one particular mind. It earns the name universal only from the job it does, which is to point at many.

(T2) When fewer will do the work, do not reach for more. + Your car will not start. One mechanic says the battery is dead. The other says the battery is fine, but the alternator is failing, and there is also a bad relay, and the cold snap has thickened the oil. Both stories account for the silence when you turn the key. You would go with the first mechanic, and if you had to say why, you would say something like: the second man has invented three problems where one will do, and he has not given me any reason to think the extra two are there. That instinct is the razor, and it is a rule about explanations rather than a rule about reality. It does not say that complicated things do not exist; plenty do. It says that when two accounts explain the same evidence equally well, the one that posits fewer things has the better claim on you, because the extra things are doing no work. Ockham used it as a tool of demolition. He took the crowd of entities that thirteenth-century philosophy had accumulated, the common natures, the intelligible species, the real relations, the distinct quantities, and asked of each one what it explained that the individual things and our concepts of them did not already explain. Where the answer was nothing, out it went. Three things are worth knowing about it, and each one surprises people. The first is that he did not invent it. Aristotle has a version, and the schools passed it around so freely that in the Summa Theologiae it turns up in the mouth of an objector arguing that God is a needless hypothesis. Everything in the world, that objector says, can be accounted for by nature on one side and human purposes on the other, so why add a third thing? Thomas Aquinas answers by tracing both of those back to a first cause, and notice what he does not do: he does not deny the rule. The second is that Ockham did not call it a razor, and neither did anyone else until the seventeenth century. The third is that the famous Latin sentence about not multiplying entities is not his at all. What is his is a pair of plainer rules in his own Latin, one about doing with fewer, one about never positing plurality without necessity.

(Q) "It is pointless to do with more what can be done with fewer." + Source: William of Ockham, Summa Logicae I, chapter 12 (translated from the Latin: frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora). He is arguing, when he uses it here, that we do not need to posit shadowy mental objects standing between the mind and the world, because the act of understanding can do the signifying by itself. His other standing formulation is numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate, "plurality is never to be posited without necessity," from his commentary on the Sentences, book I, distinction 27, question 2. In 1918 William Thorburn searched the printed works for the sentence about multiplying entities and could not find it anywhere; the wording turns up instead in the seventeenth century, in John Ponce of Cork in 1639 and Johann Clauberg in 1654, and nobody has found it in Ockham since.

(T3) God owes the world nothing, and what he has made he was free not to make. + A man who has promised to meet you on Tuesday could perfectly well have said Wednesday. Nothing outside him forced the choice. But he did say Tuesday, and now Tuesday is settled, and if you turn up expecting him you are not being presumptuous. He is free and he is committed at the same time, and the commitment is his own doing. Hold on to that, because it is the shape of the whole idea. Medieval theologians had a pair of terms for it, and they are worth learning because they run underneath a great deal of later thought. God’s potentia absoluta, his absolute power, is everything he could do, bounded only by contradiction: he cannot make a square circle, because that is not a thing to be made, but there is no further list of things ruled out. God’s potentia ordinata, his ordained power, is what he has in fact set up and committed himself to: this world, these laws, this covenant, these sacraments. The distinction is not two powers. It is one God considered twice, once as free and once as having freely chosen. Ockham did not invent the pair. He pressed it harder than anyone before him. Grace is not something God has to give to a person who does his best; if he gives it, that is generosity and not payment, because God is no one’s debtor. The sacraments work because God has bound himself to work through them, not because water and bread contain a power of their own. The laws of nature hold because he keeps them, and could have kept different ones. Everywhere Ockham finds a supposed necessity in the way things stand, he asks whether the necessity is in God or only in our habit of expecting things to be as they are. Much of this a Christian will simply want to say. Scripture says it: "Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases" (Psalm 115:3). But Ockham pushed the same reasoning into morality, and there it takes a turn that has troubled readers ever since, because if right and wrong depend on a free divine command, it seems to follow that a different command would have made different things right. He accepted that consequence, and he accepted it in as blunt a form as anyone has ever put it. His own words for it are worth hearing before anyone answers them, and this is a point where the gospel parts company with him.

