A paradox nestled within the currents of thought sheltered beneath the canopy of postmodernism is that its seed was sown in the fourteenth century, sprouting from a fruit that had germinated in Ephesus, the land of Heraclitus, in the aftermath of Christ’s crucifixion, through the hand of St. John. The apostle’s cardinal wisdom is manifest in the Fourth Gospel, in the phrase “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God” (John 1:1).
It is precisely the semantic ambiguity of the term Logos, which simultaneously denotes the sacred and rational order manifested in the universal hierarchy (hieros and arkhei) and the word or verb, that enables John to reconcile Greek rationality with biblical revelation (Brown, 1966). Rather than resolving any ambiguity through the use of the Aramaic Memrā or even the Hebrew Dābār, the text employs the polysemous Greek term Logos, thereby allowing for a conceptual synthesis that bridges Hellenistic philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology. (Brown, 1966).
Indeed, Western thought, as a synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, is born from the “Logos made flesh,” that is, from the assertion that the absolutely universal (God) can also be absolutely particular (the Crucified). For only that which has the power to represent all particulars is absolutely concrete, just as only that which can represent all abstractions is absolutely universal, the two being, in consequence, one and the same.
This paradoxical affirmation constitutes the cornerstone upon which the edifice of Catholic reason is erected, for it grounds the claim that God lacks nothing proper to Him, that is, that He is perfect (perficere) as pure act. In other words, God’s omnipotence does not reside in the mere arbitrary exercise of His potentialities: God, as Pure Act, is the structure of Reason (Logos), whose essential norm is the Good (Aquinas, 1947). Hence, God can do all things save cease to be God; He is not free to wield His will so as to transmute good into evil, thereby chaotically altering the nature of things. In the medieval Christian world, all reality—created by and for the Word (Jn 1:3)—is suffused with the supernatural, manifesting a radical dependence on God. Freedom, in this context, operates across psychological, metaphysical, moral-political, and supernatural planes: man, redeemed from sin by the Redemption, is a servant of justice (Rom 6:22) and acts within natural communities (family, guilds) and supernatural ones (the Mystical Body of Christ), united yet distinct.
St. Augustine apprehended this with clarity, noting that the natural order is created by God to reflect the divine order, and that the qualities of the physical world are accessible to human reason, which can thus discern the logical inconsistency of Manichaean cosmogony (Augustine, 1991). The latter might anticipate the coexistence of two physical laws in the cosmic duel between the wills of the Kingdom of Light (Good) and the Kingdom of Darkness (Evil). Augustine deduced that the regularity and predictability of astronomical phenomena testify to the divine will expressing the divine intellect, such that both intellect and will are manifestations of God’s perfectly good nature, rendering evil neither existent within God nor creatable by Him.
Consequently, God is not free to act contrary to His perfect nature by ceasing to be God. In his struggle against Pelagianism, in works such as De gratia et libero arbitrio (426) and De natura et gratia (415), Augustine refuted the self-sufficiency of human freedom for salvation, denying that the initium fidei could be a voluntary act without divine intervention and affirming the necessity of grace to order freedom toward the good (Augustine, 1999).
Thus, both Augustine of Hippo and his intellectual heir, Thomas Aquinas, constructed their monumental theological edifices upon the rational element of the Logos, inclining toward the view that God’s will is subordinate to His divine reason. Reality, therefore, exists independently of any perceiving consciousness and emanates from a God whose very nature is truth (Aquinas, 1947). Yet, it is evident that we are drawn to the pure pursuit of ultimate, plural, and relational realities—that is, to the transcendentals, those universal and supreme properties of “being qua being,” such as Truth, Beauty, Goodness, or Qualia (Eco, 1988).
To this, Augustine and Miguel de Unamuno discuss, the latter writing that “God is the ideal of humanity, man projected to infinity and eternalized in Him,” as a concave reflection of Augustine’s “in the interior man dwells truth” (Unamuno, 1972). If the ultimate and human transcendentals constitute a real plurality, truth resides in the innermost depths of the human being, enabling us to ascend cognitively, to transcend ourselves.
Nevertheless, the import of this worldview for the ethical and moral concerns of Western civilization cannot be underestimated, not only because it remains an implicit part of Christianity’s cultural heritage, but because, a contrario sensu, it stands as the counter-image to efforts, from the fourteenth century onward, to establish irrationalism and human self-sufficiency across all domains. The first serious salvo was fired by the English Franciscan theologian William of Ockham, whose central argument held that the rationalist doctrines of ontological realism were unacceptable, as they constrained God’s will. As the supreme Being, God must be free to determine His acts unrestrictedly, arbitrarily, and autonomously (Ockham, 1990).
