Nominalism's Legacy in Luther and the Protestant Reformation

By the late fifteenth century, the nominalist tradition descending from Ockham had become formally institutionalized in several German and central European universities as the via moderna, taught alongside, and often in open faculty rivalry with, the via antiqua of Thomist and Scotist realism. Martin Luther (1483–1546) received his university education within precisely this nominalist environment, studying the arts course at the University of Erfurt from 1501, where the philosophical curriculum was dominated by nominalist logic and natural philosophy, before entering the Augustinian friary at Erfurt in 1505 and proceeding to theological study grounded heavily in the writings of the last major systematic nominalist theologian, Gabriel Biel (c. 1420–1495), a former secular priest and, later, professor at the newly founded University of Tübingen.