William of Ockham on Original sin & the human will
Nature wounded but not destroyed; grace perfects it
THE POSITION
Original sin as the privation of original justice, on the common Franciscan account, held together with an unusually strong doctrine of the will's freedom: the will can choose otherwise than it does, and can knowingly choose against its own ultimate good.
WHY THERE IS NO QUOTATIONNo quotations. He died in 1347 and the Latin is public domain, but the usable English translations are modern and in copyright, so these positions are paraphrased from standard scholarly accounts rather than reproduced. Fewer loci are filled for him than for Scotus, and the reason is recorded per cell rather than hidden: the literature on Ockham is dominated by his logic, metaphysics and politics, and his positions on several loci are not reported cell-by-cell in the standard accounts consulted.
4 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Franciscan, the Venerable Inceptor. Nominalist in metaphysics and voluntarist about God's freedom and the human will; spent his last two decades writing against Pope John XXII from the emperor's court in Munich.
Cite this page
"William of Ockham on Original sin & the human will", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/ockham/original-sin (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/ockham/original-sin).