Truth and scientific knowledge in the thought of Henry of Ghent (Speculum anniversary monographs) 9780910956925, 091095691X, 0910956928

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SPECULUM ANNIVERSARY MONOGRAPHS ELEVEN

Truth and Scientific Knowledge in the Thought of Henry of Ghent

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BOARD OF EDITORS

Bernard S. Bachrach Roberta Frank Lester K. Little Fred C. Robinson Luke Wenger

Truth and Scientific Knowledge

in the Thought of Henry of Ghent

Steven P. Marrone

THE MEDIEVAL ACADEMY OF AMERICA 1985

The publication of this book was made possible by funds contributed to the Medieval Academy during the Semi-Centennial Fund Drive. Copyright © 1985. Cambridge, Massachusetts By The Medieval Academy of America LCC: 84-62885 ISBN: 0-910956-91-X (cloth); 0-910956-92-8 (paper) Printed in the United States of America

To Benjamin

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations x I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH © 13

III. THE SECOND STAGE 41 1. Truth as Mental Reflection 50 2. Truth and Aristotelian Science 69

IV. THE FINAL SUMMATION 93 , V. CONCLUSION 141 Works Cited 149

Index 159

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Acknowledgments

Convention requires that an author acknowledge the assistance of all those who contributed to the making of a book. Yet in the present case I bear an obligation greater than is usually implied by the conventional courtesies. Not only the book that follows but indeed a good deal of my work has been profoundly influenced by three colleagues who have done much to lay the way for the study of Henry of Ghent and latethirteenth-century scholasticism. To Prof. John F. Wippel, Dr. Raymond Macken, and Dr. Jerome V. Brown I must express my deepest gratitude. Their generous and thoughtful comments as readers of earlier versions of the present work have contributed significantly to its

final form and caused me to reshape and refine many of my ideas about Henry. Their own scholarship and their kind support have served as an encouragement and are the basis for much of my research. It is true in many ways that the present book would not have been possible without their help. I must add my thanks to Elisabeth Bouché, who has for years assisted

me in the arduous task of getting my work ready for print. To the Medieval Academy of America I am most grateful for the kind offer to publish at a time when the rising costs of printing make any such endeavor increasingly difficult. Finally, I must thank the Division of Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation, both of which have generously provided support for the research upon which this book is based.

1X

Abbreviations

AHDLMA Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen age

BCRH Bulletin de la Commission royale d’histoire (Brussels)

Beitrage Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters (Now: Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters)

CC Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina

CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum

PL J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus, Series Latina, 221 vols. (Paris, 1844-64)

RTAM Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale

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I

Introduction

Since the early years of the nineteenth century, scholars have recognized the importance of Henry of Ghent for the history of medieval scholasticism.! Yet it was only after the revisionary biographical work of Franz Ehrle in the 1880s that it came to be realized just how large was Henry’s role in the intellectual developments of his day.* Before Ehrle, it was assumed that Henry’s literary activity came at the same time as that of Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, with the nearly inevitable result that his work was seen to have stood in the shadow of the achievements of these two great masters, no real assessment being made of its true value or its precise meaning. Once Ehrle had demonstrated that Henry composed his theological writings in the decades after the death of Thomas and Bonaventure, it became necessary to revise this view. No longer having to compete with such widely recognized giants, Henry began to be seen as one of the most significant thinkers of his time, perhaps even the dominant figure at the University of Paris during the years of his intellectual maturity.? Besides making it more likely that his work would be given the measure of critical scrutiny it deserved, this readjustment also meant that modern scholars would be able to make a clearer and more intelligent analysis, equipped with a historical perspective that allowed them to ask the right questions and draw appropriate connections and comparisons to other thinkers. 1. The most notable early work on Henry is Francois Huet, Recherches historiques et critiques sur la vie, les ouvrages et la doctrine de Henri de Gand (Ghent, 1838). 2. See Franz Ehrle, “Beitrage zu den Biographen beriihmter Scholastiker: Heinrich von Gent,” Archiv fiir Literatur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters 1 (1885), 365401, 507-8. This article was translated into French by J. Raskop as “Recherches critiques sur la biographie de Henri de Gand dit le Docteur solennel,” Bulletins de la Société historique et littéraire de Tournai 21, suppl. (1887), 7-51. 3. This reassessment brought modern scholarship more into line with the testimony of medieval authors themselves. Intellectual figures of the first rank in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, men such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, continually referred to Henry’s works and, particularly in Scotus’s case, seem to have regarded them as the primary foil against which they wanted their own ideas to be set.

1

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

The dates of Henry’s life do indeed situate him at a crucial point in the history of scholastic thought.* He was born in Ghent in the early thirteenth century, possibly into the family of a tailor and most likely not into the noble line of the Goethals, as was believed for many years. As a young man he was a student at the chapter school of the cathedral at Tournai, where by 1267 he was already a canon. He studied and perhaps taught in the faculty of arts at Paris and went on to attend classes there in theology in the third quarter of the century. It was probably in 1276 that he became regent master in theology at Paris, a position he held until his death, nearly twenty years later. By 1277 he had been appointed archdeacon of Bruges, and sometime in 1278 or 1279 he was promoted to the influential post of archdeacon of Tournai. During these later years of his life Henry not only was involved in the administration of his diocese but also played an active and formative role in the intellectual and political affairs of the University of Paris. In 1277 he was a member of the commission of theologians appointed by Bishop Tempier to examine the orthodoxy of certain doctrines being taught at the university. The recommendations of this 4. The sketchy details of Henry’s biography have been worked out in a series of studies following up on Ehrle’s groundbreaking work of 1885 (n. 2, above). See Hippolyte Delehaye, “Nouvelles recherches sur Henri de Gand,” Messager des sciences historiques ou Archives des arts et de la bibliographie de Belgique (1886), 328-55, 438-55, and (1887), 59-85; and “Notes sur Henri de Gand,” ibid. (1888), 421-56; Alphonse Wauters, “Sur les documents apocryphes qui concerneraient Henri de Gand, le docteur solennel, et qui le rattachent a la famille Goethals,” BCRH, 4th ser., 14 (1887), 179-90; “Sur la signification du mot latin Formator, a propos de Henri de Gand,” BCRH, 4th ser., 16 (1889), 12-15; and “Le mot latin Formator, au moyen age, avait la signification de professeur,” BCRH, 4th ser., 16 (1889), 400-410; Napoléon De Pauw, “Note sur le vrai nom du Docteur solennel Henri de Gand,” BCRH, 4th ser., 15 (1888), 135-45; and “Derniéres découvertes concernant le Docteur solennel Henri de Gand, fils de Jean le Tailleur (Formator ou de Sceppere),” BCRH, 4th ser., 16 (1889), 27-138; Clemens Baeumker, “Jahresbericht tiber die abendlandische Philosophie im Mittelalter. 1890,” Archiv ftir Geschichte der Philosophie 5 (1892), 113-38;

Maurice De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie en Belgique (Brussels, 1910), pp. 80-116; Martin Grabmann, Mittelalterliche lateinische Aristotelestubersetzungen und Aristoteleskommentare in Handschriften spanischer Bibliotheken, Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-philologische und historische Klasse, 1928, 5. Abhandlung (Munich, 1928), pp. 95-96; Palémon Glorieux, La littérature quodlibétique de 1260 a 1320, I (Le Saulchoir, 1925), p. 177; Répertoire des maitres en théologie de Paris au XIIle siécle, 1 (Paris, 1933), p. 387; and Aux origines de la Sorbonne, 1: Robert de Sorbon (Paris, 1966), p. 309; Jean Paulus, Henri de Gand: Essai sur les tendances de sa métaphysique (Paris, 1938), pp. xi-xxiii; and Raymond Macken’s introduction to Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet I, ed. Raymond Macken, Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, 5 (Leuven, 1979), pp. vi-xii. For other works on Henry and his ideas, see the bibliography at the end of

2

INTRODUCTION

commission were enshrined in the condemnation of 219 propositions Tempier issued on March 7 of that same year. Henry was also a mem-

ber of the commission of masters convened at Paris in 1282 at the behest of a number of French bishops in order to deliberate on the extent of the privilege to hear confession that had recently been granted to the mendicant orders. Henry was in fact a vocal opponent of the mendicants in those years of controversy and a strong supporter of the rights of the secular clerics against them. In 1284 Pope Martin

IV called upon Henry along with the bishops of Amiens and Périgueux to decide the remaining issues in an acrimonious dispute between the chancellor of Paris, Philip of Thory, and the university. Henry was

by this time evidently a person of recognized eminence throughout Europe and considerable influence at Paris. He died in 1293. So much is sure concerning Henry’s life. But if it has been known for some time exactly where he came in the line of thirteenth-century scholastics and if historians have been compelled to make a deferential nod to Henry as arguably the leading scholarly figure in Europe during the last decades of his life, the actual investigation of his work has proceeded slowly. One reason for this must certainly be the extraordinary

difficulty of coming to grips with Henry’s thought. It is not simply that he had a subtle mind, prone to complex chains of reasoning and exacting attention to detail. This is all true. Yet Henry was also a prolix, frequently obscure writer, and his works have none of the clarity and grace that make it such a pleasure to work through the ideas of a thinker like Thomas Aquinas. To make things even more difficult, the structure Henry imposed on his work creates an enormous problem. The difficulty is that Henry, at least as much as any of the leading scholastics of the later thirteenth century, changed his mind, modified his ideas, and progressively elaborated his thought over the course of his career.? Yet his two major works, his Summa quaestionum ordinariarum and his collected Quodlibeta —to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life — have come down to us in a form that masks this developmental process. In

Raymond Macken, “Hendrik van Gent (Henricus de Gandavo), wijsgeer en theoloog,” in Nationaal biografisch woordenboek, VIII (Brussels, 1979), coll. 377-95. 5. Two studies to confront the problem of change in Henry’s thought — each one dealing with a different aspect of his philosophy — are Theophiel V. Nys, De werking van het menselijk verstand volgens Hendrik van Gent (Leuven, 1949) (in an abridged Latin translation: De psychologia cognitionis humanae secundum Henricum Gandavensem [Rome, 1949]); and Raymond Macken, “La théorie de l’illumination divine dans la philosophie d’Henri de Gand,” RTAM 39 (1972), 82-112. 3

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

both works Henry frequently refers his reader back to earlier passages

or ahead to later ones, taking no heed of the fact that his thoughts were not entirely equivalent or complementary at all stages of his career and tacitly suggesting that there had never been any intellectual revision on his part. The same impression of a seamless conception and perfect consistency is only heightened by the text of the Summa alone, which reads as if it were thought out and even composed all at once.® In short, the truly chronological nature of the composition of both works tends to be obscured behind the timeless facade of a highly articulated, apparently premeditated organization. 6. Although it was once thought that Henry first composed his Summa quaestionum and only then began his series of Quodlibeta, scholars now agree that they were both written concurrently, over a long period of time, and that they must be thought of as interlocking, mutually dependent works. For a short bibliography of studies on the dating of the articles and questions of these two works, see Macken, “La théorie,” pp. 88-89, n. 26. The schema for dating Henry’s works that I have used is that provided by José Gomez Caffarena, “Cronologia de la ‘Suma’ de Enrique de Gante por relacién a sus ‘Quodlibetos,’” Gregorianum 38 (1957), 116-33. Gomez Caffarena does not pretend that he can do more than suggest terminal dates for the composition of the various articles of the Summa, and there are still questions about the dating of a few of the quodlibets (see, for instance, Macken, “La théorie,” p. 91, n. 41). There is furthermore the problem that Henry systematically revised most of his works, so that one must be prepared for at least occasional insertions that fall outside the otherwise orderly chronological sequence. (Macken, in “Les corrections d’Henri de Gand a ses Quodlibets,” RTAM 40 [1973], 5-51; “Les corrections d’Henri de Gand a sa Somme,”

RTAM 44 [1977], 55-100; and the introduction to his edition of Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet X, Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, 14 [Leuven, 1981], pp. xliv-Ixxxii, has drawn attention to the manuscript evidence that reveals how Henry made considerable revisions after at least one redaction of each of his quodlibets and major segments of his Summa. For a notable case of an insertion that may have come some time after the original redaction of the text, see below, p. 117, n. 65). Yet given the fact that most of Henry’s revisions seem to have been introduced shortly after the initial composition of his various works, it would seem that for the most part the sequence of questions in Henry’s works reflects the order of composition. One can say, therefore, that Gédmez Caffarena’s scheme appears to be reasonably reliable, and it has received at least a measure of internal verification by the success scholars have had in applying it to an analysis of the development of Henry’s thought. The editions of Henry’s works chiefly used in the present study are Summa quaes-

tionum ordinariarum, 2 vols. (Paris, 1520), reprinted at St. Bonaventure, N.Y., 1953; and Quodlibeta, 2 vols. (Paris, 1518), reprinted at Leuven, 1961. Henceforth these works will be cited as Summa and Quod., and when volume and folio numbers are given, they refer to these editions. A critical reedition of all of Henry’s works has been begun at the De Wulf-Mansion Center of the Catholic University of Louvain under the direction of Raymond Macken. (See Macken, Bibliotheca manuscripta Henrici de Gandavo, Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, 1 and 2 [Leuven, 1979];

4

INTRODUCTION

This makes the task extremely arduous for the historian trying to reconstruct the complicated outline of Henry’s thought without losing track of its developmental character.’ One can maintain one’s scholarly balance only by keeping to two different perspectives at once. On the one hand, one must look upon the whole corpus of Henry’s work

as a manifestation of a single structure of thought, where each part illumines all others and where nothing makes sense out of the context of the whole. On the other hand, one must remain aware of the modulations of an ever-shifting philosophical system, where ideas change and the relations among them are constantly redrawn over a long career of intense academic debate. Such a tightrope act is demanding. So far it has presented an insuperable obstacle to anyone wishing even to conceive of tackling the whole of Henry’s thought.

All this makes the plunge into the sea of Henry’s mind at once a challenge and a fascinating exercise in exegesis. What is clear is that the modern historian can hardly go it alone. As much as anywhere in the field of medieval intellectual history, one feels with Henry the need for a variety of studies on specific areas of his thought, the cumulative effect of which would be gradually to deepen our understanding of the complex structure of the whole. The fact that there have been so few

forays into this territory means that progress in understanding and evaluating this seminal thinker of the late thirteenth century will continue to be slow and only partial for some time to come. One of the most significant efforts to date is Jean Paulus’s study of Henry’s metaphysics, the only attempt to deal with so much of his total intellectual schema at once.® Within the sphere of epistemology, it is certainly Theophiel Nys’s study of Henry’s ideas on the workings of the mind that has made the most important contribution and had the greatest

“Die Editionstechnik der ‘Opera Omnia’ des Heinrich von Gent,” Franziskanische Studien 63 [1981], 227-39; and “Der Aufbau eines wissenschaftlichen Unternehmens: Die ‘Opera Omnia’ des Heinrich von Gent,” Franziskanische Studien 65 [1983], 82-96.) So far Quodlibets I, II, IX, and X have been published in this series. All citations to passages from these four quodlibets will be to pages from the new

Opera Omnia editions.

7. Several scholars have noted Henry’s tendency — whether intentional or not — to camouflage the progressive nature of his thought. Nys, De werking, p. 60, remarks how Henry changed his mind about his earlier Aristotelian noetics without ever expressly stating as much to his readers. Macken, “La théorie,” p. 92, has shown how Henry frequently alludes to his earlier writings in such a way that the reader is forced to reinterpret passages that, when originally written, had quite a different meaning.

8. Paulus, Henri de Gand.

5

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

influence on recent scholarship.? Nys’s demonstration that Henry changed his mind about the matter of an impressed intelligible species must be the starting point for any other investigation of Henry’s views concerning human understanding. More recently Jerome Brown has published numerous articles on matters of psychology, noetics, and epistemology in Henry’s thought.!° Perhaps the most interesting current efforts come from Raymond Macken, who not only has contri-

buted a number of articles of consistently high quality on various aspects of Henry’s life and thought, but also has undertaken to direct the critical edition of all of Henry’s works — an endeavor absolutely necessary for the continued growth of our appreciation of his thought." In the present study I shall focus on a single aspect of Henry’s phi-

losophy, but one that has wider ramifications than might at first appear to be the case. I shall look at Henry’s notion of truth. Most modern scholars who have dealt with the problem of truth in Henry’s thought have done so largely within the context of his ideas on the role 9. Nys, De werking and De psychologia. See also Jean Paulus’s sometimes critical review, “A propos de la théorie de la connaissance d’Henri de Gand,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 47 (1949), 493-96. 10. Jerome V. Brown, “Sensation in Henry of Ghent: A Late Medieval AristotelianAugustinian Synthesis,” Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie 53 (1971), 238-66; “Henry of Ghent on Internal Sensation,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 10 (1972), 15-28; “Abstraction and the Object of the Human Intellect according to Henry of Ghent,” Vivarium 11 (1973), 80-104; “Divine Illumination in Henry of Ghent,” RTAM 41 (1974), 177-99; “Intellect and Knowing in Henry of Ghent,” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 37 (1975), 490-512, 692-710; “John Duns Scotus on Henry of Ghent’s Arguments for Divine Illumination: The Statement of the Case,” Vivarium 14 (1976), 94-113; “John Duns Scotus on Henry of Ghent’s Theory of

Knowledge,” The Modern Schoolman 56 (1978), 1-29; and “The Meaning of Notitia in Henry of Ghent,” in Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter, Akten des VI. Internationalen Kongresses fiir Mittelalterliche Philosophie, 29 August -3 September 1977, Miscellanea Mediaevalia, 13 (Berlin, 1981), II, 992-98. 11. Among Macken’s numerous articles, in addition to the important work cited above, n. 5, see “De radicale tijdelijkheid van het schepsel volgens Hendrik van Gent,” — Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 31 (1969), 519-71 La temporalité radicale de la creature selon Henri de Gand,” RTAM 38 [1971], 211-72); “Les quodlibets d’Henri de Gand et leur ‘exemplar’ parisien,” RTAM 37 (1970), 75-96; “La volonté humaine, faculté plus élevée que l’intelligence selon Henri de Gand,” RTAM 42 (1975), 5-51; “Les sources d’Henri de Gand,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 76 (1978), 5-28; and “Le statut de la matiére premiére dans la philosophie d’Henri de Gand,” RTAM 46 (1979), 130-82. On the projected edition of all of Henry’s works, see above, n. 6. Macken has also edited Lectura ordinaria super Sacram Scripturam Henrico de Gandavo adscripta, Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, 36 (Leuven, 1980; originally published in the series Analecta Mediaevalia Namurcensia in 1972), a work that stands close to Henry but may not actually come from his pen. 6

INTRODUCTION

of divine illumination.!? I believe, however, that no attempt to date has adequately grasped the full character of Henry’s thought. !?

Part of the problem stems from the difficulty of understanding Henry’s attitude toward divine illumination. Henry’s earliest state12. See, most significantly, Macken, “La théorie,” and Brown, “Divine Illumination,” as well as Robert Bourgeois, “La théorie de la connaissance intellectuelle chez Henri de Gand,” Revue de philosophie, n.s. 6 (1936), 238-59; and Maurice De Wulf, “L’exemplarisme et la théorie de illumination spéciale dans la philosophie de Henri de Gand,” Revue néo-scolastique | (1894), 53-75 (also in De Wulf, Etudes sur Henri de Gand [Paris, 1894], pp. 119-52). The major exception to this rule is Raphael Braun, Die Erkenntnislehre des Heinrich von Gent (Fribourg, 1916). Although Braun’s work is a marvelous study of the formal criteria for certain knowledge according to Henry, it errs in its own way by giving too little attention to the notion of divine illumination. 13. In addition to the important works cited above in nn. 5 and 8-12, the following studies that concern at least in part Henry’s psychology, noetics, or epistemology also touch on the problem of truth: Camille Bérubé, “Dynamisme psychologique et existence de Dieu chez Jean Duns Scot, J. Maréchal et B. Lonergan,” Antonianum 48 (1973), 5-45; and “Henri de Gand et Mathieu d’Aquasparta interprétes de saint Bonaventure,” Naturaleza y gracia 21 (1974), 131-72; Efrem Bettoni, // processo astrattivo nella concezione di Enrico de Gand (Milan, 1954); Johannes Beumer, “Erleuchteter Glaube: Die Theorie Heinrichs von Gent und ihr Fortleben in der Spatscholastik,” Franziskanische Studien 37 (1955), 129-60; Giuseppina Cannizzo, “La dottrina del ‘verbum mentis’ in Enrico di Gand,” Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica 54 (1962), 243-66; Maurice De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique dans les Pays-Bas et la Principauté de Liége jusqu’a la Révolution francaise, Mémoires Couronnés et Autres Mémoires publiés par l’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 51 (Brussels, 1894-95), pp. 46272; Edward Dwyer, Die Wissenschaftslehre Heinrichs von Gent (Wirzburg, 1933); Mieczystaw Gogacz, Problem istnienia boga u Anselma z Canterbury i problem prawdy u Henryka z Gandawy (Lublin, 1961); Georg Hagemann, “De Henrici Gandavensis quem vocant ontologismo,” Jndex lectionum quae auspiciis augustissimi ac potentissimi Imperatoris Regis Guilelmi II in Academia theologica et philo-— sophica Monasteriensi . . . publice privatimque habebuntur, summer 1898 (pp. 312) and winter, 1898/99 (pp. 3-13) (Miinster, 1898); Jean Paulus,“Henri de Gand et argument ontologique,” AHDLMA 10-11 (1935-36), 265-323; Anton C. Pegis, “Toward a New Way to God: Henry of Ghent,” Mediaeval Studies 30 (1968), 226-47; “A New Way to God: Henry of Ghent (II),” Mediaeval Studies 31 (1969), 93-116; and “Henry of Ghent and the New Way to God (III),” Mediaeval Studies 33 (1971), 158-79; Faustino A. Prezioso, La critica di Duns Scoto all’ontologismo di Enrico di Gand (Padua, 1961); Heinrich Riissman, Zur Ideenlehre der Hochscholastik unter besonderer Beriicksichtigung des Heinrich von Gent, Gottfried von Fontaines und Jakob von Viterbo (Wiirzburg [1937]); Charles B. Schmitt, “Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus and Gianfrancesco Pico on Illumination,” Mediaeval Studies 25 (1963), 231-58; and Prospero Stella, “La prima critica di Herveus Natalis O.P. alla noetica di Enrico di Gand: II ‘De intellectu et specie’ del considdetto ‘De quatuor materiis,’” Salesianum 21 (1959), 125-70.

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THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

ments about the nature of truth laid great emphasis on the image of an intellectual illumination from God, to the point of making such godly

intervention a necessary ingredient in any real appreciation of the truth. Yet there has been some debate whether Henry continued to adhere to his earlier views on illumination throughout his final years. In his later writings he never referred to the theory of divine illumination with the same kind of attention to detail he had lavished on it at the beginning of his Summa, and this has led some scholars to hold that the later Henry either rejected or, at the very least, lost interest in his earlier views.!4 Although a careful reading of all his work reveals — as more and more scholars are coming to believe — that Henry not only never repudiated his first ideas on the importance of divine illumination but also quite plainly intended to maintain a place for a theory

of illumination to the very end, it has also become clear that what Henry meant by divine illumination in human knowledge later in his career must have been somewhat different from what he meant by it in his earliest works.!° In particular, Raymond Macken has noted that as Henry’s ideas on the noetic process changed during the course of his life, he had progressively to modify the way he conceived of divine illumination.!® It would seem, therefore, that Henry’s views on truth must likewise have varied from the early to the later years of his career. No discussion of the issue has as yet made enough of this developmental side of Henry’s thought. Yet the problem goes beyond the need to improve our appreciation of the changing picture Henry drew of the function of divine light. A

14. For example, Paulus, Henri de Gand, p. 5, maintains that Henry mentioned divine illumination only once — in Quodlibet IX, 15 — after his earliest works, and he generally casts doubt on the strength with which Henry adhered to the doctrine. See also a similar assertion in Stella, “La prima critica di Herveus Natalis.” Mieczystaw Gogacz, Problem istnienia boga, p. 117, takes a position even more radical than either of these authors and altogether denies the importance of divine illumination

at any time for Henry. .

15. The view that Henry continued to hold a place for divine illumination in his vision of natural human cognition has been defended by Macken, “La théorie”; Nys, De werking; and Prezioso, La critica. It is an easy matter to show that Henry actually

referred back to the theory of illumination more often than Paulus thought. Macken, “La théorie,” p. 91, mentions instances in Summa, art. 11, q. 1, and art. 13, q. 6, as well as Quodlibet III, q. 1, in addition to which can be cited Summa, art. 24, q. 8 (I, 154v). The present work will argue that these references were not more-or-less involuntary nods to a theory about which Henry came to feel increasingly ambivalent — as Paulus would suggest, Henri de Gand, pp. 4-6 — but rather real affirmations of the important role he felt divine involvement played in human intellection. 16. See Macken, “La théorie,” pp. 92-93 and 95, n. 57. 8

INTRODUCTION

major failure of the scholarly investigation of Henry’s position on truth is that so far it has been conducted from too narrow a perspective. If one focuses only on the matter of divine illumination as a clue to what Henry thought about truth, one cannot fully understand the development of his thought concerning this single but vital philosophical issue. In fact, the question of truth sits at the center of a constellation of problems, and in Henry’s case there were complementary changes in his answers to each one, all of which went together to account for the final trajectory of his thought. First of all, there was the purely formal question of the nature of truth, a criteriological issue that was of intense interest to scholastics of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries and to which they devoted considerable attention in an attempt to find a solution that was both precise and generally relevant to the intellectual business of the university.!7 Second, intimately connected to the isolated issue of truth, were a host of dependent epistemological questions — questions, that is, having to do with the nature of human knowledge. Perhaps the

most important of these concerned the highest form of knowledge naturally available to man, scientia or science, pure and simple. Ever since the early thirteenth century, scholars at the universities had been busy working out a notion of science and its proper procedures, drawing primarily on ideas Aristotle had expounded in his works of logic and natural philosophy and adapting them to suit the nature of high medieval intellectual endeavors.!® Here theologians played a large role as they debated the epistemological standing of their own increasingly self-conscious discipline and tried to give it the kind of prestige the scientific model had already attained in the faculty of arts.!? Henry himself was deeply engaged in this undertaking, as indeed the first seven articles of his Summa show. Before going on to the business of theologizing, he thought it imperative to discuss what science was, how closely the human mind could attain to the ideal, and whether or 17. On this matter see my William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth in the Early Thirteenth Century (Princeton, 1983). 18. For a good assessment of Aristotle’s ideas on science, see Jonathan Barnes, “Aristotle’s Theory of Demonstration,” Articles on Aristotle, I: Science, ed. J onathan Barnes, Malcolm Schofield, and Richard Sorabji (London, 1975), pp. 65-87. On the theory of science in the high Middle Ages, see William A. Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation, 1: Medieval and Early Classical Science (Ann Arbor, 1972).

19. On "he development of theology as a science, see Marie-Dominique Chenu, La théologie comme science au XIIle siecle, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1957); and Albert Lang, Die theologische Prinzipienlehre der mittelalterlichen Scholastik (Frieburg im Br., 1964).

