Medieval Religion and Thought175Scotus never saw himself as an opponent of
Aquinas. He did not question the usefulness of reason
in illuminating faith. That task was left to another
Franciscan, William of Ockham (c. 1285–c. 1349).
Ockham carried the ideas of Scotus a step further and
declared that only individuals are real and that the ob-
ject of the senses and of the intellect are the same.
Universals are no more than mental patterns created
by recurring similarities of experience. Although a
subtle difference, it meant that God was unknowable,
at least to the intellect.
Ockham was a Spiritual Franciscan who opposed
the papacy after the condemnation of 1322. He was
not a heretic. When his conclusions were questioned,
he insisted that the doctrines of the church must be ac-
cepted in their entirety as revealed truth. His followers,
known as nominalists because they supposedly believed
that universals were only nomina,or names, became one
of the three dominant philosophical schools of the later
Middle Ages and by the fifteenth century were a major-
ity on most university faculties. Some, such as Nicholas
of Autrecourt (fl. 1340), went further than their master
and declared that not even the existence of the material
world could be demonstrated by rational means. Each
person knows only his or her own soul. Though
Thomism and Scotism continued to attract adherents,
the Ockhamist critique of reason was highly corrosive.
It presumed a dichotomy with faith that made formal
thought virtually irrelevant. When such views became
widespread, the creative age of scholasticism was over.