William Occam (1295-1346)

The date is July 5th, 1983. Okay. This is the fifth lecture in a series of lecture by Roger Ware on the mystic century. Tonight's lectures entitled William of Ockham who left 1295, 1346. The end of scholasticism in the logic of via negativa.
The man tonight is a case in point in history, he has an absolutely indispensable connection linking us from the medieval to the modern world. And yet, if you consult books in print or bibliographies and any major university, there are very few books on our man tonight. William of Ockham, the reason for this is that his penetration of insight was so profound that it endangered the entire structure of the Western church. And he single handedly was the representative from the era that we are dealing with the 14th century who provided the intellectual fire power for the core of the reformation. Martin Luther refers to him, uh, many times as the theological logic because he was the man who figured out, thought out, had time to differentiate in his mind and in his expression, why it was that the Scholastic arguments of his day were totally ineffective in terms of religion.
And also at the same time, an absolute sham as far as logical form was concerned. So we have tonight a very important individual. One who still suffers the black list of the centuries outcomes claim to fame is a phrase which was used many times during the centuries in particular, during the late 19th century and English universities, the phrase was [inaudible] razor outcomes raiser, and the principle behind Ockham's razor is it's not so much to cut everything down to the simplest, such as would it be the case in a law of simple, Persimmony reducing everything to the essential, and it's not quite the same as is it, it is frequently stated as a law economy that we must not, uh, uh, waste terms. We must not waste concepts. The proper statement of [inaudible] razor is that truthfulness necessarily limits they false multiplication of terms.
And it's metaphysical corollary that true profound religious experience of God does away with all of the multiplication of half gods or quarter gods or three quarter cons that there are, that there is only one experience which has two turn, which can be given it. And the two terms are in Latin ends, E N S in Greek, Oh, U S I a and English B. And the other term is in Latin Unum and English one, but God is, and is one. And that, that is all that can be logic basically said about God that there is no way to proliferate or to expand upon those two primary designations. That in fact, there is only an intellectual gaming going on in the human mind that by manipulating things, and by manipulating terms, we suppose to build a structure of argument enlarging, our sense of knowledge, OCHEM pointed out with penetrating devastation that all of this is foolishness, that it holds absolutely no water, either logically or metaphysically.
And for this year he was excommunicated, right? Almost silenced except that William of Ockham set in motion, a well worn path that was to serve Western history well for the next four or 500 years. And when we get to his life, you can see now this Hakim's razor, then that entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity has within its formulation, folded up the implication that we must in our religious apprehension of the divine, be willing and able to dispense with all logical relations, that there are no connections, so necessary to the world of thought. So absolutely essential to the world of expression. There are no relations in the experience of God.
Thus, when we come to experience the divine, William of Ockham says that we only experienced God in terms of the identity of those so-called ideas in God, which are manifested in nature. In other words, it is we physically, who are the ideas in God that there is no metaphysical cloud. That is the mind of God. There is no universal level anywhere where such a paradoxical substratum or jet stream of divinity lays other than here that we are the manifestations observable investigat Bible in the mind of God, but that there is a peculiar paradox of the mind involved and understanding this OCHEM went further. He said pointedly and proved it in argument after argument that the Scholastic approach had in fact, led man away from God, almost diametrically. And he traced back to the very beginnings, although he was not so concerned with the origins of ideas as many of the other thinkers of his day, but he traced the root problem back to where it began. And that's with Aristotle and the, in which Aristotle was interpreted from classical antiquity and then through the Arabs, and then through the Latin [inaudible] and the, uh, Scholastic, uh, in the university of Paris on up to his time now it's peculiar.
And probably one of the oddest quirks in any world history that Aristotle in classical antiquity should have received an introduction from a man who was really not an Aristotelian, but was of the Neoplatonic school. That man's name was porphyry. So that when you come to obtain at any time after 300, a D Aristotle's logical works, they always had appended with them. And that's why it was safe. The introduction by porphyry called in Latin and Greek, also the ICIC go-get paraphrase introduction to Aristotle's logic gave a strange sort of twist, which when it was read out in succeeding civilizations, whether it was Arab or Latin or Byzantine, there were conundrums. That is impossible problems that came up on the fundamental levels of thought, producing the necessity for a mystical leap of unification in the most profound minds. So that we find those individuals in their respective civilizations, who really did come to terms with what they found like [inaudible] and the Arabic world, or like Roger bacon in the Christian world, we find those individuals creating enormous visions of unity and being which transcend.
