THE MORTALISTS:
ARISTOTLE, WILLIAM OF OCKHAM, POMPONAZZI
by Webster G. Tarpley, December, 1996
The founder of the mortalist or no soul thesis in philosophy can be considered Aristotle, in his treatise De Anima. Aristotle's argument is that since the human soul cannot be separated from sense and matter, it cannot be immaterial and immortal. If nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses, then the contents of all thought and the soul are "imagistic," matter-bound, and cannot be immortal. Aristotle's key point in De Anima III is that "the soul does not know at all without a phantasm," that is, without the image of sensual experience. This is the notorious "nequaquam sine phantasmate intellegit anima."
Aristotle as usual was talking through his hat. The dialogues of Aristotle's enemy, Plato, contain abstract concepts that are more real than any mere sense impressions. These works have proven to be literally immortal, and have triumphed over Plato's physical death.
Aristotle was known during the Roman Empire largely as a poisoner and the assassin of Alexander the Great. Roman oligarchs were stoics, and not Aristotelians. Aristotle became prominent as a philosopher after the creation of the eastern Roman Empire by the Emperor Constantine. The eastern or Byzantine Empire found that Aristotle was a useful weapon in combatting the strong Platonic and later Augustinian coloration of patristic Christianity.
Later, during the 1200's, anti-Platonic forces mobilized the Arab Averroes and his commentary on Aristotle. In western Europe, people calling themselves Averroists put forward the idea of a single universal soul in which all individual souls were dissolved when they returned to God. This amounted simply to a delphic way of getting rid of the idea of an immortal human soul.
William of Ockham denied the existence of the soul as much as the fourteenth-century market would bear. William of Ockham was perhaps the individual who did the most to destroy the European civilization of the High Middle Ages. One side of this was his philosophy. But William of Ockham was also an important political operative in the service of Venetian foreign policy. William was a high-profile supporter of Edward III's aggressive policy of starting what turned out to be the Hundred years' War between England and France. William of Ockham also attempted to destroy the papacy during the very dangerous time of the Babylonian captivity, when the popes resided in Avignon, France.
William of Ockham (1285-c.1347) was born in Surrey, not far from London. He was a younger contemporary of Dante. He joined the Francican order and studied with Duns Scotus at Oxford and Paris. He became the leading representative of the nominalist/terminist school and was referred to by his supporters as doctor singularis, invincible doctor, and venerabilis inceptor. The "inceptor" meant beginner, and refers to the fact that William never got his doctorate, since he was called to Avignon in France in 1324 at Pope John XXII's request to be examined for his heretical statements. Soon after this William of Ockham was formally excommunicated by the Holy See. William of Ockham supported Philip the Fair of France against Pope Boniface VIII, and also against John XXII. One of William's writings is the Disputatio super potestate ecclesiastica praelatis atque principibus terrarum commisa." This treatise asserts the superiority of the temporal rulers over the papacy.
William of Ockham's enemies had other names for him: for his pro-papal contemporary Conradus von Megenberg, Ockham qualified as "non solum hereticus, sed heresiarcha vel princeps hereticorum" - not only a heretic, but a heresiarch or price of heretics. William was indeed a scholastic and a nominalist, but it is wrong to think of him as a cloistered scholar poring over manuscripts. He was a mercenary political gangster.
William of Ockham was a member of an extremist party in the Franciscan Order which denied the right of the church to own any property whatsoever (their argument being that Christ and the apostles had set the example of being without property); one consequence of this was that all Franciscans should beg as mendicant friars and not live in convents. The mendicant Franciscan friars became one of the plagues of the late Middle Ages. They were impossible to discipline and often turned to a life of crime. In some ways they prefigure modern organized crime syndicates. See the friar in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to get some idea of the crime and corruption of these wandering panhandlers.
Ironically, the dissident party among the Franciscans to which Ockham belonged were called the "Spirituali," the same name later used by the party of oligarchical Italian Protestants created by the Venetian Cardinal Gasparo Contarini during and after the War of the League of Cambrai. Ockham's Spirituali staged a revolt against Pope John XXII, whom they solemnly declared to be a heretic. The Spirituali line was that there had been no legitimate pope after Celestine V, who had resigned in 1294 ("che fece per vilta' il gran rifuito", as Dante wrote) Ockham's Spirituali left the church and set up a heretical and schmismatic sect, the "Fraticelli."
