Great fun to 'do a David and Goliath'

I had a quite ambitious idea a few days ago, about writing of William of Ockham and his opposition to the scholastic theologians - indeed, a good mental workout for one who is happy that the warm breezes have thawed her brain. I am declining to do so because proper form for such a presentation is a massive amount of work, which I would devote to a lecture, paper, or dissertation, but not to a blog which I doubt anyone reads. Still, I smiled to recall what a Franciscan friar used to tell me (and accurately - and this was many years before I had eight years of Jesuit education) : "You always sound like a Franciscan arguing with a Domiinican."

I can sympathise with William of Ockham, though his political prudence must have been even worse than my own if he denied the temporal authority of the papacy in view of that Christ reigns in heaven. I can well understand his seeing philosophy as not dealing with the 'real world,' not only because (as I've addressed elsewhere) brilliant philosophical arguments, taken in anything beyond the limited sense in which they were formulated, lead to pastoral disasters, but because so much that is 'logically possible' is impossible, and it all tends to be counter-intuitive outside of philosophy books. (Bear with me. I'm writing this on a library computer with a faulty keyboard and cursor.)

Much in scholastic theology could be puzzling, if not chilling! God is whatever it happens to mean to be fully God, though all we can determine is what God is not. Evil seems to be denied, because it doesn't exist and only appears as such because God's priorities are not ours. God has power over us but no responsibility, and one would shudder to think of what seems to be good to God since it wouldn't meet the lowest human standards of love and morality. (I am hugely exagerrating, of course - but just try taking a single sscholastic argument out of context.)

William probably created the worst havoc of his century with nominalism (which somehow had the secondary effect of messing up worship and having canon law impose legalism just to assure uniformity and doctrine.) William based everyything, whether in regard to us or to God, on the will. God could have saved us without the cross - He could have produced another universe and just might after the last judgement - there is none of the working backwards from effect to cause of the scholastics. (In all fairness to William, he only said that God could have done things differently, not that he did.) Yet, in a nutshell, his affective approach, with an emphasis on will common amongst Franciscans, can leave one with the weird impression that we never can know what is real, or that the will can respond to what the mind hasn't even grasped as a good in the first place.

(You are probably wondering why I became Franciscan in the first place. I have no idea.)

Yesterday, I heard a comment about a young theologian who created a stir by a writing that questioned the 100% Catholic status of Hans urs von Balthasar. I'm jealous - that must have been great fun. I'm too shy, and still infected by the Franciscan worm of inferiority, to do it in person, but I just love the exercise of refuting theologians for whom I have the greatest respect (as I do for Hans if not exactly for William.) It isn't that I have any illusions of having a fraction of their brilliance or learning, but that 'doing a David and Goliath' is so enriching. It means gathering the wisdom from varied areas, finally getting insight, exploring the history and traditions, exploring what one truly believes - and then setting forth an argument that is as much a song of praise as an Alleluia that a Franciscan just might still have a brain and show it in public. (Many Franciscans were and are brilliant, but Bonaventure and Anthony were only being brilliant under obedience, when the need arose as they were washing dishes or pulling the weeds. The down side of this, of course, isn't just the'worm' thing again, but that those who...don't sound like they are arguing with Dominicans can base everything on inspiration at the dish pan.)