And at the same time become imminent. The world of particulars, it always happened, but unfortunately, major mines are absolutely hard to come by and conditions which permit them to be heard are equally scarce. Human beings have always lived in times of OBS vacation. It comes with the planet, I guess. So that with William of Ockham, we find that he was put into a position of understanding by virtue of a first class lineage that had come his way for William of Ockham was a direct descendant of Roger bacon and a direct descendant of Robert Groza testy so that it was gross. A test day who was English. It was Roger bacon, who was English who set the stage for William of Ockham, who was born in Surrey, England about 1285 or 1290 around in there when he was born, Roger bacon was still alive. The legacy of a gross of testy was still viable in England.
Bacon had called Groza testy the major mind of his time. And I gave a lecture at the philosophic research society on Groza testy, but I want to give you one paragraph of the kind of refinement that grows a test his mind had and understand now that this would have been refined and developed even further by Bacon's long life. And then with William of [inaudible] genius, it was carried to incredible limits of penetration grows. A testy, wrote many commentaries and Aristotle. He was one of the few who in his day, the 11 nine days or so could read enough Greek to be able to pick up Aristotle himself and not have to read somebody's introduction to it. So he could read Aristotle himself. And of course, with his genius and penetration, when he read Aristotle, it occurred to him that the mind was not a static, single quality, but that it had all kinds of degrees, all stages of capacity, so that when it came to examining the logical books of Aristotle and they're collected together and they're called, they are organic, but in the organic, there are a number of books. There's the topics of Aristotle there's. Um, the, uh, sophistical lunchy, the prior analytics, the posterior analytics, the categories, um, de interpret toddy.
A number of books gathered together with the introduction by porphyry when cruise attest, he said, all this aside, all the commentaries and sat down, he wrote his own commentaries, which were then read by Roger bacon and by William Ivanka and his influence. I'm quite a quote, a few sentences from a book by a man named Stevenson written about 90 years ago on Groza testing, there's been nothing, much sense, just one good book and grows a, he sends his, uh, he has Groza testes influence was distinctly on the side of realism as against nominalism keep these terms in mind, just for a second realism as against nominalism. But it was a realism which differed widely from the crude system of thought with which William of CIM Paul had been identified and which ascribed to universal notions and objective reality, that is, there was a position of thought generally, which said that when you say father, it means that there is someone who is that father somewhere.
And when you say God, it means that there is someone somewhere in some way, who is that person that in nominalism the name of a universal quality predicated the existence of it in fact, somewhere was where was the problem, how to get there was another problem contrast to that was what was called realism. That words are simply words they're terms. And we have to have a sense based experience in order to assure ourselves that something is real. So they're talking here about realism, but in the eyes of Groza test day, universals have various stages of manifestation, pure thought, perceives them to be principles of being so that if one is capable of concentration, to the point where one could have pure thought, one could understand principles of big, they would occur to you in their existence as they are.
But there are very few who can attain to pure thought or few who always have pure thought. So thought, which falls short of the standard, regards them as merely principles of cogitation principles of mind. So that the mind when it is pure becomes transparent and is able to see through itself to the universe and perceive the universe as it is. But when it falls short of that, it falls short all the way back to a world of its own and perceives these as principles of its own mechanism of its own process so that they are simply principles of thought or structures of logic. But even that takes a certain amount of training and organization. So thought often falls even short of that and comes back. This is gross attesting. This was about 700 years ago. Thought that comes back. Then we think in a reconstructed way, remembering how we've experienced things and how we put things together in a reconstructed way by induction and abstraction.
Following upon observation and experiment, we view them as reflections from the creator that they really aren't ours at all, but that they must just simply, we only have the capacity to reflect them and that they, they came from out there to us so that there is this staging of human capacity and at the lowest gauge and grows the testes thought. And also for Roger bacon, William of Ockham, we experience the truth of the world as simply things given to us by reflection and thus we're in a position only to prepare ourselves to reflect as best we can. But on further maturity, we realize that we can in fact, organize ourselves, learn how to use our mind, learn how to use our experience. And in focusing that we realized that our sense of understanding permeates the whole world of thought that we have so that we fill out our mind by our understanding.