Ockham was a pro-Venetian intelligence operative heavily engaged in creating the disasters that made the fourteenth century a "distant mirror" for the current descent into a New Dark Age.
After Ockham had been condemned for his doctrinal deviations, he fled in 1328 along with some other renegade churchmen to the court of Ludwig IV of Bavaria, who was at that time the de facto Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He was de facto because, since he had claimed the Imperial title without the permission of the papacy, no pope was ever willing to certify him as the rightful overlord of the Empire. This set up a conflict between the French-controlled papacy and Ludwig which William of Ockham did his best to exacerbate. In his flight into Bavaria, Ockham was accompanied by Michael of Cesena, the Franciscan General, and Bonagratia of Bergamo, both supporters of the Spirituali faction of the Franciscans.
William said to Ludwig of Bavaria: You defend me [against capture by the pope] with the sword, and I will defend you with the pen. William of Ockham wrote a number of political works defending Ludwig of Bavaria and the validity of his Imperial title. But William of Ockham was not the only fugitive churchman at the court of Ludwig of Bavaria. Ludwig maintained a a whole stable of church dissidents, which included Marsilio of Padua and John of Jandun as well as the three Franciscan friars already mentioned. Marsilio was another anti-papal propagandist. Marsilio was the author of the 1324 Defensor Pacis, which argues the absolute supremacy of the state over the church. When Ludwig of Bavaria made his trip to Italy, he had himself proclaimed Holy Roman Emperor by the people of Rome, exactly as prescribed by Marsilio; Ludwig never asked the popes for their approval.
Dante was alive at this time, and was an implacable critic of the corruption of the papacy. But Dante did not want to destroy the papacy. For him, the world needed two suns, the emperor and the pope. DAnte wanted to strengthen the empire while curbing the temporal excesses of the papacy. Dante hated Pope Boniface VIII Caetani for many good reasons, and destined him for a place among the simonists of the VIII circle of the Inferno. But Dante was also indignant when in 1303 the French King Philip the Fair (condemned by Dante as the "evil of France" and the "new Pontius Pilate") ordered his forces to capture Boniface VIII and throw him into prison, where he soon died.
The great political project in which William of Ockham participated was the Hundred Years' War, which together with its concomitant Black Death constituted the definitive catastrophe of the first half of the second millenium of the Christian era.
The aggressor in the Hundred Years' War was of course King Edward III of England, who advanced a claim on the throne of France. Edward III's maternal grandfather was in fact the same Philip IV the Fair whom Dante detested. Edward III was one of a series of Plantagenet kings of England who are best seen as bankrupt wards of Italian bankers like the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Frescobaldi. These bankrupt borrowers included Henry III (1216-1272), Edward I (1272-1307), Edward II (1307-1327), and Edward III (1327-1377). During this time the power of Italian financiers in England was very great. The Genoese galley fleet began visiting England in 1278, and the Venetian state galleys first appeared off the English coast in 1319. British historians like to write about Edward I as "the English Justinian"; the Italian banker Amerigo dei Frescobaldi called King Edward I "my yeoman."
Edward III's regime was warlike and expensive, and before long he owed the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence almost 1 million florins, an astronomical sum at that time. When Edward III found he could not pay, he issued an edict on May 6, 1339 suspending all debt payments. Edward III's insolvency became a factor in the general economic depression of Europe.
In April 1340, while Edward III was still in the early stages of his war, he sent an embassy to Doge Gradenigo of Venice in which he offered an Anglo-Venetian alliance, and asked for the assistance of the Venetian navy. Edward III offered to pay Venice a subsidy, and also decreed that henceforward Venetians in England should have all the rights, privileges, and immunities of the English themselves - a policy that was to have far-reaching consequences. The Venetian Doge Gradenigo replied that he could not send ships, but accepted the rest of Edward III's offer.
The English attack on France advanced an entire set of Venetian strategic goals. In 1339 the Venetians conquered Treviso, which represented the beginning of Venetian efforts to secure a large land empire in northern Italy. At this time the Venetians were attempting to absorb the state which had been created by Dante's patron, Can Grande della Scala of Verona. It was clear to the Venetian oligarchy that, to the degree their land empire expanded, it might be headed for a clash with the French feudal land forces. This threat might become acute if Venice showed signs of taking over Milan, something that Venice doubtless had ambitions of doing.
