Durandus of St. Pourçain

Dominican theologian, and bishop successively of Limoux (the only cleric ever to hold this title) in 1317, Le Puy-en-Velay (1318), and Meaux (1326). Known as the Doctor Modernus and the Doctor Resolutissimus, he lectured at Paris until 1313, when he was called to Avignon and entrusted with a diplomatic mission by Pope John XXII. Though a Dominican at a time when [[Thomas Aquinas]] was already recognized as the official doctor of the order, Durandus was not a Thomist but a kind of nominalist, maintaining that the universal comes after the thing and that intellection is a psychological rather than a metaphysical operation. His partiality for nominalist solutions did not prevent his serving on the papal commission which condemned fifty-one propositions taken from William Ockham. Under heavy pressure from his own order for his anti-Thomist ideas, Durandus revised his Commentary on the Sentences (before 1308) twice (1310-12, 1317-27), removing some of his more offensive theses. He never repudiated his position, however, and eleven articles from his treatise De Visione Dei were censured by a papal commission in 1333.