SOURCE: Kenny, Anthony. “The Philosopher of Truth.” In Wyclif, pp. 1-17. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Kenny probes Wyclif's position as an epistemological Realist by contrasting his views on the subject of universals with those of the nominalist William of Ockham.]

Wyclif lived from the late twenties to the early eighties of the fourteenth century. He was a dozen years older than Geoffrey Chaucer, and they had friends in common. His career fell under the last two kings of the main Plantagenet line, Edward III and his grandson Richard II. Because Edward had a long dotage, and Richard succeeded while still a child, the effective ruler of England during much of Wyclif's working life was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Edward's son and Richard's uncle. To many people, John of Gaunt is best known for the speech placed on his dying lips in Shakespeare's Richard II: the eloquent homage to England which begins ‘This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle!’ The real John of Gaunt was more ambitious and less patriotic than Shakespeare's elder statesman; for better or worse, his power and patronage provided the framework for Wyclif's public career.

It was not until 1374 that Wyclif encountered the royal service: for the previous twenty years he had lived a scholarly life at Oxford. He came there, a Yorkshireman born, a few years after the great plague known as the Black Death; the Hundred Years' War between England and France was just coming to the end of its first phase. For more than a century Oxford University had been one of the great centres of European thought: it was entering on a period of comparative independence and isolation from its great sister university at Paris. The best known scholars of the generations before Wyclif, Duns Scotus and William Ockham, had both lectured in Paris as well as in Oxford, and had lived long periods on the Continent; Wyclif except for one brief visit abroad spent all his life in England. University lectures and sermons continued to be in Latin, and almost all Wyclif's works were written in that tongue; but Oxford men now began to write and preach in English too.

In the University which Wyclif entered there were already in existence half a dozen of the colleges which still survive in Oxford: University, Balliol, Merton, Queen's, Exeter, St Edmund Hall. But these colleges were not the powerful institutions within the University which they are today. The University nowadays consists of a confederation of Colleges with a few small religious halls attached: St Benet's, for instance, for Benedictine monks, and Greyfriars for Franciscan friars. To imagine the Oxford of Wyclif's time you must imagine the University of today turned inside out: the most influential institutions in the University were the houses of monks and friars, and the colleges were comparatively insignificant bodies, little grander than the lodging houses in which the majority of the scholars lived.

Most of Oxford's famous sons had been from the religious orders, especially from the ‘mendicant’ friars, whose vocation called for an austere life supported by the alms they begged. The two best known orders of mendicants were the Dominicans, the preaching friars whose especial care was to preserve the Catholic faith from heresy, and the Franciscans, who pursued ideals of apostolic simplicity and poverty. The unworldly spirituality of the earliest disciples of St Francis was constantly being modified to take account of the realities of ecclesiastical administration. In particular, Franciscans often gave themselves to academic learning. Oxford's first Chancellor, Robert Grosseteste the Bishop of Lincoln, one of Wyclif's lifelong heroes, had been the Franciscans' lecturer; Roger Bacon, the university's first experimental scientist, was a Franciscan. So too were the two most distinguished philosophers and theologians the university had produced, Scotus and Ockham.

It was only in the decades before Wyclif's arrival in Oxford that there began to appear first-rate scholars drawn from the secular or parochial clergy and attached to colleges rather than friaries: men like Thomas Bradwardine and Richard Fitzralph, who were both fellows first of Balliol and then of Merton. Wyclif, like them a secular, followed in their footsteps in the opposite direction: he was a fellow of Merton in the 1350s, and Master of Balliol by 1360.