And there, we experienced truths as principles of thought. And we think to ourselves, this is really an advance, but grocer test, he says, there's a third level. There's a purification where the mind becomes transparent and its own processes go out from itself to guide. And there discovers that. In fact, there never were any differentiations that being and unity were always the only conditions that obtained anywhere at any time in any way. And thus any expression from the world of thought or from the world of experience leads us to OBS vacate the divine. But at the same time, it's the only way that we can train ourselves to step up to the divine, thus William of Ockham, like Roger bacon and Rosa Testee before him emphasize the fact that man has to develop an experimental science to organize his experience of the world, finding out so that he can get out of the simple, dumb reflecting of experience into an organization of experience so that the mind can understand that its processes are the organizing synthesizing principle of our experience of the world.
But at the same time, we have to have a second movement kind of competent to that. First in conjunction with developing a natural science, we have to be developing a sense of training our minds so that we don't stop there and get trapped there. So we develop natural science and we develop logic at the same time, each one of them going to emancipate us from that world from the world of sense and from the world of the mind. And if we do it right by discipline, we could correlate the two so that they mature at the same time. And we have an individual vision of the divine. And this coordination OCHEM says can depend only upon the integrity of the individual following the only pattern that ever worked for a man. And that is you have to follow someone who actually did this. And for William of Optum being a Christian in the 14th century, he took the life of Jesus as the template to follow.
And for him, the only possibility was that in the life of Jesus, one had to understand poignantly that he was a man attaining to a divine vision, and that this attaining to the divine vision meant progressively organizing and letting go of the material world, which William of Ockham said was exactly what st Francis of Assisi was talking about and his vow of poverty that you don't have riches and property and things. Not because they aren't nice and beautiful, but because you're disciplining yourself by this detachment, this yoga of detachment to go beyond that. But at the same time, as you are taking this vowel of Franciscan poverty, you have to tune the mind to understand its own processes. So when the world becomes detached from you, you don't fall into the trap of having an egotistical willful mind dominating them. You have to be able to jettison that also and have a pure divine vision. Now, all of this in William of Ockham came because as a youngster, as a boy, probably before he was 10 years old, he was put into a Franciscan convent. Now the Franciscans had come to England in the early 13th century, probably about 1220, 12, 25 around in that period and grows a test. He had been the first man in England to understand the incredible metaphysical reality of the Franciscan poverty of Val.
And for those who didn't attend the Groza testy lecture, his emphasis was that the mind is a modulation of light energy, hence the whole whole, uh, uh, metaphorical, uh, jargon about reflection and focusing and transcendent, purity, purifying all of this. He meant that light was exactly that physical phenomenon. That is the Royal road that leads man, and his understanding of the profoundness of light out of here and out of here to the all. Now, of course, when this was understood and it's more profounder aspects, it was manifested in the book by sir Isaac Newton called the optics. And when Newton organized that into the optics, the development of 18th century mystical poetry proceeded a pace and found its combination in the visions of William Blake, the writings of Coleridge and words, Shelly, and so forth, but the indispensable figure, and this whole development is William of Ockham without him, none of it would have worked. There were great years of geniuses, all poised, and there was no one to connect them with what was to come except for William of Ockham.
By the time that he was probably 17 or 18, he was sent to Merton college. Oxford Burton is I think the oldest college at Oxford Oxford today has about 20 colleges and, uh, five or six of them are really old. And I think Merton is about the oldest Merton college is, uh, I think two buildings, one that has a large quad in it. And one that, uh, uh, is off that quad structure. He was sent there as a youngster and he was a brilliant, uh, adolescent in the sense that everything that he learned, he retained and had a tendency to try to fit it together. So he had one of these, uh, minds. We call them today, a mechanical mind, somebody who toys with gadgets will take them apart and then put them back together. That's sort of a mind. And he specialized in listening to what he was told by his teachers and taking apart what they said and understanding how all this language got put together. And so he became very masterful at this. So he was singled out and he was sent to the university of Paris and he was sent there probably when he was about 20 years old, the university of Paris, this time, one of the real intellectual centers of the world, this would have been about 1305.