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THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

not theology was a field to which scientific methods could be appropriately applied.2° The concern with science remained central to Henry’s

thought throughout his life, and changes registered here would naturally have an effect on his vision of truth. Likewise, changes in Henry’s notion of truth would in turn somehow have to be accommodated in his understanding of science. Beyond truth and science came noetics, the explanation of the way the mind actually works. On this matter Henry also had much to say,

as the writings of Macken, Brown, and Nys have shown. Here, of course, the issue of divine illumination looms large. It is important to consider how Henry conceived of the illuminative process and in what way he modified his ideas over time. What makes this of even greater

significance to historians is that the theory of divine illumination, which in the West goes back at least to the work of Augustine, was in Henry’s day beginning to be withdrawn as a way to explain the normal

and natural attainments of the mind.2! This curious development, which has been very little studied, came moreover just after the most vigorous attempts to find a place for divine illumination in the theo-

retical understanding of scientific procedure, most notably in the works of Bonaventure and his followers, John Pecham, Matthew of Aquasparta, and Roger Marston. Henry’s views stand, then, at the point where the doctrine, recently fully established, was beginning to lose its force, and what he has to say about it is crucial to an understanding of the role it was to play in the future and, indeed, how later scholars were to conceive of noetics in its absence.

Finally, one must not forget metaphysics. This area of thought would necessarily be important for our topic as it was implied in any discussion of the object of knowledge. In Henry’s case, however, there was the additional factor that over the course of his career he seems progressively to have deepened his understanding and then worked out the broader implications of a metaphysical system all his own. Ingenious and highly original, this metaphysics lends an elusive but quite special character to all Henry’s intellectualizing. No understanding of his thought — epistemology and noetics included — is possible unless

20. Consult the first page to the index of questions in Henry’s Summa (I, 3r). 21. Martin Grabmann noted this phenomenon decades ago in his Der g6ttliche Grund menschlicher Wahrheitserkenntnis nach Augustinus und Thomas von Aquin (Minster, 1924), p. 41. Modern scholars have been slow to develop Grabmann’s observation.

10

INTRODUCTION

one comes to grips with his ideas on this most abstruse, but most fun-

damental, plane. Only by understanding the theories as well as the changes in theory in all these areas of Henry’s thought can we fully comprehend the story

of his ideas in any one. The nature of truth, the structure of epistemology (and especially what constitutes knowledge in its most certain form — science), some aspects of noetics, a bit on psychology or the actual workings of the powers of the soul, and a portion of metaphysics must all be considered together. This is the procedure I shall follow. In all of these areas we can see development, modulations that impinge on each other and thus together explain the growth of Henry’s thought. In order to make the whole process clear, it will be necessary to divide his scholarly career into three phases. Henry’s ideas on truth seem to cluster around three distinct chronological moments. Although an absolutely certain chronology for the composition of his works may never be possible, one can settle on a general scheme of dates that is relatively reliable and, insofar as the question of truth is concerned, would seem to be partially confirmed by the coherence of the developmental pattern that unfolds.?3 The first phase began somewhere in the

middle of Henry’s teaching career and lasted up through 1276, at which point Henry seems to have completed the initial, fundamental articles of his Summa quaestionum. The second phase centered around writings done during the years 1279 and 1280, although there are echoes of this same cast of mind in his later writings, especially in those com-

posed in 1285 and 1290. The final phase is most clearly typified in works written during the years 1284 and 1285. To be more exact, these final ideas are not so much indicative of a third and different stage as

of a summation and final integration of the ideas Henry developed throughout his life as an active scholar. They represent the culmination of his deepening understanding of the problem of truth. 22. In his discussion of Nys’s work Paulus rightly noted that any full understanding of changes in Henry’s thought must come to terms with the profound, subterranean developments in his metaphysics. See Paulus, “A propos,” pp. 495-96. 23. On the matter of dating see above, p. 4, n. 6.

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II

Henry’s First Ideas on Truth

Henry’s earliest written statements about the nature of truth, those in the articles that introduce his Summa, are the ones that have received the most scholarly attention. It was in those initial articles that Henry tried to lay the methodological and criteriological foundations for the massive work he planned his Summa to be.! In accordance with the scientific spirit current in the universities of his day, he intended to be

absolutely explicit about the guiding principles of his thought and about the possibility of achieving cognitive certitude in his endeavor. More specifically, he wanted to show how far what he would be doing in the Summa could be said to achieve the level of science. It was, therefore, natural for him to begin by laying out his theory of truth at some length. His analysis of the matter in those early articles possesses a fullness and a leisurely attention to detail that are not to be found in any of his later references to the subject. An appreciation of his ideas on truth must start here. We should not, however, expect to see Henry plunge immediately

into an examination of the concept of truth. So radically critical a procedure — to begin with the criteria for judgment and then to inves-

tigate the possibilities for knowledge —is not to be found among medieval scholastics. Instead Henry first turned to the idea of cognition

or knowledge itself, sketching out a rough taxonomy of the varieties of apprehension available to the mind. Only gradually did he work towards an analysis of the criteria by which such cognition was to be judged. Even then he did so more with an eye to distinguishing stronger

degrees of certitude from weaker than with the intention of proving that certain knowledge was in fact available to the mind. It was, therefore, the desire to differentiate the levels of cognition that brought 1. Henry never actually completed the Summa. His original scheme for the whole work appears at the beginning of article 21 (I, 123r), where he explains that the rest of the Summa will consist of two parts, one having to do with God and the other with creation. Henry finished the section on God but never went on to the second part dealing with creation. See Macken in Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet I, ed. Macken, pp. xxiXXl1l.

13

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

Henry to the problem of truth. His analysis of truth was not preliminary to or determinative of his consideration of knowledge in general

but rather a way of explaining, after the fact, what some kinds of knowing were all about. It is in this sense that we must understand Henry’s introductory remarks about knowledge. He explained that knowledge or, more precisely, knowing (scire) in the broadest sense could be defined as any certain comprehension (certa notitia) of a thing, by which that thing was perceived as it was and without any error or deception.* Although _ in this broad sense the term scire could be loosely applied to any sort of apprehension whatsoever, whether sensory or intellectual, Henry was quick to add that, properly considered, it was limited to that kind of comprehension available to the intellect alone (cognitio intellectiva). In other words Henry was willing to accept from the outset the _ fact that the mind could attain knowledge. He even believed without _ hesitation that such knowledge was reliable. He was no skeptic, and it was no part of his intention to prove that knowledge was possible for the human mind. Indeed, at this broadest and most fundamental level Henry did not even feel that the value of knowledge had to be more closely scrutinized or explained. One way that knowledge had been explained, and cognitive certitude defended against skepticism, was to have recourse to some variety of the theory of divine illumination. This theory had had a long history in the intellectual traditions within which Henry worked, and he was fully familiar with it. It had been Augustine, at the very latest, who had introduced to the Latin West the Neoplatonic notion that human intellection took place within the context of an illumination streaming directly from the Divinity itself and that truth was unattainable without some contact with the divine light. In Augustine’s scheme this divine corroboration of the content of ideas was what provided the certitude the human mind could not achieve on its own.

Yet Henry rejected the idea that contact with a divine light was absolutely necessary or indispensable in the attainment of cognitive certitude. As he saw things, so long as one remained on the level of intellectual knowledge (scire) broadly conceived, no illumination need take place. He stated in unambiguous terms that human beings could 2. Summa, art. 1, q. 1 (I, IvB). See also Summa, art. 2, q. 2 (I, 24rF), and art. 6, qq. 1 and 2 (I, 42vB and 43rL), where Henry called this kind of knowledge scientia communi nomine or scientia large appellata. 3. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 4vC). 14

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

attain at least some general knowledge by relying exclusively on their own natural endowments and without any special divine illumination? By making this point, Henry added, he did not thereby mean to exclude from cognition the general influence of God (generalis influentia), which he sometimes referred to as a general or natural providence by which God gave to all humans their own natural power of knowing and, as a Universal Mover, sustained them in their natural motions.°

This kind of general influence was present in any action, natural or supernatural, and was not what thinkers generally had in mind when they spoke of divine illumination. Henry was, therefore, not suggesting the mind could do without a providential support of this sort from God. Nor, he explained, was he talking about the supernatural light of grace, a light that properly affected man’s moral rather than intellectual side. Most thinkers, even those who allotted a large role to divine | illumination, agreed that this light of grace was something different from and more than what could normally have been involved in the processes of certain intellection on earth. It was not this kind of light

that the debate over divine illumination was about. What Henry wanted to eliminate at this most rudimentary level in his epistemology was simply the specific kind of illumination associated with Augustine’s doctrine of certain knowledge. No light of this sort was necessary for the mind to reach knowledge broadly conceived. Thus Henry’s answer to the question of how the mind could achieve knowledge — if only of the most general sort — was merely to reaffirm that it could, on its own, and to leave the matter at that. No more precise epistemological theory was required; no greater clarification had to be given. Yet if certain knowledge, broadly construed, could be so casually accepted into Henry’s system, the same procedure would not work when it came to accounting for higher levels of comprehension. Here Henry would be compelled to spell out some principles by which these levels could be differentiated. The need to do so was, in fact, only increased by the fact that he was not really interested in intellectual cognition in the broadest sense but rather in identifying and isolating that kind of knowledge which was most certain — in the final analysis, 4. “Absolute ergo concedere oportet quod homo per suam animam absque omni speciali divina illustratione potest aliqua scire aut cognoscere, et hoc ex puris naturalibus.” Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 4vB). 5. Ibid. On natural providence see Summa, art. 3, q. 5 (1, 30rT). See also Summa, art. 1, q. 7 (I, 17rK), where Henry divided God’s general influence into the action of a universal cause, giving to each thing its own power, and that of a universal mover, the ultimate cause of all particular motions. 6. Summa, art. 1, q. 7 (I, 17rK). 15

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

science alone.’ His purpose in the introductory articles of the Summa was, after all, to examine the formal bases for scientific thought, with the ultimate intention of showing how one could pursue theology as a scientific discipline. He wanted to show what kinds of certitude were

attainable beyond knowledge in the broadest sense and how they approached the ideal of Aristotelian science. To deal with matters such as these Henry would have to be more specific about the criteria for knowledge than his initial remarks would allow. He would likewise have to engage in a precise investigation of the nature of truth. Finally, he would have to consider the different ways the mind might seize the object of its understanding and the various paths it might take along the way. In short, although Henry, like the rest of his contemporaries, did not have in mind anything like a Cartesian critique of human cognition, neither could he long rest content with merely stating that the intellect was able to achieve certain knowledge and close the philosophical issue with that. He had to give some attention to the philosophical concerns that in the modern world are associated with critical thought, at least enough attention to explain the different intensities with which he thought cognitive certitude could be attained. It was at this point, and not at the foundation of his discussion of cognition, that he was brought to delineate a theory of knowledge — an epistemology — that would explain the formal characteristics of thought, and it was here that he was led to introduce noetics,

examining the powers of the mind and showing how they related to various levels of understanding or judgment. Here is where Henry’s work begins to be of interest for our concerns. What is more, it is here that he did, ultimately, make room for a more immediate or special role for God. To set the stage for his investigation of these weightier, espistemological issues, Henry drew a fundamental distinction. He said that there were two basic ways the human intellect could exercise its power to know, or, to be more exact, two levels of knowledge it could attain. In his own words: “It is one thing to know concerning a creature that which is true (id quod verum est) in it, and another thing to know its truth (eius veritas).”® In themselves these general words about the 7. As Henry once said, it was not scire — everything that came within the purview of the intellective power — that concerned him, but certitudinaliter scire, which came only when the mind began to work in the realm of science. See Summa, art. 2, q. 1 (I, 23vB). 8. “... distinguendum est... : aliud tamen est scire de creatura id quod verum est in ea, et aliud est scire eius veritatem. .. .” Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, 4vC).

16

HENRY ’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

nature of the two levels are somewhat vague, and it must be admitted that at this stage in his career Henry did not completely dispel the ambiguity. Only later, when he had further developed his ideas about truth, did he begin to address the problem with any real precision. It is

nevertheless important to fashion some idea of what Henry had in mind even in this early stage in his thought, for the distinction is of major significance. Here, in the division between knowing what is true

and knowing the truth, Henry drew the line between cognition that met only the most general criteria for knowledge and cognition whose strength or certitude had reached a level sufficient to attract his scholarly interest. On the lower level the mind could be said to know simply in the broadest sense of the word. On the higher, truth, it had attained a conceptual intensity that could be analyzed and philosophically de-

argument. , ,

fended —a cognitive clarity suitable for the business of scholastic If we look carefully at all the ways Henry described the two levels in his earliest works, perhaps we can bring the distinction into somewhat sharper focus and more nearly decide in just what the difference consisted. Henry explained that on the first level the intellect apprehended

the thing as it had being in itself, outside the knowing subject.’ Presumably knowledge on the second level incorporated more of what the subject could contribute, more of the processes of knowledge themselves. Another way to put this was to say that while on the second level the intellect knew the thing’s truth, on the first it knew that which

the thing was (id quod res est). Knowing “that which the thing was” came through simple —that is, noncomplex — intellection (simplex intelligentia), while knowing the truth involved a more complex procedure, compounding and dividing (intelligentia componens et dividens).'° Indeed, throughout his writings Henry seems to have used the term simplex intelligentia to refer precisely to his first level of knowledge, below the apprehension of truth. 9. “Omnis enim virtus cognoscitiva per suam notitiam apprehendens rem sicuti habet esse in se extra cognoscentem: apprehendit quod verum est in ea.” Ibid. If the quality of residing outside the subject can be construed to mean “exclusive of any relation to the knowing mind,” then perhaps here there is the hint of a formulation Henry would later develop at length, whereby knowing the truth — as opposed to knowing simply a being in itself — was to see the explicit connection between mind and object. 10. “Cognitione igitur intellectiva de re creata potest haberi duplex cognitio. Una qua praecise sci sive cognoscitur simplici intelligentia id quod res est. Alia qua scitur et cognoscitur intelligentia componente et dividente veritas ipsius rei.” Sum-

17

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

All of these ways of speaking about the distinction between the two levels were to bear fruit later in Henry’s thought. Yet there was still another way he described the two in his early writings, a way that suggests more clearly how the distinction touched on the problem of relative certitude. According to this final formulation the intellect on the first level of cognition followed closely on the senses, perceiving nothing more of the object than they had originally perceived. Presumably this sort of knowledge was a more spiritualized version of what had already been known in sensation — because it rested in a higher power

of the soul — but not necessarily one that was more generalized or abstracted. On the second level, however, the intellect conceived or understood the truth itself of the thing, “by certain judgment coming to grasp concerning the object what it is (quid sit).” |! Implicit in this formulation were two new and important criteria that Henry was applying to his second level of knowledge. First of all, he was saying that knowledge on this level necessarily involved a judg-

ment. The idea was certainly related to the notion referred to just above that on the first level the intellect simply apprehended the object, while on the second it went through some more complicated process,

compounding and dividing its knowledge to come up with a more meaningful result. More important, however, were his words that on the second level the intellect knew about the object what it was (quid sit). This can be interpreted to mean only what scholastics frequently

referred to as the quiddity or abstracted essence of a thing.!* That Henry actually had this in mind is clear from other places where he talked about the truth that was the object of the intellect — for instance, later in the same article of the Summa, where he explicitly ma, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 4vC). The distinction between simple and complex cognition can be traced back to Aristotle (see especially De anima, ed. William D. Ross [Oxford, 1956], III, 6 [430a26-28]) and was a commonplace among scholastics. Although the general idea of Aristotle’s distinction must surely have influenced Henry here, in fact he did not have in mind precisely Aristotle’s division between knowledge of concepts and knowledge of propositions. Both Henry’s simplex intelligentia and his knowledge

of truth, as they must be interpreted in this case, were by Aristotle’s terms simple cognition.

11. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 4vC). 12. The idea of quiddity derived from what was called, in the Latin translation of Aristotle, quod quid est, the essential nature of a thing determined by its substantial form and described by the definition. See, for example, Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II, 3 (90b3-4), in the Latin translation by James of Venice: Analytica posteriora, ed. Lorenzo Minio-Paluello and Bernard G. Dod, Aristoteles Latinus 4/1-4 (Bruges, 1968), p. 71. 18

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

coupled quiddity and truth, or in the early Quodlibet II, where he noted that the truth was the quidditas rei or its quod quid est.'? Knowledge of the quiddity, unlike whatever was generated at Henry’s

first level of knowledge, had to occur at a higher level of abstraction than could be obtained on the plane of the senses. What is more significant, however, is that this abstraction provided the basis for all science. Scientific knowledge, according to Henry, depended on and was characterized by knowledge of quod quid est.'* In purely Aristotelian terms, out of knowledge of quiddities were derived the principles upon which all science was built.!> In short, knowledge of the truth, which was knowledge of the quiddity of things, was the stage at which science became possible in human understanding. Truth was the cause of science and the proper object of scientific knowledge. !® Simply put, knowledge at Henry’s second level was the initial stage for science. Once this had been made clear to Henry’s readers, there

was naturally little need for him to say more about his first level, knowing id quod verum est. In fact, he had very little to say about it, and we must be satisfied with the essentially oblique descriptions of this level given so far. It is simply not possible to form a clearer notion of what he thought this most rudimentary level of knowledge involved, , at least at this stage in his thought. Henry was primarily after knowledge that was scientific. Providing a science of theology was, in the long run, what he intended to do, and it was to science alone that he would devote his attention in these initial articles of his Summa. 13. Summa, art. 1, q. 12 (I, 22rK and L) and Quod. Il, q. 6 (ed. Robert Wielockx, Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, 6 [Leuven, 1983], p. 32). Quodlibet II dates from Christmas 1277 (see Gomez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133). 14. “. .. sine cognitione eius quod quid est, omnino scientia de natura rei haberi non potest.” Summa, art. 3, q. 4 (I, 29vP). See also Summa, art. 2, q. 6 (1, 27rD). 15. See Summa, art. 1, qg. 5 (I, 14v-15r[B]). 16. Summa, art. 7, q. 2 [I, 48vK). At one point Henry defined science, strictly speaking, as the certain comprehension (certa notitia) of those things whose truth was apparent to the intellect by means of the evidence provided by the things themselves — in other words, whose truth was directly evident (see Summa, art. 6, q. 1 (I, 42vB]). He even attributed to Aristotle the idea that to attain science (scire) was to have certain comprehension of the truth (certa veritatis notitia) (see Summa, art. 2, q. 2 [I, 24rF]). In drawing these connections between truth and science Henry evidently thought he was relying on Aristotle, especially Metaphysics II (a), 1 (see the reference in Summa, art. 7, q. 2 (1, 48vK]). As is clear from numerous other passages in Henry’s writings, for instance, the one cited above in n. 15, he also thought of science according to the more properly Aristotelian notion of a set of apodictically proved conclusions, derived from absolutely certain principles. On this idea see above, p. 9, n. 18. For occasions where Henry deviated from either of these uses of the word “science,” see below, p. 87, n. 155. 19

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

Even after it had been established that knowledge of the truth was knowledge of the quiddity and therefore science properly speaking, there still remained much to be said about the criteria and the methods of cognition. For within Henry’s second fundamental level of knowledge — within science itself —there were further distinctions in the

| degree of certitude available to the human mind. To examine these Henry had to focus for a moment more sharply on the nature of truth pure and simple. Here he offered a definition of truth somewhat different from that given just before, where he said that truth was the same as quiddity. In this new definition Henry explained that truth, as it constituted the proper object of the intellect, was that quality of a thing by which it came to be known.!” It was what facilitated perfect knowledge of a thing (cognitio perfecta de re) and, going beyond knowledge broadly conceived, was what was involved in knowing in the proper sense of the word (proprie scire).'® All this was, of course, no more than a restatement of the connection between science and truth. Going further, however, and examining in more meaningful terms what this truth could be, Henry said that truth could be defined precisely as that quality of a thing that allowed it to be called true. This was, according to Henry, the ability of its nature to represent an exemplar to which — in a way Henry left vague at this general level of definition — it bore some relation (exemplar ad quod est).'9 Simply put, a thing was called true because it had this relation (respectus) to an exemplar.”° In fact, 17. “... veritas rei est id quo res scitur et intelligitur: quia ipsa est proprium obiectum intellectus.” Summa, art. 2, q. 6 (I, 27rD). 18. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 5rD). Naturally this “proprie scire” is even more strictly construed than the “scire properly considered” mentioned above, n. 3. Although Henry was generally extremely careful about the precise use of language, he did not eliminate absolutely all ambiguity. 19. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I 5rD).

20. “...verum dicit intentionem rei in respectu ad suum exemplar.” Ibid. Henry’s discussion of truth was tied in here with his idea of the first simple concepts or intentions, what would later be known as the transcendentals. As Henry explained to his reader, a thing was true by its relation to an exemplar, but it was being (ens) simply and without any other consideration. Thus the concept of being was more fundamental than the concept of truth: “being” was the very first of first intentions. This distinction between the concepts of being and of truth fit quite nicely with the difference between knowing id quod est and knowing the truth, and Henry pointed out how moving from one level of knowledge to the next involved passing from seizing the first of first intentions to understanding the more complicated one, the true. See Henry’s Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 4v-5r [C and D]), as well as the discussion in my article, “Matthew of Aquasparta, Henry of Ghent and Augustinian Epistemology after Bonaventure,” Franziskanische Studien 65 (1983), 279-80.

20

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

truth was this relation, a relation that could be characterized more explicitly as a conformity or, in a formula that had become traditional by this time, as an adequation (adaequatio).*! One came to know the truth by coming to see the relation itself. Having defined truth in this way, as a relation between thing and exemplar, Henry was now able to introduce his further distinction in the

scheme of knowledge, one that divided knowledge of the truth, or science, into two parts. The kind of exemplar Henry was thinking of in his definition of truth was an exemplar that existed in a mind. Indeed the definition that used the word “adequation” reads: “truth is the adequation of the thing and the intellect.”?* The question to ask was what minds or intellects these were or, more correctly, exactly what exemplars came into the relation of truth. As Henry explained things, there were two ways the human mind could seize the truth, because there were two places it could look for exemplars of its cognitive objects. The first place was in itself — that is, in the human intellect. The second place was in God, in the divine

mind.”? Henry said that on this score he was simply following the teaching of Plato.*4 In the human mind the exemplar was the universal

species of the thing, a cognitive form caused by the external thing, impressed on the soul and constituting the means by which the mind came to knowledge of its external object. In God’s mind the exemplar was the divine idea, a kind of godly art (ars divina) that the Creator consulted in making the things of this world.” Each of the exemplars provided a legitimate way of coming to know the truth. One merely compared the real object to the exemplar in order to see the relation or 21. On truth as conformity see Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, 5rD); and art. 1, q. 7 (I, 16vK). For adequation see Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 7rL); art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10rF); and art. 7, q. 2 (I, 48vK). The definition of truth as an adequation of thing and intellect, which actually goes back to Avicenna, was sometimes erroneously ascribed to Isaac Israeli. See J. T. Muckle, “Isaac Israeli’s Definition of Truth,” AHDLMA 8 (1933), 5-8; Henri Pouillon, “Le premier traité des propriétes transcendantales: La ‘“Summa de bono’ du Chancelier Philippe,” Revue néoscolastique de philosophie 42 (1939), 59; and Alexander Altmann and Samuel M. Stern, J/saac Israeli: A Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth Century (Oxford, 1958), pp. 58-59. Once Henry did attribute the definition to Isaac: see below, p. 51, n. 37. 22. See the preceding note. 23. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 5rE). 24. For a subtle analysis of how to interpret Plato on the matter of the nature of the eternal forms — whether according to Aristotle or according to Augustine — see Summa, art. 1, q. 1 (I, 3r-v[I]). 25. See above, n. 23. Henry accepted the theory of an impressed intelligible species at this early stage in his career, but he was later to eliminate the idea altogether from his noetics. The classic work investigating this development is Nys, De werking. 21

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

adequation by which the object was true. Yet because the exemplars were clearly so different in nature, the truths they produced would be of remarkably different sorts. Henry was willing even to say that they were the bases for two different truths (duplex veritas).~® By looking to the first sort of exemplar, the impressed universal species of a thing, the mind came to a lower knowledge of the truth. This was possible, however, only if the exemplar was used in the proper way.

Henry drew a clear distinction between two functions an impressed universal species might be made to serve. If the mind were to look to the species as an object of knowledge in itself, the species would not provide the basis for knowledge of the truth but would lead instead to an imaginary apprehension of the external thing.”’ It would be like looking at a picture of someone as an adequate way of knowing who , that person was. If, on the other hand, the mind were to use the species as a means to knowledge (ratio cognoscendi) and not as an object to be known in itself, then the species would offer a way of getting at the truth.”8 This was, of course, the way the species was properly supposed to function — as a means of knowing and not as an object — according

to one common thirteenth-century interpretation of Aristotelian noetics. In this manner the species led to the real object and did not interpose itself as a sort of objective screen between the mind and the thing to be known. Yet it was not easy for Henry to show exactly how the impressed Species permitted the mind to perceive the truth once one had conceded it had to function according to the second way. His precise words were that the mind knew the truth by forming a mental concept of the thing (conceptus mentis de re) in conformity with the exemplar — that is, in conformity with the impressed species.? Such a concept is surely what Henry also called the mental word (verbum), more precisely the simple

word as opposed to the perfect one of illumination.2° Another term for the same thing was the expressed or expressive form (forma expres-

siva) in contrast to an impressed one (forma impressiva), by which opposition Henry clearly intended to set the intentional, almost emanative character of the word against the less meaningful, more extrinsic

26. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, S5vF).

27. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, SrE). Henry later explained that he thought the mind rarely could look upon its own intelligible species as objects of knowledge. 28. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 5rE).

29. Ibid. |

30. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 8rO). See also below, p. 27, n. 48, and p. 35, n. 80. Henry’s notion of the verbum was complicated and, like most elements of his philosophy, grew and changed somewhat with time. For an excellent discussion of Henry’s use of verbum, see Nys, De werking, chap. 3, especially pp. 103-11.

22

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

nature of the cognitive species impressed on the mind.*! The difficulty was that Henry’s formulation of the way the word was conceived — in conformity to the species — yielded a relation between these two mental entities, even though the terms of the definition demanded that the relationship be between species and external object — a real adequation between exemplar in the intellect and thing.

Henry must have meant that the mind considered the relation between impressed species and the object of its knowledge and, once it had recognized this relation for what it was, formed a concept or word

that stood as the noetic or psychological marker for its new understanding. Thus the fact that the mind had formed the word indicated that it had come to see the relation of truth. That Henry did not in fact _ Say this exactly or in so many words might be a sign that he was not sure how to explain the process by which the mind compared impressed species with object. The species was, after all, supposed to be a way of

knowing and not properly an object, something that could be compared, in itself. It is likely that at this point he had simply not worked out a way to resolve this difficulty.2

What is important, however, is not the precise way the formula worked but the fact that, for Henry, truth of this sort depended on a natural and created exemplar residing in the human mind — the impressed species — and that knowledge of such truth thus made no reference to divine involvement. This was, Henry added, the sort of truth

Aristotle was dealing with when he talked about science. It was the truth available to the mind working solely from its natural abilities (ex puris naturalibus), and it provided certitude sufficient for the category of things known to philosophy (scibilia philosophica).*? In this way, 31. On forma expressiva see below, p. 72, nn. 101 and 102. 32. We probably see here a sign of stress in Henry’s early thought, the elimination of which would ultimately lead him to give up the notion of an impressed intelligible species.

33. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 5rE), and art. 3, q. 4 (I, 29vP). Although truth defined this way, as a conformity, may seem to bear little relationship to the more general definition of truth Henry gave when talking about his two levels of scire (knowing id quod verum est and knowing veritas rei), in fact they were connected. At one point Henry noted that the certitude by which the mind judged a thing — that is, by which it judged it to be true — was that by which the thing was that which it was (qua est id quod est), or in other words its essence (see Summa, art. 2, q. 2 [I, 24rF], and art. 3, q. 1 [I, 28rC}). This wouid imply, following the interpretation given above, that when the mind formed the word by comparing the species to the thing, it was comparing species to essence or quiddity. In this way truth could be referred to in an abbreviated fashion as the quiddity itself. It is interesting to note that this early reference to essence may indicate the seed of his later ideas about the role essentia or res a ratitudine played in human cognition (see below, Chap. 4). 23

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

then, science — knowledge of the quiddities and real truth — was avail-

able to the human intellect working solely on its own, without any special divine illumination.* Henry cautioned, however, that this one way of coming to the truth was not the finest kind of knowledge available to man on earth. It was, as he said, knowledge of “the truth in some way” or “the imperfect truth of a thing.”>° The problem was that this first sort of knowledge of the truth, dependent on a created exemplar, was not altogether certain and infallible (certa omnino et infallibilis). For this, one had to turn to Henry’s second way of seizing the truth. Above scientific knowledge of the first sort, which was dependent exclusively on the species as exemplar in the human mind, there was a kind of cognition that was certain science (certa scientia) and certain knowledge of the truth (certa notitia veritatis).*° In other words, there was a second, higher grade of science, and this kind of intellection was just what the lower sort had

not been: it was infallible and perfect (infallibilis scientia, perfecta scientia).*’ Knowledge of this more certain sort was acquired when the mind had recourse to the second kind of exemplar — to the uncreated idea in the mind of God. In making this separation between two levels of science, two ways of knowing the truth, Henry was relying on a fine distinction between two ways knowledge could be certain.*® According to the first way, knowledge was certain when it was free from all error, and the psycho-

logical counterpart to this was that the mind possessing such knowledge could not doubt at all that what it knew was true. The mind could attain this kind of certainty when it came to the truth by means of the created exemplar provided by the impressed species — that is, when it came to truth of the sort that has been discussed so far. Yet there was another way knowledge could be said to be certain — when it was perceived in the open vision of the truth (in aperta veritatis visione). This

kind of knowledge meant seeing the truth clearly in the intellectual light (exactly what light Henry did not yet say), the same way the eyes

could see visible objects clearly in the light of the sun. It was more than free from doubt; it was full and lucid. In other words, although it did not involve any greater psychological commitment or assent to 34. Summa, art. 1, q. 5 (I, 14v-15r[B]), and art. 1, q. 6 (I, 16rB). 35. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, SrE), and art. 1, q. 3 [I, 1OvG). See also Summa, art. 1, q. 7 (I, 17rK), and art. 2, q. 1 (I, 23vC).

| 36. For certa scientia and certa notitia veritatis, see Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 5vE), and art. 1, q. 4 (I, llvD). 37. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10vG), and art. 1, q. 4 (I, 12vD). 38. See Summa, art. 2, q. 1 (1, 23vB). 24

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

that which was known, it gave somehow a more complete or more per-

fect picture, and it was totally without the obscurity necessarily involved whenever the mind relied on its natural powers alone. Henry’s second kind of scientific knowledge yielded certainty in this way. For such absolute certitude one had to turn to God. In fact, as Henry’s language of a duplex veritas had already implied, this higher form of scientific knowledge represented more than a dif-

ferent way of seeing the truth from that of the first process he had described. It actually revealed a second, higher kind of truth — what he called the pure truth (sincera veritas).*? The intellect seized this pure truth when it recognized or perceived the conformity of an object to its divine exemplar.” Other ways of talking about the same thing were to speak of the lucid or clear truth (liquida sive clara veritas), the certain truth (certa veritas), or the truth pure and simple (veritas simpliciter).*! However one described it, it provided certain knowledge to the fullest degree possible on earth, short of some kind of supernatural grace.* 39. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 6rH), and throughout his writings. 40. Summa, art. 1, q. 7 (I, 16VK). 41. For the lucid and clear truth see Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 7vM), and art. 2, q. 1 (I, 23vB); for certain truth see Summa, art. 1, q. 8 (I, 18rE); for truth pure and simple see Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (1, 8vA, 10rF and 10vG), and art. 1, q. 7 (I, 17rK). 42. Although Henry explained in clear and categorical language that two categories of truth were available to the human mind, one without any special divine intervention and the other only upon some kind of contact with the divine ideas, there were occasions early in his work where he revealed some hesitation about accepting this schema. On the one hand, he once implied it was possible to attain something like knowledge of pure truth (sincera veritas) by relying solely on one’s natural powers (see Summa, art. 1, q. 1 [I, 2vF]). This would have weakened his formal theory of pure truth available only through contact with the divine. More frequently, however, his doubts about a twofold schema of truth led in the opposite direction. In article 1, question 2, of his Summa (1, 8rS) he initially admitted the validity of arguments that man could know some kind of truth, though not the pure truth, without any special divine illumination, but then he added that if one were so inclined, one could say, and perhaps with better reason (forte melius), that it was possible to attain knowledge only of id quod verum est without the aid of some superior light. This plainly flies in the face of what he was prepared to claim most of the time about general knowledge of the truth. And there are other places where he showed the same kind of hesitation unequivocally to support the idea of two levels of knowledge of the truth. See, for example, Summa, art. 1, q. 7 (I, 17rK and M), art. 2, q. 1 (I, 23vVB), and art. 24, q. 8 (I, 145vR), in each of which cases he added that “perhaps” the mind had to have recourse to the divine light in order to know the truth. It is my contention that these passages represent authentic doubts Henry had about his theory of knowledge, but that they should not be read as his formal and declared position, which was that there was a kind of knowledge of the truth available to the human mind below the level at which the mind had some contact 25

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

According to Henry, this was how Augustine thought science was certified.” And from this Henry evidently meant his reader to understand that this kind of truth held a different place in the history of thought

from that of the first and lower sort, which he had associated with Aristotle. Naturally, describing the process by which the mind grasped this sort of truth would leave room for the notion of an illumination

from above, and it was indeed on this high level of certitude that Henry began to incorporate Augustinian language referring to God’s light into his noetics and theory of truth. It 1s only at this point that one can begin to see, in the early Henry, a theory of divine illumination. Henry devoted considerable attention to explaining precisely what this higher form of truth involved and how the human mind attained it.“4 Given the fact that he was a theologian, one can understand why

he was so interested in this higher form of truth and why it should have occupied so large a place in his analysis. Yet in part because he looked so deeply into the issue, his ideas concerning the knowledge of this sort of truth constitute a most complicated, even abstruse, area in his thought, one that has been a legitimate source of confusion or controversy for his modern interpreters.* with the divine light or the divine ideas. Such an interpretation is the only way to make sense of the many categorical statements — lacking any conditional words like “perhaps” — in which he came out in favor of the notion that there was science and knowledge of the truth, short of pure truth, solely from man’s natural abilities and without any special intervention by God. 43. Summa, art. 1, q. 1 (1, 3r-v[I]). Augustine may even have been Henry’s direct source for the word sincera. See Augustine, De diversis quaestionibus octoginta tribus, q. 9 (ed. Almut Mutzenbecher, CC, 44A [Turnhout, 1975], p. 16). The term sinceritas veritatis also appears in Hilary of Poitiers, De Trinitate, VIII, 1 (ed. Pieter Smulders, CC, 62 [Turnhout, 1979 and 1980], p. 313).

44. Braun, in Die Erkenntnislehre, pp. 43-44; and following him Dwyer, in Die Wissenschaftslehre, p. 36; and Stella, in “La prima critica,” p. 127, called the lower kind of truth logical and the higher, depending on the divine reasons, ontological. I would prefer to reserve the term “logical” for a use that I think more naturally suits the language of the thirteenth century — that is, to refer to knowledge of a complex fact, especially one whose truth is proved through a process of reasoning. For the two levels of knowledge of the truth I therefore keep to Henry’s wording: knowledge of the truth and knowledge of the pure truth. The notion of a distinction be-

tween logical and ontological truth is, it should be noted, one that a number of scholars have found useful for the analysis of many scholastics besides Henry alone. See, for instance, the discussion by John F. Wippel in The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines (Washington, D.C., 1981), pp. 33-34, and the work he cites, J. Vande Wiele, “Le probléme de la vérité ontologique dans la philosophie de saint Thomas,” Revue philosophique de Louvain 52 (1954), 521-71. 45. To see this, one need only look at the differences between two of the most recent interpretations: Macken, “La théorie,” and Brown, “Divine Illumination.” I offer another, still somewhat different, explication.

26

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

Any understanding of the matter must begin with Henry’s most general formulation of the nature of the higher truth — that it explicitly involved the eternal exemplars of things in God.“ In terms more precisely reflective of Henry’s formal definition of truth as a relation or adequation, this meant that the pure truth consisted in the conformity of the thing as object to its exemplary form in the mind of God.*’ Perceiving this truth entailed forming a concept or word that, as on the immediately preceding level of knowledge, served as the container or marker for the newfound understanding. In this case it was the perfect concept or word, perfect because it was attuned to the highest and perfect similitude of the thing, the eternal exemplar itself.** There were, however, two ways the eternal exemplar could enter into human knowl-

edge (just as there had been two ways the worldly exemplar had entered into science at the lower level), and Henry did not intend for

both of them to apply to the normal process of knowing the pure truth. In one way, the eternal exemplar could be the object itself that the human mind came to know; in the other way, it could be instead just a means of knowing another, created object.”

According to the first way the divine exemplar might touch on human knowledge, the mind would know the exemplar and in it the object in the created world. By comparing the object to the exemplar, the mind would then come to see the truth. Henry explained that the process was something like seeing the real Hercules and thereby knowing that a picture resembling him was indeed a true image of the man.” Yet this meant that in perceiving the truth the mind had actually to see the nude essence of God, and Henry hastened to add that such a bless-

ing was not available to man acting solely out of his own natural powers. Instead it required a special kind of light — not, this time, the special illumination associated with Augustine’s theory of knowledge

46. “Sincera igitur veritas ut dictum est non nisi ad exemplar aeternum conspici potest.” Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, 6rH). 47. Summa, art. i, q. 4 (I, 10vG). Henry’s exact words here are that this pure truth is the conformity of the truth in the thing to the truth in God. He states clearly that the truth in God is that of God’s exemplary nature. What we must understand is that by the truth in the thing he means to refer to his earlier identification of truth with quidditas rei. This is even clearer if one examines an equivalent statement of the definition, Summa, art. 1, q. 7 (I, 16vK): “Veritas igitur cuiusque rei intellectui ostendi non potest nisi ostendendo ei conformitatem ad suum exemplar primum a quo est transformata.” 48. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (1, 10rF). On the word below this perfect word see above, p. 22, n. 30. 49. Surnnna, art. 1, q. 2 (1, 6rI).

50. Ibid. 27

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

through divine light but rather a true light of grace.>! What is more, this grace was not merely the gift by which men and women were normally converted to God in this life; it had to be a gift of special grace (donum gratiae specialis), that rare blessing given to a chosen few, like Moses, Paul, and Benedict, and then only for a rapturous moment.” In the future life the redeemed souls of the blessed would receive a similar benefit through the light of glory, but that naturally had nothing to do with life on earth.*? In short, knowledge of the pure truth according to this first way — knowledge that involved seeing the divine exemplar as an object known — would not provide a useful model for

the way the mind came to know the pure truth in this life. It was, as Henry pointed out, the only way man could know the truth with absolutely perfect certitude (perfecta certitudine), but it applied to almost no one while living on earth.~4

It was then the second way the divine exemplar came into human knowledge that provided Henry with the basis for his theory of normal knowledge of the pure truth. According to this way, the divine exemplar was not an object known in itself but rather a means of knowing something else (ratio cognoscendi). Henry said that it was by thinking along these lines that Plato had explained all knowledge of the truth as somehow related to a vision of the eternal exemplars.*° Since the intel-

lectual procedure involved here did suffice to give the mind actual knowledge of the pure truth, it was, as Henry noted, a truer way (verior

, modus) of attaining science or knowledge of the truth than the way Aristotle described in his scientific works.~ If it did not allow absolutely perfect certitude, which came only with the open vision of the 51. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, 6vI). The exact words Henry used to refer to the action of this light of grace were specialis illustratio. This was not, however, to be confused with the same phrase as he more often used it — to refer to the action of divine light

associated with the Augustinian paradigm for knowledge of the truth. For examples of this more typical, and presumably also for Henry more precise, application of the phrase “special illumination,” see above, p. 15, n. 4, and below, p. 29, n. 59.

52. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 6vI). It was a commonplace of the thirteenth century to refer to the rapture of Moses and Paul as examples of how the human mind might see the divine essence, and its exemplars, face to face. See, for instance, Robert Grosseteste in his commentary on De caelesti hierarchia of Pseudo-Dionysius (Hyacinthe-Fran¢ois Dondaine, “L’objet et le ‘medium’ de la vision béatifique chez les théologiens du XIIIe siécle,” RTAM 19 [1952], 125). 53. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 8vA). See also Summa, art. 24, q. 9 (I, 146rV). 54. Summa, art. 2, q. 1 (1, 23vB).

55. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 6vI). 56. Summa, art. 1, gq. 2 (I, 6vK and 6vL). On Henry’s idea of Aristotle’s view see above, p. 23, n. 33. 28

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

exemplar, it still permitted a judgment that was certain (certum iudi-

cium), and this was more than could be expected from knowledge dependent solely upon a created exemplar.>’ Simply put, this was the way of divine illumination as Henry most frequently used the term.*® It differed from all other instances where divine light played a role in knowledge because it required, in words Henry was now using in a precise and technical sense, a special illumination (specialis illustratio), one that was above the general influence of God and yet below any light of grace.*? This was the sort of divine illumination that was important for Henry’s theory of science and scientific truth. Up to this point Henry’s explanation of knowledge of the pure truth was relatively simple and straightforward. When he delved further into the process, however, things became considerably more complex and ambiguous. The difficulty arose in the attempt to be more specific about how the divine exemplar affected human cognition — that is, about precisely how divine illumination worked. Although specificity and precise analysis were qualities held in high esteem by scholastic thinkers like Henry, on this particular issue there were enormous obstacles to being precise. Indeed, many of the obstacles derived from the very philosophical tradition through which the problem had to be approached. Augustine’s doctrine of divine illumination — perhaps the basic paradigm of this process for thinkers in the Latin West — had been broadly conceived and on the whole imprecise. Not only could it be applied to a host of issues concerning the workings of the mind as well as the way to salvation, but it also led in at least two directions within the confines of the theory of knowledge alone. One can read Augustine’s illumination both as an attempt to resolve the noetic problem of how the human mind generates the ideas it has and as an effort to deal with the more purely epistemological question of judgment — how the mind sorts out the ideas it already possesses into those that are true and those that are false. Etienne Gilson has drawn this distinction as clearly as any commentator on Augustine’s work, and he has convincingly argued that for Augustine the criteriological or judgmental function of divine illumination far outweighed any interest he had in the 57. See Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 7rL). 398. “Absolute ergo dicendum quod homo sinceram veritatem de nulla re habere potest ex puris naturalibus eius notitiam acquirendo: sed solum illustratione luminis divini: ita quod licet in puris naturalibus constitutus illud attingat: tamen illud ex puris naturalibus naturaliter attingere non potest.” Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 8rM).

59. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 8rN and S). 29

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

ideogenic purposes it might be made to serve. Yet wherever Augustine’s emphasis lay, the fact remains that his description of illumination yields two models for the process, and they are not precisely compatible in analytical terms. It would appear that Henry was himself aware of the distinction between criteria and ideogenesis that Gilson has pointed out. He explic-

itly stated that intellectual operations were perfected by two sorts of things: intellectual light and intelligible species. Species accounted for the fact of apprehension; they were, as we should say today, the concrete means by which contact was made with the object. In other words,

their function was essentially ideogenic. Light, on the other hand, made possible a judgment. It allowed the mind to set right its thoughts about what it had come to know. This was the other side of the coin, covering the criteriological, one might even say normative, function.®!

So far as concerned God’s role in human knowledge of the pure truth, Henry once actually confessed that only one of the two models for how an intellectual operation might be perfected properly applied. In question 8 of the first article of his Summa, he stated unambiguously that the proper way God acted in teaching human beings the truth was as a light.©? If this were all Henry had had to say on the subject, it would be clear that he reserved for God an essentially criteriological role in human knowledge of the pure truth. And in fact it would appear that this was primarily how he viewed the process of illumination —that is, this was the principal way he viewed the illumination commonly involved in human knowledge here on earth. Yet Henry’s theory, if examined in detail, was actually not so simple or unambiguous as such general statements would make it appear. Like Augustine, Henry had a tendency to speak of God’s action in more than one way. Indeed, he noted that Augustine and the saints spoke about God’s role in the illuminative process in as many as three ways, and he carefully tried to integrate these three into his own explication of the way to knowledge of the pure truth. According to Henry the first function God performed was to serve as a spiritual light; the second, to serve as a form or species; the third, to serve as a figure or mark, a kind of divine art.®? These three cannot be interpreted in ex60. Etienne Gilson, “Sur quelques difficultés de Villumination augustinienne,” Revue néoscolastique de philosophie 36 (1934), 321-31. 61. For Henry’s mention of these two processes see Summa, art. 1, q. 8 (I, 18rE).

62. Ibid. | 63. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 9r-v[D]). As evidence that Augustine had recognized three ways Henry cited Soliloquia, I, 6 (PL, 32:875). 30

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

actly the same way, and some of them, especially God acting as species or as art, seem to imply as much an ideogenic as a criteriological role. Thus, for all his efforts to come down on one side of the issue, Henry

did not totally reject the multiple functions of divine illumination he

found in the writings of Augustine. He did, however, take much greater care to be precise about how these functions were worked out. In his role as an intellectual light illuminating the mind God acted not so that the mind should see (intueri, videre) the pure truth but so that it should be sharpened (acui) to the point where it could be led to see it. In other words, here the divine light prepared the way but was

not actually involved in the process by which the intellect came to know the truth. Henry explained that in this role God’s light cleansed the mind, which had been clouded by the base affections of the flesh, and restored it to spiritual health. He added that in sensory perception material light played a comparable role, purging the bodily eyes so that they could receive visible images. It is interesting to note that this very function — purging the receptive cognitive power — is one of the two roles Henry attributed to the agent intellect in the natural processes

of coming to know objects in the world.© This would suggest that when God acted in this way as a divine light for the mind, he was in fact serving as a sort of external agent intellect, a view commonly attributed to several thinkers in the thirteenth century and generally considered to reveal an Avicennian influence.© Henry himself was once

later to use the term “agent intellect” to describe God in this role.® Whether he intended to imply as much already in the earliest parts of the Summa cannot be known. Whatever Henry’s early thoughts about Avicenna’s agent intellect, 64. “Est enim primo ratio cognitionis ut lux, mentem solummodo illustrando: ut ad intuendum sinceram veritatem rei acuatur: non ut eam intueatur et iam videat.” Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 9vD). 65. On the two roles of the agent intellect, see Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 129v-130r[E]). 66. The earliest and classic statements about this Avicennizing current — known as “augustinisme avicennisant” — are to be found in Etienne Gilson, “Pourquoi saint Thomas a critiqué saint Augustin,” AHDLMA 1 (1926-27), 5-127; and “Les sources gréco-arabes de l’augustinisme avicennisant,” AHDLMA 4 (1929), 5-149. 67. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Raymond Macken, Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, 13 [Leuven, 1983], p. 264), and below, p. 98, n. 16. Macken points to Henry’s discussion of God as agent intellect in “La théorie,” p. 92. The claim, which Macken finds supported in the work of Nys and Prezioso (see Macken, “La théorie,” pp. 92-93, n. 46), that this is a sign of a late move in Henry’s thought towards a more Avicennizing interpretation must be considerably qualified by this evidence of an early explanation of God’s role along lines formally the same as that of an agent intellect, even though the term itself is not explicitly used. 31

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

however, it is clear that in speaking of God’s role as illuminator he did not mean to suggest that the human mind received God’s light directly in this act that prepared the way for knowledge of pure truth. Instead, God illuminated the intellect indirectly. What happened was that the divine light diffused itself on the intelligible species of things, and they carried it to the mind, where it then did its work of cleansing and healing. Henry compared the process to the way a hidden source of light would shine upon colors, the species of which would then carry the light as well as the color to the eye. The analogy was not perfect, to be sure. For one thing, there was nothing in intellectual vision to correspond to the visible medium in sight, and for another, one had to introduce a second source of light in intellection, in order to account for the difference between the illuminative process leading to pure truth and the lower procedure whereby the mind came to know the created species alone. Henry must have realized that a complete account would therefore have required him to go further, and in what seems to be an apologetic tone he stated that for the moment his analogy alone would

have to suffice. In God’s second role he acted as a form and species, one that actually transformed (immutare) the mind in some way and brought it to see (intueri) its object — presumably the pure truth.© This contrasted sharply with God’s first role in the whole process, for God as light had prepared the way and was not involved in the actual mental vision. Yet the knowledge Henry had in mind in this second case was, he said, indistinct (indistincta cognitio). It was like what would result on the sensory level if the species of color came to the eyes without any determinate form. Perhaps Henry was thinking about blurred vision. In that case the eyes would not really know what they were seeing; they would know only that there was some object present to them. If this analogy is to mean anything, however, it is very hard to know exactly what we should take that meaning to be, or how God’s action in this second role was to be distinguished from the way he functioned according to either of the other two. In fact, practically everything about this second role for God is problematic. When on occasion Henry managed to speak explicitly about species in the intellect, he seems to have been saying that there were actually two species the mind employed to come to knowledge of the pure truth. 68. For Henry’s comparison of God’s action to that of sensible light, see Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (1, 9VE and F). 69. “Secundo modo deus est ratio cognitionis ut forma et species mentem immutans ad intuendum.” Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10rF). 32

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

One was the species taken from the external object. The other was the species that was in fact the cause of the thing — that is, the exemplar in God. By comparing these two the mind was able to form the perfect word, the actual psychological manifestation of the pure truth in its understanding.’° Clearly this explanation kept very close to Henry’s formal definition of pure truth as a conformity of the object to its divine exemplar, with the exception that now the lower species in the mind would have to serve as object in place of the external thing itself. Such use of the impressed species drawn from the object was not pre-

cisely correct according to the terms of Henry’s noetics, but it did make sense as a sort of philosophical shorthand. The impressed species was, after all, what accounted for the mind’s initial confrontation with

external reality.”! Consequently, seeing things this way fit well with Henry’s long-standing insistence that knowledge of the truth was knowledge of a conformity. One is therefore inclined to believe that the notion of a literal and explicit comparison between two species, one of which was properly in or from God, was in fact the way Henry intended his explanation of God’s second role to be understood.” Yet Henry’s key discussion of the comparison of the two species actually came in the middle of the passage where he was explaining his third role for God, which was not properly God as species at all. This would make an unlikely candidate for Henry’s understanding of how a divine species was actually supposed to work. What is more, immediately after mentioning the comparison he drew back from such a literal

application of the idea of two species and cautioned the reader that the / species from God did not inhere (inhaerere) in the mind but rather flowed (illabi) into it or, perhaps even more to the point, shone or ra-

diated (/ucere) within it.7? If such was the case, then it would seem that Henry had in mind not so much the literal comparison of two species as the examination of one — the species coming from the exter70. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10rG). See also Summa, art. 1, q. 4 (I, 12vD). 71. It has already been suggested above in connection with the truth known by means only of a created exemplar that Henry’s language became somewhat imprecise whenever in his early works he touched on the matter of the exact role of impressed species.

72. Macken, “La théorie,” pp. 93-94, shows how this notion of a double species — the reception of two real species by the mind on the way to pure truth — was the way

Gilson interpreted Henry on this score (see Gilson, “Roger Marston: Un cas d’augustinisme avicennisant,” AHDLMA 8 [1933], 41, n. 1). Macken makes the point noted here — that Henry’s subsequent qualification means that his language about two species cannot be taken at face value, or is at least only partly an accurate expression of what he meant. 73. See above, n. 70. Compare Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 9rD).

