ments of Neoplatonism, in the form of a purified mysticism. On this front the
fame went to the Dominican Eckhart.
The Breakup of Theological Philosophy
William of Ockham personifies the field of Christian philosophy-cum-theology
coming apart. Although he came from within the Franciscans,^12 Ockham
lumped Duns Scotus with his predecessors and antagonists—Aquinas, Bona-
venture, and all the rest—into what became known as the “via antiqua.”
Ockham by contrast exemplifies the “via moderna.” The Franciscans, the
biggest and strongest order, could afford the most internal diversity.
There were numerous other creative positions at the turn of the century,
working out the metaphysics of essence and existence, act and form, composite
and unity: Thomas Sutton, Giles of Rome, Godfrey of Fontaines, Giles of
Orleans, Hervé Nedellec, Dietrich of Freiberg, Peter John Olivi, Richard of
Middleton, and Raymond Lull before the turn of the century; Durand of St.
Pourçain, Peter Aureoli, Henry Harclay, Walter Chatton, and Eckhart shortly
after. Most fall into the shadows beside Scotus and Ockham. There were too
many creative positions for all of them to become recognized, and they
squeezed one another out of the possibilities for propagating their ideas. They
all worked on the same intellectual space; all had grand visions of God, Ideas,
angels, forms, souls, material things, the nature of knowledge and the modes
of being. They resemble the generation of 400–365 b.c.e. in Greece, with its
superabundant energy forming new schools, most of which were fated not to
survive. At Paris, little attention was given to the weird character Raymond
Lull, a kind of wandering showman with his “Great Art,” a grid of boxes
generated by combining items from a list of fundamental elements of the
universe. In its combinations all things of heaven and earth are contained. This
was both a universal metaphysics and a grand mnemonic device for dealing
with intellectual chaos. A self-educated nobleman from Majorca on the fringes
of the action in Muslim Spain, Lull came from too far away at the periphery
to have more than an outsider’s sense of the intellectual world, and his device
was ignored, though later revived in the Renaissance. In relation to the over-
crowding of the medieval attention space, Lull’s “Art” is emblematic of the
actual social condition.
Ockham, the most successful of the critics, worked a strategic synthesis
between the anti-religious critics of theology and the extremists of the opposite
end, the anti-philosophical fideist theologians. He almost explicitly aimed, by
eliminating superfluous metaphysical entities, to simplify what had become an
extremely complicated intellectual field. Ockham’s so-called “razor” was not
original to him. In the previous generation a fellow Franciscan, Peter John
Academic Expansion: Medieval Christendom^ •^485