The 1300's also marked the final phase of the Venetian wars against Genoa. Venice was at war with Genoa from 1350 to 1355, during which time the Genoese fleet threatened the Venetian lagoon. The war restarted in 1377, and Venice was threatened once again. The final Venetian victory would come in the War of Chioggia, when most of the Genoese fleet was captured, leading to the peace of 1380-1382, under which Genoa ended its rivarly with Venice and agreed to become a junior partner of the Venetians. During this time France was often allied with Genoa; this explains the presence of several thousand Genoese crossbowmen with the French forces at the battle of Crecy against the Engish in 1346. Indeed, Genoa became a part of France during this time.
The Venetians sought most fundamentally to preserve their own power by ruining the potential of others. The Venetians were also animated by the love of evil and fundamental hostility to human civilization itself that are the hallmarks of their policy.
The contemporary ruler who received the greatest praise from William of Ockham was none other than the butcher Edward III of England, the chosen vehicle for the Venetian-backed aggression against France which led to the nightmare eclipse of European civilization. Here is William of Ockham's tribute to Edward III :
"Magnanimum hactenus et invictum ac per gratiam Dei perpetuis temporibus non vincendum Anglorum regem Eduardum, generis claritate florentem, fama celebrem, corporali venustate decorum, potestate sublimem, affluentem moribus, gratiosum et strenuum probitate ac ardua aggredientem intrepide, iusta gerere bella hii, qui de hiis, quae facti sunt, veritatem plene noverunt, nequaquam dubitant, ut opinor...." -- those who are well informed have never up to now doubted that just wars [meaning the Hundred Years' War] are waged by that magnanimous and undefeated and by the grace of God perpetually invincibile King Edward of England, who is prospering in the renown of his birth, celebrated in his fame, graceful in his bodily attractiveness, exalted in power, abounding in good habits, favored and vigorous in his integrity, and calm in dealing with difficulties. (This appears to go beyond any praise William of Ockham ever lavished on Ludwig of Bavaria, even though the latter was his immediate paymaster.) William says that Edward III's justification for starting the Hundred Years' War is so overwhelming that it is pointless even to discuss the matter, so he gets busy right away justifying Edward III's taxes on the English clergy.
This panegyric is taken from William of Ockham's political pamphlet entitled "An Princeps Pro Suo Succursu, Scilicet Guerrae, Possit Recipere Bona Ecclesiarum, etiam Invito Papa" - "If a Prince, for his own requirements, including war, may take possession of Church property against the will of the Pope." This was written by William of Ockham between 1337 and 1340. Ockham defends the right of Edward III to impose a war tax on the English churches without the consent of the Pope in order to finance the campaign to seize the crown of France. This essay is significant because it cuts against not one but both of the Venetian targets of that time: France and the papacy.
When Edward III started the Hundred Years' War with his landing on the continent in July 1338 he did not act alone, but had assembled a war coalition which he hoped would allow him to achieve a geopolitical encirclement of France. It is easy to detect the hand of the Venetian oligarchy assisting Edward III in assembling this prerrequisite for ruining France. Edward III had the nominal support of the duke of Austria, the towns of Flanders, and of a number of rulers in the Low Countries. But Edward III's most important ally was the Holy Roman Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria. It was precisely at Ludwig's court that William of Ockham had decided to seek refuge ten years before. In September 1338 Edward III met Ludwig at the imperial Reichstag held in Koblenz, where Ludwig gave the English king the title of Imperial Vicar of the Holy Roman Empire, meaning that Edward was able to exercise all the powers of the emperor during the latter's absence. Edward wanted to use these powers in order to compel German feudal lords to join him in making war on France, especially in areas where the French had made encroachments on imperial territory. Edward III's idea was to attack France starting from the lower Rhine with the help of German forces dragooned in this way. Historians thus recognize a German-English alliance that lasted from 1335 to 1342. The deal broke down when Edward III did not have enough cash to pay Ludwig the promised subsidies, while Ludwig's attention was distracted by his interests in Italy. But by 1342 time the Hundred Years' War was in full swing. In 1347-48, Edward III had for a time strong support to be elected Holy Roman Emperor in his own right.