33

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

nal object — in the light that radiated from a higher and exemplary species in God.’”* This would, of course, seem to reduce the second mode to little more than the first, wherein God shone on the mind and

created the atmosphere in which knowledge of the pure truth could take place, and it marks a clear retreat from the language of comparison, which better suits Henry’s formal definition of the truth. Given Henry’s warning that the mind in this life normally could not see the divine exemplar as an object, there would in fact seem to be little alternative to interpreting God’s second role in this reduced way. Perhaps the problem was inherent in Henry’s language itself, caught between describing the divine element as a light and seeing it as an exemplar far above the mind. So far as concerned the model of exemplar, it was not on the second level but on the third where Henry succeeded in finding an adequate formulation for how God entered into knowledge of the pure truth. Henry said that the third way God acted to lead the human mind to knowledge of the pure truth was as a figure or a mark that transfigured the mind and made it distinctly understand the truth. God was able to do this because he contained the eternal reasons (regulae aeternae) of all things — that is, the exemplars or divine ideas. In this way he was like an art (ars) — perhaps like a storehouse of artistic forms — impressing the concepts of the mind with the truth itself, sealing and marking the mind with its own image.’> Henry even drew the traditional analogy to a signet ring, which made its mark on the sealing wax not by literally passing over (migrare) into it but by transferring its image onto it through an impression.’© Other ways to say the same 74. Macken makes this point most clearly. See “La théorie,” p. 94. 75. “Tertio modo est ratio cognitionis ut exemplar atque character transfigurans mentem ad distincte intelligendum: et hoc ratione aeternarum regularum in divina arte contentarum. ...Et propter hoc proxima et perfecta ratio cognoscendi sinceram veritatem de re quacumque perfecta distincta atque determinata cognitione est divina essentia inquantum est ars sive exemplar rerum imprimens ipsi menti verbum simillimum veritati rei extra, per hoc quod ipsa continens est in se ideas et regulas aeternas expressivas Omnium rerum similitudines: quas imprimit conceptibus mentis: per quod etiam sigillat et. characterizat ipsam mentem imagine sua et expressiva.” Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10rF). See also Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (1, 9rD), where

Henry calls God in this third way an exemplar oridea. 7

It is interesting to note that Aristotle, in De anima, III, 5 (430a10-14), used the

analogy of an art and its material subject to describe the active and passive elements

he thought could be found within the soul. Perhaps here Henry was consciously trying to accommodate both Augustinian and Aristotelian terms of analysis in his own noetics. 76. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10rF). See also Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 7rL). This image can be found in Augustine, De Trinitate, XIV, 15 (ed. William J. Mountain and Fr. 34

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

thing were that the divine truth transformed (transformare) the mind, struck against it (impellere), and informed it (informare)." Clearly this was a process distinct from the first two modes whereby God was seen to influence cognition. What is more, it was, according to Henry’s express words, a way that was more immediate and more perfect.” Yet this third way was also the most difficult to explain, and it was the one to which Henry gave the most attention. He began his discussion with the notion of the “word” (verbum).”? By this, he explained, he meant the fully formed concept by which the mind could be said to know the object or thing. This was Henry’s standard usage and agreed with what he had said before.®° Then he turned to “truth,” which, as he reminded the reader, was the adequation of the thing and the intellect.2! Combined, the two ideas yielded the “word of truth,” the perfect form of which — that is to say, the fullest manifestation of human knowledge of the truth, the perfect word of truth — was the concept fully formed according to the highest, perfect similitude that a thing could have, the eternal exemplar of the object in God.® This was precisely the way Henry wanted the reader to think of pure truth when considering God’s third role in leading the mind to knowledge of such truth. There were, however, problems in Henry’s formulation. First of all, in a way reminiscent of the ambiguity seen earlier when Henry had originally introduced the idea of a word at his lower level of knowledge of the truth, he seems only intermittently to have kept strictly to the notion of a word or concept as simply the psychological or noetic marker for knowledge of the similitude that constituted truth. More often he swept the word itself up into the language of similarity so that it, like the exemplar or species on which it was based, was said to be similar to the object, somehow in conformity with it. In fact this tendency to transfer the idea of conformity or accommodation from the

Glorie, CC, 50-S50A [Turnhout, 1968], II, 451). Even earlier Aristotle, in De anima, II, 12 (424a17-24), referred to a signet ring making its impression in wax, not however to illustrate the process of intellection but rather sensory perception. 77. Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, 7rL). 78. See above, n. 75. 79. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10rF). 80. Henry referred here to Augustine, De Trinitate, as an authority for his definition of the word. The citation in the printed edition of the Summa — to book XI, chap. 9 — must be wrong. See, however, De Trinitate, IX, 11 (ed. Mountain and Glorie,

I, 308), which might be the passage Henry had in mind. |

81. On this definition see above, p. 21. 82. Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10rF and 10vG). 35

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

exemplar to the concept or word was constant throughout Henry’s early works. Strictly speaking it could not have been justified according to the formal terms of Henry’s noetics. Yet it cannot be written off as an aberration or an accident. Henry was clearly fascinated with the idea that knowledge of the truth itself, as signified by the concept or word, was likewise drawn into its own conformity to object or exemplar

in a way that made it not just knowledge of the truth but also in its own way true. The attractiveness of this image seems to have outweighed its clumsiness as an analytic model. Secondly, there was the problem that although Henry had specifically noted that truth was the adequation of thing and intellect, his explanation of the perfect word of truth seemed to imply that the requisite adequation had to come between the intellect — or at least the concept in the intellect — and God. In short, the external, created object

seemed to fall away, and knowledge of the pure truth was left to involve a confrontation or accommodation between a concept in the mind and the thing simply as it was represented by a divine form. This could not be precisely what Henry had intended. In the very same passage where he spoke of God’s role as an art, he took pains to add that although the perfect concept of truth was formed in the mind by the divine exemplar, the whole process could not occur without the use of a created exemplar drawn from the external object in the world. This exemplar was the intelligible species derived from the phantasm, without which species the mind could know nothing of the world so long as

it existed as a wayfarer here below. No matter how much the perfect word of truth might seem to direct the mind straight to God’s ideas, there had still to be a place for the external created object and the species it impressed on the intellect. Finally, as if to make things even more complicated, there were times when Henry lapsed into speaking about God’s third role as figure

or mark along lines that would appear much more suited to the first, which Henry had specifically reserved for God’s action as a light. He said that once the mind had attained the knowledge of an external object by means of the created species, the eternal exemplar then shone upon this knowledge and thus led the mind to perceive the pure truth.3 If, as has been noted, the proper way God acted in teaching the mind was as a light, apparently he acted as a light that functioned in some way like an art.4 How, then, should the first and third ways be distinguished? 83. Ibid. 84. Summa, art. 1, q. 8 (I, 18rE). Henry’s reference to God acting properly as a light, which he also made in this same passage, was pointed out above, p. 30. The whole 36

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

There is, in fact, no way to remove these ambiguities completely from Henry’s work. By focusing on certain passages where his language was especially precise, one can, however, discover the general direction his ideas on this third and, by his own testimony, most proper role for God were taking at the time he wrote the early articles to his Summa. Henry insisted that the two species or exemplars — one from the created thing and one in God — had to work together in the mind, and out of them both the intellect had to construct a single concept or word by which it knew the pure truth.® The way this happened involved two steps. First, the intellect used the exemplar or the species

taken from the thing itself to form an incomplete similitude of the thing, the mental manifestation of a knowledge of the incomplete truth. Presumably this was precisely the process Henry had described before

when speaking of the first and lower kind of knowledge of the truth, that which led to the formation of the simple word.® Yet the mind that knew the truth in this way stood in need of an adjustment in order to come to form a perfect word, the vehicle for knowledge of the pure truth. Its concept had to be determined, which is to say made more definite or more precise.®” What made this adjustment or determination possible was the second exemplar, eternal and residing in God, and it did this by impressing something on the mind — specifically a similitude of its very self.®®

This was the second and crucial step. In effect the First Truth, the exemplar in God, molded and shaped the simple word already residing in the mind and transformed it from being the manifestation of knowl-

edge of an imperfect truth to being the psychological marker for knowledge of the pure truth itself. God thereby set his seal on the mind, marking it with his own image, and the impression that was left

was the perfect word of pure truth.” section concludes, however, with an explicit declaration that the correct way to interpret this illuminative action is to see God acting as an art. When Macken, “La théorie,” p. 96, says that the notion of God acting as ars has full force only later in Henry’s work, he has not, I believe, given enough attention to such express testimony to its importance early on in the Summa. 85. For Henry’s most complete description of the process, see Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (10rv[G]).

86. See above, p. 22, n. 30. 87. “Sed oportet conceptum de re ad exemplar acceptum a re determinari per divinum exemplar.” Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (I, 8rS). 88. See, for instance, Summa, art. 1, q. 2 (1, 7rL): “Perfecta igitur ut dictum est informatio veritatis non habetur nisi ex similitudine veritatis menti impressa de re cognoscibili ab ipsa prima et exemplari veritate.” 89. See Henry’s language, Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (1, 10rG). 37

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

Of course, the subject or, in metaphorical terms, material content of this impression — that is, whatever psychological entity received the impression — was still the mental word, originally formed by the mind

in its confrontation with the external thing through the intelligible species.” This was the reason Henry had insisted on the metaphor of the signet ring. God did not so much give the mind literally a new species as reform the concept the mind had already devised from the earthly one. Perhaps the same reason led Henry to choose the word “art.” In this mode of influencing intellection God acted not as the vehicle for knowledge but as the modeler who raised a lower sort of knowledge to a more perfect form. Yet if the constituent elements in the mind were still the same even after God acted in this third way, there had nonetheless been a striking change. The word or concept was now altered in a manner that increased its value and brought it closer to the divine exemplar itself. Whereas before it had referred to or in effect been related to only the created object, now it also referred to or was drawn into a relationship with an idea in God. In this way the concept in the mind became a more perfect manifestation of the

truth. It became itself more perfectly true. It is here that the real subtlety and the full complexity of Henry’s ideas become apparent. God’s intervention in the cognitive process as an art set up a three-way relation: the external object related to God’s exemplar as to the source of its essential truth; the concept in the mind related to the external object, through the species, as to the source of the mind’s and indeed the concept’s first and incomplete cognitive truth; and the concept in the mind related to the divine exemplar as to the cause of its second, now complete, cognitive truth. But this third relation was not something entirely separate from the second; instead it was its fulfillment and perfection. By entering into a relation with God, the concept in the mind had thereby become a better manifestation of truth as apprehended at the lower cognitive level. This was because the concept had become, in a way that reveals the ambiguity between concept as cognitive marker and concept as one of the elements itself in the relation of truth, on a deeper level something more like the actual created object it was intended to reflect and to which it

, was already related through the initial cognitive act. Just as the external object was the impression in the material world left by a divine exemplar, so now the concept in the mind had received an independent impression from that same exemplar in God. And just as the object in the world was part of a relation of truth through its comparison to the 90. See Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (I, 10vG). 38

HENRY’S FIRST IDEAS ON TRUTH

divine idea, so now the mental concept had entered into its own separate relation of truth to God. Thus the truth which the concept signified and in which it took part had become a real reflection of the original truth that accounted for the object in the world, and this meant that the concept was now an even better image of its worldly object.?! In short, the addition of the third relation — the relation of the concept directly to God — served to

strengthen the second relation, the one that tied the concept to the

| worldly thing. In a real sense it extended and perfected this second relation, but did not supersede it. Here lay the essence of how God worked as an art. By stamping his impression on the concept of truth in the mind, God transformed a word that represented only a created object into one that also bore an image of the divine exemplar and thus reflected, on its own cognitive level, the original creative or existential relationship between God and the object in the world. As Henry explained, once the mind’s word had been marked by the seal of God’s exemplar itself, it became a more perfect similitude of the objective thing, because both of them were now impressions left by the same seal .92

With this Henry put the cap on a general outline of the structure of human knowledge and the place in it for science and truth. At the very bottom of intellection lay knowledge in the broadest sense, any certain comprehension of a mental object. This broad and most basic category of cognition could be split into two parts. On the one hand, there was simply knowledge of the object as it was (id quod res est), and on the other, knowledge of its truth, the quiddity of the thing. Here, on the level of truth, the mind entered the territory of science and began to deal with degrees of certitude that Henry considered worthy of the scholarly mind. Yet science itself could be further divided into two differing, unequal kinds. If the mind worked solely on its own and de91. As Henry said, the truth of the perfect word was “ad perfectam assimulationem veritatis quae est in re in nullo disconvenienfs]. .. .” Summa, art. 1, q. 3 (1, 10rG). 92. Ibid. In Brown’s analysis of Henry on the pure (or, in Brown’s words, genuine) truth he refers to this complex configuration (see Brown, “Divine Illumination,” pp. 191-92). Yet when he says that the similitude between mind and thing is itself wrapped up in another similitude to God, he has overburdened Henry’s language and the logical limits of the concept of similitude. Henry does not mean that the similitude between mind and object is itself similar to an exemplar, but that each correlative — concept and thing — is itself similar to the divine. It is, admittedly, easy to see how Henry’s language could encourage Brown’s interpretation, given Henry’s own ambivalent attitude about whether the concept simply revealed the relation of truth or was somehow subsumed in it. 39

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

pended only on the species it naturally derived from its external object,

it could work its way among the truths of philosophy but not attain the certitude of science in the perfect sense of the word. For the latter the mind needed a special illumination from God. Only with the aid of the Divinity could the intellect reach the pure truth (sincera veritas). It was the upper level, where God acted as a divine light revealing the pure truth, that represented the most complicated part of Henry’s

theory and the one most wrapped in ambiguity. In particular Henry had not succeeded in showing how one could talk about any one of the three ways God acted on the mind without drawing on language more

appropriately reserved for the other two. Yet it may be that at this stage in his career analytical purity was not what he had in mind. He had carefully articulated the various levels of certitude the mind could attain in the world and related these levels not only to the way things were but also to the manner in which the mind came into contact with

creation and with God. His picture of the mental topography was, therefore, complete in this, his earliest statement of what it was to know. One cannot deny the ingenuity and what must have appeared to

his contemporaries as the real power of his ideas.

40

III

The Second Stage

In the years immediately after 1276 (or, to be more precise, in the writings composed first after the initial articles of the Summa quaestionum)

Henry had little to add to the view of truth laid out in his earliest written work. Even though he returned to the subject on several occasions, in each case it is clear that the epistemological schema he had in mind was essentially the same as before. Article 24 of the Summa, completed probably before the end of 1277, made reference to Henry’s general ideas on truth, and indeed question 8 of that article provided a quick outline of the levels of human knowledge as they have been explained above.! The only peculiarity in that question was the implication that the word (verbum) by which the mind understood the quiddity of a thing — and which was by Henry’s early statements the mark

of knowledge of the truth — was itself subject to a judgment that followed upon its formation and led the mind finally to perceive the truth.” In the earlier articles it appeared that the judgment had preceded the formation of the word. Other than this single deviation (one that may have foreshadowed developments that were to come later in Henry’s theory of the truth), he merely repeated in abbreviated form what he had already said. In the same way Henry’s mentions of truth in Quodlibets II and III, dating from 1277 and 1278, did not go beyond the outlines of the theory he had sketched before.? It is true that in these two quodlibets he elaborated somewhat on the language he would use to describe the concept or word the mind possessed when it came to know the truth, particularly by showing how he would compare this concept metaphysically

with the object it was intended to represent. He said that the word (verbum) the intellect formed was the quiddity or specific essence of the thing in some way existing in the intellect itself.4 Naturally, this quiddity in the intellect could not be precisely the same thing as the 1. On the dating of article 24, see Gdmez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133. 2. Summa, art. 24, q. 8 (I, 145rN). 3. Gomez Caffarena dates these two works respectively to Christmas 1277 and Easter 1278. See Gomez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133. 4. “Et praeterea intellectus . . . non intelligit rem . . . nisi formando in se quandam in41

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

quiddity of the thing in its real existence outside the mind, but it was very closely connected to it. Henry even went so far as to say that it was something of the thing in the intellect (quicquid est de re in intellectu).° And he added that while the external quiddity was actually the truth (veritas) of the object, the word in the mind was also in a way its truth — its truth in the intelligent soul (veritas apud animam), different from the external truth of the thing (veritas naturae [rei] visae) although apparently derived from it.© This word or truth in the soul was, in short, an extension of or variation on the actual being of the object; it was its diminished being as found in the intellect (diminuta rei entitas).’ All of this suggests some of the metaphysical considerations that lay behind the way Henry was later to explain certain knowledge and the truth. It seems, moreover, that in these passages Henry was making the first tentative moves towards applying to his analysis of truth some of the ideas from his theory of being and essence — a theory that will be discussed below.’ What is important at present, however, is not these meager foreshadowings of things to come but the fact that for the most part Henry’s references to truth and knowledge in these works immediately following the earliest articles of his Summa did not depart from his original ideas on the subject. In fact, it would seem he was little concerned with the problem of truth during these years.

tentionem rei intellectae quae dicitur verbum et notitia: in qua illam intelligit tanquam in suo quod quid est existente apud intellectum.” Quod. III, q. 1 (I, 48rS). As shown in this passage Henry also called this word an intentio and a notitia. For a similar definition of the word as the quiddity in the intellect, see Quod. II, q. 6 (ed. Wielockx, p. 32). 5. See below, n. 7. 6. On the quiddity of the object being its truth, see Quod. II, q. 6 (ed. Wielockx, p. 32). On the word being a truth in the soul, different from the truth in nature, see Quod.

Ill, q. 1 , 48rS and 48vX). 7. “Illud autem verbum, et quicquid est de re in intellectu: est perfecta ratio et similitudo rei extra prefecte assimilans intelligentem intellecto. Unde et dicitur ipsa veritas: quae est diminuta rei entitas, sive ipsa adaequatio rei et intellectus: quoniam adaequat intelligentem intellecto, et facit quod intellectus quodammodo sit ipsum intellectum.” Quod. III, q. 15 (1, 76rA). On the history of the notion of ens diminutum as a way of characterizing some sort of being in the mind as opposed to full being outside the mind, see Armand Maurer, “Ens diminutum: A Note on Its Origin and Meaning,” Mediaeval Studies 12 (1950), 216-22. 8. See below, Chap. 4. The relation of Henry’s ideas on truth at this time to his theory of being and essence is even clearer in Quod. III, q. 9 (I, 62rQ), and in Quod. III, q. 15 (I, 76rA), he actually uses the words esse essentiae — a key element of his theory of being and essence — to expound his views. 42

THE SECOND STAGE

Yet if Henry’s writings give the impression that he did not think much about the theory of truth in the years immediately after 1276, the reality must actually have been somewhat different. For in 1279 and 1280 Henry wrote a number of questions in which he dealt with truth and certain knowledge in ways radically different from what can be seen in his earliest works. It would appear, therefore, that the few years of relative silence in between masked a process of intensive rethinking, or at the very least the quiet beginnings of an investigation and development ot areas of theory left practically untouched by his first series of questions on epistemology. Whether or not this is exactly what happened, by 1279 and 1280, at what would have been the end of

this process of revaluation, Henry’s explicit approach to truth had taken a new turn. Now he revealed himself to be not just another member of the scholastic community, interested in drawing upon the growing prestige of science, but rather an active theoretician intent on refining scientific methods and, in particular, accommodating more fully the ideas of Aristotle. For in these new works there was no men-

tion of a theory of divine illumination. Instead, Henry showed his debt to the great and recently deceased interpreter of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and demonstrated that he was himself an Aristotelian of considerable subtlety. To see how far Henry’s ideas on truth had developed it is necessary to look first at article 34 of his Summa, composed most likely some-

time in late 1279 or early 1280, at any rate before he gave his fifth quodlibet during the Easter disputations of 1280.7 In this article Henry dealt with truth as a property of God, but in doing so he had much to say about truth as it entered into human intellection. As he explained, truth could be defined most generally — his words were that

this was the perfect notion of truth (perfecta ratio veritatis) — as the condition of a thing when it possessed all that its nature required. Another way of saying this was that in its truth the thing contained everything that pertained to the perfection of its essence. !° Henry’s definition, associating truth with the fulfillment of some natural or essential requirement, accorded with an intellectual tradition that in the West went back at least as far as Augustine. Yet Henry was not using words to be found precisely in any of Augustine’s works. Instead, his ideas were more directly dependent on Anselm, a more re9. Again, see Gomez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133. 10. “Ergo similiter haec est perfecta ratio veritatis, quod ipsa habeat hoc quod natura sua requirit ut habeat, continendo scilicet in se quicquid ad essentiae suae perfectionem pertinet.” Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (I, 211rH). 43

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

cent source for similar ideas." In his De veritate Anselm had defined truth as a rightness or rectitude perceptible only to the mind.!* Henry knew Anselm’s definition — it was a commonplace in the thirteenth century — and he indeed quoted it in this same article of his Summa. '3 What is more, Anselm had interpreted rightness or rectitude to mean

the quality of a thing by which it did what it ought to do, a facere quod debet.'* This interpretation had been worked out in even fuller terms by the thirteenth-century scholastic Robert Grosseteste, who in his own De veritate explicitly associated veritas with both rectitudo and debitum esse.'> Henry’s requirit, the notion of a requirement to be fulfilled for truth to hold, was essentially the same as the debet of Anselm and Grosseteste, and in fact he used the ideas of requirere and debere as if they were interchangeable throughout his discussion of truth in this passage.!© His explanation of this traditional formula was only slightly

different from what had come before. More than either Anselm or Grosseteste, he laid emphasis on the idea of a “nature.” For Henry, truth had to do with a nature that required something rather than the simpler but more indefinite debere to be found in the works of his pre-

decessors. Most likely this was a sign of his predilection for metaphysics, especially his tendency to analyze things according to the category of essence, the foundation upon which Henry’s notion of nature depended. Yet whatever the reason for this modification, on all other counts Henry’s definition of truth held close to that of his illus-

trious predecessors. |

Once Henry had defined truth generally as the condition of doing whatever a thing’s nature required, he was able to distinguish within this general category two more specific kinds of truth: the truth of an actual thing (veritas rei) and the truth of a sign (veritas signi).'’ The truth of a thing attached to an actually existing essence; the truth of a sign to something less substantially independent, such as a sentence, a 11. See Henry’s reference to Anselm’s De veritate, 5 (Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (1, 210VH)).

12. Anselm, De veritate, 11, in Opera omnia, I, ed. Francis S. Schmitt (Edinburgh, 1946), p. 191.

13. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 219rV). See also below, p. 47, n. 26. 14. See Anselm, De veritate, 2, ed. Schmitt, I, 178-79. 15. Robert Grosseteste, De veritate, in Die philosophischen Werke des Robert Grosseteste, Bischofs von Lincoln, ed. Ludwig Baur, Beitrage, 9 (Miinster, 1912), pp. 134-35.

16. See, for example, Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (I, 210vG and H). 17. Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (I, 210vG).

44

THE SECOND STAGE

concept, a desire, or an action.!® Both truths could be defined as particular applications of the general rule. If we look at Henry’s discussion of what constituted the truth of an actual thing (veritas rei), we see that it was more or less an elaboration of ideas he had long held about the nature of reality. This part of his analysis did not, therefore, involve the new direction in his thought. As he explained it, the truth of an actual thing had to do with the state that held when the thing existed as its nature required — that is, when the real thing actually contained everything that pertained to its nature, which was in this instance the essence or quiddity.!? In short, this was a truth that lay in the essence of a thing.”° In a manner of speaking, it was the thing itself. After all, each thing, insofar as it was true 18. As Henry indicated, he drew his four types of sign directly from Anselm’s De veritate, which had presented a discussion of truth for each of the four things Henry included under sign. See Henry, Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (1, 210vG), and Anselm, De veritate, 2-5, ed. Schmitt, I, 177-83. It should be apparent from the discussion which follows that the difference between the truth of a thing and the truth of a sign was broadly related to the difference Henry had introduced earlier between the pure truth and the lower, initial truth available to the mind. As I shall soon point out, however, Henry did not now draw the same conclusions about human knowledge of the truth. In this period of his career he based his epistemology exclusively on the truth of the sign. One might also note that Henry’s division of truth into two general sorts is paralleled by the distinction many scholars have drawn between ontological and logical truth. On this, see above, p. 26, n. 44. 19. “Sic veritas rei oportet quod sit, quando res id existit quod natura sua requirit ut sit: videlicet quod in se contineat omne id quod ad naturam suam pertinet, et quiditatem.” Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (1, 210vG). A nearly identical version, where Henry mentioned essence instead of quiddity, can be found in Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 211vN).

It is interesting to note that Henry usually added to this definition some mention

of the fact that it was of the character of this sort of truth to be revealed to the intellect. In other words, the truth pertained to the essence as it was what it was, but it was specifically associated with the ability of the essence to reveal itself adequately to an intellect — “sub ratione qua ipsa essentia est declarativa suiipsius apud intellectum.” (Summa, art. 34, q. 1 [I, 211rH]. See also art. 34, q. 4 [I, 215vB)). This was Henry’s attempt to reconcile the definition of the truth of a thing given here with an earlier definition that held truth to be the quality of any object that made it an intelligible — that is, the fact that it could be related through cognition to an intellect (see Summa, art. 33, q. 2 [I, 206vA and B], and art. 34, q. 5 [I, 216vI]). The latter principle can be traced back to his earliest writings: “The truth of a thing is that by which a thing is known and understood, because it is the proper object of the intellect.” (Summa, art. 2, q. 6 [I, 27rD].) 20. “Veritatem autem quae est in rerum essentia pauci considerant.” Summa, art. 34, q. 1 di, 210vG).

45

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

to the essential nature or quiddity that made it what it was, manifested the truth. Given the strong emphasis on essence to be found in Henry’s metaphysics, whereby the essence or quiddity was in fact the realest thing about any object, it is not surprising that his language should go so far as to identify this truth with the very being of substantial reality. The true, or even more radically, the truth itself, was in Henry’s words

the perfect or true being of a thing (perfecta or vera rei entitas).*! Moreover, it was the proper object of the intellect — that is, the quod quid est or quiddity.” This notion of truth as the true being or essence of a thing brought Henry directly back to his views on the relation of all things to God and the exemplary role played by the divine ideas. If the truth of each subsisting, created thing was founded in its nature or quiddity, that would mean that the truth resided in each thing insofar as the thing participated in some formal or essential ideal dictated by its species.” This was, in clearer metaphysical terms, what it meant for Henry to say that a thing existed as its nature required. A man was a true man

because he participated in humanity, just as any individual of any species was true because it participated in a specific form.“ But to speak of participation suggested the idea of some higher reality in which the thing participated, and Henry was prepared to say that a higher reality was in fact involved: the supersubstantial world of God’s ideas. Each existing essence was true, or possessed the truth, because it reflected the essential ideal of a divine exemplar. An existing essence could even be called a truth, because it imitated the highest truth, and 21. Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (I, 211rK), and art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rQ). The idea was the same as that mentioned above, p. 42, n. 7, whereby the truth of a thing was the full being of the thing in its quiddity, while the truth of a thing in the perceiving mind was a diminished being (diminuta entitas). Henry backed up his view with a reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics II (a) where it is claimed that the disposition of a thing in being is the same as its disposition in truth (see Metaphysics II [a] [993b30-31], in the Latin Translatio Anonyma or Media, ed. Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, Aristoteles Latinus, 25/2 [Leiden, 1976], p. 37). Another statement that shows how Henry associated the truth of a thing with its reality can be found in Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (i, 212rR): “. . . veritas non est in aliquo nisi id in quo firmitas sua et realitas absoluta consistit.” 22. Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 211vO). 23. “Et ideo veritas cuiusque rei subsistentis in creaturis non dicitur fundari nisi in re secundo modo... ut ex hoc veritas dicatur esse in unoquoque, quia habet in se participatum id formae et essentiae, quod natum est habere secundum suam speciem.” Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rS). The reference to res secundo modo has to do with Henry’s notion of a res a ratitudine or esse essentiae, which will be explained below in Chap. 4. It meant simply the quiddity or essence of a thing. 24. Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212vS).