The course of studies at Oxford in the fourteenth century fell into two parts, and Wyclif was only half-way through his when he became Master of Balliol. The first half was the arts course, which included the liberal arts of grammar, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and rhetoric; a scholar would be encouraged by his master to concentrate especially on the seventh art, logic. Logic provided the introduction to the study of philosophy; there were three branches of this: natural philosophy (covering the topics now treated by scientific disciplines), moral philosophy or ethics, and metaphysics. The second half of an academic training was a degree course in one of the higher faculties of medicine, law, or theology. When the arts course was successfully completed, which took six or eight years, the candidate became a Master of Arts, which made him a member of the governing body of the University; the second part of the course was crowned when the candidate became a Doctor. Wyclif did not take his Doctorate of theology until 1372, about eighteen years after he first came to Oxford; but he had already been lecturing and writing for many years. Teaching and learning were closely interwoven in the course, from the BA onwards; indeed a Bachelor, in order to become a Master of Arts, had to give lecture courses for several years.

Lecture courses in Arts were usually attached, more or less loosely, to set texts of Aristotle, but the lecturer was free to concentrate on topics which interested him. One of the most valued methods of instruction, and of examination, was the disputation, in which master or scholar publicly defended, in accordance with strict logical rules, a thesis on a philosophical or theological topic. Disputations were public spectacles, the academic equivalent of a chivalric tournament; in some of their more elaborate forms they were highly stylized, as removed from the cut-and-thrust of spontaneous academic debate as a modern fencing match is from a lethal sword-fight.

The conventions of these scholastic disputations influenced Wyclif's style throughout his life, and his first surviving works are his lecture courses on the logic of the Oxford schools. His Logic (W [Wyclif's Latin Works. 1883-1922. 36 volumes] 1893) is a brief treatise on elementary Aristotelian logic; clear and brisk, and free from the repetitions and digressions which were to plague his later works, it contains little that is original. But one feature is notable: he declares that what he is expounding is the logic of sacred scripture; and though the content of the treatise is traditional Aristotelian teaching, very many of the examples used are biblical texts.

The Continuation of Logic (W 1893-9) is several times longer than the Logic; it is more original, more discursive, and takes sides on matters of contemporary controversy. Thus Wyclif, reacting against the Aristotelian teaching that matter is infinitely divisible, defends a form of atomism. The world, he says, is composed of indivisible atoms; it cannot be increased or reduced in size, or moved or changed in shape.

It is the juxtaposition of atoms, in the appropriate conditions, which truly constitutes the compound … Though no bodily eye can recognize the individual positions of the corpuscles in the compound, God knows most distinctly, and the human intellect knows obscurely, what position is to be assigned in each compound.

(W 1899. 80)

In other works Wyclif shows his interest in contemporary astronomy and optics: his essay on the Acts of the Soul (W 1902) is in part a commentary on a treatise on perspective by the Polish optician Witelo.

The natural philosophy of the fourteenth century has been almost entirely antiquated by the progress of science. It is often interesting to see how many of the ideas of Galileo, Newton, and others were anticipated in medieval Oxford, but the interest is historical rather than philosophical. It is another matter with medieval logic and metaphysics: here the scholars and students of the fourteenth century were discussing problems and using methods which are current among Oxford philosophers today.

In the mid-twentieth century, as in the mid-fourteenth, philosophers in Oxford pay keen attention to the nature of language: to the way in which terms have meaning, the way in which sentences are put together, the way in which human beings do things with words. In this, contemporary Oxford philosophy resembles the philosophy of Wyclif's day more than it resembles the Oxford of the nineteenth century or the Paris of the twentieth century. Like Wyclif's philosophy, Oxford philosophy today is linguistic philosophy in the sense that it regards the study of language as a central and powerful method for the solution of philosophical problems and the pursuit of philosophical enlightenment.

