Gabriel Biel c. 1420 – 1495

Gabriel Biel was a German scholastic philosopher and theologian, sometimes called the last of the great medieval nominalists. After studies at Heidelberg, Erfurt, and Cologne and many years as a cathedral preacher at Mainz, he was called in his later years to the new University of Tubingen, where he taught nominalist theology in the tradition of William of Ockham. His Collectorium circa Quattuor Libros Sententiarum, the most influential late medieval commentary on the Sentences, set out a systematic Ockhamist theology of grace, will, and divine command that shaped early sixteenth-century universities and left a deep impression on the young Martin Luther.

Gabriel Biel was born around 1420 at Speyer in the German Rhineland. He took his master of arts at Heidelberg in 1438, studied further at Erfurt and Cologne, and served from 1457 as cathedral preacher at Mainz, where he supported Diether von Isenburg in the Mainz schism of 1462. Around 1468 he joined the Brethren of the Common Life, served as provost of their houses at Butzbach and Urach, and in 1484 became one of the founding professors of theology at the new University of Tübingen.

His chief works are the four-volume Collectorium circa quattuor libros sententiarum, a faithful epitome of the Sentences-commentary tradition along the lines of William of Ockham; the Canonis Missae expositio, an extended commentary on the canon of the Mass and the most important late-medieval treatise on Eucharistic theology; the Defensorium obedientiae apostolicae; the De potestate et utilitate monetarum on monetary policy; and a series of Latin sermons.

Biel is usually described as the last of the great schoolmen and the most authoritative spokesman of the via moderna in fifteenth-century Germany; he taught a moderate Ockhamist covenant theology in which God has freely bound himself to reward those who 'do what is in them' with first grace, a doctrine the young Luther studied in detail and later denounced as semi-Pelagian. His monetary treatise was an important source for sixteenth-century Salamanca economists. He died at Einsiedel near Tübingen in December 1495.