Tiny Step into a Minefield
Is blaming the Franciscans for The Reformation really Catholic?
To begin this month’s discussion, I want to start before the beginning. I want to take one tiny cautious step into this minefield of a topic by looking at one narrative about the philosophical background leading to the Reformation and a helpful revisionism that this narrative has recently undergone.
As much disagreement as there is around interpreting the Protestant Reformation, it seems that most (who bother taking a position at all) see the Reformation as one of the great hinges by which Europe swung from a medieval to a modern culture.
Of course, for some, the swing from medieval to modern can be summed up by the motto of Calvin’s Geneva: Post Tenebras Lux (“After the darkness, light”). For many Catholics, on the other hand, the transition was fraught with tragic distortions that still plague western culture. I basically endorse this latter view, but wish, as the objective of this reflection, to throw in a word of caution regarding the interpretation of the philosophical background to this transition.
There is a view of the history of philosophy leading up to the Reformation that runs something like this: From 1252-1274, Thomas Aquinas completed a nearly perfect synthesis of Aristotle, Augustine, and Perennial Catholic truth. Unfortunately, Thomas’s contemporaries and successors fell away from his pure doctrine. The likes of John Duns Scotus then began messing with dangerous ideas like voluntarism and univocity of being, until finally, William of Ockham jumped off the deep end and planted the seeds of modernity with his nominalism. With this philosophical corruption in place (along with significant political corruption), the stage was set for Luther & Co. to get to work. If only Luther had read more Aquinas this whole mess could have been averted.1
Due to considerations of space, I have set up a caricature that is little better than a straw man. Nevertheless, there has undoubtedly been a strand of interpretation that has engaged in what can be called “blaming the Franciscans” (meaning Scotus and Ockham).2 Reconsiderations of this kind of narrative have revealed that, ironically, the narrative’s roots lie in 16th century Protestant historians of philosophy. I would argue that Catholics who perpetuate the narrative shoot their own tradition in the foot.
Trent Pomplun has traced the origins of this kind of narrative in great detail, though he did so only in the interest of understanding the historical development of interpreting Duns Scotus.3 According to Pomplun, it was the French Calvinist Lambert Daneau who, in the 16th Century, first divided the philosophy of the Middle Ages into three periods. Of course, Daneau’s narrative does not reflect my caricature above in every detail. Most importantly, for example, he does not view Aquinas in a very favorable light. Nevertheless, Daneau is one of the first to articulate a view of philosophy in the Middle Ages in which Aquinas is viewed as the central figure and Scotus and Ockham are characterized primarily by their degree of opposition to Aquinas. Daneau then concludes his summary of the third period, in which Ockham figures significantly, by the observation that it was from all this that Luther began to turn as well as those who came after and preached the true gospel.4
Pomplun then traces the complex evolution of this narrative down the centuries (mostly through Lutheran Universities) until, in the 20th Century, he says, a version of this narrative (one very close to my caricature above) came to be widely attributed to the great Étienne Gilson.5 Pomplun forcefully contests the attribution of such a narrative to Gilson, even while conceding that Gilson did not wholly escape the influence of the Protestant historians.
Of course, just because this narrative has its roots in Protestant historians doesn’t mean it’s wrong. However, a few brief considerations may help to show how dramatically oversimplified the narrative is.
First, Scotus and Ockham only rarely directed their arguments against Aquinas. Scotus was usually concerned with responding to the Augustinian Henry of Ghent, while Ockham was often concerned with responding to Scotus, a fellow Franciscan.6
Second, some of the issues that caused later philosophers to adopt positions that differ from Aquinas’s are issues that Aquinas doesn’t address, either because the question wasn’t raised at all during his career or did not particularly interest him. An extreme question to illustrate the point: is it strictly correct to say that anyone’s philosophical approach to AI differs from that taken by Aquinas?
Finally, the “dangerous” ideas introduced by Scotus and Ockham are often less of a radical departure and always more nuanced than they are portrayed to be in the inherited narrative. Scotus’s rejection of Analogy, for example, is now usually admitted to be only a rejection of semantic, and not metaphysical analogy.7
When Catholics accept the inherited narrative, therefore, they often end up demonizing or “scapegoating” philosophers who fall squarely within the Catholic intellectual tradition. Such a move can only hurt philosophy as a perennial undertaking and history as a reliable discipline. Fortunately, the narrative has already shifted significantly. Gifted philosophers have gradually changed their tone on thinkers like Scotus and Ockham. Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, has shifted from “blaming the Franciscans” to recently advancing a view of Scotus and Ockham as incredibly important thinkers within the Catholic philosophical tradition (this is not at all the same thing as agreeing with them).8 It is my goal merely to nudge the revisionism along.
I have not helped much in explaining the origins of the Protestant Reformation, but hopefully I have at least pointed out the need for a more sophisticated account of the intellectual background than an inherited caricature.