We can understand that Meister Eckhart was probably still around, but the overwhelming genius, there was a man named Don SCOTUS, who who's also English from Scotland. And that area DUNS, SCOTUS, it was done SCOTUS. Who's a genius was to carry the day for three or 400 years. But William of Ockham with his logical penetration, his analytical capacity very soon became, I think we should use the term, the terror of the university of Paris. You couldn't say anything to the man about what two or three days later, he understood what you had said. And the fact that you were using terms incorrectly and very quickly, he became persona non grata, just like the smart Alec who knows everything, who in fact does know everything, not that he's encyclopedic, but because he's penetrating, there wasn't any argument that he couldn't hear and understand the structure of it and reveal all kinds of sloppiness, all kinds of errors, all kinds of assumptions that simply didn't hold water.
Well, he went back to Oxford off and on throughout his life. He lived at convents. He liked convents. He liked the quiet excellence of convents and the Franciscans had a very, uh, wonderful way of, of, of having the gray friars, uh, live in the convents, very inconspicuous. And yet it was a wholesome kind of a community, but he talked for two years at the university of Oxford, 13, 17 to 1319. And in those days, the textbook was the book of four, sent the four books of sentences of Peter Lombard, Peter of Lombard, which is just a grind, them out textbook sort of thing. And everyone had to write commentaries on this or essays on it. For hundreds of years, they drag those sentences on, into the, uh, 15th century, 16th century. In some places, someone like William Ivanka could not stand simply to be a teacher who reiterated.
And so he wrote a devastating criticism of the sentences of Peter Lombard. And in this criticism, he poignantly cut apart, not only the ground of Peter of Lombard's flimsy mentality, but he went deeper. He went to the quick and the authorities in the papel delegates send a message that we've got to get this man out of the university. So he went back to the conference in England and he spent supposedly four quiet years there, but I've done a lot of research on William Morocco and he didn't spend quiet years there. He was a Sharpie. You as poignant in 1322, he was in Perugia, Italy at a huge convention, a con fab of all the Franciscan monks brought from all over Europe and what they were doing as they were setting up the Franciscan order to try to, I guess the word we have to use is impeached the Pope.
They were concerned with the dishonesty of the Roman Curia, but they were absolutely appalled at the IR religiosity of the Pope. And the Pope at this time was no grand individual. He wasn't the John Paul, the second somebody that one could, uh, even admire just as a man. He was a, a slovenly thinker so-called and his name was Pope John the 22nd and Pope John, the 22nd in fact, uh, was so slovenly in his thought that he maintained at one time that even the souls of the saved did not immediately go to heaven and have a vision of God, but that they had to wait until the last judgment when they could be unified with their body. And only then could you see God? Well, William of Ockham wrote a tremendous book later on an exile after he was ex-communicated showing that in fact, these were the most heretical standpoints and that the Pope himself was the heritage par excellence. And in fact, OCHIN was the first to go even further. He was the first to say, the Pope is the antichrist, the Pope, and the famous statement and the reformation, the famous statement and the Rosicrucian, uh, declarations of the Fama and confess CEO, the famous statements and all the developments, uh, that were to produce the 17th century, that there is a palpable authority in the shape of a large ignorant thumb holding man down in hell.
Aachen was the first to be able to express this, not simply as an opinion held, but showing step by step, the logical arguments that led him and anyone who would follow those arguments to this inescapable conclusion. Well, they refused to give him a master's degree. So with great pride, William of Ockham kept the beginners label at that time was called an incept door. And so he called himself, uh, uh, uh, an incept or for most of his life. He was a beginner. He was very proud of this later on, uh, individuals would give him the name, doctor and Vince abolishes invincibility, but he liked the name in Sceptre beginner. Uh, it appealed to him quite a bit.
This confab in 1322 in Perugia, Italy was the place where the interceptor became finally the leader of the opposition. He became the voice. And if you remember, this was just about the time that mr Eckhart's involvement with the great commune movement of Europe was coming to an apex, the brethren of the free spirit, the begins the big hearts, and also at this time was the first appearances of, uh, Raman, um, uh, laws, uh, great books coming into translation. Our Yon Roy's Brook was, uh, beginning to stir in the green Valley. So this was a tremendous period of upheaval, but awesome. Being the poignant political agitator, as well as the sharpest logical mind of the 14th century was so pointed in his criticisms that he was summoned by the Pope's, who were not at the Vatican at this time, but were in Southern France at Avignon.
