8
turn in philosophy which gave birth to the subjective turn in philosophy with whose bitter
fruit we are still dealing today. Further, these authors intimate that because the Protestant
Reformers broadly followed the Via Moderna (i.e. nominalism as opposed to the old
medieval realism), they are unwitting accomplices in the demise of the West. If only the
poor Reformers would have known better, some say, perhaps we may have never gotten
to Nietzsche. As the prolific Thomist Ralph McInerny forthrightly, if viciously,
condemns, "It is not just a well-turned phrase that modern philosophy is the Reformation
carried on by other means. Most of the major figures are Protestant or apostate or both.
Luthers attack on reason and his Manichean split between nature and grace poisoned the
well of thinking."
12
There is, no doubt, some explanatory power to this analysis. Clearly something
went wrong in the modern period. Modernity gave way to modernism. To offer a
biblical allusion, the Thomist, the Calvinist, and the Postmodernist can all lie down and
let a little child lead them together on that issue. But to suggest that the blame and bane
of modernism as we now know it is to be laid at the feet of the Reformers, is, quite
frankly, ludicrous. That notion lacks a serious amount of perspective and two-
dimensionalizes intellectual history in an unhelpful way. Although it lies beyond the
purview of the present paper to offer a thoroughgoing response to these charges, allow
me to suggest three observations.
First, as far as Occam himself is concerned, Occam did not deny the existence of
universals quite in the way he is often taken to have done. Rather, as far as I can deduce,
12
Ralph McInerny, A Student's Guide to Philosophy (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1999),
25.