An excellent essay, especially noting the impact of nominalism on how the Reformation changed our view God.
A Nominalist Note
In philosophy we have a series of idealized positions and arguments about which we argue like nominalism, realism, idealism, materialism and so on. This is both good and bad. It is bad because the use of such categories often distorts the complexity of individual thinkers. Historical positions aren't pure examples of idealized conceptual stances. A rationalist may have empirical elements in his thought and vice versa. One person’s realism or nominalism may be more radical than another’s and a philosopher, who after all is not an all knowing machine, may build doubts and hesitations into his position. He may even have unresolved contradictions. He may even have contradictions he does not WANT to resolve as (after all) what is a contradiction but an unfinished thought? That said it is sometimes necessary to paint in broader strokes as all analysis can’t be carried out at the individual level. This is as much as to say that in history there are broad movements that cohere over time and maintain a certain shape however much the individual instances may vary or mix promiscuously with other currents. This is a tangle that can be frustrating to unwind but such, alas, is history which does not have the rigor and clarity of discursive thought. Something I have mentioned a few times on this blog is nominalism. Nominalism in my mind is something as dangerous as it is essential. By essential I mean it is part of the development of the concept of freedom in Western Europe. Nominalism is not a ‘mistake’ in the historical sense (I don’t really believe in mistakes in that sense). At the same time a fixation on the nominalist viewpoint produces positions that strike me as ambivalent at best or wrong at worst. This, alas, is both the greatness and the danger of an idea.
Nominalism is a position about universals and a position about will. This may be by logical entailment or by historical association it does not matter at this point. According to the nominalist (in the conceptual sense) there are no forms or universals only particular things and events. Divine intellect is not concrete in nature as the ideas. Therefore reason does not reveal or measure God even by the basic notions of the true and the good. Therefore, ad nos, God is pure power. The more accustomed people are to this notion, of course, the more they drop the ad nos qualification so that God simply becomes power: sheer, immediate unmitigated will. This has a number of outcomes across a broad range of cultural phenomena. One of these is the Protestant Reformation. Though Luther and Calvin may or may not have been ‘pure’ nominalists in the conceptual sense (history does not care about that) they are none the less part of an intellectual world shaped by it. From this we get not so much a series of positions but a set of dangers: stances that could harden into over determinate positions. Here are the ‘strong versions’ of these positions though there may be any number of ‘weak’ versions. This 'nominalist world' does not assume the analogia entis between God and creatures. Divine intellect is not the prism through which nature is seen nor is nature, in any sense, seen through the divine ideas or forms. The relation of the soul to God is then direct as in the reformed doctrine of justification. This relation is one of direct dependence to which the human qua human does not contribute. There is no ‘human nature’ to develop or perfect through grace but the immediate fact of election or damnation. Also, scripture is now directly positive revelation that is not mediated by philosophical tradition or anagogical ascent. The Bible is now, if you like, a worldly object to whose authority the Christian submits in a direct way exclusive of tradition or human mediation (Luther, to his eternal credit, actually insists that the word of God is not the positive text of scripture but the Divine word itself!). Morality, too, is no longer grounded in the natural law or reason but is a matter of divine commands positively revealed in scripture. From this we get what I think IS an atrocity; divine command ethics! In contradiction to what is given in Plato we are now told, not that the gods will what is good because it is good but that what is good is good because the Gods will it. Calvin sometimes takes this view though he shrinks from it elsewhere.[1] It became prominent enough subsequent to Calvin that people like Hooker and Cudworth (and indeed Leibniz) had to issue pointed critiques of it. At any rate so successful was this shift that you will scarcely find an ‘atheist’ today who does not assume that Christian ethics is divine command ethics which, of course, he has ‘destroyed’! Still, we have in the reformation people moving towards positions of this type as we have people, like Melancthon, who move away from them.
The second aspect of this nominalist mood, if I may call it that, manifests in scientific and philosophical culture both of which, in early modern times, were intimately connected to theology. If, now, the divine thought is not immanent in nature as the ideas, then final causes are not explanatory principles. Both Descartes and Malebranche explicitly tell us this. Final causes are in the hidden wisdom of God and not mediated rationally. Naturally, as these cease to be relevant to concrete investigation, they become increasingly ignored. We move, again, from final causes being hidden to us to there simply being no final causes. The object of finite knowledge is empirical regularities ordered mathematically under the conception not of telos but of law. This allows a shift toward quantitative precision and away from qualitative sensation as in the old classification of the elements as cold, hot, wet and dry. This produces the world as mathesis, which, Heidegger informs us, involves both number and recollection. The modern subject pulls out of its own recollection the mathematical form of nature now liberated from divine reason and ready to hand as a simple empirical object, a set of atomic facts, subject to prediction and control.
This simple potted history, which let me add, does no justice to the complexity of any historical figure (is Descartes a nominalist? Is Malebranche?), gives us a rough idea of the major fault line in European culture on the relation of will and thinking to natural and divine order. One side of this fault line is clearly revealed in Hobbes. Hobbes believes general terms are simply names. He therefore believes that being equals body and that body consists of corpuscules arranged by the direct legislation of a corporeal God. This translates into politics as royal absolutism for the Leviathan is not subject to any law but that of his own will. Both God and the sovereign are law givers in the sense that all effects in nature and all positive injunctions of divine law (whether natural or scriptural) are simply positive injunctions of will (which, in protestant fashion, focus heavily on notions of covenant!). This produces the world as determinate fact rather than intelligible form. It also produces scripture as positive and purely propositional. Now, my bias, alas, falls on the other side of this fault line. STILL, and I can’t emphasize this enough, this short piece is NOT a polemic. The relationship of reason and will, of logos and spirit was vexing then and is vexing now. It is vexing to me personally. What is more, the difficulty of the question is amplified when we acknowledge the ‘nominalist’ moments in ancient Platonism (where the one is in fact pure productive power though what it produces first is pure mind) and the realist hesitations in figures like Calvin. Plus, who has fully sorted out the tangle of reason and will, justice and power that is Augustine? Augustine does all in his power to subordinate will to reason and justice yet still ends up with double predestination and the damnation of infants! History constitutes this boundary but also, as history does, consistently blurs and even erases it.
[1] As more than one person has insisted to me that, after all, there is not a trace of nominalism in Calvin who is either just ‘mere Christianity’ or ‘simply an Augustinian’ here is a scholarly account of what is and is not nominalist about Calvin and where his doubts and hesitations lay (https://robinmarkphillips.com/calvin-nominalist-part-3-voluntarism-nominalism-theology-calvin-2/). Here is a corresponding piece on Luther (https://www.calledtocommunion.com/2014/01/post-tenebras-lux/). The problem, as one would expect, is how strict a definition of nominalism one wishes to employ: I assume for the sake of thick historical description that one wants something looser than a strict dictionary definition though others may differ. The question, as is the case with literally ANY historical figure, is what aspect of these thinkers you want to emphasize. Both these thinkers tried to elevate the transcendence and sovereignty of God over and against what they saw as an overly naturalized grace and a crude doctrine of works. The ‘plausibility structure’ of nominalist thought was one ready framework for doing that. That said, Luther and Calvin’s aims were spiritual not philosophical. If their emphasis on the mystery of divine freedom threatened to evacuate nature of any and all significance (and ultimately reduce it to an object of simple exploitation) then we do not need to attribute this to them as a ‘fault’ or even a ‘mistake’. Certainly we do not need to attribute it to them as an intent! This is why I am NOT a polemicist.
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