And he was summoned on a heresy trial and he was brought there at first. They kept him in the convent. And then as the situation began to mature, he was thrown into the papel Dungeons. Now, when he was in the convent, he met a fellow Franciscan who was a doctor of Canon law and a doctor of, um, uh, law in the, in the civil way. And, uh, his name was, uh, Bama Gracia of Bergamo Bergamo Italy, uh, far up in the Northern parts near Switzerland, this doctor of civil and Canon law, along with outcomes, tremendous logical insight began to produce papers that showed that the papel authority had overstepped its bounds consistently throughout history. And that in fact had misunderstood the whole life of Jesus and the point that they, the nail that they hung all of their arguments on was the Franciscan vow of poverty.
And we have to get this in mind, st. Francis had had one of those universal colossal indelible, mystical experiences outside of his cave, where he had received physically the stigmata, the holes of the nails in his hands and palms and the, uh, Lance, uh, in his, uh, wound in his side, he had physically himself received that stigmata, not from a religious vision of some transcendent cloud-like experience, not in his mind as some imagined or remembered or psychological experience, but in that realm of totality, of being in unity, Francis had emerged to that realm. And Jesus had come in that realm and they had come together. And this is what the Franciscans believed. And those Franciscans like OCHEM, who were very sharp to understand the implications of this said, then if we look at Christ's life, we have to understand that he owned no property. He owned no thing, because if he had had attachment to any things, it would have automatically logically excluded him from the experience of the, all of being of unity of the father.
We know that he had that experience. We know that he moved in that realm freely. We know that Francis contacted him exactly there in that capacity and that realm, therefore the church by accumulating property was in that particular going against the very life of Christ. That the only way that one could lead a Christian life was to take this vow of poverty and not to have property. Now, the correlate to that is that any property owned by the church was then in the secular world and was not a religious owning, that a church is not a religious building. It belongs in the world of architecture. It belongs in the world of taxes and that's civil authority can tax church property because it has nothing whatsoever to do with God. And William of Ockham sent these arguments to the King of England in 1339. And the King of England set the precedent that would be followed later by Henry the eighth and all the other authorities.
That AHCA was the one who provided the arguments separating church and state, not just because it was a good idea or not just that it was a political, cute act of supposedly democracy or something else. But because it was logically inescapable from the true profound metaphysical understanding of the religious life, and to make sure I can wrote four or five books to this point, but of course he would never have written them if he just stayed in the Dungeons and having young [inaudible] and he has good Franciscan brother [inaudible] while they were dutifully, waiting for their trial, suddenly found a third prisoner thrown in with them in the Dungeons. When they looked up, the man was none other than the general of the whole Franciscan order, Michael ESIS, Cena, the Pope had thrown the head of the whole Franciscan order into the dungeon. The man who represented Saint Francis in the temporal manifestation, there was too much for rock and being somewhat of a Doty, uh, Englishman along with two Doty Italians, they decided to break out and they did, and they broke out of the Dungeons of Avenue.
We're not told how, but it must've been some neat Trek and they beat it across the border into Italy, to the city of PISA, because at this time, pizza was held not by the church, but by an emperor from Bavaria. Yeah. Louis the fourth, the Bavarian. And he was of course, holding a position, very close to Frederick. The second saying that I am a emperor of this world. And by divine right of King, I have temporal authority. I owe allegiance of my soul to God, but I've got a kingdom to run. And that's a trust that's in keeping with my eventual purity of soul. But right now the church is trying to take lands away from me, trying to take people away from me. And so I'm going to fight them well, he was really glad to see William Ivanka and it was under his Aegis because the good King, the emperor moved OCHEM eventually up to Munich. And it was from Munich in Bavaria that Aachen wrote all of his great political diatribes. I guess they call them the opposition calls. Please turn your cassette. Now that'll convince clay again on the other side, after a break, pause.

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What do you call diatribes? I guess they call them the opposition causes. They were gems. They were beautiful. They were sound, they had logical form. They had poignant ideas and the ideas kept proliferating more and more because the implications kept coming out more and more. And it set up the pattern that the English and the Germans would have a related development. So that later on, when we see for the rest of this course, most of the mystics are either English or German. And in the reformation, it was the English and the Germans that developed the hermetic sciences to the utmost and found its culmination in live knits and Newton at the same time, in fact, found his combination when the house of Hanover became the Kings of England, because this whole interplay, this karmic twining of England and Germany together started with William of Ockham being sheltered by the emperor of Bavaria.