46

THE SECOND STAGE

it did so for the simple reason that it was brought into existence by the

higher truth in accordance with the essential characteristics of the divine ideal. Quoting Augustine, Henry noted that things were true insofar as they were similar to the unitary principle from which all being derived.*°

Another way of making the same point led through the two traditional definitions of truth that Henry used frequently in his writings. The first was the definition that had appeared in the very earliest articles

of the Summa, according to which truth was the adequation of thing and intellect. The second was the definition taken from Anselm, mentioned just above, by which truth was a rectitude perceptible only to the mind.*© What Henry did with these two definitions was to follow precisely the same route he had outlined in the early articles. In effect conflating the two definitions, he said that if there was a rule, a standard to which all things that participate in the truth must relate by rectitude or adequation, then this rule could be of two sorts. One sort was to be found in the divine mind; the other in the human intellect. If the rule lay in the divine mind, then the rectitude that gave the created thing its truth was the fact that its essence or quiddity had been formed after this rule, which served as an exemplar for the act of creation. The adequation of thing and intellect, in this case, would arise from the fact that the created thing could, through its quiddity, correspond to the divine intellect as this intellect contained the unparticipated model in which that quiddity participated. Man was a true man, an ass a true ass, because they corresponded to an exemplary representation of their essence in God. In short, the truth of each thing was the result of its necessary relation to the Creator.?’ As for the case where the rule lay in a created intellect, for example, when it was a concept in the human mind, then a somewhat different truth relationship was established, one that drew together the concept and the external quiddity. In this instance, the concept in the mind was 25. Ibid. Henry was quoting Augustine, De vera religione, 36 (§66) (ed. William M. Green, CSEL, 77/6° [Vienna, 1961], p. 48). The same passage had earlier been an occasion for Henry to make the same point — that created essence was the truth because it was a similitude or imitation of a higher truth in God. See Summa, art. 34, q. 1 I, 211rL). 26. Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212vS and T). For Henry’s earlier use of the definition as adequation, see above, p. 21, n. 21. On Anselm’s definition see above, p. 44, n. 12. In the text (1, 212vT) the latter definition is erroneously attributed to Augustine. The citation is most likely a mistake of the 1520 edition, since in every other case where this definition is given Henry attributes it correctly to Anselm. 27. “... veritas per se non est in aliqua re naturali creata nisi ex respectu ad intellectum increatum.” Summa, art. 34, q. 3 (1, 215rQ). 47

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

still a rule, a standard that, in Henry’s words, declared the truth of the thing as it was manifested in the created, participating quiddity (regula declarandi veritatem eius in participante). Yet it served this standardizing, declarative function only accidentally and not per se, as did the exemplar in God. After all, the concept in the mind was caused by the

be measured.” , external quiddity. It would be odd, then, to think that this concept

was in any full sense the standard by which the external thing should

It should be clear that Henry’s ideas in these passages were no more than an amplification of what he had said in his earliest works — that the truth of a thing arose out of a relation or correspondence, primarily one that reflected back on God and his exemplary ideals. Yet now, in this middle stage in his career, Henry made no further use of these views, the way he had before 1276. If, so far as the truth of a thing (veritas rei) was concerned, the essential relationship lay between a created nature and God, when it came to talking about human intellection and the role truth had to play in it — and Henry had much to say about human intellection in article 34 — God dropped out of the picture. The truth that pertained to human intellection was not the truth of a thing but rather the truth of a sign (veritas signi). And this sort of truth could be adequately explained without making any reference at all to God or to his ideas. It is at this point that we begin to see the new direction Henry’s thought was taking in the years 1279 and 1280. Here he managed to give a full analysis of the truth to be found in human knowledge without making any appeal to divine exemplars and divine light or to any process that led out of the created world of intellect and the essence of real objects. This brings us, therefore, to consider Henry’s definition of the truth of a sign. In order to be consistent with the principle set down in the general definition of truth, the truth of a sign had somehow to involve doing what its nature required. To understand what nature required of a sign, one had to turn to grammatical theory. According to Henry, a sign did what it ought to do — it fulfilled the requirement of its nature 28. See Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212vS). The configuration set up here between quiddity and concept in the mind implies the notion of an accidental truth of the thing consisting in the thing’s relation to the concept. If this is what Henry meant, he would not have been alone in reading the relationship of truth in a way that appears to modern eyes either odd or philosophically empty. Both William of Auvergne and

Godfrey of Fontaines at times interpreted the relationship of truth similarly as making the referent of knowledge true because it was adequately represented by some concept or proposition. See my William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste, p. 84, and Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, p. 27. 48

THE SECOND STAGE

— when it did everything that pertained properly to its signification (significatio). This meant, in more explicit terms, when it described

(indicare) what it signified (significatum) precisely as that thing signified was in the real world.” In other words, the relation that accounted for the truth in signs was a relation between the sign and the signified or, as we might say, between a word or idea and its referent.” There were, however, four basic types of sign, and this grammatical rule had to be adapted differently to each one.*! The only two types that are important here are the truth of a sentence and the truth of a concept. The truth of a sentence (veritas orationis), which allowed one to call a sentence “true,” was the condition that applied when the sentence described things to be as they actually were. After all, the nature of a sentence — which was presumably to convey information about reality — required it to do this, and if it did not, it failed to live up to its nature and had to be designated “false.”32 The truth of a concept (veritas cogitationis) could be explained in somewhat more metaphysical terms. A concept was true when it correctly reflected or represented a quiddity or essence in the external world. Reverting to language he

had used before, Henry said that the true concept was, in a way, the quiddity of the external thing as it existed in the knowing soul (quod quid est rei apud animam). It was the diminished being (ens diminutum) of a thing, pointing towards the full and real being outside.* The fact that this quiddity or being in the soul did the pointing it was supposed to do was what made it true. 29. “... veritas signi tunc est, quando signum facit hoc quod facere debet, sive quod natura sua requirit ut faciat: videlicet quod faciat omne id quod pertinet ad suam significationem scilicet ut indicet ipsum significatum secundum quod est in re extra.” Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (I, 210vG). Considerable work has been done recently on the history of medieval logic and grammar, but this is not the place for a bibliographical survey. Suffice it to refer to the work of Lammert M. de Rijk, Logica modernorum, 2 vols. (Assen, 1967), which deals extensively with the problem of signification, and to the bibliography of E. J. Ashworth, The Tradition of Medieval Logic and Speculative Grammar from Anselm to the End of the Seventeenth Century, Subsidia Mediaevalia, 9 (Toronto, 1978). 30. Summa, art. 34, q. 1 Ui, 210vH).

31. For the four types see above, p. 45, n. 18.

32. On the truth of a sentence see Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (I, 210VG and H). Henry referred extensively to Aristotle in this section. He had in mind principally Metaphysics, V, 7 and 29. 33. Summa, art. 34, q. 1 (1, 211rK). On the quiddity of the thing in the intellect, see above p. 41, n. 4. For an earlier mention of diminutum ens, see above, p. 42, n. 7. Henry continued to refer to the concept in the intellect and its truth in this way. See, for example, Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (1, 212rQ), art. 34, q. 3 (I, 215rT), and art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217vL and 219rX). 49

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

These simple definitions provided the basis for Henry’s whole discussion of the problem of truth in human knowledge as he presented the issue in the years 1279 and 1280. And they laid the foundation for an even more extensive consideration in those years of the nature of knowledge and in particular that part of it worthy of the name of science. For Henry, the key to understanding human knowledge and to being able to identify it in its scientific form lay in discovering how to determine when the signs that made up human speech or that were the building blocks of human thought were true. This meant coming to recognize the rules by which one could decide when these signs adequately represented externalities and also with what degree of preci-

sion they did so. His investigations into this subject constitute his clearest statement of a theory of knowledge and his most precise speculations on the nature of science. They reveal that by 1280 Henry was fully aware of the advances of the leading Aristotelians of his time and was himself capable of putting a strongly Aristotelian position into a form as clear and as sophisticated as that of any of his contemporaries.

1. TRUTH AS MENTAL REFLECTION

Henry’s new approach to the theory of knowledge and of science actually took two forms — one that would appear to draw on Thomas Aquinas’s analysis of truth, although as will be shown it was not fully identical with it, and another that seems to be a more independent elaboration of Henry’s own ideas on Aristotle. These two lines of thought were not ultimately incompatible, but neither were they explictly tied

in any of Henry’s writings. The more Thomistic line appears only in article 34 of the Summa, and it is this position I shall consider first. Henry began to work his way towards his first new understanding of knowledge of the truth by considering not truth but instead the object of intellection, the intelligible. In article 34, question 3, he said that the formal quality making an objective entity intelligible was the fact that it could enter into a relation with the intellect, moving it to understanding.** Quickly, however, Henry revealed that his interest lay not with the intelligible itself but rather with how it provided an avenue for considering the problem of truth. Indeed, the very notion of intelligibility he had spelled out was close to one of his earlier descriptions of truth, according to which truth was the quality that could be attributed to an object insofar as that object was related to, in some

50 |

34. Summa, art. 34, q. 3 (I, 214vP).

THE SECOND STAGE

way directed towards, an intellect.3> Plainly, Henry had this very idea of truth in mind, and he turned immediately from the quality of being intelligible to that of being true. He explained that the fact that an object could be related adequately to a mind — that it could assimilate an intellect to itself — was what allowed one to call an object true and associate it with the idea of truth.*® He even described this truth in the same terms he had used before. It

was a conforming (conformatio) of the thing and the mind, an adequation and a rectitude by which the mind was brought to correspond to an object in the real world.*’ It was also the property by which an object revealed (declarare) itself to the intellect, a property he apparently thought of as equivalent to the power to move the intellect he had placed at the basis of intelligibility.°® What is more, all these ways of speaking of the truth were related. At the end of article 34, question

5, Henry summarized them by saying that all definitions of the truth could be divided into those that turned on its property of revealing something (manifestatio), those that turned on the fact that it established an adequation, and those that incorporated a bit of each of the other two descriptions. The important fact was that they all involved some kind of comparison of object to intellect.29 All this might seem like a strangely circuitous way for Henry to get to the point. Whether deliberately planned or not, however, his procedure was superbly suited for launching him into his investigation of truth and human knowledge. He had begun with a look at the intelligible object, all the while laying his emphasis on its relation to the knowing intellect — a relation which was, of course, the formal basis for truth. He had thereby set his sights somewhere between his fundamental notions of the truth of the thing (veritas rei), interpreted simply as its essence or quiddity, and the truth of the sign (veritas signi), in 35. See above, p. 45, n. 19. 36. Summa, art. 34, q. 3 (I, 214vP). 37. Onconformatio or conformitas see also Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217vM and N). On adaequatio, see above, p. 47, n. 26. Henry repeated this definition of truth in his summation of art. 34, q. 5 (1, 219rV), and there for the first time he attributed it to Isaac Israeli (see above, p. 21, n. 21). On rectitudo see above, p. 44, n. 12, and p. 47, n. 26. 38. On moving the intellect see the passage cited above, p. 50, n. 34. See above, p. 45, n. 19, for other instances where Henry used the word declarativum to describe true

being. This was practically the same as another attribute of true being: to be manifestativum. Henry attributed this way of describing the truth to Hilary of Poitiers (see Summa, art. 34, q. 5 [I, 217r-vL, 218rP and 219rV]), but I have been unable to locate the passage he had in mind. 39. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218v-219r[V]). 51

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

particular the truth of a sign that was a mental concept (veritas cogitationis). One might say that Henry was talking about that sort of truth of the thing he had characterized before as arising from the relation between

an actual essence and its derivative idea in a created mind, the idea serving as a kind of accidental standard by which the thing was to be measured.” Yet such a description, although useful insofar as it brought in both object and the mind, was of limited analytical value. It still allowed truth to be attributed to the thing, although it did little to elucidate why this should be so. More important, this description was not really to Henry’s point. In fact, Henry’s intention at this moment was not specifically to describe the intelligible object or a truth that inhered in it. He wanted his ultimate focus to be on the truth in the mind and on the criteria that determined when it had been achieved.

Yet in working to this kind of truth he hoped to be able to deal with both the truth of a thing and the truth in the mind in a way that highlighted the transition from one to the other without introducing any radical break. By talking first about the object and then moving to a definition of truth dependent on the notion of a comparison or relation to the intellect, he had made it possible to do precisely this. In fact, he even accomplished a bit more. For the first time he made explicit the connection between the truth of the thing and the truth of the sign — a connection that would prove fruitful when it came to examin-

ing the criteria for scientific truth. Following up on what he had said in his previous question, Henry

| stated in article 34, question 4, that the truth was that quality of a quiddity by which it related to an intellect. But it was, after all, more than just a simple quality attached to the object’s quiddity alone. Because truth was a quality arising out of a relation, it also involved that thing towards which the quiddity was related — the intellect. To be exact, the truth was really both of these things, real essence or quiddity and intellect, as they related to each other. The way it was both things was through the dualism of potency and act. In potency, the truth was the two extremes, essence and intellect, as they existed separately and without any actual correspondence. In act, however, it was both of them together, as they had been made one thing out of two.*! Indeed, somewhat changing the terms of his analysis, Henry went so far as to identify each of these two variations on the same truth — in potency and in act — respectively with each of the

52 | 40. See above, pp. 47-48. |

41. Summa, art. 34, q. 4 (I, 215vB). _

THE SECOND STAGE

two extremes. Truth in potency was simply the nature of the thing as an essential unity existing by itself outside the intellect. It was only potentially directed towards the intellect in such a way as to be called

true. Truth in act was the intelligible form indicative of the act of understanding, existing in the intellect itself.* By now, of course, Henry had worked his way back to the idea he

had introduced before. Defined in this final way, the two kinds of truth — in potency and in act — were the same as Henry’s earlier truth of the thing and his truth of the sign. At last the full nature of the connection between these two fundamental kinds of truth was clear. The

veritas rei and the veritas signi were two forms of the same thing. From the point of view of the intellect, the truth of the external thing — its essence — was merely the truth in potency. When the intellect came to know the thing, only then did it possess the actual truth, its concept of the essence it had come to know. This intimate connection between the external truth in the essence of the thing and the intelligible truth within the knowing mind was just what Henry needed to proceed with his analysis of the truth and the knowledge associated with it. He had laid the theoretical foundation that made it clear to his reader how to relate the truth in the mind back to another kind of truth lying in the external world. From here on, his

attention shifted more exclusively to the second half of the relation — to the veritas signi that was the mental truth. Yet Henry’s greater focus on the mental truth was only part of what happened at this point in his analysis. For now he also modified the terms of his investigation. He moved to a level of greater theoretical complexity, looking beyond simply truth in the mind, the truth of a concept that pointed to a real essence. He now began to speak about knowledge of this truth. Such knowledge would of necessity be a subjective, almost self-conscious, apprehension by the mind that it contained something called the truth. It was by entering into this world of subjectivity that Henry became implicated in the terms of analysis previously used by Thomas and most readily associated with his name. Here the text of Henry’s Summa becomes more difficult to read. Question 5 of article 34 — where he laid out the most important elements of this new understanding of truth — consists of general statements on the nature of truth scattered throughout an almost bewildering

elaboration of the ways truth can be said to inhere in an intellect.

42. “Et sic primo modo veritas est ratio rei: ut res est existens secundum se extra intellectum. Secundo modo, ut est forma intellectus existens in intellectu.” Ibid. 53

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

Henry’s immediate design in all this was, in fact, not so much to explicate a general theory of truth as to show how the truth could be said to reside in God, in particular how it related to the first two persons of the Trinity. Yet since our purpose, if not Henry’s, is to expose the general theory that lay behind what he said, we can pass over most of his details. We need only extract and analyze the general statements on truth alone. From the outset Henry pursued what he had previously said about

truth in act. He stated that the way an intellect knew an object was through something formal (esse formale illud) residing in the intellect, which formal thing served as a means of understanding (ratio intelli-

gendi). The formal thing was able to do this because it had been in some way caused by an external object that had informed the intellect, thereby bringing it into the state of knowing.” But Henry’s definition of truth in act in the preceding question had made mention of something formal in the intellect, and this was the intelligible form in the understanding intellect, the same as the truth in act itself.“ Indeed this was just the form Henry had in mind, for he promptly added that the formal thing he was speaking of in question 5 could be called the truth

of the thing, existing in the soul (veritas rei in anima).* He further observed that it was a kind of diminished version of the thing as it existed outside the soul, thus recalling his earlier references to the truth in the soul as the diminished being of the object.“ He even called it a

diminished truth, although perhaps he was more faithful to his principles when he later noted that the truth in the soul was perfect (per-

fecta veritas), that in the external thing diminished.*’ After all, it made more sense that the truth that was fully in act should somehow be perfect while that which was in potential alone should be dimin43. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 216vI). 44. For this definition, see above, n. 42. 45. “...illa veritas rei in anima diminuta est respectu veritatis quae est in re extra: quemadmodum et ipsa est res diminuta respectu illius quae est extra. Et est veritas signi respectu veritatis rei.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 216vK). 46. He called it a res diminuta (ibid.). On diminished being see above, p. 42, n. 7, and p. 49, n. 33. 47. “... veritas rei in anima est perfecta veritas: et esse in eadem est esse diminutum: esso vero in re extra est perfectum esse et diminuta veritas.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217vL). Naturally, in this case truth did not exactly follow being. As Henry pointed out, full being lay in the external thing; full truth in the mind. See also in the same question (I, 219rX), where Henry invoked Aristotle as a source for the idea of esse diminutum in the soul. The reference in the text of the 1520 edition is to Metaphysics, VI, but the intended citation must actually have been to Metaphysics, VI, 4. As Maurer has pointed out (in his article “Ens diminutum”), the phrase esse

54

THE SECOND STAGE

ished. Regardless of the specific terminology, however, Henry’s basic point was clear and quite precise. He was talking about an intelligible form in the mind, one that was a truth referring to an object outside.

It was, as he said, the truth of the sign pointing to the truth of the thing.* According to Henry, it was this truth — the truth of a sign existing in the mind — that made the intellect or understanding true. It did this because it was a form that in some way brought the intellect into conformity with the quiddity of an external object. The external quiddity or form had become then a kind of exemplar for the intelligible form in the mind. The case was analogous to that of a picture drawn on a tablet, the mind being the tablet, the intelligible form the picture, and

the objective quiddity the thing that the picture was intended to depict.4? But Henry wanted to go farther than this. To be sure, once the mind contained an intelligible form that represented an objective essence — once it possessed the truth —- it could itself be said to be true.

Yet being true was different from knowing the truth, and it was the latter condition Henry was aiming at. What did it mean to say the mind knew the truth, and how could one explain the way it came to such a state? Henry’s answer was in part set in the very terms with which he had discussed truth at the beginning of his Summa over four years before. He explained that understanding had to be divided into two sorts. One occurred when the mind knew that which is true (id quod verum est).

The other occurred when it knew the truth itself (ipsa veritas), the truth by which both the external thing and the understanding intelligence could be said to be true.’ The second sort of understanding not only had to follow the first, it was also a mental state of quite a different kind. Yet if this was in some ways precisely the point Henry had tried to make in the earliest articles of the Summa, it was also, in other ways, different. Now he was prepared to draw out the distinction in much more specific terms. Moreover, his ideas about knowledge had changed, and he was ready to give to this distinction a meaning it had

diminutum was an erroneous rendering of the original Greek and is found among Latin translations only in the version made from the intermediary Arabic translation and known as the Metaphysica nova. By Henry’s day at least two correct translations of the text were available, but the notion of esse diminutum continued nevertheless to exercise a powerful hold on the mind of most scholastics. 48. See above, n. 45. 49. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (1, 216v-217r[K]). 50. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217rL). 55

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

not borne in his earlier work. More than before, he would now emphasize the complexity of the second act, and he would show that it depended on the power of the intellect to bend back upon itself. It was Henry’s emphasis on the reflexive nature of the act by which the mind came to know the truth that suggests a debt to Thomas Aqu-

| nas. For although it cannot be proved that Henry was drawing on Thomas’s work, it is nonetheless true that in Thomas’s major writings — all of which would have been available to Henry — lay the clearest

exposition of the formal principles Henry was to follow in his own analysis of the truth. In Thomas’s terms the knowledge of truth had to depend on a re/lexio. The mind had to turn back on itself so that it could perceive the very act by which it had come to know an intelligible object.*! In other words, the mind had to be able to examine itself so as to look upon the 51. In aclassic passage in his De veritate Thomas had stated: “. . . veritas . . . cognoscitur autem ab intellectu secundum quod intellectus reflectitur super actum suum.

... Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 1, art. 9 (Opera Omnia [Leonine edition], 22/1 [Rome, 1970], p. 29). Thomas returned to the problem of truth numerOus times; other key passages that reveal his ideas are: Scriptum super libros Sententiarum, I, d. 19, q. 5, art. 1 (I, ed. Pierre Mandonnet [Paris, 1929], pp. 484-94); Summa theologiae, 1, q. 16, art. 2 (Opera Omnia [Leonine edition], 4 [Rome, 1888], p. 208); In Metaphysicam Aristotelis commentaria, VI, lect. 4 (ed. M.-R. Cathala, 2nd ed. [Marietti edition] [Turin, 1926], pp. 369-72); In libros Peri hermeneias expositio, I, lect. 3 (Opera Omnia [Leonine edition], 1 [Rome, 1882], pp. 15-18); and Jn Aristotelis librum De anima commentarium, III, lect. 11 (ed. Angelo M. Pirotta [Marietti edition] [Turin, 1959], pp. 178-80). Good scholarly analyses of Thomas on truth can be found in Matthias Baumgartner, “Zum thomistischen Wahrheitsbegriff,” Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie: Festgabe zum 60. Geburtstag Clemens Baeumker, Beitrage, Supplementband 1 (Munster, 1913), pp. 241-60; Marie-Dominique Roland-Gosselin, “Sur la théorie thomiste de la vérite,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 10 (1921), 222-34; Charles Boyer, “Le sens d’un texte de saint Thomas: De veritate q. 1 a. 9,” Gregorianum 5 (1924), 424-43; Blaise Romeyer, “La doctrine de saint Thomas sur la vérité,” Archives de philosophie 3 (1925), 145-98; Paul Wilpert, Das Problem der Wahrheitssicherung bei Thomas von Aquin, Beitrage, 30/3 (Miinster, 1931); Alfons Hufnagel, Intuition und Erkenntnis nach Thomas von Aquin, Ver6ffentlichungen der Albertus-Magnus-Akademie zu K6ln, 2/5-6 (Munster, 1932); Joseph de Vries, “Ausgangspunkt der Erkenntniskritik und thomistische Erkenntnispsychologie,” Scholastik 8 (1933), 89-98; and de Vries, De cognitione veritatis textus selecti s. Thomae Aquinatis, Opuscula et Textus, series scholastica, 14 (Miinster, 1933). Three more recent works are Bernard Lonergan, La notion de verbe dans les écrits de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris, 1967), esp. pp. 47-96; Francis Ruello, La notion de vérité chez saint Albert le Grand et saint Thomas d’Aquin de 1243 a 1254 (Leuven, 1969); and Benoit Garceau, “Jugement et vérité chez saint Thomas d’Aquin,” in Tommaso d’Aquino nel suo settimo centenario, Atti del Congresso Internazionale, Rome-Naples, 17-24 April 1974 (Naples, 1977), VI, 189-95. 56

THE SECOND STAGE

truth that was already in it. Naturally, in order to recognize the truth as the truth, the mind had also to be able to see beyond its own initial knowledge to an intelligible object outside. Yet even here the essential quality was reflexivity. It was the fact that the mind could be a subject for itself, so that it could then search through its own processes and recognize them for what they were. One might object that at no point in Henry’s writings did he actually employ the word reflectere that seems to be such an important element in Thomistic truth. Yet it must be remembered that Thomas himself did not use the word very often in his own discussions of the truth. And what is surely more significant, there can be little doubt that the process Henry described as knowing the truth involved exactly the

same sort of objective examination of the intellect by itself that Thomas had had in mind.» In fact, Henry did occasionally use a word that was functionally equivalent to reflectere to describe the act that he thought lay at the heart of knowing the truth. In his own words, the intellect in its most perfect act “turn[ed] itself (convertit se) upon its object in order to perceive not just that which is true... but the truth itself.” °? The resonance with Thomistic language could hardly be more

striking. |

Let us return to the basic terms of Henry’s analysis. He repeated his assertion that the simple truth touched on the intellect in two ways: in the first way, insofar as through the truth the intellect knew that which

was true; in the second way, insofar as the intellect knew the truth itself.°4 The first way — knowing id quod verum est — constituted the

lowest and most immediate contact the intellect had with an intelligible object, and it was obtained — as he had explained early on in the Summa — through what he called simple intellection (simplex intelli-

52. For example, see Henry’s discussion in Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 219rZ [ad opp.]). There he explained that the intellect was essentially passive in its reception of true knowledge from an external object. But when the intellect came to perceive the truth itself, it had to act, establishing a correspondence of idea to object “in itself out of itself” (in ipso ex seipso). In other words, it had to act upon itself, which was the essence of the Thomistic reflexio. 53. “... [intellectus] perfectissime per cognitionem convertit se super suum obiectum, non solum percipiendo id quod verum est, . . . sed ipsam veritatem. .. .” Quod. II, q. 6 (ed. Wielockx, p. 32). Much later, in article 58 of his Summa, Henry cited Proclus’s Elements of Theology as an authority supporting the idea that the soul had the property of turning upon itself (conversio super se). See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rL). The reference was to Elements, props. 15 and 16 (see the edition by E. R. Dodds, The Elements of Theology, 2nd ed. [Oxford, 1963], pp. 16-19). 54. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217VM). 57

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gentia).>> Whereas in the earlier account, however, this kind of knowl-

edge did not seem to rise to the level of quidditative understanding, now Henry appeared to maintain that knowledge of the verum was indeed knowledge of the quiddity or essence of the thing.*° In short, now there seemed to be no intellectual comprehension below knowledge of the quiddity. If so, this would clearly bring Henry more into line with Thomas’s, and Aristotle’s, idea of the workings of the intellect than he had been before. Again, there may be reason to think that Henry was modifying his theories of knowledge in a direction suggested to him by Aquinas’s work.

| When it came to the second way the intellect knew something, its knowing the truth itself, Henry explained that what was involved was knowing a conformity. Truth was a conformity of things that were true (verorum conformitas) and in this conformity lay the perfect nature of all truth.*’ Truth was, therefore, like a similitude that held among things that were similar (similitudo or conformitas similium).*® In this case, the things that were similar were the essence of an objective thing and an intelligence that knew this essence, and because their

conformity was the truth itself, through this conformity they could each be said to be true.°? This idea was, of course, consistent with Henry’s early notion of the truth as an adequation. If looked at from the point of view of the intelligence, or, more precisely, the intelligible form in the intelligence, the same idea could also be reduced to his definition of the truth of a concept, one of the four types he recognized for the truth of a sign.™ In other words, the truth that the intellect had to know in this second stage of its knowledge was the truth that had

been established by virtue of the first stage, knowledge of id quod verum est. By knowing id quod verum est, which was now according to Henry the essence of the object, the intellect entered into a relation55. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). On simplex intelligentia see above, pp. 17-18, n. 10. 56. See Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217VM): “. . . ipsum verum quod est res ipsa aut quidi-

tas....”

57. Ibid. Henry had frequently characterized truth as a conformity. See above, p. 51, nn. 36 and 37. 58. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). 59. “Sic verum inquantum verum dicit respectum quo res una alteri rei conformis est, veritate quae fundatur in rei essentia et natura et habet esse in essentia rei et in intelligentia, ambo denominando, ut dictum est, ut conformitas illa sit ipsa veritas qua ambo dicuntur esse vera; non autem sunt ipsa veritas.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217vN). It is interesting to note that Thomas, too, following Aristotle, held that the intellect in understanding the thing became “true.” See, for instance, Thomas, Jn De anima, Il, lect. 11 (ed. Pirotta, p. 180b). 60. See above, p. 49, nn. 29, 30, and 33. 58

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ship or conformity with the object that was itself available to be known. It is interesting to note that here again Henry was speaking in terms

that would have been congenial to Thomas, even if the source for them could also have lain in Henry’s earlier works, where no special debt to Thomas would seem to be implied. When Thomas spoke of the truth, he generally described it as a situation holding between at least two things, and he was particularly likely to use the word “conformity” to describe this situation.®! The parallels with Henry’s own earlier formulations might well have encouraged him to draw closer to Thomas’s views on the other points discussed above. At any rate, the notion of conformity certainly emphasized for Henry an aspect of his thought

that was also important in the theories of Thomas. Truth for them both represented a complex configuration. It was, as Henry insisted, not so much a thing as a connection among things. In absolute terms, truth was purely a relation (respectus purus).” Since truth was a complex thing, a conformity between an object and _an intelligible form, the way the intellect came to know it was by making a comparison (collatio).© In the technical language of Henry’s scholasticism this meant the intellect had to rely on comparative intellection (intelligentia collativa), apparently in contrast to the simple intellection by which it knew what was true.“ Henry pointed out that this process was similar to what he had had in mind earlier when at the beginning of his Summa he had talked about knowledge of the truth.© He was apparently referring to his previous discussion of the way the mind came to know the truth by having recourse to a created form, an exemplar in the world. As an example of what he meant, he even drew an analogy with sensory perception. One could not know the truthfulness of a picture of Caesar unless one had the opportunity to inspect both the picture and Caesar himself, thus being able to make a comparison between the two. Knowing intelligible truth required the same 61. See, for example, Thomas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 16, art. 2 (Opera Omnia, IV, 208).

