A History of Philosophy, Vol. III: Ockham to Suárez

Summary

Frederick Copleston published Ockham to Suárez in 1953 as the third volume of his History of Philosophy, carrying the story from the death of Duns Scotus in 1308 to the generation of Francisco Suárez, who died in 1617. The Continuum reissue of 2003 renamed it Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy. The period it covers had often been treated as a dull interval between Aquinas and Descartes; Copleston argues instead that it was the workshop in which the tools of early modern thought were forged, though he does not hide his judgment that much of the forging was done by taking the medieval synthesis apart. The first part concentrates on the fourteenth century. Copleston prepares the ground with Durandus and Peter Aureoli, Dominican and Franciscan critics of the older schools, and then gives William of Ockham a long sequence of chapters: his life and quarrel with Pope John XXII, his terminist logic and denial of real universals, his account of intuitive knowledge, his natural theology and ethics, and his political polemics. The thread Copleston keeps in view is Ockham's stress on divine omnipotence and freedom, which in his reading tends to make the moral law depend on God's will and to narrow what unaided reason can prove about God. He then follows the movement Ockham set going: the sceptical arguments of Nicholas of Autrecourt and John of Mirecourt about causality and substance, the impetus physics of John Buridan and the mathematical work of Nicole Oresme at Paris, the secular political theory of Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis, and the speculative mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck and Gerson. The second part turns to the Renaissance. Copleston treats the Florentine Platonists, the quarrels among Aristotelians at Padua, and Nicholas of Cusa, whose learned ignorance and coincidence of opposites he presents as a bridge between medieval and modern habits of mind. Philosophers of nature such as Telesio, Campanella and Giordano Bruno, the theosophy of Jakob Böhme, the astronomy and mechanics culminating in Galileo, and Francis Bacon's program for an inductive science follow. A chapter on political philosophy sets Machiavelli beside Thomas More and carries the subject toward Bodin, Hooker and Grotius. The third part describes the revival of scholasticism in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy, including Cajetan, Francisco de Vitoria on the law of nations, and the controversies over grace and freedom, and closes with two chapters on Suárez's Disputationes Metaphysicae and his treatise on law. Copleston argues that this second scholasticism was more than a rearguard action: Suárez's metaphysics was studied in Protestant as well as Catholic universities, and his account of political authority as given by God through the community entered early modern debate. For students, the volume is most useful one chapter at a time, read beside the primary texts of More, Machiavelli, Bacon and Vitoria already in this library. It records where Copleston, writing as a Jesuit and a Thomist, thinks a line of argument went astray, and those judgments are clearly separable from the exposition that precedes them.

Plot or Argument

• Prelude to the via moderna: Durandus and Aureoli

  Copleston opens with two early fourteenth-century critics who had already questioned parts of the Thomist and Scotist inheritance, so that Ockham appears as the sharpest voice in a wider movement rather than a lone innovator.

• William of Ockham at length

  Several chapters set out Ockham's life and conflict with the Avignon papacy, his logic of terms and supposition, his rejection of real common natures, intuitive and abstractive cognition, the limits of demonstrative natural theology, an ethics grounded in the divine will, and his political writings against papal plenitude of power.

• After Ockham: sceptics, Paris physics and Marsilius

  Nicholas of Autrecourt's doubts about inferring one thing from another, Buridan's impetus and Oresme's mathematics, and the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua, which Copleston treats as a theory of the state with little room for the Church as a juridical society.

• The Rhineland and Low Countries mystics

  Eckhart's daring language about the Godhead and the ground of the soul, with Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck and Gerson, read as a reaction toward experience of God when speculative theology seemed to be fragmenting.

• Revivals of Plato and Aristotle; Nicholas of Cusa

  The Florentine Academy, the Paduan debates over the soul's immortality, and Cusa's De docta ignorantia with its doctrine that the infinite God exceeds every finite measure and unites opposites.

• Nature, science and Bacon

  Renaissance philosophies of nature from Telesio to Bruno and Böhme, the scientific work leading to Galileo, and Bacon's critique of the idols and plan for induction, which Copleston weighs as prophecy of method more than a working logic of discovery.

• Rulers, commonwealths and law

  Machiavelli's separation of political technique from moral theology, More's imagined commonwealth, and the theorists of sovereignty and natural law who followed.

• Second scholasticism and Suárez

  The Spanish and Italian revival, Vitoria on the rights of peoples, the grace-and-freedom controversy, and Suárez's systematic metaphysics and his teaching that political power comes from God through the consent of the community.