One can believe that philosophy is linguistic in this sense without believing that philosophy is only about language. Among philosophers who are linguistic in the broad sense of using linguistic methods there is keen debate today whether philosophy is linguistic in the narrow sense of being concerned only with language, and not with the world. This debate is raised in various forms: it is often called a debate between realists and anti-realists. Philosophers ask, for instance, whether truth is objective: is our understanding of language based on an absolute conception of truth itself as opposed to our methods of discovering truth and expressing it? A popular view at the present time is one which may be called creative anti-realism: according to this it is human thought and language that are somehow responsible for the ultimate structure of reality. At the other extreme there are realists who claim that the fundamental framework not only of the actual world, but of all possible worlds, is something quite independent of any mind, human or divine. Anti-realists clearly assign language a role which goes far beyond anything attributed to it by realists; but both realists and anti-realists are, in the broad sense, ‘linguistic philosophers’ and belong to the tradition dominant nowadays in Oxford and most of the English-speaking world.

The conflict between realism and anti-realism mirrors a conflict which was being conducted among the scholastic philosophers of the fourteenth century. Both Wyclif and his immediate predecessors were linguistic philosophers in the sense that they paid great attention to language; but the great philosophers of the previous generation, such as Ockham, defended a form of anti-realism, known as nominalism, whereas Wyclif himself was a realist. The form which the argument took was a debate over the nature of universals.

What is a universal? Take a word such as ‘animal’. This is a term which is universal in the sense that it can be applied to many different things. It is not a proper name like ‘Bucephalus’; it can be used of the cat Tibbles and of the dog Fido and of the man John. Now what, in reality, corresponds to this universal term? What is it that John and Fido and Tibbles have in common which makes them all animals? Shall we say that they have nothing in common except the fact that we use the same name ‘animal’ to refer to each of them? But surely that is absurd. Surely it is because they are all animals that we can call them by the same name, not the other way round! So they must have something in common in reality. But what is that common thing they share? Is it itself an animal? If not, how can it be something which we can rightly refer to by the word ‘animal’? If it is, then must it not be a fourth animal, an animal distinct from John and Fido and Tibbles, since none of them can be identified with each other? But is not such a fourth animal, in its turn, something absurd in itself: an animal that is common to every animal and yet distinct from any of them?

The problem of accounting for the meaning of general terms is a key problem in the philosophy of language. From one point of view, which Wyclif shared with many of his contemporaries, this problem, the problem of universals, can appear as the problem of philosophy. The first of the answers suggested above, the answer that objects have nothing in common other than the names we attach to them, is the nominalist answer; the second answer, that there is in the real world something which is common to all things of a kind but distinct from any of them, is the realist answer. Hardly any philosopher has presented either the nominalist or the realist answer in the extreme form presented above; but in the fourteenth century as at the present day philosophers tend towards one or other of the two poles on this issue. Wyclif saw it as his major philosophical task to undertake the defence of realism against nominalism.

Historians of philosophy and theology have fostered the idea that in the Middle Ages realism belonged with Catholic orthodoxy and that it was the growth of nominalism which paved the way for the Protestant Reformation. But this association is too facile, as is shown by Wyclif's own career: an arch-heretic in his later life, he was at all times a passionate realist. Wyclif would indeed have agreed that nominalism leads to heresy; he thought it incompatible with an orthodox grasp of the Trinity. He believed that he and his friends had been raised up by God to defend realism against the nominalism of the previous generation so that the true Christian doctrine would not die out. His great adversary, in the early part of his career, was Ockham, who had denied realist universals, stressed an empiricist theory of knowledge, and endeavoured to interpret metaphysical truths as truths about language. He attacked Ockham's ‘modernism’, and mocked his disciples as ‘doctors of signs’: they remain fixed for lifetime in the first stages of grammar.

Wyclif wrote as if he had been brought up as a nominalist, and as if it was the dominant tendency in the Oxford of his time; but in attacking it he was aligning himself with conservative orthodoxy. Fifty-one points of Ockham's teaching had been censured at the Papal court at Avignon in 1326, and nominalist techniques which were believed to lead to sceptical doubts were condemned several times in the University of Paris in the 1330s and '40s.

