Visiting the Sacra di San Michele where Umberto Eco filmed The Name of the Rose. It is moving to see this pulpit carved in the rock 3000 feet in the air on which William of Ockham might have preached his forbidden philosophy which is Nominalism. It is interesting that the most important religious revolutions have happened inside the church and not against the church. The legacy of Nominalism who raised against Scholasticism is enormous and inspired Luther, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, it is even considered by some as the father of phenomenology. What a legacy for a monk from the fourteen century!
William of Ockham showed that the appropriation by the church of the philosophical quest for universal essences by Aristotle and Plato was wrong. For Ockham the reality of essences is only nominal, meaning it is just a word, what exist is only subjectivity. Therefore if God were to be found anywhere it is not in knowledge but in experience.
What Umberto Eco does not say is that William of Ockham was the developer of Nominalism but not the inventor of it. The inventor of Nominalism was Roscelin de Compiegne a French Monk from the twelve century. His theory that God might be just a word got him persecuted by the church, he had to leave France and became protected by the University of Oxford.
The simple opposition between religion and atheism is intellectually very poor but on the other hand the opposition of religion against religion is fascinating. To enrich theology we need the religious opposing religion and a new atheism opposing the old atheism. Or even in contemporary philosophy I dream of a nihilism which could rise against nihilism.
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