The study of medieval philosophy is flourishing, as witness the selective bibliography for this book. And yet, from some philosophical viewpoints – analytic, continental, or science-oriented – the subject of this volume can still seem remote. Where ontology recapitulates philology, or Dasein replaces being and essence, or naturalism needs no arguing, the immersion of medieval thinkers in questions about eternity, God, and the immateriality of intellect can seem incomprehensible, if occasionally intriguing. This Companion seeks to enhance fascination while diminishing incomprehension. The contributors hope to bring readers into medieval discussions as directly as possible, enabling them to appreciate for themselves the philosophical motives instigating these discussions and the boldness, subtlety, and analytic rigor with which they were carried on. The aim is to exhibit the variety and freshness of medieval approaches to problems rather than to evaluate solutions. This is not to deny that timeless truth can be found in the material presented. Many students of medieval metaphysics would hold that the discipline had entered on “the sure path of a science,” in Kant’s phrase, several centuries before Kant restricted its scope to laying bare the conditions of possible experience (and would attribute Kant’s dismissal of earlier efforts as “random groping” to typical Enlightenment ignorance of medieval thought). We are convinced, however, that the insights of medieval philosophy appear most clearly in the midst of the discussions in which the medievals themselves sought them.

What follows is as much reconstruction provoked by Ockham as a study of Ockham. My main aim is to provide a framework to accommodate various things Ockham said but did not put together as neatly as we might wish.

What provokes this project is the apparent tension between obedience to divine will, which figures so prominently in Ockham's academic writings, and the nonsacral reasonableness so prominent in his political works. Granted, both divine command ethics and a demonstrative science of morals are found in the academic writings, and extensive references to God's will as well as astute Aristotelian political analysis are found in the political works. Ockham did not abandon God's will in favor of philosophical reason when he abandoned John XXII for the protection of Ludwig of Bavaria. Yet there is, I believe, something to the impression that Ockham, especially the earlier Ockham, held God's will to be a uniquely supreme, comprehensive, unrestricted moral principle, and also something to the impression that the later, political Ockham was distinctive in arguing for a secular political order operating according to a rationally ascertainable natural law but lacking any inherent religious orientation. At any rate, such impressions set the problem I want to grapple with in this chapter.

This volume is designed to offer the most direct access possible to the argument and sources of a classic of English political and religious thought which has recently become a subject of critical controversy. There are difficulties. Hooker's sentences are long and his chapter-length paragraphs very long. His sources, tersely cited as a rule, are unfamiliar. The solutions to these problems chosen by the great nineteenth-century editor of his works, John Keble, were to segment Hooker's text – by heavy punctuation of sentences and the division of chapters into numbered sections – and vastly augment his notes. These measures had their point, but they are sometimes intrusive. In this edition, spelling has been modernized, but Hooker's punctuation and paragraph indivisions have been left alone for the Preface and Book I (which were published in his lifetime), and only a few changes have been made in the posthumously published Book VIII (the surviving manuscripts of which have paragraph divisions, one indication among others that our version of the book is not a finished one). The lack of paragraphs in the earlier parts of the work may seem a hardship at first, but if the reader will think of immersion rather than quick processing as the right approach to Hooker's prose, the result will be rewarding.