Metaphysics

Scriptum in librum primum Sententiarum (Ordinatio)

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William of Ockham

1318

The Ordinatio is Ockham's commentary on the first book of Peter Lombard's Sentences — the standard theological textbook of medieval universities — revised and authorised for circulation from his Oxford lectures delivered around 1317–19. It is the most systematic of his theological works and the text in which he most fully develops the consequences of his nominalism and voluntarism for theology. Here Ockham argues that God's absolute power is unlimited by any logical or metaphysical necessity save the principle of non-contradiction: God could have made the moral law otherwise, could have ordained a different means of salvation, could have decreed that hatred of him was meritorious. This radical divine freedom does not make morality arbitrary in practice — the established order is binding — but it severs the connection between reason and revelation that Aquinas had carefully built. Faith and philosophical reason operate in separate domains, and attempting to demonstrate theological truths by rational argument alone is a category error. The Ordinatio is one of the most consequential documents in the history of the faith-reason relationship.