Wyclif's major philosophical work, which occupied him from about 1365 to 1372, was the Summa de Ente, a compendium of philosophical questions in thirteen treatises grouped into two books. The title of the work stresses its comprehensiveness: ‘Ens’, which means ‘being’ or ‘entity’, is the most general word in medieval Latin for all that there is. The first book, of seven treatises, considers being in relation to man; the second book, with six treatises, considers God and his attributes—understanding, knowledge, will, and creative power. When, in the second book, Wyclif comes to treat of the Trinity and of the divine Ideas, he crosses the boundary between philosophy (including philosophy of religion or natural theology) and theology strictly so called (specifically Christian or ‘revealed’ theology). It may well be that these treatises mark Wyclif's first lectures in the theology faculty.

The Summa de Ente has never been published as a whole. Three of the treatises of the first part were published by the Wyclif Society (W 1901 and 1909); two were published in a separate edition in 1930 after the Society had ceased to function. The most important of the philosophical treatises, the one on Universals, had to wait for publication until the sexcentenary year of 1984; the seventh treatise, concerning time, is being prepared for publication. Only two treatises of the second book have been published (W 1909); the remainder of the work still awaits an editor.

As a sample of Wyclif's philosophical thought, we shall consider the treatment of nominalism and realism from the treatise on Universals in the first book. This work was early recognized as central to Wyclif's philosophy, as appears from the unusually large number of manuscripts in which it has been preserved; it also looks forward in several ways to the reformer's radical theological thought.

The treatise is impressive. Wyclif draws on a wide variety of sources, and organizes them into a lively and individual whole. Like any scholastic, he quotes copiously from the works of Aristotle; but in invoking his authority he is not at all servile. He disagrees with him from time to time, and points out that as a pagan the philosopher was ignorant of many truths which Christians know. He makes use of Arabic commentaries on Aristotle, such as the works of Averroës and Avicenna, which he knew, like the text of Aristotle, in Latin versions. Among Christian authors he quotes most voluminously from St Augustine, treating him with veneration and careful never to disagree with him; only Grosseteste and St Anselm of Canterbury receive a comparable degree of respect. Standard scholastic authorities such as St Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus are referred to politely; so too are more recent authors like Bradwardine and Fitzralph, and another predecessor at Balliol and Merton, Walter Burley, who is held up as a solid champion of universals. But most scholars from Ockham onwards are denounced, usually anonymously, as ‘doctors of signs’ who tried to abolish universals and turn the eternal truths of metaphysics into linguistic truisms.

The nominalists' disdain for universals is not a merely academic error, according to Wyclif:

All envy or actual sin is caused by the lack of an ordered love of universals … because every such sin consists in a will preferring a lesser good to a greater good, whereas in general the more universal goods are better … Thus, if proprietors who are devoted to particulars were more concerned with the well-being of the commonwealth than with the prosperity of their kinsfolk they would not press for their own people to be raised to wealth, office, prelacy and other dignities … Beyond doubt, intellectual and emotional error about universals is the cause of all the sin that reigns in the world.

(U [De Universalibus (On Universals). Oxford University Press, 1984] 77)

Thus the germ of Wyclif's later communism is already found in his logic.

The nominalists, Wyclif maintains, mistake the nature of universals because they misunderstand the nature of predication. Universal terms occur as predicates in sentences. Thus, in ‘John is a man’ there occurs the term ‘man’ which tells you what species John belongs to; and in ‘John is an animal’ there occurs the term ‘animal’ which tells you what genus John belongs to—a genus which includes other species, such as the species dog, cat, and so on. Now nothing can be a predicate—so the nominalists argue—unless it is a part of a proposition or sentence. But nothing in the real world is a part of a sentence, so nothing in the real world is a predicate. So universals, such as species and genera, are not parts of the real world; being predicates, they are terms, and terms which do not signify anything in the world. Thus argue the nominalists.