(Q) "Hatred, theft, adultery, and the like may involve evil according to the common law, in so far as they are done by someone who is obligated by a divine command to perform the opposite act. As far as everything absolute in these actions is concerned, however, God can perform them without involving any evil." + Source: William of Ockham, Quaestiones in librum secundum Sententiarum (the Reportatio), question 15, in Opera Theologica V, page 352 (translated from the Latin). "Everything absolute in these actions" means the act considered on its own, apart from the command it breaks: the physical taking, the movement of the will. Ockham’s claim is that the wrongness sits in the disobedience rather than in the bare act, and that God, who is under no command, cannot be disobedient. The passage goes on to say that such acts could even be meritorious in a person if God commanded them, "just as now the opposite of these, in fact, fall under a divine command."

(T4) The learning a theologian acquires, an unbeliever could acquire; what makes the difference is faith. + Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus had both thought that reason unaided could get a fair distance toward God: that there is a first cause, that it is one, that it is infinite. Ockham went through those proofs one at a time and found most of them wanting. He allowed one argument to stand, and it is not the one people expect. Take anything that exists now. Something must be keeping it in being at this moment, the way a singer keeps a note going rather than the way a father begets a son, and that chain of conservers cannot run on forever, so there is something that conserves without being conserved. That much, he thought, could be shown. But then he stopped, and the stopping is the point. That there is only one such being, that it is infinite, that it knows and loves what it has made: these he judged we cannot demonstrate. We hold them because God has told us. You might think that sounds like a man quietly giving ground. Ockham did not think so, and the proof is that he turned the same knife on his own profession. A theology faculty teaches a great deal that is genuinely knowledge, languages, logic, the consequences that follow from a doctrine once it is granted, and Ockham says flatly that an unbeliever sitting in the same lecture hall could acquire every bit of that, and could defend the faith in argument as ably as a believer. What the unbeliever cannot acquire by studying is assent, because assent to the articles of the creed comes by faith and by nothing else. This is not a low view of reason and it is not fideism, the position that faith should not be reasoned about at all: no fideist writes a Summa Logicae. It is a boundary line. Reason does its own work honestly and stops where its evidence stops, and revelation is not a weaker kind of knowledge but a different road to the same country. Whether he drew the line in the right place is a fair question, and Christians have answered it both ways ever since.

(Q) "No one can assent to the truths of belief without faith. Therefore there is no science properly speaking with respect to them." + Source: William of Ockham, Ordinatio, Prologue, question 7, headed whether the theology commonly held by theologians is science properly so called (Franciscan Institute critical edition, Opera Theologica I; translated from the Latin: sine fide nullus potest assentire veritatibus credibilibus ... respectu talium credibilium non est scientia proprie dicta, the premise and the conclusion of one argument in his own solution to the question). "Science properly speaking," scientia, does not mean laboratory work. In this vocabulary it means a body of conclusions demonstrated from premises you can see to be true. Ockham’s question is whether theology is that sort of thing, and his answer is no: not because theology is careless, but because its first premises are received on God’s word rather than seen. Earlier in the same solution he makes the point from the other side, that every habit besides faith which a believing theologian acquires, an unbeliever can acquire too.

(T5) No power on earth is unlimited, and a pope who teaches error may be told so. + Think of a tenancy in which the landlord may alter any term of the agreement whenever he pleases, and there is no term he cannot alter. You would still call the house a home. You would not, if you were being careful, call anything in it yours. Keep that picture, because it is the worry Ockham kept pressing, and he pressed it about the church. The claim he spent his Munich years attacking was called plenitudo potestatis, fullness of power: the idea, urged by canon lawyers of his day and by John XXII in particular, that the pope holds an authority so complete that he may do anything not forbidden by divine or natural law, in temporal affairs as well as spiritual ones. Ockham’s central argument against it is a scriptural one, and it is elegant. James calls the gospel "the perfect law, the law of liberty" (James 1:25). Now suppose one man really did hold power over every Christian in every matter. Then no Christian would own anything he could not be ordered to hand over, and no Christian would have any right his superior could not cancel, and the new covenant would have laid on believers a servitude heavier than anything under the old law. That cannot be what Christ established, so the fullness of power cannot be what Christ gave. Paul says the same thing about his own authority, that the Lord gave it "for building you up and not for destroying you" (2 Corinthians 10:8), and Jesus had told the Twelve that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over their people and that it shall not be so among them (Matthew 20:25–26). From that root Ockham draws conclusions that were startling in 1340 and are commonplace now: that spiritual and temporal authority are distinct, each with its own sphere and neither absorbing the other; that a ruler holds power for the good of those he rules and forfeits the claim when he rules for himself; and, most dangerous of all in his situation, that a pope can fall into heresy, since no office protects a man from error, and that when one does, ordinary Christians who can see it are not obliged to pretend otherwise. Ockham was never a democrat and never argued for anything resembling a vote. What he argued for was limit.

