5 - HENRY OF GHENT Can a Human Being Know Anything without Divine Illumination?

Summary

Introduction

In the previous selection, Henry of Ghent considered and rejected the ancient skeptical arguments purporting to show that human beings can know nothing at all. His strategy there was to define a broad sense of knowledge (scientia) on which ordinary sensory experience could count as a sufficient ground, and then to establish a criterion for picking out those circumstances in which the senses should be trusted. All of that was, in a sense, merely a warm-up exercise for the far more complicated discussion contained in the present selection. Whereas ancient skepticism must have struck Henry as a tired and antiquated issue, the present question – divine illumination – clearly lies at the heart of his own interests, and indeed of thirteenth-century epistemology in general.

For medieval philosophers up until Henry's time (the last quarter of the thirteenth century), it was commonplace to assume that true knowledge requires some kind of special illumination from God. (Bonaventure offers a classic statement of the doctrine in Translation 3.) But later thirteenth century authors began to question this doctrine and then reject it entirely. Thomas Aquinas supported the theory of illumination, but denied that it should be conceived of as a special ongoing event: He thought human beings were born with a certain sort of illumination (Summa theologiae 1a 84.7). Later scholars, in particular John Duns Scotus, were even more critical of the theory, and by the fourteenth century the theory was entirely discredited. Henry of Ghent, then, should be read as the last great defender of divine illumination.

In this selection, Henry works to spell out precisely what kind of knowledge requires a special divine illumination.