William of Ockham therefore emerges as a propagandist for Edward III, the main tool of Venetian foreign policy, as well as for Edward III's auxiliary, Ludwig of Bavaria. Every political project supported by William of Ockham was a project to which Venice was also fully committed.
Now listen to what William of Ockham thought about the human soul:
"Understanding by intellectual soul an immaterial and incorruptible form which is wholly in the whole and wholly in every part (of the body), it cannot be known evidently either by arguments or by experience that there is such a form in us of that the activity of understanding belongs to a substance of this kind in us, or that a soul of this kind is the form of the body. I do not care what Aristotle thought about this, for he seems to speak always in an ambiguous manner. But these three things we hold only by faith."
As a modern Jesuit commentator points out:
"Ockham does not say, of course, that we do not possess immortal souls; what he says is that we cannot prove that we possess them. That we do possess them is a revealed truth, known by faith." [Copleston, History of Philosophy, III.96]
But by this sleight of hand, the human creative faculty has been reduced to a mere empty construct. The irony is that once it has been experienced, the process of mental creativity is empirically known beyond all doubt, and it does not depend on sense impressions. Creative discoveries impart a forward progress to humanity which is never lost. William of Ockham thus emerges as a mortalist, albeit clothed in the obligatory fideistic robes of the friar.
Cardinal Contarini was close to Ockham's view two centuries later when he argued that there is no empirical evidence of a soul while we are alive, but that scripture requires us to believe we have a soul after death.
One overtone of this is that there is no real certainty except sense certainty, and the rest requires the leap of faith. Fideism, skepticism and empiricism go hand in hand. For Ockham, we can have no direct knowledge of God; we can know the created object, but not the Creator. This is the deus absconditus or hidden God, and we are very close to a later Venetian operative, Jean Calvin of Geneva.
The general line of the Ockhamist school was thus that nothing in theology can be proven, and that much of it cannot even be understood. Nevertheless we are required to believe what theology asserts. This gives rise to a double or duplicitious theory of truth: there is one truth for theology, and one for philosophy. Nothing important can be know, everything important has to be taken on faith. Human reason is worthless, even as an auxiliary. The one side is fideism, and the other side is skepticism, and these two acids will dissolve anything worthwhile.
Ockham took perverse pleasure in inventing all sorts of absurd paradoxes in the realm of theology. He wrote: "Est articulus fidei, quod Deus assumpsit naturam humanam. Non includit contradictionem, Deum assumere naturam asiniam, pari ratione potest, assumere lapidem vel lignum." (It is an article of faith that God too on a human nature. But it is does not include a contradiction for God to take on the nature of a donkey, and it is equally reasonable for God to take on the nature of stone or wood.)
Like a modern deconstructionist, Ockham loved to demolish medieval theology. God the Father, he claimed, might have died, while the Son of God, who did die, could just as well have avoided death. For Ockham, Christ's head could have been his hand, and his hand could have been his eye. Attacking the Holy Trinity, Ockham asserted that no theology could rule out the proposition that God the Father is the Son of the Virgin Mary, or that the Holy Spirit is the Son of the Virgin Mary. Ockham argued argued that under certain circumstances God can rightly be hated. He thought that the same body could be in several places at the same time, and that several bodies could be in the same place at the same time. God is all-powerful, argued Ockham, so powerful that he might at any time and without warning overturn the entire established order of things. The Scripture is the word of God, Ockham conceded, but it may not be God's last word.
Ockham's great crusade was to prove that only things in themselves had real existence, and that universal concepts are simply cobwebs of human imagination. He is the great representative of the terminist school, so called because it believed that the things in themselves stood alone, with no shared or universal qualities: "Illud, quod primo et immediate denominatur universale, est tantum ens in anima, et sic non est in re." -- That which is first and immediately called a universal exists in the soul, and does not exist in things. "Since things exist only as individual things, there is no divine idea of kind, difference, and of the other universals."
Anselm of Canterbury, in his ontological proof of the existence of God, had asserted: "The more generality, the more reality." Since God is the most general being, God is also the most real. For Plato, the universal is incomparably more real than the isolated thing, which is unreal. Ockham took the opposite view.
In his fight against unbiversal concepts, Ockham used a sophistic trick which has gone down in histroy as "Ockham's razor." The key slogan is that "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem," that entities should not be added to a system unless they are absolutely necessary. The trick is that for Ockham, all universal concepts fall into the category of these useless and superfluous entities. Ockham insists that we live in a world of things: "Sufficiunt singularia et ita tales res universales omnino frustra ponuntur" - individual things are enough and thus the universals are posited in vain.