(Q) "For against the errors of this pseudo-pope I have set my face like the hardest rock, so that neither lies nor slurs nor persecution of whatever sort (that does not physically touch my person) ... will ever at any time be able to prevent me from attacking and refuting his errors as long as I have hand, paper, pen, and ink." + Source: William of Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor (1334), in A Letter to the Friars Minor and Other Writings, edited by A. S. McGrade and John Kilcullen, translated by John Kilcullen (Cambridge University Press, 1995), page 13. The Letter is the closest thing Ockham wrote to an account of himself: an open letter to the friars of his own order gathered at Assisi for their general chapter at Pentecost in 1334, telling them why he had left Avignon and what he had concluded about the man who summoned him there. The image of the rock comes from Isaiah 50:7, where the servant of the Lord, struck and spat on, sets his face like flint; the Latin Bible Ockham read has the phrase he uses, the hardest rock. This is the practical edge of (T5): if no office on earth protects a man from error, then a Christian who can see the error is free to say so, and saying so needs nothing more than hand, paper, pen and ink.

(Q) "Only an assertion which is consonant with theology is truly catholic, and only one which is known to be opposed to theology is known to be heretical." + Source: William of Ockham, Dialogus, part 1, book 1, chapter 2 (British Academy edition, translated by John Kilcullen and John Scott). A man who had spent four years in Avignon watching a commission sift his lecture notes had earned the right to ask what actually makes a sentence heretical, and this is the answer the book gives: not conflict with a papal decree, not conflict with an imperial law, but conflict with revealed truth. Deciding which is which, the master adds, "chiefly pertains to theologians, the experts on divine scripture." The words are the master’s in a work written throughout as a conversation, and Ockham owns the rule in his own name elsewhere, telling his order in the Letter that he prefers the divine Scriptures to a man who is a simpleton in sacred literature. It is a rule that cost him everything and that he never took back.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Within a lifetime his way of arguing had a name and a following: the modern way. + Universities in the century after his death sorted themselves into two camps and gave them names. The via antiqua, the old way, meant Aquinas and Scotus and the position that universals are real. The via moderna, the modern way, meant Ockham. Some faculties taught one, some the other, and a few statutes required a student to be examined in both. The line of teachers is easy to follow, and it runs from one classroom to the next for a century and a half. Gregory of Rimini stands near the head of it in the mid fourteenth century. Then come Pierre d’Ailly and Jean Gerson at Paris around 1400. At the end of the chain is Gabriel Biel, who died in 1495 and whose commentary on the Sentences was the standard textbook of the via moderna in Germany. Erfurt, where Martin Luther studied, was an Ockhamist faculty, and Biel was the theologian Luther was raised on. Luther later attacked the whole scholastic enterprise and Biel’s account of grace in particular, and he still called Ockham his dear master and the most ingenious of the schoolmen, and wrote in his Latin works that he was of Ockham’s party, sum Occamicae factionis. That the young Luther was trained to think in Ockham’s terms is not in doubt. What travelled with the training was a habit of mind: distrust of entities that explain nothing, insistence that grace is a gift and not a wage, and a sharp sense that God is free.

