Erozja tajemnicy. Przemiany religijności w późnych wiekach średnich na przykładzie filozofii Williama Ockhama

Abstract

Researchers have pointed to various origins of the historical processes of secularisation. Within this article, I assume that the nominalist philosophical-religious thought of William Ockham constituted such a possible origin. This thinker developed a social philosophy critical of the excessive political power of the papacy in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. In this way, Ockham pushed forward the philosophical and political thought of his time. According to the earlier medieval thought, it was the ecclesiastic power that would determine who should rule in a given society. Ockham did significantly reduce the intellectual prerogatives of the ecclesiastic power to control the emerging secular society based on monarchic-national principles. This did not mean that Ockham was personally a non-believer; in fact, on the basis of his metaphysics, he considered God to be an omnipotent being capable of bending at will the laws underlying reality. This, however, led him to the conclusion that God is essentially unknowable, which, in turn, pushed Ockham to some form of intellectual scepticism and a pronounced limitation of the capacities of theology in juxtaposition to the secularizing philosophy. Ockham did thus inspire the processes of secularisation on multiple planes: cultural as well as institutional, and this is what supports the main thesis of this paper.