And so the pulp of course, uh, became absolutely, uh, violent against this, uh, tandem proposition because with, uh, uh, German power and English inside, he was being forced against the wall. In fact, this, uh, Michael of Saxena, when he died in 1342, passed the seal of the order of the Franciscans to William Lavaca. So that William of Ockham became the general of the Franciscan order. He became the man whose responsibility. It was to carry the Saint Francis vision in this world forward. And he took this very seriously, but for him, the seriousness of this mantle of office was a three part seriousness. He felt that it was up to him to develop Franciscan science for all the reasons that we've covered so far. He felt that it was up to him to develop the rules of logical order, clean out the stables of confusion, Herculean task, but he decided that he would do this and he would go back and he would take all of the confusion through the millennia by this time, almost 2000 years of logical confusion, which he did. And he put it into order all very compact logical system. One of the finest it's still viable today. And third, he developed the sense that metaphysics has for its province being in unity. And that if we are to understand God, it must be in this way in the logical development.
He said that now ones are like algebraic symbols. And that they're merely denoted terms who is meaning is conveniently agreed upon. And he used the Latin words positive. So suppose it too. So that any term that we use and an argument, a logical construction is simply a convenient point of agreement. It has no necessary metaphysical connection whatsoever that this then gives us the capacity to understand that by destroying arguments, by showing up their falsity and no way impairs the truth of the world or the truth of God, it merely helps us to clarify for ourselves the organization of our mind, that therefore in the world of the mind and in the world of the senses, civil law should hold it's ordering. He went to great extremes to write a very poignant treatise on and matrimony. You said, yes, matrimony is a sacrament. It has the capacity to metaphysically lead one to the experience of being in unity. But it also is a civil procedure and is a procedure of the natural world. And therefore should be subject to civil law.
And therefore affinities of people and degrees of afinity are subjects of civil law and human law and human understanding because the sacramental aspect of marriage is a purification through this process and what come naturally if we followed it to the T, but that it does not then reflect back upon its capacities from its sacramental possibility to give the condition where the Pope should say, whether or not you could marry or who you could marry. All of these kinds of arguments. And he did dozens of them began to stack up. And of course, if you look in the Catholic encyclopedia, find no mention of William Shabaka. In fact, if you look in most, uh, reference books, they give you very little on him for William of Ockham. Then the absolute necessity for a Christian life was to have the life of poverty of increasing detachment from this world.
He was a practical man. You could have chairs, you could have clothes, but the object was to become detached for them. Do not think that you need them and do not confuse them and their organization with your inner capacity. And further, we have to have ideas. We have to have training. We have to have words, but don't confuse that ordering with metaphysical experience that these realms are available in terms of themselves. And that there is a great injustice done by transposing from one class of experience to another, by taking the confusion of the mind and trying to impose that on the world of nature. We ended up with a mess by trying to take an understanding from the world of the nature, and then trying to impose that upon the divine as if the divine has to anagogical somehow fit in where all the time breeding confusion.
And this of course OCHEM said is what is meant by, and he never used the word in his writings. Nominalism that the name is a term and these terms are useful, but that the organization of the terms does not permit us to just freely bridge, like taking cookie cutters from one realm and stamping out those shapes. And another it's simply doesn't work. And this of course, uh, became a rallying point throughout Europe of this time. More and more, there was a skepticism over theological arguments over even the capacity of, uh, uh, theology to lead human beings, to some experience of the divine. And all of the criticisms that had mounted up for several generations came to an apex in William Avastin and his works, which he popularized and sent all over Europe at that time began to increasingly produce the perception that if an individual wanted to have an experience of the divine, he, or she would have to do it themselves, but they would have to step outside of the institutions in some way, some shape or form, but they took encouragement to this, that that capacity was a God given right for each individual.
So that increasingly now we will see for the rest of the course that the following of the interior path, all along the template, however one understood it that the imitation of Christ, the imitation of the man who found the way to the experience of the divine was the only path to take. And there were, there were be many ways we'll see there, uh, almost a dozen different ways in which this was done, but after William of Ockham, they had a certainty that even though they may not be able to understand all of the refined arguments of the man, and I outlined them, uh, in, uh, several volumes for you, I won't go through them, uh, tremendous convolutions and real poignancy to them. But the upshot of it was that for tens of thousands of individuals throughout Europe, at this time, they realized that not only could they step outside the confines of the church in terms of living, but that in terms of understanding, even metaphysical religious ultimate experience, they were free to experiment and they were free to try their way.