This is quite wrong, Wyclif argues. Besides a sentence such as ‘John is a man’ or ‘John is wise’, which expresses a certain truth, we have to look in the world for the truth it expresses. The sentence does not contain its own truth; in itself a sentence is just the same whether it is true or false. To tell whether it is true we have to look outside it at what corresponds to it in the world. This Wyclif calls, following Walter Burley, ‘the real proposition’: it is a proposition put together by God from subject and predicate. That is to say, the sentence ‘John is wise’, which consists of the subject term ‘John’ attached to a verbal predicate, is true only if in the real world the substance John has attached to itself the characterization being wise which corresponds to the predicate of the sentence. This characterization, Wyclif says, is a form, the form of wisdom; a form which inheres in every individual who is wise. Similarly corresponding to the predicate in the sentence ‘John is a man’ there is in the world the form of humanity, which inheres in every individual of the human race or species.

So as well as terms which are predicated of individuals, there are forms; forms are predicated of, or are shared by, or are common to individuals. This is the real predication of which predication in language is just a sign. Wyclif has no difficulty in finding passages in Aristotle which support this notion of real predication. Thus in his Categories Aristotle had distinguished between primary substances (such as this man, this horse) and secondary substances, which he said were the kinds in which primary substances came. Secondary substance, unlike primary substance, Aristotle said, is said or predicated of a subject. ‘This’, Wyclif observes, ‘is more easily understood about things signified than about their signs.’

It is absurd to say that the existence of species and genera depends upon the mind, at least if the mind we are thinking of is the human mind.

Even though no created nature ever did any thinking, none the less there would be species and genera truly shared by their individuals; thus it does not depend on any created intellect that it is common to every fire to be fire, and so with the other substances.

(U 79)

No doubt universality depends on the mind in the sense that it is the divine intellect of the creator which has produced the common humanity which is shared by each individual human; but being man is common to every man whether or not any creature thinks of this or not.

A correct understanding of predication, Wyclif maintains, will enable us to see how much better a realist definition of universals is than a nominalist one. A realist will tell us simply that a genus is what is predicated of many things which are different in species. A nominalist has to entangle himself in some circumlocution such as this: ‘A genus is a term which is predicable, or whose counterpart is predicable, of many terms which signify things which are specifically distinct.’ The nominalist cannot say that it is essential to a term to be actually predicated: perhaps there is no one around to do any verbal predicating. He cannot say that any particular term—any particular sound or image or mark on paper—has to be predicable; most signs do not last long enough for multiple predication. That is why he has to speak of counterparts, that is to say of other resembling signs. He cannot say that the term is predicated of terms differing in species: the word ‘dog’ does not differ in species from the word ‘cat’; they are both English nouns on this page. So they have to say that the terms signify things that differ specifically. But of course in doing this they give the game away: they are making specific difference something on the side of the things signified, not something belonging purely to the signs. So the nominalist's gobbledygook does not really help him at all.

When we talk of species and genus, we are not talking of ink blots on paper; if we were, we could change a man into a donkey by altering the significance of a term. But of course we cannot alter the species and genus of things by fiat, as we can alter the meanings of words by convention. It is not the possibility or the fact of assigning a word which causes extra-mental things to resemble each other more or less; the specific resemblance or difference between things is based on the constituents of things themselves. The predication or predicability of signs is not the reason for the resemblances between extra-mental things; it is the other way round.

So far Wyclif seems to have the better of the argument with his adversary, whether or not the adversary he sets up for himself is a fair representation of Ockham and his disciples. But if his theory is to be not only true but also Aristotelian, what is he to make of the polemic which Aristotle conducted against Plato's theory of Ideas, in a number of passages which Wyclif quotes? For was not Plato's theory nothing other than the postulation of real universals such as the nominalists rejected?

Wyclif knew Plato only at second hand, through Aristotle's critique and Augustine's defence of Platonism. He endeavours to reconcile the two great classical philosophers by making distinctions between different kinds of universals.

First of all, in the mind of God from all eternity there is the thought of all the different kinds of things he can make: these are the patterns and paradigms by which he creates. To refer to these Wyclif, like other Latin theologians, used the Greek word ‘Idea’.

