Ockham's Hellenism
Plato and Plato's inversion
In a brilliant contribution to Essays in Thomism (1942), Anton Pegis explains the continuity between ancient Hellenic philosophy and late medieval scholasticism. He identifies “causes within Greek philosophy itself as well as within thirteenth-century experiences of Greek philosophy which were bound to lead to Ockham.”
His story in a nutshell: Christian thinkers inherited a problem from Hellenic philosophy, and never abandoned it. Even the anti-Hellenic nominalists assumed the old Hellenic dilemma. Ockham attacked the Platonism of earlier scholastics, yet he escapes Platonism along a Platonic path, and, as a result, ends in the only place he could – with an inversion of Plato. None of this, Pegis argues, was necessary, because the Hellenic problem should never have been a problem for Christians who confessed the Triune Creator (152-3).
The “unchanging problem” in Greek philosophy was the “dilemma of being and unity” (152). The opposition is evident at the beginning of Greek philosophy, in the tension between Parmenides, a philosopher of the One, and Heraclitus, who emphasizes the flux of being.
The problem is stated clearly in Plato’s Sophist (on which, see Eva Brann’s superb essay in The Music of the Republic). Plato concludes that “no Form is the same as itself without being also different from every other Form; which also means that the whole of being must be considered not only as being but also as non-being [difference], for non-being is the mysterious co-principle of its interior intelligibility” (157). Plato steers between Parmenides and Heraclitus, but only by insisting that being must be diverse in order to be intelligible. Being’s only unity is the “unity of an ordered whole which maintains within itself the distinct articulation of its members” (157). A body, for instance, cannot be truly one, because it’s made of diverse parts, each of has its own integrity. A body is merely an assemblage of parts, a “whole.”
On these premises, the only way to save oneness from plurality, the only way to arrive at a pure unity, is to say oneness is unintelligible.