Takashi Shogimen. Ockham and Political Discourse in Late Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 301 pp. $99.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-84581-6.

Reviewed by Volker Leppin (Faculty of Theology, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)
Published on H-German (April, 2008)

A False Dilemma?

William of Ockham transcends the boundaries of modern scholarship. Historians, political scientists, philosophers, and theologians have good reason to be interested in this late medieval thinker, who had at least two important phases in his life. First, he taught as a theologian and a philosopher at Oxford and London; then, after having been accused of heresy at the papal court at Avignon, he went to Munich to support Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria in his fight against Pope John XXII.

The later period of his life and oeuvre stands in the midst of Takashi Shogimen's study. Shogimen's main idea is to show how in the polemical context, Ockham countered strictly theological arguments with arguments more based in canon law. This stance permits Shogimen to provide a fresh look at some well-known debates. He contrasts Ockham's theological arguments with the canon law approach of his counterparts; this contrast, however, may be too sharply drawn. Indeed, Ockham was compelled to read and use canon law literature when he was accused for heresy, so this vein of thinking was at least initially foreign to Ockham. By looking at his later oeuvre--especially his ecclesiology, which derived from canon law discussions--one can also see the constructive power of legal thinking.

The questionable quality of the basic argument move notwithstanding, opposing theology and canon law does give Shogimen the opportunity to re-examine different topics and debates in Ockham's political writings. In chapter 1, he discusses Ockham's position on the poverty debate. Shogimen shows that Ockham distinguishes theological and legal uses of words, but downplays the differentiations in Ockham's semantic distinctions. Shogimen succinctly reconstructs Ockham's interpretation of dominium pertaining to salvation history, which was mainly based in Genesis 1 where, as Ockham states, property is not established in the same sense as it is used by mankind after the expulsion from Eden. This later meaning of property was established later by human will and reason.

The second chapter deals with the question of heresy and heretics, where the author's approach again reveals the strained quality of Shogimen's too-strong distinction between theology and canon law. In it, Shogimen argues that Ockham relates heresy mainly to the sources of Christian faith, as scripture, tradition, and special revelation, and considers discussion about faith a necessary aspect of defining who is a heretic. While it is correct that Ockham stresses these substantial points rather than the results of heresy trials, his own trial at Avignon demonstrates that his ideas were not far from the canon law argumentation of the time. Indeed, the reason the trial took so long was because theologians had to examine the ideas in his work very carefully in order to condemn him. Because it took them four years to accomplish this task, Ockham was not condemned for heretical doctrine, but rather for fleeing from Avignon to Munich.

This flight was caused by the insight Ockham developed into the teaching of John XXII on religious poverty. The pope argued against the Franciscan teaching that Jesus and his apostles had no possessions. For Ockham, this exposed the pope as a heretic. Shogimen addresses the matter of the pope's heresy in chapter 3. Here, Ockham argues in terms of cognition rather than institution, leading to a discussion of the problem of how to assess the conflict between a pope's assertion and a bull of an earlier pope--as shown by John XXII's contradiction of Nicholas III and his bull Exiit qui seminat (1279). Ockham argues that if John was correct and Nicholas wrong, then Nicholas could not have been a legitimate pope. In turn, his illegitimacy meant that Nicholas's chosen cardinals were also illegitimate, as would be every later pope elected by these cardinals. Therefore, John XXII was made illegitimate by his own wrong doctrine, or, even if the doctrine were right, by its contradiction to the pronouncements of an earlier pope. Arguments like this demonstrate, in contrast to Shogimen's position, that Ockham was arguing in both canonical and theological terms. This point is also addressed in the fourth chapter on papal plenitude of power. While Shogimen is correct in stressing Ockham's use of the concept of the Gospel as the law of freedom, elements of legal thinking are also present in this argument, especially if one looks at the context of the debate concerning the pope's claim to the power to invest the emperor and his refusal to perform this task for Ludwig of Bavaria.

Shogimen's most original chapter is the fifth one, on Petrine primacy, because he shows that Ockham negotiates a stance that oscillates between a totally papalist position and radical anti-papal ones, like that of Marsilius of Padua. On the one hand, Ockham stresses the contingency of Petrine and papal primacy but on the other hand, he does not find papal power totally irrational. In general--and despite the degenerate condition of the period's papacy--Ockham argues for the rationality of the primate. The book concludes with a chapter on the position of secular powers. Shogimen argues that this question was not directly relevant to Ockham but instead derives from his discussion of heresy, which led to a crisis in a church in which lay people had to assume responsibility for Christianity in its entirety. Nevertheless, it would have been useful for this argument to be placed into Ockham's larger biographical context. Ockham was closely connected to an imperial court in Munich and tied to the interests of Ludwig of Bavaria. If one wants to understand Ockham as a polemicist rather than a philosopher on this topic, then Shogimen needed to stress more rigorously what Ockham actually did in this regard.

The whole book would have been more convincing if the clear and decisive line of argumentation was more intensively connected with other aspects of Ockham's life, such as the historical context of his political experience and the broader intellectual and institutional context of Ockham's theory and conceptualization. Despite its detachment from these themes, however, it is convincing in terms of its own goals. Shogimen demonstrates the broad theological discussion of themes in Ockham's writing and that of his predecessors and contemporaries. In particular, debates about Franciscan ideas are presented in a learned manner in the course of Shogimen's demonstration of Ockham's theological background. This theme deserves to be addressed more fully in further Ockham research, in which it should be placed in the proper context and relation to the work of the Venerabilis Inceptor.

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Citation: Volker Leppin. Review of Shogimen, Takashi, Ockham and Political Discourse in Late Middle Ages. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14442

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