This post is towards an adjustment to a correct, or at least more correct, understanding of Ockham's razor and Anselm's proof that I found in an interesting* book. All of substance in what follows is from The Theological Origins of Modernity, Michael Gillespie, 2008. I never encountered this material before and am forced to conclude that every reference to these that did not include the following as qualifying data was, to the degree it matters, ignorant and errant. You may judge for yourself if and how it matters. All quoted material below is from the book.

Some groundwork is essential. Christianity was "adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine." This adoption did not resolve the tensions between the ecstatic and rational aspects of Christianity. The rediscovery in Western Europe of Aristotle led "to the rise of scholasticism, which was the greatest and most comprehensive theological attempt to reconcile the philosophical and scriptural elements in Christianity," the main form of which was realism, the "belief in the extra-mental existence of universals."

"Univerals such as species and genera were the ultimately real things and that individual beings were merely particular instances of these universals.... [And] were thought to be nothing other than divine reason made known to man either by illumination, as Augustine had suggested, or through the investigation of nature, as Aquinas and others argued."

Roughly and crudely: God's realm is structured and subsumed under reason, by a perfect God of perfect reason.

Nominalism read into this an implication that God, being rational, was not (therefore) omnipotent and thus rejected scholastic realism - Ockham being a main engine of this rejection. Universals, Ockham argued, were a constraint on God's omnipotence and thus could not stand. "If there were no real universals, every being must be radically individual, a unique creation of God himself, called forth out of nothing by his infinite power and sustained by that power alone."

I have made no effort to reproduce the thoroughness and nuance of the author's presentation.

Scholastic realism: universals are real, and God's structure by which we can appreciate his perfect, rational Being. That is, universals are a part of truth. Nominalism: the rejection of realism in favor of an omnipotent God who is the only necessary being, and under whom all beings are unique individuals. "Omnipotence" in this context being just the power to be arbitrary, which a God of perfect reason cannot be.

We know Ockham's razor as the rule not to multiply explanations unnecessarily, or make them more complicated than they need to be. A fine and worthy rule; a good razor. But arguably not Ockham's! "Thus the guiding principle of nominalist logic for Ockham was his famous razor: do not multiply universals needlessly. While we cannot, as finite beings, make sense of the world without universals, every generalization takes us one more step away from the real. Hence, the fewer we employ the closer we remain to the truth."

Anselm on the other hand was a realist. His argument, mocked for nearly all of the almost one thousand years of its existence, was sound in terms of his beliefs. "God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Being a scholastic realist, Anselm invokes a hierarchy of being extending upward into increasingly real abstraction until he gets to the ultimate and ultimately real being of God. Perhaps read that again: an absolutely sound argument! R.G. Collingwood comes closest to understanding it when he identifies the belief in God as an "absolute presupposition" of Anselm's thinking. But so astute an historian would not have omitted the scholastic realist element of Anselm's thinking and argument if he had known of it (he must have, why did he omit it?).

The meaning, weight, and significance of the razor and the proof are recast when understood in the light of the realist/nominalist divide in which they were born - it's an old lesson: for correct understanding get as close as possible to the original.

I have teased my church's pastors with the question as to whether they are nominalists or scholastic realists. They don't know the terms.

*Interesting doesn't remotely begin to cover it. Find reviews and see your local library.