62. “.. ipsa veritas absoluta: sumendo veritatem pro ratione respectus puri.” Summa, art, 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). 63. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). See also fols. 217VM and 218rO. 64. For intelligentia collativa, see Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (1, 217VM and 218rP). 65. His words were: “secundum quod supra expositum est in quaestionibus an contingit aliquid scire.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). He was, of course, referring to the first articles of his Summa, most especially art. 1. 66. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). It is significant that this model for how one could know the truth in natural knowledge was formally or structurally the same as the one Henry had used to describe how the mind would know the truth in the blessed life, when it could compare its ideas directly with the divine exemplars (see above, 59

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

sort of process. The intellect had to compare its own knowledge — indeed itself as knowing the true object — and the object or essence it actually knew. In knowing their agreement or conformity it knew the

truth. Just as important as the concrete example, however, was the technical language Henry chose to describe the process of knowing truth. It carried an implication that was both precise and important. As Henry now saw it, the intellect could come to know the truth only through a complex intellective act.6” Here again the parallels with Thomas’s

thought are striking if not always new to Henry’s middle years. Thomas, too, had insisted that the intellect could come to know the truth only through a complex act. Furthermore, he specifically stated that the act was one of compounding and dividing, the very language Henry had used in the early articles of the Summa.® It was, finally, in characterizing the nature of this complex act that Henry was led to the language of subjectivity that would appear to tie him most closely to Thomas. After all, this was no ordinary action of the mind. In knowing the truth the intellect had to be able to look upon itself. The intellectual motion by which the intellect seized truth was therefore one of reflexivity or conversion upon itself.” In both Henry’s and Thomas’s theories, access to the truth was explicitly linked

to this peculiar ability of the mind. As I have said several times, it is this about Henry’s new ideas that speaks most eloquently for supposing an influence from Aquinas.

Yet if there were these points of contact, some of them new to Henry’s middle years, it must also be granted that on other aspects of Henry’s new theory of truth he and Thomas did not have precisely the

same idea in mind. When Thomas spoke about the complex act of cognition leading to the truth, he meant plainly and simply that knowledge of the truth was a form of complex intellection.”° In other words, knowledge of the truth had to do with understanding statements, complex utterances, and not just the simple comprehension of single ideas

or words. In this, Thomas was following Aristotle to the letter, for p. 27, n. 50). Henry’s earlier point, which would still seem to have held here, was that the divine exemplars were not available for such cognitive purposes to the wayfarer on earth. 67. Henry actually used the term intellectus complexus. See below, p. 62, n. 77. 68. See, for example, Thomas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 16, art. 2 (Opera Omnia, IV, 208). For Henry’s usage of the same terms, see above, p. 17, n. 10. 69. See above, p. 57, nn. 52 and 53. 70. Nowhere is this clearer than in Thomas’s In Metaphysicam Aristotelis commentarium, V1, lect. 4 (ed. Cathala, p. 371).

60 |

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Aristotle had held that one could not speak of judgments of the truth or falsehood of knowledge until one had advanced to the level of complex cognition.’ Here Henry diverged. For Henry, although knowledge of the truth arose out of a complex act of the mind, it did not itself have to constitute complex understanding. ’” On this point Henry was explicit: knowledge of the truth could remain on the level of simple cognition. This was to say that the act of knowing the truth could be a process leading to a judgment merely about the correctness of ideas, and not necessarily about that of statements of fact. | By Henry’s account the act by which the intellect came to know the truth began with the two extremes that had to be compared in order for the intellect to see if they were similar.’> One extreme was, as has been shown above, the object or thing in the world; the other was the intellect itself. Assuming that they were indeed related through a conformity of truth, each one could be called a true thing (verum). To be absolutely exact, of course, the two extremes should be described as the essence of the thing and a concept in the intellect, for these were the specific elements upon which the correspondence was founded. The precise term Henry used to refer to the element in the mind was conceptus, a term he normally employed interchangeably with verbum or “word.” There is no reason to think he meant anything different here.’* Thus the two extremes the intellect was to compare were an external essence or quiddity and its own mental concept or word.

In order to be able to make the comparison the intellect had to be able to see each of the extremes: it had to be able to perceive not only the external object but also the concept lying in itself. Perceiving the object was easy to explain. The mind knew the object through the simple intellection by which it always came into contact with external reality. Perceiving the concept or word might have proved a more

- difficult matter. Again, however, Henry thought things were clear 71. See Aristotle, De interpretatione, ed. Lorenzo Minio-Paluello and Gerard Verbeke, Aristoteles Latinus, 2/1-2 (Bruges, 1965), I, 1 (16a9-18); De anima, III, 6 (430a2628); and Metaphysics, V1, 4 (1027b18-29). 72. Perhaps we see in this a vestige of Augustine’s influence on Henry’s thought, even in the middle of a largely Thomistic analysis. Augustine thought the mind had to judge all forms of knowledge, simple and complex, to determine their truth. He applied the words “true” and “false” to even the simplest of ideas. To Thomas, as to Aristotle, this would have made no sense. For them, “true” and “false” were more strictly logical terms, and they could properly apply only to the complex utterances upon which logic worked. 73. The following analysis is based on Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rQ).

74. See above, pp. 22-23, nn. 29, 30, and 31. 61

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enough. The mind merely grasped its own concept by the same simple intellection it used to see the object outside.’> Nothing illustrates more plainly the reflexivity Henry thought was a normal part of the action of the mind. By the very act it came to know things external to it, it

could turn back on itself and perceive objects grounded in its own intelligible nature. Once the intellect had apprehended both the extremes, it could, by acting this time through comparative intellection, compare the two. If the intellect saw that the concept contained neither more nor less than was congruent with the nature of the external thing, then it could declare the concept “true.” If, on the other hand, the concept did contain something more or less than the real nature, then it must proclaim the

concept “false.” In either case the intellect was led to make a judgment, upon which was founded its knowledge of the truth.”° It is significant that this judgment followed on an earlier formation of a mental word; it was, in fact, a judgment of the word. Such a view differs from the way Henry explained knowledge of the truth in the early articles of the Summa, where it appeared that the judgment preceded the forma-

tion of the word, the final expression of its considered estimation of the truth. Although Henry surely now thought a second word was formed after the judgment on the first, the variation between the two accounts 1s still quite striking. To finish up his description of the whole process, Henry noted that from its comparison of the two true extremes, concept and thing, the intellect conceived a form that was their truth. This was, of course, the second word. And he carefully explained that while the comparison of the extremes came about through a complex act of the intellect (intellectus complexus), the resulting truth or form rested in the simple or incomplex intellect and was an expression of simple cognition.” Knowledge of the truth, for Henry, could be as noncomplex as knowledge of a simple idea. This brings us back to where Henry had started, to the truth of a sign. He had wanted to explain how the intellect could come to know this truth, a truth that consisted formally in the correspondence between a sign and a real essence. His explanation worked splendidly if “truth of a sign” were taken to mean “the truth of a concept.” The in75. See Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). 76. Henry specifically used the word iudicare. See Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rQ). 77. “Et sic ex collatione utriusque, scilicet rei et conceptus...concipitur veritas in abstractione quae est forma utriusque verorum inquantum vera sunt: et hoc non nisi intellectu complexo. . . . [Q]uod tamen venatum est ex illo intellectu complexo collativo, concipitur intellect incomplex.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rQ). 62

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tellect could know such a truth because it could reflect back upon its Own concepts and compare them with the external essences they were supposed to represent. If extended, the explanation would also have worked for the truth of a sentence (veritas orationis).’® The reflecting intellect would be able to examine its own utterances in order to see whether they correctly described the realities for which they were intended. The latter process was, in fact, what Thomas had had in mind when he spoke of knowledge of the truth. It seems, however, that although Henry’s analysis could easily have accommodated such an application to complex cognition, he did not intend it to be taken that

| way. At any rate he said nothing at this point about how truth related to complex knowledge. Yet if Henry’s explication of knowledge of the truth in question 5 should be restricted to the field of simple cognition, there remained One more problem for him to solve. The tendency of his metaphysics towards an almost concrete realism — a quality it shared with the metaphysics of much of thirteenth-century scholasticism — demanded that

he explain what it was the intellect came up with when it knew the truth. He had to describe in discrete psychological or noetic terms what it was in the intellect that stood for the newly acquired know]ledge. What was this second word obtained in knowing truth? Henry had said that when the intellect, through its comparison of the two extremes of the truth relation, came to know the truth, it conceived an abstract truth (veritas in abstractione) that was, in effect, the form (forma) of each of the extremes insofar as they were true. In other words, there was a formal entity in the intellect that, so to speak,

contained the mind’s knowledge of the truth.” It was, of course, a simple thing, since the knowledge it stood for was simple knowledge. Continuing his explanation, Henry added that the intellect, in coming

to know the truth, abstracted from each of the true extremes — the concept and the external essence — a notion (ratio) of their reciprocal conformity or truth and that this notion was a form or quiddity common to both of them to the extent that they were true. He compared the process to the case of someone examining two white things. The observer would see that the two were similar, in that they were both 78. See above, p. 49, n. 32. 79. See above, p. 62, n. 77. As I have suggested, one should think of this form as a word or esse formale, the same term Henry had used to describe the original concept or word the intellect came to judge in knowing the truth (see above, p. 54, n. 43). It was, therefore, a forma expressiva (see above, pp. 22-23, n. 31, and below, p. 72, nn. 101 and 102). 63

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white, and he would then abstract from them the nature (ratio) of their

similarity. This abstracted nature would be like a form common to them both insofar as they shared a common quality.” It would presumably be the form of whiteness, which was, after all, in abstract terms what made them alike. What Henry seems to have intended by all this was that the intellect, in coming to know the truth, had to generate in itself a form — much

like a second concept or word —that would house this knowledge. This form was, in turn, in some way an abstraction from the two elements the intellect had come to recognize as true. Since it was to be abstracted from both of these things, it had, naturally, to be from something they both shared. What they shared was that they were both true, and so the form had necessarily to be the form of their truth. As Henry noted, such a truth had to be considered as absolute — an absolute truth, totally cut off from any particular manifestation in any real object or any primary concept in the mind.*! This is what he meant

when he said that the abstraction by which such a form should be contrived was not a logical abstraction, by which a universal was abstracted from its particulars, but rather a metaphysical one, by which a form or quiddity was abstracted from those things that participate in it.** It was, in other words, not the sort of abstraction by which the mind came to see that a concept, such as that of man, or the term dependent on it could be applied to any man or woman whatsoever. It was instead like the procedure by which the mind came to recognize the formal characteristic of an object, like man, that related it to the other members of its species and then isolated this characteristic from any considerations of real existence in the world, calling it simply “humanity” itself. Of course, in the case of truth the intellect had to isolate not the species or its nature but the very form, “truth,” that made the 80. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218r-v[Q]). 81. “... veritas considerata ut est conformitas absoluta super utrumque conformium: non habet esse nisi in consideratione actuali intelligentiae, quae ex collatione utriusque conformis percipit ipsorum conformitatem inter se, intelligendo conformitatem inter se quasi in esse quodam quiditativo: cum in utroque conformium intelligitur quasi in esse naturae.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rO). For the precise term veritas absoluta, see above, p. 59, n. 62. It was what logicians of the fourteenth century would have called a term of second intention. Yet they would have considered it to be merely logical, denuded of Henry’s metaphysical reality. This is an instance of what many scholars have noted — how some of Henry’s ideas seem to have paved the way for fourteenth-century nominalism, even though Henry’s metaphysics led in just the opposite direction. See below, p. 148, n. 8. 82. Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218vQ). Brown, “Abstraction and the Object of the Human Intellect,” pp. 84-86, has misunderstood the significance of this distinction.

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primary concept, and also the real essence to which it pointed, true. Yet if this is literally what Henry said, it is still exceptionally hard for the modern reader to understand exactly what he was thinking of — that is, if one stands, as we all do, outside the mental world of his technical scholastic vocabulary.*? Precisely what could he mean by a “metaphysical abstraction” of the truth? As a partial answer he explained how the form the intellect conceived in coming to know the truth existed in “a kind of quidditative being,” in contrast to the real being of nature to be found in either of the two extremes the truth related.* But “quidditative being” is just as difficult to define as “metaphysical abstraction.” And here, in article 34, Henry gave his reader

only a little help. |

On the one hand, he seems to have been implying that quidditative being was something in the mind. He had pointed out, to be sure, that

the absolute truth was a pure relation, and so, in a sense, it did not exist anywhere at all outside the two extremes it related.®> Yet clearly, the gist of his thought was that the absolute truth could be abstracted, or separated, from its two related extremes. He had plainly stated that

the truth that made a concept and its referent true was founded in both of them, but that they were not actually this truth itself.®° Henry’s

solution to this dilemma was that the truth, an absolute, could find real existence only in the mind, and then only in a mind that was in that moment considering the conformity of a true concept to an essence outside.®’ In short, he merely returned to his assertion that the mind in knowing the truth generated a form or concept that stood for, and facilitated, its knowledge. This is one side of Henry’s answer to the problem. In real terms the truth was the formal manifestation of understanding the truth; it was a concept in the intellect. Yet Henry’s term “quidditative being” suggested something more than this. The truth was, as he had said, an abstract essence that both the concept and the objective essence participated in. As such it could not be reduced completely to a concept in the mind. There had to be 83. Some assistance will be provided below in Chap. 4, when we consider Henry’s theory of truth more fully in the light of his notion of being and essence. 84. See above, n. 81. 85. See above, p. 59, n. 62. 86. See above, p. 58, n. 59. Henry’s language sometimes almost implied that there was some slight gap between truth and the pure relation in which it consisted, as in Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 219rZ), where he spoke of the truth as “founded in” the coaequatio of thing and intellect. 87. See above, n. 81. See also other statements to the same effect, Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 218rP). 65

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some stronger metaphysical connection between the truth and true things, something more than could be condensed into the mere idea by which an intellect recognized the similarity between a concept of an essence and the essence itself. There had to be something special about

a true concept and a true essence that could be distilled into some superessence called the truth. Indeed, there is a hint in Henry’s language that this superessence, truth, was somehow intimately related to the essential nature of the real object towards which the truth of the sign pointed. This is to say that it related to the essential nature more than just because it testified to the fact that the concept was somehow similar to the real nature of the object. In some way, the superessence, truth, was itself a variation on the quiddity or essence in which the object and the concept partici-

pated. In other words, the truth of the concept “man” was perhaps more than just the distillation of the idea of similarity between concept and object — all that the formal definition of truth actually required. Perhaps it was also the distillation of what that similarity rested upon.

At times it sounds as if Henry’s absolute truth was the abstracted essence or quiddity itself — in this case, humanity. This was the other side of Henry’s answer to the problem of the metaphysical reality underlying knowledge of the truth, a side about which he had very little explicit to say in question 5 of article 34. A full examination of this aspect of his thought can be given below only after a consideration of some of his later writings.®8 Looking back at last to all of Henry’s scattered references in article 34 of his Summa to the nature of truth and human understanding of it, one can see that they constituted a significant development in his thought. Not only did they reveal what appears to be a considerable debt Henry owed by that time to the epistemological ideas of Thomas Aquinas. They also suggested his sense of the need to push deeper into the broad philosophical problems posed by the desire to explain human understanding. Here, there were epistemological as well as metaphysical issues that would receive fuller consideration only progressively in Henry’s later work. Yet even with this incompleteness, the advance Henry’s ideas about knowledge had taken since he wrote his earliest views on the matter in the first articles of the Summa remains striking. Although the discussion of truth and knowledge in article 34 was built on many of the same principles he had used in his earlier writings, in several crucial respects it was remarkably different from what he had said before. 88. See below, Chap. 4. 66

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Where the theories of article 34 touched most closely on Henry’s earlier views, they can be seen at the very least as an elucidation of his previous analyses. This is clear if one looks at areas of his former thought that were ambiguous or obscure. A good example is his account of what objects the intellect had to apprehend in order to know the truth. In article 1 of his Summa Henry had stated that the intellect had to apprehend and compare an object and an exemplar, yet in the case where the exemplar was not a divine ideal but rather something in the mind itself (the only case relevant here), it was unclear exactly how that comparison was to be made. To have made full sense it ought to have been that the mind compared the impressed intelligible species, by which it knew id quod verum est, and the external thing itself. This is, however, not precisely what Henry had said. Instead he had talked

about formulating a word in conformity with the impressed species, almost as if the species itself should stand for the object and the relationship of truth come between the species as object and the word.®? Such an ambiguity is easy to understand, given the fact that the very notion of an impressed species introduced a formal element in the mind that was in no way to be seen as intruding itself objectively between mind and external object. It was, all the same, an ambiguity, and philosophically awkward. By the time Henry composed article 34 he had resolved the problem. Now there was no more impressed species. The exemplar in the mind was simply the initial concept or word, which the intellect then compared with the external essence to arrive at a second concept or word, the form of the truth itself. An advance of this sort is plain to see. On the side where the theories presented in article 34 went in a completely new direction, they testify to the discontinuity in Henry’s thinking between 1276 and 1280. Here, there were shifts of three basic kinds. The most fundamental manifestation of a change in his thought lay in the way he attached his epistemology to his noetics and metaphysics —

the way he attached knowledge to the real world. After all, many of the structural principles of his theory of knowledge had remained the 89. See the discussion of this problem above, pp. 22-23. | 90. The fact that Henry couid make this clarification surely depended upon his rejection of the whole idea of an impressed intelligible species. It was during the years 1276-79 that he reformulated his noetics to exclude such a species (see Nys, De werking, pp. 51-98). The ambiguities about the exact nature of the comparison that led to knowledge of the truth, seen in the early articles of the Summa, may have been an indication that Henry was already uncertain about the philosophical status of intelligible species and how they should be related to the mental entity he was later to emphasize, the concept or word. 67

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same, such as his distinction between knowledge of that which is true and knowledge of the truth and his insistence that truth was an adequation or relation. But the way he pegged these principles to entities in the mind or in the world had changed. The early Henry directed knowledge of that which is true towards something below the quiddity, while the Henry of article 34 apparently considered it as operating at precisely the quidditative level. Similarly, in what must have been a parallel development, early on Henry held that judgment of the truth preceded the formation of any word, while as has been shown his later theories admitted a preliminary word that was itself judged when the mind apprehended the truth. In all such cases the nature of Henry’s theories of epistemology was altered radically as he came to transform the way he thought knowledge related to the world. A second expression of the shift in Henry’s thought has to do with an actual reshaping of the structure of his epistemology itself. The most pronounced effect along these lines derived from the integration

of a host of ideas that may have come directly from the works of Thomas Aquinas. Henry expanded his theories of knowledge considerably in order to accommodate processes of mind practically ignored in his earliest views. Among these processes the most important were those that involved the subjectivity of intellect, especially those concerning the reflexivity by which the mind came to know itself in order to know the truth. Finally, maybe most dramatically, the shift in Henry’s thought can be seen in his silence on the matter of a role for the divine ideas. It is not that Henry had come to reject the place of the divine ideas in creation or to deny their importance as the exemplary foundations upon which was established the essential truth of each created thing. Even in question 5 of article 34 he repeated his earlier theory on this score; he

held to the traditional doctrine of an exemplary truth as firmly as ever.?! The point is that he now made no explicit place for the divine ideas in his explanation of the truth as it entered into human knowledge. Gone were all his earlier references to divine illumination or to a divine art working on the mind. Everything that now went into human intellection had to do with created beings and created forms or with essences abstracted from the created world. There is nothing specifically Thomistic about this final aspect of Henry’s later thoughts about knowledge and truth, but it certainly fits nicely with the other trends that took him in Thomas’s direction. In a

91. See Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (1, 219rY). 68

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larger sense perhaps it can be said that Henry was becoming more Aris-

totelian. As a sign of how radically he had changed his ideas from before, it is interesting to note what he now said about the truth that related the object to a created exemplar in the human mind. He was now willing to grace this human truth, a truth of the sign, with a term he had previously reserved for a truth rectified by an exemplar in the divine mind. He called it the perfect and pure truth (perfecta et sincera veritas) .?

2. TRUTH AND ARISTOTELIAN SCIENCE

In apparently the very same years that Henry was elaborating an idea of knowledge of the truth dependent formally upon the power of the mind to reflect upon itself, he was also working out a considerably more complicated view explicitly connecting truth to Aristotle’s theory of science. This was, of course, not the first time he had spoken of a kind of truth knowledge of which was to be associated with science of a specifically Aristotelian sort. In the very first article of his Summa he had explained that the intellect could come to know the “truth in a certain way,” an “imperfect truth,” working solely from its own natural abilities, and he had explicitly associated this truth with Aristotle’s science.”?> Yet the account Henry began to weave about this sort of truth in the years 1279 and 1280 was much fuller and more precise than the short mention he had made before. What is more, it did not seem

to suffer from the taint of imperfection Henry had attributed to it earlier in his career.”4 The whole of Henry’s Aristotelian theory of science and truth took

some years for him to develop. There are, indeed, three questions, scattered thoughout the length of his mature academic career, in which he tackled the problem of truth with a paradigm of Aristotle’s science in mind. His first attempt came in question 8 of Quodlibet IV, a work dating from either Christmas 1279 or Easter 1280 — precisely the period in which he produced the more Thomistic view of truth ex92. “Ita quod sine eius [i.e., conformitatis] perceptione ex collatione utriusque conformium adinvicem, a nullo intellectu divino [sic, perhaps for: creato] potest esse perceptio perfectae et sincerae veritatis.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (I, 217vM). That the word divino is an error is obvious. Throughout the article Henry makes the point that God’s knowledge does not have to depend on such a comparison. 93. See above, p. 23, n. 33, and p. 24, n. 35. 94. Remember that the early Henry had said that perfect science (perfecta scientia) was available only with divine illumination. See above, p. 24, nn. 36 and 37. 69

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pressed in the Summa, article 34.9° Henry’s second look at the issue came in the long and detailed question 2 of article 58 of his Summa, which can be assigned to 1285. The final opportunity Henry took to

look at truth from this Aristotelian point of view came in his very short question 6 of Quodlibet XIV, Henry’s next-to-last set of quodlibetal questions, dating from Easter 1290.” The entire series represents at least a decade of Henry’s career, going from the middle years of his literary activity to very near the end. Naturally, given the span of time involved, it should not be surprising that one can see in those three questions evidence of progress, or change, in Henry’s ideas. In Quodlibet IV he emphasized the logical

side of the question, and he remained primarily dependent on Aristotle’s analysis of science as given in the Posterior Analytics. Article 58, question 2, delved more into the realm of noetics, in an attempt to tie the earlier logical parameters to specific processes of the mind. Here Henry seems to have been reading Aristotle through the eyes of Averroes, particularly the Averroes of the commentaries on De anima and on the Metaphysics, works Henry evidently had before him as he

composed his own question. In the final instance, Quodlibet XIV, question 6, Henry drew together his earlier views into a compact statement, the briefest he was to make of his theory of human knowledge.

This final word represents then a combination of his previous two questions, polished by five years of further consideration. Despite these differences among the three questions, however, it is the similarities that stand out most strikingly. In them all, Henry seems to have

been working with the same general vision of what constitutes the truth. The earliest of the questions was number 8 of Quodlibet IV, and I shall begin by looking for a moment at the relevant passages of this text alone. Henry started out his examination of science in Quodlibet 95. Gémez Caffarena follows the more general opinion, assigning the work to 1279. Yet Paulus felt there was evidence the quodlibet came from a debate held in 1280. See Gomez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133, and Paulus, Henri de Gand, p. xv, n. 1.

The general theme of Quodlibet IV, q. 8, was the beatific vision of God, but in formulating his answer Henry was led to speculate more generally on the processes of human intellection. 96. For these latter two dates, see GOmez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133. Question 2 of article 58 examined the relation between God the Father’s power to generate and his power to speak — that is, to say a word. This naturally brought Henry to con-

sider the formation of the mental word in human intellection. Quodlibet XIV, question 6, was a more straightforward inquiry into the causal link between the quidditative object of the mind and the actual acts of the mind’s various powers. 710

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IV with a quick sketch of the primary process of intellection, essentially an epitome of Aristotle’s abstraction. He explained that the intellect in itself was bare, like a clean slate (tabula complanata). In order for knowledge to be inscribed upon it, the intellect had to be moved by its

: intelligible object, the universal, which in turn had to be abstracted from the phantasm in the imaginative power of the mind. The agent intellect was responsible for this abstraction, and its job was to strip the object as it was perceived in the phantasm of all those singular or particular conditions that seemed to go with it. The agent then, so to speak, presented the abstracted — and therefore properly universal — object to the possible intellect, whereupon the object elicited from the possible intellect an act of understanding that reached out and terminated in the object itself.7’ In a more precise vein Henry quickly added that this act of understanding could be analyzed into three moments, each one representing a different way the object moved or perfected the intellect, according to how it was received by a different power of the mind.?8 Insofar as the universal object was present to the possible intellect as it potentially but not yet actually understood the object, it could be said to move or perfect the memorative power of the mind. Insofar as it moved the will, which then triggered the mind to act in order to understand, it could be called the perfection of the will joining the intelligence to the memory through an act. And insofar as it actually moved the possible intellect to understand it, the object could be called the perfection of the intelligence plain and simple. What is important for us about these 97. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97rM). A much more complicated, and more original, description of the process of abstraction can be found in Henry’s later composition, article 58, question 2, of his Summa (II, 129v-130v). Those few pages constitute a gem of scholastic noetics, and they demonstrate how far Henry was able to pass beyond a simple reading of Aristotle into theorizing of quite a novel and independent sort. Henry’s account, which shows him trying to compensate for the gaps and ambiguities in Aristotle’s theory, is one of the most remarkable passages in the works of a man who was, by any estimate, a remarkable philosopher.

