![]() Unfortunately, according to Pinckaers, the result was not genuine renewal but Ockham Lite. This was the kind of ossified moral theology that Vatican II urged theologians to renovate and renew. A philosophical distortion, in turn, misshaped sacramental life: the confessional became a legal tribunal and the confessor a judge. Ockham’s morality is a morality of rules, and it led over time to a nit-picking casuistry in which “How far can I go?” replaced the Gospel question, “What must I do to have eternal life?” as the crucial question for Christian morality. Grace, prayer, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the beatitudes, and happiness: in Ockham’s moral theory, these all drop by the wayside and the moral life is reduced to a battle of wills. The crucial moral question becomes, “How far can I go before I run into an obligation being imposed by that stronger will?” God’s will is stronger, and the meeting-point between our two wills is moral obligation. So in Ockham’s system, technically known as “nominalism,” morality is a struggle between two wills: my will and God’s will. The Ten Commandments were purely arbitrary edicts (rather than moral reflections of the structure of created reality), and God could change them if He so desired. This was as true of God’s will as it was of ours. How did Ockham get it wrong, and what does that have to do with us?Īccording to Father Pinckaers, Ockham changed the Catholic understanding of the will, teaching that it was a free-floating capacity capable of moving in any direction. Or so argues Servais Pinckaers, O.P., a Belgian Dominican, in one of the best books I’ve read in years: The Sources of Christian Ethics (Catholic University of America Press). And his baneful influence continues to mis-shape Catholic thinking about the moral life today. William of Ockham is much with us in another way, however: he is the chief influence on the decline of Catholic moral theology since the Middle Ages. (My friend and colleague Michael Uhlmann, who has considerable experience in the trenches of Washington’s political, legal, and bureaucratic wars, has devised a parallel principle, “Uhlmann’s razor,” which stipulates that “If stupidity is a sufficient explanation, you need not look for another.” But that is for another day and another column.) It’s a principle that makes a lot of sense, even if philosophers have honored it more in the breach than in the observance in the six centuries since Friar William enunciated it. “Ockham’s razor” is a philosophical principle of economy which holds that, in analyzing any complex problem, the simplest explanation is always to be preferred. Everybody knows and uses “Ockham’s razor” even if they’ve never heard of William of Ockham, the 14 th century Franciscan philosopher.
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