In his Dialogus against Pope John XXII, Ockham proclaims the complete independence of civil power, founding secularization on a conception of freedom as empirical spontaneity, divorced from intelligence and metaphysical good. This stance evacuates the category of real relation (relatio realis), implying popular sovereignty as the voluntary origin of society and positive normativism, nullifying natural law (Adams, 1986).
Unlike Augustine and Aquinas, Ockham deftly tilted toward the verbal pole of the Logos, waging battle on the terrain of the nominal (i.e., the names of things). He denied the existence of universal realities (res universales), objects possessing real existence in God’s mind, asserting that such universals are merely names we assign to similar particular objects.
For Ockham, these similar objects share a common nature only by virtue of the mental concepts we assign to them, not by intrinsic properties of the objects themselves.
His strategy, grounded in linguistic analysis, laid the first stone of logical positivism in its subjective idealist variant. Ockham’s key assertion was that “it is sufficient and necessary that the subject and predicate of a true proposition be equivalent” (as in “Socrates is a man”), which is true by the identity of supposition between subject and predicate, rather than because the predicate signifies an inherent universal. From this derives the oft-cited “Ockham’s razor,” reducing propositions to mere chains of nominal identity—tautologies—from which universals, understood as abstract concepts, are excluded (Spade, 1999).
By this device, Ockham tipped the balance of truth toward the adequacy of language to reality, dispensing with reflection on signification. The efficacy of this approach lies in its assumption that whatever cannot be empirically verified lacks meaning in the eyes of positivism, rendering verses like “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” meaningless except in indirect discourse (e.g., “Genesis 1:1 states that ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’”), thereby cancelling their religious significance.
In this domain, the Averroism of John of Jandun, radicalizing the “double truth” by declaring the truths of faith irrational, and the thought of Marsilius of Padua, who in his Defensor pacis delegates sovereignty to the people and subordinates the Church to the State, reinforce Ockham’s nominalism. As Galvão de Sousa observes, Marsilius delineated “a theory of the totalitarian state” through his juridical monism and immanentism (Marsilius, 2006). Nicholas of Autrecourt, with his phenomenalism, annihilates the metaphysical order by declaring the external world indemonstrable, configuring a self-sufficient human world. These thinkers, sheltered in the court of Louis of Bavaria, prefigure apostasy, opening cracks in Christendom (Le Goff, 2000).
The consequences of this inductivism, not unlike the verificationalism of Carnap’s neopositivism or Quine’s postulate that “there is no entity without identity,” were profound (Quine, 1969). Excising universals from philosophy complicates discourse about things endowed with an inherent telos definitive of their natural perfection, such as “being.” Ockham anticipates Hume’s empiricism, which held that philosophical conclusions fail to capture the essential nature of humanity or the universe (Hume, 2000).
This method, by providing a grammatical theory of truth, conceptualizes the essence of things from the particular, deriving a cosmogony composed of a sum of individualities. The cardinal consequence of nominalism is that knowledge is not participation in the divine: human understanding (inter-légere) is limited to apprehending what God has categorized by His will, which is just by definition, rendering reflection on the intrinsic nature of universal things unnecessary.
With Duns Scotus, Ockham deduces that, as man is made in God’s image, the primary nature of man lies in the separation of the acts of free will from the intellect, such that voluntarism is radical in the person (Scotus, 1987). The rupture of the logical relation (relatio rationis) between the Good and the Right, implicit in Ockham’s refutation of real relation (relatio realis), allows man to become self-sufficient, endowed with a positive normativism whose legitimacy emanates from radical will, tempered only by an occasional natural law.
According to Ockham, there are no moral truths that God cannot alter, for to suggest otherwise would limit His omnipotence. This stance finds echo in the Protestant Reformation, particularly in Luther, who, influenced by Ockham’s nominalism, declared in the Heidelberg Disputation that free will, post-Fall, is “captive and enslaved,” free only for evil (Luther, 2018). This annihilates human nature and confines religion to subjectivity, shattering the balance between faith and works.
As Frederick Wilhelmsen observes, “the balance between works and faith was broken, and with it all the bonds that made possible a social and political life with justice and dignity” (Wilhelmsen, 1978). Calvin accentuates this human “nothingness,” justifying election by earthly success, transforming Catholic asceticism into a “profane ascesis” that, per Max Weber, fosters capitalist accumulation and the self-made man (Weber, 1930). Society atomizes into “solitudes together,” denying natural law and the sacrality of the world.
