The first half of our treatment on Ullmann can be found here, and the prelude to this two-part series can be found here (and the forerunner to the prelude [!] is here); in the six (a through e; part 2a here, part 2b here, part 2c here, and part 2d here) parts of this second post, we’ll cover the way that his students, admirers and critics have presented the outline of his thought, and the faults they have found with it.
William of Ockham
Merit & Grace in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period
Earlier, I posted, in several sections, a larger work on the changing notions of merit and grace in the later medieval period, with minor attention to the changing economic background that affected the metaphors used for these. In some ways, these were stimulated by a post on the sense of the Greek word (“χάρις”) that gets translated into English as “grace” or “favor”. Continue reading
Merit & Grace in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period, Part 3
Continued from part one, which was followed by part two: this is the third and final post (for now, until I get to Calvin at some future date.) Continue reading
Merit & Grace in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period, Part 2
Continued from the previous post. Continue reading
Merit & Grace in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period, Part 1
1) There are a number of helpful topics by which one might examine some of the differences and similarities across the centuries from the Medieval period up through the Reformation, and each allows a set of concerns to come into focus. The related questions of the nature of grace and whether a person might merit salvation is one such helpful pair of topics. These questions, conjoined from the Middle Ages through the beginning of the Reformation, begin at a point where they are very much tied up with ontological questions about the relationship between beings and God, and about the character of knowledge, in general, and the nature of theological knowledge, in particular. Do beings naturally participate in God to some degree (i.e., in a manner according to the nature of a being), or are they wholly separate, radically contingent and entirely superfluous ephemera of the divine will, thoroughly alien in their being to divinity, without a native point of contact? Is knowledge –even secular knowledge– a participation in divine knowledge, or is it a navigation of singularly unique particulars through signs? Is grace participation in God, likeness to God, favor from God, divine acception, or else some or even all of these? Is this grace something which people are able to know they are partaking of? The Nominalists’ and Reformers’ answers to these questions illumine some of the crucial elements that come to characterize the Modern period, our secular cultural condition. We will begin with Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), briefly noting the Ockhamist/Nominalist tradition which follows shortly after him, then we will move through these questions in Martin Luther (1483–1546).
Into the Clarities 