Ockham's immediate disciples took his teachings a little bit further. If there are universal concepts, then causality is surely one of them. So Ockham's successors Nicole d'Autrecourt and Jean de Mirecourt applied Ockham's axioms to deny any objective causality. And with that they were four centuries ahead of Hume. [See Karl Hammerle, Von Ockham zu Milton (Innsbruck, 1934)]
If Ockham makes the universals the figments of the human mind, the next step might be to assert that all reality is also a figment of the human mind. For Ockham, the only reality of the universals consists in being perceived by the human mind. This same idea, "esse est percepi," was applied to all experience by the English Bishop Berkeley, also about four hundred years after Ockham. [Hammerle, Von Ockham zu Milton]
Luther was a follower of Ockham, especially in his earlier career. A half-century later, Paolo Sarpi started his career as a disciple of William of Ockham. But the dean of the Ockhamite mortalists of the 1500's was Pietro Pomponazzi, professor at the Venetian state university at Padua, the temple of anti-Renaissance materialism. Pomponazzi was the teacher of Cardinal Gasparo Contarini, the founder of Protestantism and of the Catholic counter- reformation.
Here is the core of Pomponazzi's denial of the human soul: "But although the human intellect, as has been considered, does not use quantity in knowing, nevertheless, since it is joined to sense, it cannot be released entirely from matter and quantity, since it never knows without a phantasm, as Aristotle says in De Anima III" 'The soul does not know at all without a phantasm.' Hence it thus needs the body as object. Nor can it know a universal unqualifiedly, but always sees the universal in the singular, as everyone can observe in himself. For in all cognition, however far abstracted, it forms some bodily image." [Pomponazzi, Tractatus de immortalitate animae]
One of the greatest twentieth-century admirers of Pomponazzi has been Ernst Cassirer. Cassirer, following the insane thesis of Aby Warburg, tries to show that modern science came out of the Renaissance starting from the magic and astrology purveyed by Venetian operatives. "This path," writes Cassirer, "seems to lead us through a hodge-podge of fantastic superstition; even in the works of such thinkers as Bruno and Campanella the line between myth and science, between 'magic' and 'philosophy' cannot be drawn with certainty." Cassirer is embarrassed by one of Pomponazzi's works, the De Incantationibus or Treatise on Incantations. "At first glance," says Cassirer, the content of this work appears to be nothing more than a compendium of ancient and medieval superstitions." Now for Cassirer, science means only a system of fixed laws expressed in mathematical form. So, he claims, Pomponazzi's belief in an all-necompassing, mechanistic determinism based on astrology turns out to be a step in the right direction: "The unconditioned dominance of the stars over eveything on earth is asserted only in order that the unconditional primacy of scientific reason may be guaranteed." The last step twards modern science, according to Cassirer, comes as follows: "...there was as yet no MATHEMATICAL SCIENCE OF NATURE for Pomponazzi. But it can easily be foreseen that once this framework is broken, and once the astrological concept of causality is replaced by that of mathematics and physics, the development of the new concept will find no inner obstacles to resist it."
Since an immortal soul equipped with free will would disturb the total determinism which is supposed to represent science, Pomponazzi must necessarly suppress such an immortal soul. But Pomponazzi's real target is human reason itself. What Pomponazzi, foreshadowing Kant, wants to deny is a faculty of human cognition higher than sense certainty and which does not depend on sense images. What about Eratosthenes, who studied the curvature of the earth in total contradiction to the evidence of his senses, focussing on just those points where sense certainty proved absurd, paradoxical, and contradictory? Is there not a level of reason which is above sense?
Pomponazzi replies: "Dicere enim...ipsum intellectum duos habere modos cognoscendi, scilicet sine phantasmate omnino, et alium cum phantasmate, est transmutare naturam humanam in divinam....[Pomponazzi, De Immortalitate animae] - For to say that the same intellect has two modes of knowing, one totally without sense images, and the other with sense images, is to transform human nature into divine nature. And that is just the point, since it is through reason that the human soul participates in God's work of creation and does render itself immortal. But, Pomponazzi claims, for a human being to advance to the level of reason is a magic trick out of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
End