Henry of Ghent and Divine Illumination: A Response to Andrea Aiello and Robert Wielockx

Abstract

In 2008, Andrea Aiello and Robert Wielockx published an article in Documenti e Studi sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale that criticized a crucial aspect of my understanding of Henry of Ghent’s theory of human knowledge of the truth. They targeted my claim that after 1279 or 1280, Henry began to move away from his early description of human knowledge of pure truth (sincera veritas) as dependent on an Augustinian illumination of the intellect by God’s light of Truth and to turn to a more Aristotelian notion of truth-perception as consisting of more precise knowledge of the mental object’s essence or quiddity. As evidence that I was wrong, Aiello and Wielockx pointed to numerous passages in Henry’s later works where he directed the reader inquiring about truth back to his earliest explanation of the matter in the beginning of his Summa. In this response, I show that I have always accepted the idea that Henry-all the way to his last works-never abandoned the notion that God as repository of ideal forms played a fundamental role in human knowledge of truth, for he realized that his mature theory of essence meant that his Aristotelianizing version of truth-perception entailed the mind’s penetrating to the divine ideal. And I argue that we should not be surprised that, on those occasions where he directed the reader back to his earliest explanation of knowledge of truth, he did not mention that in precise terms he had modified the mechanics of truthperception. For the mature Henry’s account of knowledge of truth, though not expressed literally in terms of illumination, for all its Aristotelian complexion still maintained the Augustinian insistence that knowledge of truth depended on rati cation by God.