Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/104

 a fellow of Merton, though there is reason to doubt the last-mentioned statement. Ockham was a Franciscan friar, and some of the ablest men of the Order in the fourteenth century were his professed followers. He had sat under Duns Scotus, who had also been a fellow of Merton and a Franciscan; but in several respects the views of master and pupil were in sharp contrast. Duns was a Realist, a "Scotist," a believer in the immaculate conception of the Virgin, a defender of the current orthodoxy of Rome. Ockham was a Nominalist, a champion of the Fraticelli, not to say a Fraticello himself, who wrote a cogent Defence of Poverty. He opposed the extreme political claims of the Papacy, denied the final authority of the decretal or canon law, and held that logic was essentially distinct from and independent of theology—which, according to his enemies, was the same thing as to declare it of superior authority. Though he was far less dogmatically assertive in regard to the spiritual assumptions of Rome than some of his friends, yet his personal courage, and the sacrifices which he made for his belief, were unquestionable; and he was finally excommunicated. He went so far as to denounce John XXII. as a heretic; and, in the quarrel between that Pope and Ludwig of Bavaria, he ranged himself on the side of the Emperor, and of the Antipope Nicolas.

Ockham, like many English scholars of his day, took advantage of the privilege accorded to those who wished to study at the University of Paris. Whilst there, he formed a close friendship with