Wyclif’s theological doctrines are reasonably familiar and I do not intend to dwell upon them unduly here. They had their focus in his concepts of the Church, the Bible and the eucharisr, and they were the outcome of a singular combination of a metaphysics of realism—the belief in the reality of universal essences or natures, such as genera and species, and including being itself as the most universal essence of all—and an apostolic or evangelical view of Christian life, modeled on the life of Christ and his disciples, as one of purely spiritual mission and temporal renunciation. It was that combination which made Wyclif’s religious beliefs distinctive, and it is that which I wish to consider here.

Among the more far-reaching consequences of the disputes over absolute poverty in the Franciscan Order was the emergence of a doctrine of natural rights. Or rather conflicting doctrines, drawn from conflicting interpretations of the life of Christ and the apostles, which crystallized in the debates between Pope John XXII and members of the Order in the 1320s and 1330s over Christ’s absolute poverty. Both the Pope, in denying that Christ had ever lived in absolute poverty, and his Franciscan opponents, who upheld the Franciscan doctrine that he had, arrived at rival conceptions of the rights involved in either possessing or renouncing temporal things.

Professor Astrik Gabriel perhaps comes nearest to being the present-day successor to Charles Homer Haskins. Not that they could for a moment be confused. For one thing Professor Gabriel's main focus of activity is the high and later middle ages, whereas for Haskins it centered on the twelfth century: a difference in the intellectual history of the period between maturity verging on old age and youth. Again Haskins touched lightly on the borderland of intellectual and social history, throwing out a stream of elegant and seminal suggestions and sketches, while Professor Gabriel has mainly concentrated on the social and institutional facets of university life, above all in the colleges. Yet, although their styles of presentation are also very different, both take one into the heart of university life as it was lived with a zest and sympathy which is distinctive.

Ockhamism was a radical restatement of the relation of revealed truth to natural experience. Its force lay in the systematic application—one might say exploitation—of the different criteria appropriate to each. That they were different was universally accepted; but not until Ockham were their differences methodically shown to be unassimilable. The reasons were not only epistemological; they were also theological. The limits to natural knowledge set by Ockham's insistence upon verification had their counterpart in the absence of limits to God's omnipotence—save self-contradiction. Ockhamism was not just empiricism; it was an extreme restatement of Christian belief in divine omnipotence and the contingency of creation. The disruptive effects lay not in the belief itself but in the play upon it, especially by Ockham's followers.