By Casey Chalk

But first, a note, Don't miss tomorrow night's episode of The World Over. Raymond Arroyo will be joined by TCT Editor-in-Chief Robert Royal and Fr. Gerald Murray (the Papal Posse). They will discuss: the discovery of a soft-porn book of "spirituality" by the head of the Dicastery of the Doctrine of the Faith, his "clarification" of his Declaration permitting "non-liturgical" blessings of same-sex "couples," and other current questions. The show airs at 8 PM Eastern Time and is usually available shortly after on the EWTN Youtube channel.

Now for Mr. Chalk's column...

William of Ockham - the fourteenth-century Franciscan friar, philosopher, and theologian - has become the favored whipping boy of a certain brand of Catholic scholarship and apologetics. Who could have predicted that Ockham's rejection of universals (nominalism) and emphasis on God's supreme omnipotence at the expense of the divine intellect (voluntarism) - esoteric philosophical concepts if ever there were ones - would provoke such censure, even centuries after his death?

But censure Ockham has received - from historian Brad S. Gregory in his celebrated The Unintended Reformation to biblical scholar Scott Hahn's Politicizing the Bible, co-authored with ethicist Benjamin Wiker. Relying on Gregory, Hahn, and Wiker, I myself take Ockham to task in my book The Obscurity of Scripture for his role in creating the philosophical framework that helped give birth to the Reformation.

It's no surprise, then, that philosopher James M. Jacobs in Seat of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy in the Catholic Tradition, after describing several philosophical errors, labels nominalism "the most perennially pernicious of these philosophical assumptions." That's a remarkable claim, especially given that Ockham was neither an Enlightenment skeptic nor an atheistic deconstructionist. Ockham was a well-read Catholic cleric, though Pope John XXI excommunicated him over a debate regarding Apostolic Poverty.

Nevertheless, Jacobs makes a compelling case. Nominalism is a recurring theme across this four-hundred-page book, but it is by no means central. Jacobs has written an excellent, accessible introduction to the extensive role of philosophy in Catholic thought.

In early chapters, he explains the relationship between reason and revelation and the origins of what is sometimes called "the perennial philosophy," meaning the principles of classical philosophy and the methods of analysis employed, which can be traced to ancient Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle, and are embraced by the Catholic tradition.

In later chapters, Jacobs tackles a variety of classical philosophical problems, from the search for being, to the meaning of truth, to the nature of man. The last several chapters ably discuss virtue, political philosophy, God, and the problem of evil.

Yet what caught my eye across these varied topics was the regular return to nominalism as a perennial temptation:

Nominalism assumes that there is no objective order in creation. It reflects not a wonder or awe at cosmic goodness but rather a pessimistic doubt about reality that demands that people impose order on an otherwise unintelligible creation. This entails that the concepts of truth and goodness are ultimately arbitrary constructs the philosopher creates to prescribe an order for a fractious world.

Jacobs calls nominalism a "universal acid" that "disintegrates the coherence of philosophy in every area: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics." Assuming nature has no intelligible order leads to the conclusion that all attempts to find meaning in human existence are futile.

Thus, for example, in the nominalist emphasis on divine sovereignty: God is capable of doing anything, and is not constrained even by his own being, and thus does not need to use forms as universal causal principles. And if there are no forms, there are no universal natures such as humanity - every single being is a radically uniq...