Among the attributes of God that Ockham discusses is divine omnipotence or the power of God. There is a traditional distinction regarding God’s power that Ockham inherits: God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. He discusses this distinction at length in Book I of the Sentences, and particularly in the context of talking about grace. In the Summa logicae (Opera philosophica I, 777), he gives a brief helpful way of understanding God’s so-called ‘‘two powers.’’ ‘‘This proposition ‘God by his absolute power can accept [for eternal life] someone who does not have grace but not by his ordained power’ is ambiguous. One meaning is that God by one power, which is absolute and not ordained, can accept someone without grace, and through one other power, which is ordained and not absolute, cannot accept him, as if there were two powers in God and that through one of them he could do this and not through another. This way of understanding it is false. In another way, the original proposition is taken improperly as though it were substituted for this statement: ‘God can accept someone who does not have [created] grace informing his soul, because doing so does not entail a contradiction, and yet God ordained that this would never take place’.’’ Here we see Ockham using his razor, we watch him decoding the original statement, and we thereby come to understand that there are not two competing powers in God.
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