(†) The razor left the friary and became a working rule of the sciences. + Isaac Newton opened the third book of the Principia with a rule of reasoning that is Ockham in seventeenth-century dress: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things, than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances," as Andrew Motte put it in the first English translation of 1729. Every scientist since has worked under some version of it, and the phrase "Occam’s razor" (a razor, because it shaves away what is not needed) has become one of the few pieces of medieval philosophy that a person can meet on the radio. Christians sometimes flinch at it, because they have heard it used as an argument against belief in God: one entity fewer, therefore simpler, therefore better. That misreads the tool in two ways. First, the razor compares explanations that account for the same evidence equally well; where they do not account for it equally well, the razor has nothing to say, and the whole question is whether a universe of this kind is left unexplained by matter alone. Second, the man whose name is on it applied it for a lifetime without trimming God, angels, the Trinity or the sacraments, because he did not think they were doing no work. A razor removes the unnecessary. Deciding what is necessary is a different argument, and it is the argument that matters.

(†) A world God did not have to make is a world you have to go and look at. + You can work out, without leaving your chair, that the three angles of any triangle you will ever draw come to the same total. You cannot work out from your chair what colour a friend has painted his kitchen. He chose it, and a choice is not the sort of thing you can reason your way to. You have to go round and look. Carry that distinction from a kitchen to the created world, and you have (T3) followed out to its consequence for the study of nature. If the order of the world is a free choice rather than a necessity, then you cannot sit still and reason out what that order must be. You have to go and find out. Necessity can be deduced; a choice has to be observed. Historians of science have argued for a century that this is one of the roots of experimental method. Their case is that a doctrine of creation which makes the world contingent, real, orderly and not divine is what made it worth studying and impossible to guess. Contingent is the load-bearing word in that sentence, and it simply means not necessary: a world that did not have to be here at all, and did not have to be like this once it was. Pierre Duhem began the case in the early twentieth century, and Michael Foster, Reijer Hooykaas and Francis Oakley carried versions of it forward. The claim is genuinely disputed, and it should be stated at the strength the evidence bears: the fourteenth-century Ockhamists at Paris and Oxford did not run experiments in any modern sense, and no straight line runs from a Munich exile to a laboratory. What can be said is that a theology of divine freedom made a certain kind of confidence in armchair physics untenable, and that the men who later did run the experiments inherited that theology and said so. There is a second inheritance, and it is easier to trace. A world held in being moment by moment, whose regularities are God’s faithfulness rather than nature’s self-sufficiency, is exactly what Colossians describes when it says that in Christ "all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). Ockham took that seriously enough to build his one surviving proof of God on it (T4).

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a God who could command hatred, and a reason told to expect too little. + Two things in his own writing, not in what other people later did with them, are worth stating against him at full strength. - The command that could have gone the other way. Ockham held that God could command a person to hate God, and that the act would then not be sinful, since sin is disobedience and there would be no disobedience in it. He wrote as much in the passage quoted at (T3). The reply that Christians of every tradition have made is that this treats God’s will as if it floated free of God’s nature. Scripture never separates the two. God "cannot be tempted with evil" (James 1:13); he is the God "who never lies" (Titus 1:2); "if we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself" (2 Timothy 2:13). Those are not limits imposed on God from outside, which is what Ockham was rightly anxious to avoid. They say what God is. A command to hate God would be a command to hate goodness itself, and it is not something an unchangeably good God has left open. The right conclusion is the one Ockham reached everywhere else and missed here: God is bound by nothing outside himself, and God is exactly what he is. - A boundary drawn too tight. Ockham judged that reason cannot show that there is only one God, and cannot show that God is infinite. Paul writes that God’s "eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Romans 1:20), and the weight of Christian thought before and after Ockham has read that as promising more to unaided reason than he allowed. His caution was honest and it came from real arguments rather than from indifference. But a boundary that tight leaves the person who does not yet believe with nothing to walk on, and Scripture seems to hold out more ground than that. Neither point should be inflated into a verdict on the man. He was, on the record of his own books, a Christian who thought God was free, that grace was a gift, that no officer of the church stands above correction, and that a theologian’s job is to say what is true rather than what is safe. He was right about all four, and he paid for the last two.