The divine Ideas existed from all eternity, and would exist whether or not the world was created. But once things have been created there is another kind of universal: the form which is shared or held in common by all the individuals of a kind. This, Wyclif maintains, is what Aristotle means by genera and species; he calls them metaphysical universals.

Metaphysical universals have in common that they share in universality: they all fall under the concept ‘universal’. But this is something which it takes an abstractive intellect to grasp. A dog may recognize another dog as being of its kind; but only a human being can realize that caninity, like humanity, is a universal. Hence universals, considered precisely as universals, have a universality which is introduced by the intellect. Here Wyclif speaks of logical universals.

Finally, there are the words and thoughts which are the signs of universals; these are the universal terms which even the nominalists recognize.

Now if we interpret Plato charitably, we can take it that the ideas he spoke of are the Ideas in the divine mind; and none of Aristotle's arguments suffices to refute the possibility of such Ideas. But what Aristotle is really taking issue with is the notion that there are ideas which are self-subsistent substances, separate from God and from individuals. These, Wyclif agrees, would be unintelligible and superfluous monstrosities. Whether Plato believed in such entities, Wyclif leaves open; but even Aristotle believed that there were forms and natures common to individuals; and these are universals in the second sense listed above, the metaphysical universals.

But what are these universals? What kinds of entities are they? Wyclif explains that the way to understand this is to reflect on the nature of truth. For anyone who grasps a necessary truth already conceives a universal. This seems difficult to accept: how can a universal, which on Wyclif's account is a reality which corresponds to a predicate, be the same as a truth, which is something corresponding to a whole sentence consisting of subject plus predicate? Wyclif agrees that a sentence is complex while a term is not; but he denies that this presents a real difficulty for his thesis. The contrast between complexity and non-complexity is something which belongs to our conceiving, and not to what we conceive.

What Wyclif has in mind seems to be something like this. Suppose that the mind is aware that an individual A resembles an individual B. There must be a particular respect in which A resembles B, since things can be similar in one respect while at the same time dissimilar in another respect—there is no such thing as pure similarity, similarity which is not similarity in some respect. Let us call this respect C: what the mind is aware of is then that A resembles B in respect of C. In seeing the resemblance of A and B in this respect, the mind is seeing the C-ness of A and B; that is to say, it is conceiving C-ness, where ‘C’ is the name of a universal. Seeing that A is like B in respect of C is the very same thing as seeing the C-ness of A and B; so what is indicated by the complex clause in the first expression must be the same as what is indicated by the abstract noun in the second. Hence, to grasp a universal is simply to conceive in a non-complex manner what one grasps by a judgement containing a subject and predicate; and anyone who can make judgements of likeness automatically knows what a universal is.

Nominalists attack realists by claiming that the postulation of universals leads to absurd consequences. If there are more men in the world today than there were yesterday, does that mean that the universal man has grown? How many heads does the universal animal have? Does the human species sin? Can it laugh? Are universals created by God? In other chapters of his treatise Wyclif patiently unravels such difficulties, and shows how non-absurd and non-arbitrary answers can be given to these and similar trick questions. In general he deals with the objections successfully, and leaves the reader with the conviction that he has had the better of his nominalist adversaries.

He is less convincing, though sometimes engaging, when he tries to show that a right understanding of universals has beneficial moral effects. He enlists Augustine in support of the thesis that nominalism leads to selfishness, and realism to love of one's neighbour. Real love of one's neighbour must be based on the fact that he or she is a human being, not that he is one's son or she is one's mistress: the common humanity is the work of God, the particular relationship is of one's own making. So every Christian ought to love his neighbour in his common nature, rather than with an eye to individual utility, kinship, or pleasure. How can he do this without a grasp of what is common, the universal humanity? It is a greater good, and a greater object of concern to God, that there should be human beings at all, than that there should be any particular individual. ‘So, if I am to conform my will to the divine will, I have a duty to love the superior truth more than the inferior truth.’