Characters

• Frederick Copleston, author

  Jesuit historian who narrates the breakup of the medieval synthesis while reserving his own Thomist verdicts for marked passages.

• William of Ockham, subject

  English Franciscan whose terminist logic and stress on divine freedom set the agenda for the century.

• Nicholas of Autrecourt, subject

  Paris master whose doubts about causal inference Copleston compares, with caution, to Hume's.

• Marsilius of Padua, subject

  Author of the Defensor Pacis, defender of imperial against papal authority.

• Meister Eckhart, subject

  Dominican preacher of the ground of the soul, some of whose propositions were condemned in 1329.

• Nicholas of Cusa, subject

  Cardinal and author of On Learned Ignorance.

• Francis Bacon, subject

  English statesman who called for a new inductive method in the sciences.

• Niccolò Machiavelli, subject

  Florentine secretary whose Prince Copleston reads as political technique cut loose from moral theology.

• Francisco Suárez, subject

  Spanish Jesuit whose Disputationes Metaphysicae closes the volume and the medieval story.

Lessons

• What follows from God's absolute power?

  Ockham distinguished what God can do absolutely from what he has ordained. Copleston shows how this distinction, meant to protect divine freedom, also loosened the link between the world's order and what reason can prove. Students can see how a theological emphasis shapes a whole philosophy.

  • Why did Ockham think stressing God's freedom was a religious duty?
  • If the moral law rests only on God's command, could God have commanded otherwise?
  • How does Aquinas's view of law in the Summa answer that worry?

• Names, natures and the razor

  Ockham denied that there are real common natures shared by individuals; universals are signs that stand for many things. Copleston expounds the logic carefully before asking what becomes of natural kinds and natural law if only individuals exist.

  • What is the difference between saying 'humanity' is a name and saying it is a nature?
  • Does economy in explanation always bring us closer to the truth?

• Mystics in a fragmenting age

  Copleston places Eckhart, Tauler and Ruysbroeck beside the logicians to show that the fourteenth century also sought God through prayer and detachment. He separates their devotional aim from the bold phrases that drew censure.

  • Why might believers turn inward when the schools quarrel?
  • What safeguards did Gerson think mystical language needed?

• Statecraft and the commonwealth

  Machiavelli and More wrote within a few years of each other. Copleston's chapter lets students compare a manual for holding power with an imagined commonwealth that judges European custom, and then see how Suárez and Vitoria grounded authority in law.

  • Is Machiavelli describing politics or recommending it?
  • Why does More put his criticisms in the mouth of a traveller?
  • What does Suárez mean by saying authority comes from God through the people?

Context

By the mid-twentieth century historians such as Pierre Duhem, Étienne Gilson and Anneliese Maier had reopened the fourteenth century, showing that Paris and Oxford masters anticipated parts of later mechanics and that late scholasticism was not merely decadent. Copleston wrote within that rediscovery, while older narratives still treated the Renaissance as a clean break from the medieval world.

Composition

Copleston wrote the volume while teaching the history of philosophy at Heythrop College, and it appeared in 1953, three years after Augustine to Scotus. Image Books later issued it in two paperback parts, and Continuum reissued it whole in 2003 under the title Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy.

Reception

Seminary and university students used the volume for decades as their first orderly map of an untidy period. Specialists have since revised parts of its picture, especially the reading of Ockham as a corrosive figure and the relative brevity of its treatment of Renaissance humanism, but its exposition of Ockham's logic and of Suárez is still often recommended.

Comparisons

• Summa Theologica

  Copleston measures Ockham's voluntarist ethics and limited natural theology against the Thomist account of law and the five ways.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Augustine to Scotus

  Volume II ends with Scotus; this volume opens where its successor-critics begin, so the two should be read in sequence.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. IV: Descartes to Leibniz

  Volume IV picks up the rationalists who studied in schools shaped by the Suárezian metaphysics described here.

• The Prince

  The political chapter treats Machiavelli's handbook as an account of means detached from the ends medieval theory assigned to rulers.

• Utopia

  More's dialogue appears in the same chapter as Machiavelli, a humanist's ideal commonwealth set against a practitioner's realism.

• Novum Organum

  Copleston's Bacon chapter expounds the idols and the tables of induction from this work and asks how far they could guide actual discovery.

• On the American Indians (De Indis)

  Vitoria's lectures on the Indies are the primary source behind Copleston's account of the Salamanca school and the law of nations.

• Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (Second to Fourth Days)

  The Renaissance science chapter ends with Galileo; his mechanics can be read against the Paris impetus theory Copleston describes in Part I.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How Ockham's distinction between God's absolute and ordained power reappears in his logic, ethics and politics.
• Where Copleston praises the Paris physicists for anticipating later mechanics, and where he holds back.
• Why Cusa is presented as standing with one foot in each age.
• How Suárez joins metaphysics to a theory of law and consent.

Key terms and names

Via moderna

The 'modern way' of Ockham and his followers in the fourteenth-century schools, set against the older realism of Aquinas and Scotus.

Supposition

In terminist logic, the way a term stands for things in a proposition, the tool Ockham used to explain universals without common natures.

Potentia absoluta / ordinata

God's power considered as unlimited except by contradiction, versus the order God has actually chosen to establish.

Impetus

Buridan's name for a quality impressed on a moving body that keeps it moving, an alternative to Aristotle's account of projectile motion.

Coincidence of opposites

Cusa's teaching that in the infinite God the distinctions that divide finite things, such as greatest and least, coincide.

Ius gentium

The law of nations, which Vitoria and Suárez treated as binding among peoples and grounded in natural law and custom.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What reasons does Copleston give for calling Ockham's influence on the fourteenth century critical rather than constructive?
2. Comprehension How did Marsilius of Padua divide authority between the ruler and the clergy in the Defensor Pacis?
3. Interpretation Why might a denial of common natures make it harder to argue from human nature to a natural law?
4. Interpretation In what sense does Copleston treat Cusa as a transitional thinker?
5. Interpretation Why did Suárez's metaphysics find readers in Lutheran universities?
6. Big Question Can a thinker who sincerely intends to defend God's freedom weaken confidence in what reason can know about God?
7. Big Question When a long-settled framework of thought breaks up, is the better response critique, mysticism, or patient restatement?

Faith Connections

• Romans 1:20 (Scripture)

  Paul's claim that God's invisible attributes are seen through created things is the text at stake when Ockham narrows what reason can demonstrate about God.

• Romans 13:1 (Scripture)

  Suárez's account of political power as coming from God through the community is one long reading of Paul's teaching that every authority is from God.

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 90-94 (Great Conversation)

  The Treatise on Law is the standard against which Copleston weighs Ockham's ethics and Suárez's De Legibus.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Copleston argues that between Ockham and Suárez the medieval union of theology, metaphysics and natural philosophy came apart: Ockham's logic and voluntarism narrowed natural theology, the mystics and humanists sought God and wisdom by other routes, the new science claimed its own method, and political theory moved toward the sovereign state; yet the Spanish revival under Suárez restated the scholastic heritage in a form that early modern philosophers still had to answer.

Rhetorical device: bridge-figure framing. Copleston presents Nicholas of Cusa as a figure who looks back to the Neoplatonic mystics and forward to the infinite universe of later cosmology, using one thinker to make the period's transition visible.

Debate: Resolved: Ockham's stress on divine freedom did more to protect Christian belief than to weaken Christian philosophy.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using Copleston's chapters on Ockham and on Suárez, explain how each grounds moral obligation, and argue which account better explains why an unjust law fails to bind.

Comparison with Utopia: Read Book II of Utopia beside Copleston's pages on More and Machiavelli, and argue whether More's island is meant as a model, a satire, or a mirror held up to Christian Europe.

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Stage a disputation in a Paris lecture hall around 1340 between a follower of Ockham and a Thomist on whether 'man' names a real nature, with each side allowed to restate the other's view before replying.

• Classroom

  Divide the class among Machiavelli, More, Vitoria and Suárez; each group reads Copleston's pages on its thinker and one primary passage, then answers the question 'Where does a ruler's authority come from?' in its thinker's voice.

• Essay

  Copleston calls the fourteenth century critical rather than constructive. Using his chapters on Ockham and Autrecourt, argue whether criticism of this kind served or damaged later Christian philosophy.

• Fiction

  Write a short scene in which Nicholas of Cusa, travelling by sea from Constantinople in 1437, first grasps the idea of learned ignorance, drawing on Copleston's account of the doctrine rather than inventing new philosophy.

Further Reading

• Summa Logicae (Part I trans. as Ockham's Theory of Terms), William of Ockham

• On Learned Ignorance, Nicholas of Cusa

• Utopia, Thomas More

• Novum Organum, Francis Bacon

• The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, Étienne Gilson

• A History of Medieval Philosophy, Frederick Copleston