Just development used two or three corollary concepts, which I have to give to you before I close. One of them concerns the nature of causality for William of Ockham. He said that causality is merely the regular succession of things, that there is no such thing as a nother thing called a relation, which hooks things together. There is only the regular succession of things. And that the perception of the secession gives us the sensation that there is a causal development or a causal effect. This is almost incidentally, the polar opposite of the, uh, understanding of causality in Mahayana Buddhism, or invite Dariana Buddhism. It's almost the polar opposite. There, there was only the motion and there are no things for William of Ockham, there only things. And there was no connector. There's no relater. So that causality is merely the regular succession of things. This later on centuries later would be perceived and developed by sir Isaac Newton and David Hume and Bishop Barclay, and be developed into empiricism and the root person who's who anchored that down was William of Ockham. He's the one, another corollary is that motion. Isn't it illusion that there is simply the reappearance of something in another place that it happens very, very quickly, but that motion is the reappearance of the same thing in another place.
This is extremely profound. And if you think about this for a little while you see that what he did was to dissolve the entire intellectual rural order of scholasticism that no one after him could refine their thought to a point where they could understand him and any longer hold any of these notions that had been the underpinnings of Western thought. Since the days of August date OCHEM was, do you use a Zen phrase, a little dose of poison. If you got over him, you got really well. And if you didn't, you were dead. He also said that psychological powers are distinct for each of the senses so that there is a psychological orientation of sight. There's a psychological orientation of sound. All of the senses have their own psychological power and levels in the orders, so that it raised senses to the levels of dimensions so that when he talks about natural philosophy and about developing experimental science, he means that we have to really explore this world and an incredible variety of ways before we have any possibility of organizing it properly.
And that, by just assuming that the mind in some blur and slur knows what it's doing is to open us up to all kinds of misunderstandings. I know it sounds poignant for a 14th century man, and in the 14th century, they couldn't take him. The Pope did excommunicate him the second or the fourth, a corollary of thought is that the PR of the presence of ideas in the mind of the creator, that those ideas are merely the creatures themselves. If you can take this in, you can see what a mystical goldmine this perception is that human beings are the ideas of God and the moving in nature as such. We are here present in the mind of God, and we are the ideas in that mind. So that by the organizing and exploring of nature, we are ordering heaven.
It gives man a tremendous responsibility. It also posits an incredible ultimate confidence that man can learn. He can learn to the point of creating the paradise itself. That is his sacred purpose. And of course the Roman Curia did not want to hear all of these ideas focused around the fact that there is a quality of firstness firstness present in reality. And this quality of firstness is the hallmark of the divine. And that just as in logical form, there are seminal axiomatic beginnings of any argument. These are the clues that the divine is present. That order is possible. This firstness ban this first test as a metaphysical flavor as it were. And what it carries is the tone of being in unity, being in unity and, and you, and now I can went back and he developed the fact that metaphysics is not a transcendental logic nor a glorified cosmology.
That's not concerned with how things came to be. It's not concerned with ways in which truths are known. Metaphysics is not a physics or an epistemology. It is a speculative science concern specifically and exclusively with what is, and this concern he has with what is for its own sake, not for the sake of making something, not for the sake of some purpose or some end. So that to be concerned with God does not mean to go back and read Genesis. It doesn't mean to go and read the apocalypse. It doesn't mean to be concerned with alphas in a Megan's. It means to be concerned with what is in terms of appropriate to itself. And this of course was just a center line, laying the architecture for this whole century of mysticism, because they could from here on proceed with confidence, even if they couldn't understand the refinement of Ockham's writings, they could realize that somewhere, someone like Einstein having discovered relativity, we have confidence that that was a pretty close understanding of the way things are the same thing for Aquaman. His time, the mistakes of the 14th century had the confidence that somewhere they would find their way to God because OCHEM had made clear to them that there was an understandable neck under them. They weren't going to fall through, into chaos. Now this is a pretty large accomplishment for one man for his century, and the fact that he doesn't appear in English and too many places. I
Think there's 30 pages of can translate into English after 700 years just speaks of our ignorance and not at his worthless. Well, there's a lot more as usual, but next week we go to the first of the great mistakes who takes this up, who takes Meister? Eckhart takes William of Ockham and runs with it. Johann is taller. Who really is somebody. I will take a look at him next week. [inaudible].

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