98. In Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 129vD), Henry explained how a power of the mind (potentia mentis) differed from a force (vis). The mind could be subdivided into powers not because of any inherent division in the mind itself but according to the different formal nature of diverse objects. Thus the same mind could be seen as either the intellect or the will insofar as it had to contend with divergent objects like the true and the good. The forces of the mind, on the other hand, were grounded in the different ways the mind had of relating to the same type of object. For example, the intellect was speculative as it regarded the true in an absolute way; it was practical as it regarded the same true object considered this time an operable good. Henry noted that the distinction of the speculative intellect into agent and possible was a division of the latter sort — a division into forces. 71

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three perfections of three powers of mind is the fact that each one was indicative of a different mode of knowledge (modus scientiae sive notitiae). The object, as it was present to the memory and constituted its perfection, gave rise to habitual knowledge (notitia habitualis). As it could be said to be the cause whereby the will triggered the intellect to act, it gave rise to the act of understanding (actus intelligendi). Finally, as the object actually moved the intellect or intelligence to understand it, it gave rise to actual knowledge (notitia actualis), knowledge formally and at that moment residing in the intellect.” _ These three modes of knowledge were related in a complicated way. Henry explained that the actual psychological foundation for habitual knowledge was the imaginative power with its material phantasms. He admitted that in a way this power and its phantasms could be said to be substantially all there was to the intellectual memory before it was

subsumed into the actual act of knowing by the possible intellect.! More significant was the difference between the act of understanding and actual knowledge (notitia actualis). As Henry saw it, the act by which the intellect came to understand had to be distinguished from the formal content — in Henry’s words, the expressed form (forma expressiva) — that constituted the essential reality of actual understanding.!! It was this formal content that provided the metaphysical kernel of knowing, in relation to which such potencies and acts as habitual knowledge and the act of understanding could be situated, and Henry called it not only actual knowledge but also the word (verbum) most

properly understood. It was, in effect, the mental concept already familiar from Henry’s earlier descriptions of cognition. In the end, however, what is most important to recognize is that all 99. This whole discussion can be found in Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97rM). See also the same question, fol. 98rP. I have changed the order of the three moments from the way they appear in the text in order to reflect more clearly the actual unfolding of the powers in the mind. A similar triad, this time explained as primum intelligere, secundum intelligere, and the act of saying or producing the verbum coming in between, can be found in Summa, art. 54, q. 9 (II, 104r-v[C]). Yet in this later case

Henry was clearly including both simplex intelligentia and science in a single scheme, while in Quodlibet IV, q. 8, he kept the two apart, giving each its own triad.

100. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 98rP). 101. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97rL). Henry explained that he drew the idea of his term expressiva from Augustine’s De Trinitate. See De Trinitate, IX, 12 (ed. Mountain and Glorie, I, 310). The 1518 edition of the quodlibets incorrectly cites De Trinitate, X, 12. 102. Henry tried to establish this identification of word and actual knowledge throughout Quodlibet IV, question 8. See especially fol. 97rL and M. See also Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131vM). 72

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three — habitual knowledge, actual knowledge, and the act of understanding — were in some way the same thing, manifestations of the same knowledge. They were not different bits of knowledge or cognitive realities, but rather three modes of a single cognitive phenomenon. One might say they were three ways of looking at a seamless process.

Yet among the three, one was most fundamental, and that was the word or concept, now increasingly described by Henry to be the very object as it took cognitive shape within the mind.!%- The other two modes, habitual knowledge and the act of understanding, in effect revolved around this ultimate formal reality. Once Henry had cleared the way with this preliminary consideration of noetics, he came to his main point. The three modes of knowledge he had mentioned so far — or perhaps more simply, the one stage in understanding they all represented — were not yet properly science (proprie scientia) nor could they be associated with strictly scientific knowledge (notitia scientialis). Instead they came at a more primitive intellectual level that he called simple comprehension (simplicium comprehensio or comprehensio simplex).' As he explained, they involved perceiving only that which is true (id quod verum est). Science properly speaking arose on a second, more complicated level, when the intellect came to perceive the truth itself “insa veritas).'©5 Here, Henry himself pointed out, he was back at the scheme he had introduced in the very first article of his Summa at least three or four years earlier. There were two stages of knowledge, knowing that which is true and knowing the truth, and only the second constituted science. Yet if the scheme of knowledge Henry had in mind was superficially the same as the one he had given from the very start, on a deeper level it was strikingly different. And now, in Quodlibet IV and the other relevant questions that followed, the difference would lie not in the direction of Henry’s other, somewhat Thomistic route, tracing truth to a simple comparison built on the possibility of a spiritual reflection, but rather along the path of a purer Aristotelian science, founded on the process of defining terms through the logical procedure of divi103. On the identification of the concept and the object, see Quod. IV, q. 8 (J, 97r™M

and 98rP). This continued an idea Henry had already begun to develop in Quodlibets II and III (see above, pp. 41-42, nn. 4-7) and that he seems to have been alluding to in the contemporary art. 34, q. 5, of his Summa (see the discussion of “quidditative being” above, pp. 63-66). 104. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97r-v[M] and 98rP). On simple comprehension see Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97r-v[M] and 98rQ). 105. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vM). 73

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sion. At the heart of it all lay Aristotle’s ars definitiva, and Henry would come to emphasize this increasingly towards the end of his career.!© More clearly than ever for Henry, science and the perception of the truth drew together. And it was his growing stress on the exclusivity of the relation that showed how far his thoughts had traveled. More and more for Henry, truth could be reduced to science — and to science in its Artistotelian form. The notion that Aristotle’s science lay at the heart of knowledge of the truth provided the basis for all three of Henry’s later accounts — the one in Quodlibet IV, the one in article 58 of the Summa, the one in Quodlibet XIV. This is the central fact for understanding the approach he took towards truth in those works. Yet as each one of the accounts was also in its own way distinct, one must be careful in drawing out Henry’s whole schema to try to keep some vision of the progressive development of his views. In Quodlibet IV Henry had said that simple comprehension was different from science properly so called — that is, knowledge of the truth. In an effort to be more precise, he added that the lower level, which could also be called simple knowledge (simplex notitia), was, if not science, either actual or habitual, rather the principle upon which science could be founded. Science, itself, was acquired by the repetitive operations of the intellect — presumably upon that lower form of cognition called simple knowledge — by which, as from teaching, the intellect could ultimately come to possess the habits of mind associated with scientific speculation.’ In making this point Henry was relying on pure Aristotle, most likely through a conflation of the beginning of the Metaphysics with a noted passage in the Nicomachean Ethics, book II, from which some of Henry’s language was drawn almost verbatim.!°8 The idea was that science could arise only through a discursive

process of the intellect, repeated over and over again, as if ina kind of psychological induction by which the mind would come to recognize a 106. See Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). 107. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vM). 108. See Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 1 (ed. Vuillemin-Diem, Aristoteles Latinus, 25/2, pp. 7-9) and Nicomachean Ethics, II, 1 (in the translation by Robert Grosseteste, ed. René A. Gauthier, Aristoteles Latinus, 26/1-3 [Leiden, 1972-74], pp. 163 and 396). In Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97VN), Henry actually quoted Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1 (1103a14-17), as his source. He also quoted a commentary on this text, although I have been unable to locate his exact citation. Perhaps he had in mind the anonymous Greek commentary translated by Robert Grosseteste. See The Greek Commentaries on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle in the Latin Translation of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln ({ 1253), I, ed. H. Paul F. Mercken, Corpus Latinum Commentariorum in Aristotelem Graecorum, 6 (Leiden, 1973), p. 197. 74

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general truth after having gone through a chain of reasoning many times. By the late thirteenth century such an understanding of the business of science was commonplace, and the fact that Henry introduced it so casually into his system reveals how much a part of the scholastic main-

stream he actually was.” Yet if the general idea was widely shared, the precise meaning attached to the Aristotelian formulas and the significance given to the procedure as a whole varied from thinker to thinker. In Henry’s case the matter was much more complicated than one might expect from the start. His simple reference to a single general process in fact covered several different specific mental procedures, including the generation of what were called scientific habits of mind. Each of these procedures had a foundation in Aristotle’s explanation of epistemology. But the way Henry distributed them in relation to the

category of science was not precisely the same as in the original Aristo- : telian view.

For Aristotle one of the differences that could be drawn between | knowledge that lay below science — in this case, Henry’s simple knowl-

edge or simple comprehension — and science properly so-called was that the first could be purely simple while the second had to be strictly complex. In other words, prescientific intellectualizing might have to do with grasping discrete concepts, while scientific thought necessarily involved combining concepts into complex configurations — propositions — that could be said to be true or false."° For Henry this was not exactly so. His simple knowledge was really his old simplex intelligentia, not just simple knowledge from a logical point of view but knowledge that had not yet reached the clarity of concepts on a higher, more “scientific” plane.!!! There was still room for a clearer apprehension of simple concepts in what Henry called “science.” In short, Henry’s distinction between simple knowledge and scien-

tific knowledge did not strictly respect the logical division between simple and complex cognition. A similar divergence between Henry and Aristotle — as well as between Henry and Thomas — had arisen at 109. An early exposition of the process — and it would seem an influential one — can be

found in Robert Grosseteste, Commentarius in Posteriorum analyticorum libros, II, 6 (ed. Pietro Rossi, Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Testi e Studi, 2 [Florence, 1981], pp. 403-6). See also the same Commentary, I, 14 (pp. 212-15).

110. For Aristotle science depended on the ability to make a judgment (see Metaphysics, I, 1). This meant that science had to do with knowledge of what was true or false, and in Aristotle’s system this came only at the level of complex cognition (see above, p. 61, n. 71). 111. For Henry’s simplex intelligentia see above, pp. 17-18, n. 10. 75

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the corresponding place in his more Thomistic discussion of truth, and on this matter Henry remained consistently non-Aristotelian throughout his career. It was perhaps just one more sign of the residual influ-

ence of Augustine and the epistemology associated with him, even here in the middle of Henry’s evolving concept of science more in line with authentic Aristotle.!!?

In this instance, however, the specifics of Henry’s teaching were sketched out more completely than they had been in article 34 of the Summa. Included in the category of science were one grade of logically simple knowledge and two grades of complex. The simple grade was definitive knowledge — that is, knowledge characterized by an understanding of the definition of the object — and Henry said that it was obtained by means of the logical procedure of division as explained in the second book of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and in Boethius’s De divisione. The two complex grades were those that could be obtained by the methods propounded in the whole of the Logica nova. In the first place came knowledge of true propositions, which was obtained by a combination of the methods of division and composition. In the second place came syllogistic knowledge — that 1s, knowledge arrived at by constructing valid syllogisms — and this was obtained through

the art of argumentation.’ Although the two sorts of complex science cannot be ignored when

considering Henry’s theory of truth in these later years, what is of most importance is understanding how he conceived of the first, logically simple grade. It was at this first grade that the mind made the crucial step into the world of knowing the truth, and so here Henry had to be most explicit about what knowledge of the truth formally 112. See above, pp. 60-61, nn. 70 and 72. 113. In Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vN), Henry actually presented a slightly simpler scheme, saying that scientific knowledge could be divided into two kinds, one definitive and the other syllogistic. He supported his statement with a reference to what he called Boethius’s Topica (see Boethius, De differentiis topicis, I, 1 [correctly: De topicis differentiis], PL, 64:1173). That Henry recognized, however, that the complex knowledge — that is, his syllogistic knowledge — going into science should be further subdivided is clear from a discussion in Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 132vQ), where he separated knowledge of true propositions from knowledge of valid syllogisms and suggested that each was obtained by a different mental procedure. The Logica nova Henry mentioned in the passage in Quod. IV, q. 8, consisted of the Aristotelian texts on logic reintroduced into the curriculum in the twelfth century: the two Analytics, the Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations (see Fernand Van Steenberghen, La philosophie au XIIle siecle, Philosophes médiévaux, 9 [Leuven, 1966], p. 83). The “/iber divisionum Boetii” was Boethius’s Liber de divisione (see PL, 64:875-92).

76

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entailed. Beyond this, explaining the higher forms of science depended primarily on elaborating the principles Aristotle expounded in the second half of his logical corpus, a business that could be left to those in the faculty of arts. At the first grade of science the difference between what the intellect

acquired with scientific knowledge and what it had known before when it had only simple intellection (simplex intelligentia) inevitably came back to the duality Henry referred to throughout his work, the difference between knowing the truth and knowing that which is true. The problem, however, is to determine precisely how he conceived of that distinction by the years 1279 or 1280 and after, when he came to write Quodlibet IV and the two other questions we are concerned with here. Knowledge of that which is true (id quod verum est) was, for the later Henry, clearly universal, in contrast to the particular knowledge of the same object available to the senses and the imaginative power on which the intellect drew.!4 But if it was universal, it was not yet knowledge of the quiddity of the object — its quid est — but merely somehow knowledge of that in which the quiddity inhered ({[compre-

hensio eius] cuius est quod quid est). Knowledge of the quiddity came only at the level of knowledge of the truth. On this point Henry’s explication of science along Aristotelian lines seems to have differed from his concurrent examination of truth following the more Thomistic notion of reflection, where the quiddity was apparently available at

the first, lower level.!!© This account appears therefore to have remained more faithful to the analysis he gave in the early articles of the Summa. Still, the distinction Henry drew in these years between first universal knowledge and knowledge of the quiddity remains hard to explain. In purely Aristotelian terms, where there was no first level of 114. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (1, 97r-v[M)]). It is illuminating to compare this straightforward distinction with the related, but much more ambiguous one of Henry’s early work where he contrasted knowledge of id quod verum est with sensory cognition (see

above, Chap. 2). 115. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vN). 116. See above, p. 58, n. 56. To be fair to Thomas, one must admit that he realized the difficulty of arriving at knowledge of the quiddity and recognized that the initial abstractive process leading to quidditative knowledge was indeed more complicated than might be implied by speaking of it as a single act. The difference was that Thomas — and, it would appear, Henry in article 34 of his Summa — wanted to separate the process of knowing the quiddity from that of knowing the truth, while Henry in these later passages made searching for the quiddity the same thing as searching for the truth. On Thomas’s views about knowledge of the quiddity, see the references Marie-Dominique Roland-Gosselin gives in Le “De ente et essentia”

de s. Thomas d’Aquin (Le Saulchoir, 1926), p. 40, n. 2. 77

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science that had to do with simple concepts, it would have been difficult to conceive of any such distinction. A full answer to the problem can be given only after looking at the whole process of attaining science as Henry described it. The account Henry gave in Quodlibet IV, question 8, pointed in the direction he was to take in his later writings but was itself too brief to clarify the difference between the two sorts of knowledge. It was evident that the division lay somewhere between general knowledge of

the universal and knowledge of the definition. In fact, Henry even gave an example of scientific knowledge at the first level. It involved being able to identify the species, with its genus and specific difference — in the case of “man,” knowing that it was a rational animal.!!’ Yet this first attempt at an explanation was not clear about what was known at the lower level of id quod verum est. This was whatever the mind knew directly from the senses, without any further study.!!® But precisely what did that mean? Henry’s answer had become more explicit by the time he wrote article 58, question 2, of his Summa in 1285 and Quodlibet XIV, question 6, in 1290. As before, he characterized the knowledge the intellect possessed when it knew “that which is true” as simple intellection (simplex

' intelligentia), also notitia simplex and prima intelligentia..9 Now, however, he described this simple intellection as confused knowledge (notitia confusa) of the universal, to be contrasted with the first level of scientific knowledge, in which the universal was known clearly (limpide) and distinctly (distincte).’"° Another way Henry spoke of the same distinction was to say that on the first level the intellect knew its object imperfectly (imperfecte); only when it arrived at science and the truth did it know perfectly (perfecte) and completely (p/ene) what that object was.!?!

In whatever form it took, Henry’s distinction — whether between confused and clear knowledge, imperfect and perfect, incomplete and complete — implied that when the intellect came to knowledge of the 117. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vN). 118. Ibid. 119. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130VH and K), and Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). For simplex notitia see Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rK); for prima intelligentia see Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). 120. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI and K, and 131rK). In Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131vM), Henry contrasted scientific knowledge to the earlier confused knowledge by saying it was known determinately (determinate). 121. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI). The word plene appears in a quotation Henry took from Augustine, De Trinitate, X, 1 (ed. Mountain and Glorie, I, 312). 78

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truth, when it reached the first level of science, it came to know something about the object that it had had the power to see before but had not yet recognized in unambiguous terms. As he had been saying all along, this something was the definition. And now Henry explained exactly how the definition related to what came before. His explanation depended heavily on what Aristotle had to say about definition in the second book of the Posterior Analytics. According to Henry, the definition — or in somewhat more metaphysical terms, the definitive nature (ratio definitiva) — was convertible with or logically equivalent to the universal, but the two were not precisely the same thing. The universal, properly speaking, brought

the object together in a single whole without clearly distinguishing

| the parts that made it what it was. The definitive nature, on the other hand, separated those parts and made them, so far as the intellect was concerned, distinct. When the intellect knew the definitive nature of an object, it could actually give the definition, in which the parts comprising the universal were designated by different terms. To give an example, Henry returned to the object he had mentioned in Quodlibet IV: “man.” The universal “man” represented a species, and like every species it could be characterized by the genus to which it belonged and

the specific difference that accounted for its peculiar nature. The genus of “man” was “animal,” and its specific difference was the quality “rational.” Putting these two together, one came up with the defini-

tion of “man”: a rational animal.’ In knowing this definition, the mind naturally knew the simple universal to which it referred, but it also knew something more. It knew distinctly —in discrete logical terms — what had previously been indistinct or confused. And Henry called this higher knowledge not only knowledge of the definition, but also knowledge of the quidditative being (esse quiditativum) or of quod quid est.'” At heart, then, Henry’s distinction was one that Aristotle would have considered essentially logical. It was analogous to the difference between a simple term and a full definition — two things that were referentially equivalent but articulated on different levels of logical speci-

ficity. On a metaphysical level, therefore, Henry’s two forms of knowledge were practically indistinguishable, and it was for this reason that he was able to call both of them knowledge of the universal. Thus the curious circumstance that in his system there was one type of 122. For this discussion see Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). 123. Ibid. Henry also used the term ratio quiditativa — see Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rK).

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knowledge of the simple universal below the level of science and another on the very first level of science itself. Yet when Henry came to describe his two types of knowledge — knowledge of that which is true and knowledge of the truth — in terms that were epistemologically meaningful, he ran into greater difficulty. It was much harder to show how they constituted a different relationship of the mind to its cognitive object. Indeed, Henry was thrown back on the vaguer language he had used before, in which the lower form of knowledge was described simply as something short of what was known on the scientific level that followed it. It was knowledge of the quiddity, but confusedly understood.'!“ Or it was, as he had said earlier, knowledge of something in which the quiddity lay or to which it could be referred (notitia eius cuius est quod quid est).'”° In either case, the difference between this sort of knowledge and Henry’s science could not easily be put into words. In fact, his clearest descriptions retreated to the logical terms noted above. Knowledge of the truth was knowledge that revealed the essential parts of the object or that broke the universal object down into the parts that went into its essential nature.!26 It was disintegrative knowledge (notitia discretiva) — knowledge that revealed the universal, but in a way that articulated the components to which it could be logically reduced. !2’ Thus Henry’s explicit descriptions of the two kinds of knowledge raised epistemological difficulties he could not easily answer. His notion of the difference between the two shone forth again much more clearly, however, when he turned to describe the processes by which they were attained. On this level — the level of noetics — there was no ambiguity. The important word here was discursus — that is, discursive thought. Already in Quodlibet IV, question 8, Henry explained that knowledge of science on the first level, knowledge of the truth, differed from mere knowledge of “that which is true” because it resulted from discursive thinking.!* He furthermore clearly accepted the conventional scholastic notion that it was “reason,” which could be interpreted either as the act of reasoning or the power of mind capable

124. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131vM). 125. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI). See above, p. 77, n. 115. 126. As Henry said, knowledge of the truth raised the mind “ut in partibus integrantibus eius essentiam ipsum limpide quid sit cognoscat.” Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI). See also the same question (II, 130vK and 13i1rL). 127. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (11, 131vL and M). 128. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97VN and 98rP). Also, Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI), and Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). 80

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of carrying it out, that was responsible for thinking of this sort.!”? Yet although the power of reasoning depended on a complex operation of

the mind, as Henry readily conceded, he continued to insist that knowledge of the truth on this first level remained, strictly speaking, simple cognition.“° In other words, although the intellect had to go through a complex procedure — reasoning — in order to achieve knowl-

edge of the truth, what it came up with was still technically simple, capable of being expressed in something less than a complete statement or proposition.'*! In the purest sense Henry’s language here deviated from the standard usage associated with Aristotelian noetics. According to this standard, abstraction was the simple, seamless process by which the mind came to know the simple universal. Reasoning was reserved for the business of complex understanding, knowledge of propositions or the syllogisms into which they could be combined.!3* Yet, on a deeper

level, Henry’s view was perfectly consistent with Aristotelian principles — that is, if not with Aristotle’s noetics, then with his logic, which Henry was also following closely. Knowledge of the definition, pure and simple, not yet attached to the subject by some form of the copulative “to be,” was in the strictest sense simple cognition. “Man is a rational animal” was a complex statement, but the idea “rational animal” was purely simple.'3? The way to such an idea lay, however, through the art of definition, what Henry also called the defining operation (operatio definitiva), and this meant in precise terms through 129. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130v-131r[K]): “. . . per discursum rationis. .. .” 130. Perhaps this is why Henry once said in contradistinction that knowledge of simple intellection — that is, his knowledge of that which is true — was knowledge sub ratione incomplexi (see Summa, art. 58, q. 2 [II, 130VH]). His meaning was not that

knowledge of the truth could not also be incomplex — he frequently insisted that as knowledge of quiddity alone it was strictly incomplex or simple knowledge — but rather that knowledge on the lower level was incomplex in a purer sense of the word, without even any hint of the configuration of the logical parts of the universal.

131. The same had been true in Henry’s more Thomistic account of knowledge of the truth. There, a complex conversion of the mind led up to a simple comprehension of the relation of truth. See above, pp. 59-62. 132. See a fine exposition of this distinction in Thomas Aquinas, Commentarium in libros Posteriorum analyticorum, prooemium, §4 in Opera Omnia (Leonine edi-

tion), 1 (Rome, 1882), p. 138.

133. Grosseteste had made the same point early in the thirteenth century, and he, too, struggled to draw a clear line here between simple and complex. Perhaps the problem would not have arisen had these thinkers not tried so hard to make Aristotle’s noetics — particularly his theory of abstraction — coincide perfectly with his logical analysis of such things as definitions and statements of the truth. 81

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the logical process of dividing, the Aristotelian via divisiva.'34 Such a process was complex, even if it was not usually described as discursive

thought. The knowledge it provided was thereby obtained in a way significantly different from that of the earlier stage where, in Henry’s words, the universal had been grasped “without any study or investigation.”!> To be fair, then, Henry had simply taken a piece out of Aristotle’s logic and used it in noetics to supply the categories with which to analyze the workings of mind. In Quodlibet IV Henry quickly sketched out the discursive process by which the mind attained his first kind of knowledge of the truth. The intellect began with the most general notion of the universal, the universale communissimum. Using the Aristotelian procedure of division it then worked on this general notion, dividing it into its logical parts according to the essential differences contained in it, then discarding the difference that did not suit the subject and beginning the same process of division over on the one that remained. Eventually the intellect would reach the final, specific difference, at which point it would be able to construct the species to which the object belonged. In the simple case Henry used so often as an example, the case of “man,”

the process consisted of recognizing that the appropriate difference within the genus “animal” was “rational” and putting these two together to describe the essence of “man,” “rational animal.”!?® Quodlibet XIV, question 6, offered an even more precise exposition of the same process, and here Henry made clearer that this last, constitutive stage

represented something more than just division. The intellect had to add all the correct differences together to compound a definition. Consequently the full process was to be attributed to an intellect dividendo et componendo.'*' Yet both these descriptions still stuck very close to the terms of logic, even though they each made mention of a discursive or rational power of mind. It was only in 1285, in article 58 of his Summa, that Henry worked out in more authentically noetic terms an account of how the mind undertook this logical maneuver. In keeping with the general tenor of Henry’s ideas about knowledge at the time, the solution was built upon Aristotelian foundations, but it rested even more heavily upon the changes Averroes had introduced into Aristotle’s world. This is not to say that Henry was a slavish imitator of Averroes, 134. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97VN), and Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). 135. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97VN). 136. Ibid. 137. Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). 82

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something one would hardly expect of a conservative theologian who had participated in the condemnation of 1277.38 Henry interpreted Averroes according to the demands of his own philosophical point of view, and what emerged out of the Averroistic vocabulary was a system of considerable originality. The process began with simple Aristotelian abstraction, explained in terms of possible and agent intellect. At this stage the agent intellect alone was active, abstracting the universal and preparing the possible intellect to receive it, while the possible, the receiver, remained purely passive.? Yet such abstraction took the intellect only to the level of simple intelligence, to knowledge of “that which is true.” Knowledge of the truth, or Henry’s first level of scientific cognition lay beyond this, and to reach it, he explained, the intellect had to act in a different way. The possible intellect had to rise from its passivity and actively intervene in the process by which the mind seized its intelligible object.‘ It was on this point that Aristotle had to be left behind. There was no place in Aristotelian noetics for an act on the part of the possible

intellect. But if pure Aristotle would not do, Henry found what he wanted in the commentaries of Averroes. Although Averroes’s doctrines on the intellect are notoriously complicated and open to widely varied readings, it would appear that in certain passages he committed himself to the view that there were three basic types of intellect: material, agent, and speculative. By Henry’s interpretation the material intellect was the same as the possible intellect insofar as it was purely passive, and the agent intellect was the Aristotelian agent as purely active. Between these two came the speculative intellect, which was, as Henry saw it, the possible intellect after it had received the intelligible form that constituted simple intellection, at a point where it was ready to pass over into act and know the truth.!*! 138. There is an extensive literature on the condemnation. The interested reader should begin with the recent works of Roland Hissette, “Etienne Tempier et ses condamnations,” RTAM 47 (1980), 231-70, and Enquéte sur les 219 articles condamneés a Paris le 7 mars 1277 (Leuven, 1977). 139. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (III, 130VH). For an authority on this position, Henry referred to Averroes’s Commentary on De anima, III, 18 (see Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, ed. F. Stuart Crawford, Corpus Commentariorum Averrois in Aristotelem, Versionum Latinarum 6/1 [Cambridge, Mass., 1953], pp. 439-40). 140. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130VH). See also Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE).

141. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rL). Henry referred explicitly to Averroes as his source for the three kinds of intellect. See Averroes, Commentarium magnum, Ill, 5, ed. Crawford, pp. 389-90 and 406. An even more striking discussion of the three kinds of intellect, especially the intellectus speculativus, can be found in 83

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If the possible intellect, become speculative by receiving the form of simple intelligence, was capable of act, then it could turn back upon the knowledge it already had. In other words, it could, through reflection or conversion, examine itself. This was the first important point to be made. Drawing on Proclus’s Elements of Theology, Henry explained that all spiritual substances had the power of reverting upon themselves. The possible intellect, become speculative, was indeed a

spiritual substance, and its reversion on itself was the first step towards knowing the truth.'** For a moment Henry had returned to the terms of his more Thomistic analysis of knowledge of the truth, and his words directly echoed the language he had used in article 34 of his Summa at least five years before: the speculative intellect turned back on itself, on its simple act of understanding and on its intellectual ob-

ject so that, as if by comparing them, it could fashion a knowledge representing science and the truth.!43 Conversion or reflection was, however, only a part of the act the possible intellect performed in knowing the truth. The complete action embraced two moments (in Henry’s words, conversio and negotium), and although the second depended on the almost gymnastic ability of the intellect to perform the first, it was itself something more.'“ What this second undertaking or negotium of the possible intellect consisted in was, plainly, the logi-

Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 132vP), where Henry quoted six passages from Averroes’s comments on Aristotle’s De anima, III, 5 and 6. The passages come from Averroes, Commentarium magnum, UI, 17, 19, 21, and 22, ed. Crawford, pp. 436, 442, 442, 441-43, 455, and 457 (in order of their appearance in Henry’s work). For discussions of Averroes’s theory of the speculative intellect, the reader might want to consult Arthur Hyman, “Aristotle’s Theory of the Intellect and Its Interpretation by Averroes,” in Studies in Aristotle, ed. Dominic J. O’Meara (Washington, D.C., 1981), pp. 161-91; and Bernardo C. Bazan, “Jntellectum speculativum: Averroes, Thomas Aquinas, and Siger of Brabant on the Intelligible Object,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981), 425-46. Bazan thinks that Averroes was not talking about a third kind of intellect but rather a way of describing the intelligible object. He notes, interestingly enough, that Siger read Averroes as referring to a kind of intellect, precisely the view we have found in Henry. 142. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rL). For the reference to Proclus, see above, p. 57, n. 53. 143. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130VH). See also all of fols. 130vI and 131rL, and compare with the account given above in this chapter, pp. 56-62. This was not the only time Henry tried to combine his seemingly Thomistic way of explaining |knowledge of the truth with a more strictly logical and Aristotelian notion of the process. See the remarkable passage in Summa, art. 54, q. 9 (II, 104r-v[C]). 144. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI). 84

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cal procedure of division and composition.'* It was the business of Aristotle’s art of definition. Of course, this also goes back to what Henry had said before, as early as Quodlibet IV, question 8. Now, however, he was prepared to , be explicit about the actions and powers of mind the procedure involved. In this second act of mind, higher than the partially passive reception of knowledge of “that which is true” and logically equivalent to compounding and dividing, the agent intellect acted again, this time alongside the possible intellect. It did so, as always, serving as a light, shining upon the phantasm — more properly, the abstracted phantasm — through which the universal object had become known in the origi-

nal process of simple intelligence.' The will, too, had a role to play. It stimulated the intellect to know more about the object it as yet comprehended in only a confused way, and thus the will led the intellect to turn back and look at things another time, on a higher plane.'*” What did the looking was the possible intellect, now become speculative — what Henry also called the intellect or intelligence pure and simple.'** Directed by the will, aided by the agent intellect, the now active possible “fixed its concentration on the object more strongly and more sharply” than before. In this way it penetrated into the heart of the object.!” It produced the first stage of science — the definition. This description of the process by which the mind came to knowledge of the truth put the remaining piece in the puzzle concerning the first level of scientific cognition. With this piece in place it is at last possible to sum up in the most general terms exactly how Henry wanted to distinguish between this higher sort of knowledge and the less ele-

vated, confused variety that preceded it. As he had made abundantly 145. As Henry explained, the possible intellect acted in this way: “negotiando circa incomplexa confuse intellecta ad explicandum in eis distinctionem partium essentialium: et hoc inquantum habet rationem intellectus sive intelligentiae simpliciter.” Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rL). 146. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI and 131rK). 147. Ibid. This sheds light on why Henry associated the will with the act of understanding. See above, p. 72, n. 99. 148. See above, n. 145, and also Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rK). 149. “Intellectus autem motus imperio voluntatis et propria vi activa eius, aclem suam in rem cognitam fortius et acrius figit: et penetrare nititur interiora ipsius cogniti confuse: ut in partibus integrantibus eius essentiam ipsum limpide quid sit cognoscat.” Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI). Henry attributed to Avicenna the notion of penetrating deep into the object (see Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima sive scientia divina, Tract. IX, 7, ed. Simone Van Riet, Avicenna Latinus [Leiden, 1980], II, 511-12). Perhaps Henry also had in mind Boethius, Philosophiae conso~ latio, V, pros. 4 (ed. Ludwig Bieler, CC, 94/1 [Turnhout, 1957], p. 97). 85

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clear, when the mind attained to the higher knowledge — to knowledge of the truth, or to science of the most basic sort — it knew, for the first time, the definition of its object. This was what it came up with on the level of logic pure and simple — that is, this was how the new knowledge would be manifested if it were put into language. Yet what corresponded to this in the mind, what actually constituted this knowledge on the level of noetics, was a discrete concept or word — in Henry’s vocabulary, a verbum of the mind. He made perhaps his clearest state-

ment to this effect in his final handling of the subject, in Quodlibet XIV, question 6. As he explained, once the intellect had come by the process of division to the last and most specific difference characterizing its object and once it had combined all the appropriate differences together into the definition (definitiva ratio), this definition then became to the intellect a sort of object, universal but nevertheless distinct and determinate. And this object moved the possible intellect and _ formed in it an understanding (intellectio), which was more properly called a “word.”!°° The word was, he added, the word of the quiddity (verbum de eo quod quid est), and thus it differed from the word the intellect had formed on the lower, more primitive level of knowledge, before it had come to see distinctly the essential characteristics of the object it was coming to know.!*! Henry also called this word declarative knowledge (notitia declarativa).'>? It was the finished product of 150. “Et illud appellatur quod quid est et definitiva ratio: et est opus intelligentiae simplicis: quod cum formatum fuerit ab intellectu per ultimam differentiam aggregatam praecedenti, tanquam universale distinctum et determinatum per partes movet intellectum possibilem tanquam eius obiectum: et format in eo intellectionem declarativam. Quae intellectio appellatur verbum de eo quod quid est.” Quod. XIV, q. 6 (II, 566vE). See also Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97VN), and Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI). In Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131VM), Henry toned down the language implying that the object actively informed the possible intellect in this process, and he reaffirmed his commitment to the active role of the mind itself in producing the word. Note that the passage from Quodlibet XIV provides one of the rare occasions when Henry used the term intelligentia simplex to mean something other than the first stage of knowledge. Here it presumably referred to the possible intellect as intellect pure and simple (see above, n. 148). It is also important to add that Henry made allowance for the case of the beatific vision. Although there was properly no definition of God — he lacked any parts — the blessed nevertheless formed a mental word referring to God, a word that was truly discrete knowledge as opposed to the confused cognition at the preceding intellectual level. On this see Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131VM). 151. On the lower word see above, pp. 72-73, nn. 102 and 103. 152. For notitia declarativa see above, n. 150, and also Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI and 131rK and L). It was also notitia discretiva, as has been shown (see above, p. 80, n. 127). 86

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simple intellection, ready to be uttered and expressed in the logical terms suitable for scientific discourse. As before at the lower level of simple intelligence, knowledge at the first stage of science could itself be broken down into three modes. There was potential science, a latent understanding resting in the intel-

lective memory; there was the concept itself, in act in the possible intellect; and there was the act of understanding by which this concept was conceived. Once again, however, it was the concept in the mind — the actual noetic kernel of scientific knowledge — that was the word in the most proper sense and the heart of the mental phenomenon con-

cerning this level of science.? It was as if the other two modes re~ volved around this key constituent element, through which alone was confirmed their relation to the object the mind knew. As previously, Henry even went so far as to suggest that in some way the word or concept was the same as the cognitive object itself. It was the object insofar as it took cognitive form within the mind.!4 Most important, of course, was the fact that this word, because it was the word of the quiddity and equivalent to the definition of the object, stood on a higher and more significant plane than the word of

simple intelligence. This is what it meant to say that it constituted science or knowledge of the truth.!>> It was, in Henry’s explicit language, the word of truth (verbum veritatis) or the scientific word (verbum scientiale), and the knowledge it made possible was scientific knowledge (notitia scientialis).-® Even more baldly stated, it led the way to scientific truth (verum scientificum).'>’ Here lay the truth itself

| (ipsa veritas), that Henry thought differed from the mere “that which 153. For the division into three modes at the lower level, see above, p. 72, n. 99. Henry described the division at the level of science in Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97v98r[O]). His most explicit statement about the concept as the proper word can be found in Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131VM). 154. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131vM) and above, p. 73, n. 103. This idea will make more sense once we have considered Henry’s ideas about being and essence. 155. On several occasions in these later questions Henry used the word scientia to refer to knowledge at the lower level, before it had become definitive — as if to suggest that there was science below declarative knowledge. This anomaly can be ex_ plained because each instance involved either a quotation from Augustine’s De Trinitate, XV, 10, or in one case a composite drawn from the same work, book XV, 15 (see ed. Mountain and Glorie, pp. 486 and 499). Thus the language was Augustine’s, not Henry’s, and need not be taken as an intentional departure from Henry’s otherwise consistent application of the word “science” to definitive cognition. 156. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 98rP). 157. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vN). 87

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is true” known at the lower level. Here was to be located the truth of Aristotle’s science, founded on that most basic analytical element from which Aristotle drew the structure of all his scientific thought —

the essential definition. And now, in his most mature works, Henry was willing even to say that this sort of knowledge was perfect — vera et perfecta notitia — thereby freely applying to knowledge achieved

through Aristotle’s logical methods an accolade in his earlier years reserved for knowledge obtained by divine illumination alone.”® What he had once thought lay far beyond the bounds of Aristotelian science he now conceded to the mundane logical realm in which Aristotle had worked. It must be remembered, of course, that above this primary grade of scientific knowledge — the principle from which all the rest of science was derived — there still lay the two other grades of science having to do exclusively with complex cognition, knowledge of a true proposition and knowledge of a valid syllogism.!°? For each of them there was

an intellectual process of similar value in Henry’s epistemology and noetics to that of the initial process leading to scientific truth.’ In both cases, as on the preceding level, the possible intellect participated actively in producing knowledge of the truth, and it did this, according to the words of article 58, question 2, of the Summa, by compounding and dividing the more simple knowledge.'©! These were, of course, precisely the words Henry had used to describe the mental procedures appropriate to simple scientific knowledge, and perhaps we should take them here, with reference to complex cognition, to mean what might be called in more purely Aristotelian language a discursive procedure. It was, after all, precisely to explain these complex stages of cognition that Aristotle, as well as Thomas, had introduced the discursive powers of the mind. Henry thought that in formal terms both these sorts of complex scientific cognition could be reduced to knowledge propter quid — that is, knowledge of the reasoned fact. Thus they had to do with just one of the four basic questions Aristotle had said could be asked in science:

si est, quid est, quia est, and propter quid est. To illustrate his point Henry turned to the often-used example of a solar eclipse, explaining that the intellect knew the reasoned fact of an eclipse when it recognized that it happened because the moon had come between the sun 158. Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130vI). 159. See above, p. 76, n. 113. 160. See, for instance, Henry’s explicit reference to both simple and complex knowledge in Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131rL). 161. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 130VH and 131vN). 88

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and the earth.!® Yet if knowledge propter quid could, in a way, stand for both types of complex scientific knowledge, to be more precise one had to keep the two kinds of complex science apart, linking each one to a different mental procedure. It was in article 58 of his Suma that Henry made sure the difference was clear.!®3 At the first grade of complex scientific cognition — knowing the truth of a proposition — the mind’s activity constituted no more than a logical, almost intuitive, extension of the business of division that had led to the original stage of simple science. Once the intellect had gone through the appropriate logical divisions, it merely had to bring all its knowledge together to form a proposition. For example, having known one white thing and another white thing, the intellect, without any additional action on its part, could see that they were similar. It could then fashion a proposition: This thing is similar to that thing, in whiteness. Likewise, having broken down the once imperfectly known object “man” into its logical components, “animal” and “rational,” the intellect could combine the two in the statement: Man is a rational animal.! The only way this differed from the simpler form of science — pure definitive knowledge — was that here the elements of cognition

had been raised to the level of assertion by arranging them around the copulative, “to be.” Although many scholastics would have felt compelled at this point to stop and investigate further what referential conditions had to obtain to justify the intellect in taking this step, Henry ignored the problem altogether. For him propositional knowledge was a natural and obvious extension of the definition. The most he conceded to such philosophical speculation was to look into some of the metaphysical underpinnings permitting the mind to make the proper arrangement among the parts of its knowledge. Briefly stated, his explanation was that the mind simply recognized the actual relationship (habitudo) existing among the referents of its ideas in the real world.!© It is inter-

162. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vN). Henry recognized that the question of the fact (quia est) also had to do with complex cognition, but in his explication he subsumed it under

what was to him the more important question, propter quid. Aristotle raised his four questions in a classic passage in the Posterior Analytics, II, 1 (89b23-25) — see the Latin text, ed. Minio-Paluello and Dod, p. 69. An excel-

lent discussion of the four can be found in Wallace, Causality and Scientific Explanation, pp. 11-13. Henry offered an exposition of all four of Aristotle’s questions in his Summa, art. 24, q. 3 (I, 138v-139r). 163. See above, p. 76, n. 113. 164. See Henry’s discussion, Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 131v-132r[N]). 165. For Henry’s full account, see Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 132r-v[O and P]). 89

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esting to note that Henry did not really explain how to form the definitions of such complicated phenomena as a solar eclipse, even though he used the eclipse as an example of a complex object of science. What makes the definitions of such phenomena significant is that the process of division does not explain how the mind comes to fashion them;

they require some more intricate process relying on a theory of induction or experience. Henry was, however, always more a theologian than a philosopher, and he left such matters to those of his colleagues more interested in the natural scieaces.!° At the second grade of complex science the mind had to work with the syllogism — to recognize when a complex argument was true and when it was false. Syllogisms were constructed out of propositions, so this grade depended directly on the scientific knowledge garnered in the previous two. Yet it involved an additional skill or process of mind quite different from anything mentioned before, and this was the skill of argumentation.!®’ It was primarily this process Henry had described

in Quodlibet IV, question 8, when he had spoken of the way to the knowledge of complex scientific truths. An operation of this kind depended on the art of logic.!© Rather than spell out all the relevant logical rules, Henry merely referred his reader to the traditional texts used in the faculty of arts.!© There was one more type of scientific knowledge Henry recognized in addition to the three indicated so far, and this was scientific habit (habitus scientialis or habitus scientiae). Although it was in some ways quite a different sort of phenomenon, representing not new knowledge but rather a different way of getting at knowledge already acquired, the fact that Henry included it in his survey of science in Quodlibet IV, question 8, makes it worthy of mention here. Henry’s understanding of scientific habit was almost completely dependent upon Aristotle’s account in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics.” Before the

166. Grosseteste, for example, had devoted considerable effort to explaining such propositions. He called them statements concerning natural, contingent events, such as were common in most of natural science. See the analysis of the foundation for this sort of science in my William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste, pp. 27382.

167. See Summa, art. 58, q. 2 (II, 132vQ). 168. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vN). 169. These comprised the Logica nova. See above, p. 76, n. 113. 170. See Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97VN). For the Aristotelian text Henry was referring to, as well as a commentary he mentioned, see above, p. 74, n. 108. Henry had more to say about speculative habits in Quod. V, q. 14 (I, 177rO), and q. 16 (I, 185rV[F]).

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first act of scientific knowledge — whether knowledge quid est or knowledge propter quid — the intellect was altogether bare, possessing neither any speculative habit nor indeed anything at all that could be called science. Once the mind had come to perform an act yielding scientific knowledge, there began to appear in it a disposition towards an identical scientific act, and this disposition would make future efforts to achieve knowledge of the same scientific truth easier to come by. After a number of repetitions of the process the disposition would become strengthened to the point where it could be called a scientific habit.!”! In other words, the mind would have gained the ability to produce a piece of scientific truth, and to recognize the fact that it was true, without having to go through the complicated process of reasoning by which that truth was originally perceived.!”* Apparently Henry intended the notion of scientific habit to apply to all the kinds of scientific knowledge he had previously discussed. Thus there would have been habits by which the mind dredged up from its memory definitions and propositions stating scientific truths as well as habits that allowed it to spell out a valid demonstration of scientific proof without having to think things carefully through. In precise terms such habits came down to a facility of mind (habilitas quaedam in intellectu), achieved

by practice or repetition, by which the intellect could call forth its knowledge and put it into words quickly and easily without the rigors involved in the original acquisition.!”3 This brief excursus into scientific habits rounds out Henry’s mature

theory of truth and scientific knowledge. He had taken at least ten years to work out all the specifics, but his fundamental vision remained consistent throughout the later years of his life. Aristotle and Averroes had provided him with the essentials. Science depended ultimately on

the logical procedures of definition and syllogistic argument, and it called upon the active powers of the mind, in particular the ability of the possible intellect to investigate a univeral object that had been ab- gtracted from sensory cognition. Yet if Henry built upon the foundations left by these two authorities, the final structure of his ideas was an achievement solely his own. The way he integrated noetics — using Averroes but not simply reproducing an Averroistic point of view — with the logical concerns paramount in Aristotle’s handling of the 171. For this explanation see Quod. IV, q. 8 (1, 97vN). Henry also called these habitus contemplativi sive speculativi. 172. This is precisely what Henry said in Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 98rP). Scientific knowledge was generated from a scientific habit “absque alio discursu.” 173. Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 97vO). 91

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theoretical problems of science constituted something new. Perhaps it should be taken as indicative of a general characteristic of scholastics

in the high and later Middle Ages — an insistence that all forms of philosophizing be reduced to a common system and that an effort be made to provide precise physical or psychological foundations for even the most abstract logical procedures of analysis. In whatever way we explain it, Henry’s mature idea of truth and sclence unquestionably represented a major development in his thought. It had begun to grow in his mind at a time when he was also dabbling in his other new notion of truth, dependent on the possibility of psychological conversion or reflection, and indeed the more purely Aristotelian and Averroistic position made room for the reflexive process

of mind, even though that process did not constitute for it a distinguishing part.!’”* Over the years it was the Aristotelian idea that was to

dominate, while the element of reflection was either ignored or left behind. Yet both explanations — and it is likely they were not sharply separated in Henry’s mind — represented a significant departure from his earlier way of analyzing truth and human knowledge of it. In these works from his mature years Henry spoke of truth and human knowledge without making reference to any objects or influences outside the created world. Most notably he made no attempt to integrate his earlier statements about the role of a divine light. For the later Henry it seems that Aristotle’s science loomed larger than ever before, and the worldly methods with which it was associated crowded out the otherworldly language that had been an important part of his earlier assessments of truth. 174. See above, p. 84, n. 143. In Quod. IV, q. 8 (I, 98rP), Henry seems to have implied that there was a reflection or conversion of the intellect upon itself at the very first level of knowledge, below scientific cognition. If this is the correct interpretation of his language, it implies that his use of the motif of reflection was sometimes much looser than would have been allowed by the notion of truth given in article 34 of the Summa.

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: IV The Final Summation

The ideas about true knowledge that Henry developed in his second phase were part of the most explicit formal analysis he was ever to make of the business of human cognition, and indeed, as it turns out, they constituted his most precise statement about the logical and noetic conditions of truth. What is more, it would appear that the fundamentals of this second phase remained essential to Henry’s philosophy throughout the rest of his life. Not only did he never abandon the technical description of truth he formulated in 1279 and 1280, but, as has been shown, he actually took several opportunities to work out the description in greater detail, most notably in article 58 of his Summa, dating from 1285, and in Quodlibet XIV, from 1290. In all these instances, his tendency no longer to describe human knowledge of the truth in terms of conformity to a divine ideal and his silence about the matter of divine influence on the workings of the mind indicate how far his new thoughts had moved from the theories of his early works, published before 1276. Yet is this really the final word on Henry’s ideas about truth? If it can be argued that Henry remained to the end committed to the formal analysis of truth he initiated in 1279, and that in its purest form this analysis seemed to turn its back on the original concerns of his thought, there is also apparently contradictory evidence to show that he never totally forsook his early ideas about the role of divine illumination. At the very least, it must be admitted that Henry continued to refer to the terms of his earliest description of true knowledge even after the years marking the transition to the second stage of his thought about truth.! The point to be made here is not that we see Henry still holding firm to his insistence that the ultimate meaning of the truth of things in nature came down to their ability to reflect an ideal order in the mind of God. Such a notion of truth as it pertained to extramental objects was a commonplace among scholastics, and its continued presence in Henry’s thought does not necessarily imply anything about his view of the normal procedures of human intellection. It might simply have 1. See above, p. 8, n. 15. 93

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been that Henry no longer believed that the words and propositions in which humans expressed their ideas made any reference to this deeper level of reality. The fact that one of Henry’s most extensive statements concerning the truth of objects as reflective of a divine ideal can be found in article 34 of his Summa, the very place where he also developed his seemingly unrelated explanation of cognitive truth dependent upon a conversion of the mind back on the data of its own thought,

does not therefore indicate any continued attachment to the idea of divine illumination. No, there is something else about Henry’s later writings that commands our attention now. The fact is that there were occasions in his later works where Henry actually brought the terms of his divinely oriented paradigm for the truth of objects into his analysis of the business of human intellection, in particular into his analysis of the final stages in the process leading to science. It was just such an association of science, or certitude, and an exemplary role for the divine ideas that had stood out as the prime characteristic of Henry’s very first thoughts on the problem of cognitive truth. It was also just this association that was So strikingly absent in the passages examined in the previous chapter. To see the same formulas reemerge in his later writings appears to indicate that whatever the nature of development in Henry’s ideas on

truth, it cannot in the end be described simply as a rejection of his earliest explanation. One of the clearest indications of this fact comes in question 15 of

Quodlibet [X, a disputation delivered over the Easter holidays of 1286.° Here Henry not only reasserted the importance of the language of divine illumination and godly intervention for explaining human understanding of truth, he even referred the reader to his earliest writings in the Summa for an indication of the kind of analysis he had in mind.* All this, it must be remembered, comes in a question composed

well after the transition to Henry’s second phase, a question almost precisely contemporaneous with article 58 of the Summa, which contains the most extensive elaboration of his Aristotelian investigations into truth. Any appreciation of Henry’s later ideas on truth must come to terms with such conservative language towards the very end of his career. 2. See above, pp. 45-48. 3. On dating see Gdmez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133. Even Paulus, who went farthest in suggesting that Henry abandoned his early ideas about illumination, conceded the importance of Quodlibet IX, question 15, if only as an anomaly in Henry’s

thought. See above, p. 8, n. 14. , 4. See Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 264). 94

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The general problem Henry faced in question 15 of Quodlibet IX was how to interpret Augustine’s references in De Trinitate to some sort of hidden knowledge.’ While he wanted to avoid the position one might take from a strictly Aristotelian point of view (that there was no such thing as a hidden knowledge), he also did not want to fall into a purely Platonic notion of reminiscence or some other view of an innate potential or habitual knowledge the soul carried with it before any confrontation with the objects of its intellection. Henry’s solution, prompted by Augustine’s own words, was to suggest that Augustine was talking about a process of divine illumination — the very sort of illumination Henry himself had called attention to in the first articles of his Summa. According to this interpretation, when Augustine spoke about the soul dipping deep into the hidden recesses of its mind, he was actually referring to the constant process by which the mind called upon the divine light in order to rectify and verify its perceptions of reality. He was alluding to the way the mind established the incontrovertible principles of its understanding. In a succinct statement Henry made clear what this would mean: It is rather to be believed that the nature of the intellectual faculty has been fashioned so as to be subject to intelligible objects through a natural order determined by the Creator, and thus it sees those [things it knows] in a sort of incorporeal light of the same nature as itself (sui generis). In a similar way, the bodily eye sees things that lie about in a corporeal light, which light it is capable of receiving and in harmony with which it has been created. Now the [incorporeal light] is the uncreated Light, in which alone, according to Augustine, one can know the pure truth (sincera veritas), as in something that represents all that God has known about creation from all eternity.°

Henry went on to add that insofar as these known or knowable things (cognita or cognoscibilia) were actual objects of God’s intellection from all eternity, they could be called the “incorporeal reasons” — which is to say, the divine ideas.’ All this would appear to indicate that here, quite late in Henry’s career, he was resurrecting the full theory of divine illumination and knowledge of the pure truth he had described in such detail in the very 5. See Quod. IX, qq. 13 and 15 (ed. Macken, pp. 240 and 258) for Henry’s statement of the problem. He referred explicitly to Augustine’s language in De Trinitate, XIV, 7 (ed. Mountain and Glorie, II, 433-34). 6. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 261). The first half of this statement is actually a direct quotation from Augustine, De Trinitate, XII, 15 (ed. Mountain and Glorie, I, 378).

7. Ouod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 261). 95

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first works of his literary activity. Indeed, he took the time in question 15 of Quodlibet [IX to examine more closely this process whereby the

mind came to grasp the certain objects of its cognition, and the description clearly matches what we know from the beginning articles of the Summa. He explained that the confrontation with a higher, pure truth occurred only after the mind had come to terms with the sensible world through the contact provided by the external senses. Thus the first step in intellection was coming to know the intelligibles inherent in sensible reality by reading them in the phantasms provided by sensory perception. Only then could the mind withdraw from the senses and abstract itself from the phantasms in order to attain the incorporeal reasons of things residing in the incorporeal Truth itself. It was this ultimate attainment, prompted by a sort of illustration (i//ustratio quaedam) from the eternal light, that allowed the mind to know the pure truth (sincera veritas). The latter could not be derived from sen-

sation and the phantasms alone.® |

Even the particulars of Henry’s analysis echoed the statements he had made in his earliest works. To show exactly how he thought Augustine ought to be read, he put together a paragraph made up of snippets

drawn here and there from the text of De Trinitate itself, a kind of patchwork of the language Augustine used to talk about the mind. In this paragraph, again, we see evidence of the same two-step procedure he had described at the beginning of the Summa as well as something analogous to the two kinds of truth he had posited there. The process began, he said, when the sensible forms of things were announced to the mind by the senses and then transferred, by the regular procedures of mental activity, to the faculty called the memory. Once this had happened, the sensible forms caused in the mind an act of intellection by which it was able to perceive the intelligible objects as they resided in the phantasms.? Drawing on Augustine’s “imaginarius conspectus,” Henry called this act of intellection “imaginarius intellectus,” and he associated it with the knowledge of what he called “jmaginaria veritas.” !° Both these terms apparently make reference to the imaginative faculty, as if to remind the reader that the knowledge the mind had acquired up to this level permitted it to conceive a truth 8. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 262). 9. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 264). This part of the paragraph drew on Augustine, De Trinitate, IX, 6 (ed. Mountain and Glorie, I, 303), which Henry had quoted at some length just before. 10. See below, n. 16. Augustine referred to imaginarius conspectus in De Trinitate, LX, 6 (ed. Mountain and Glorie, I, 303). 96

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that did not go beyond the evidence available from the sensible world, all that the imaginative faculty was competent to work upon. There was, Henry added, an intellectual light that provided the motor for the mental activity necessary to attain this restricted truth, and it could be

called, in the language of Aristotle, an agent intellect. Henry made clear that at this stage the agent was a created power, either a power of the soul or — to make allowance for those who argued the soul did not act alone — some other power in the created world.!! Up to this point, then, he was plainly referring to something like the workings he had,

in his earliest account of human intellection, included in the procedures leading to knowledge of that which is true (id quod verum est) and to knowledge of the sort of truth dependent on a created exemplar. There was as yet no reference to God or to a divine intervention,

and accordingly the truth acquired could not lay claim to the purity associated with the eternal world. The second step came when the mind passed on to the realm of the divine ideas. At this point the form of unshakable truth, the divine Art itself, shone on the mind and into its previous act of intellection (imaginarius intellectus) with the light of incorruptible and most pure reason (sincerissima ratio). When this happened, the mind saw in the eternal Truth the form according to which it had been made and, indeed, the forms through which all created things had their being. These forms were, of course, the divine ideas. Once the mind had seized them, it used them to judge their created reflections as they existed in the material world.!* That is to say, it judged its previous understanding of the intelligible objects by these new standards from above. Once again Henry’s description brings to mind the nearly identical account he had given at the beginning of his Summa. In fact, the reader is actually referred to the first articles of the Summa -— cited as the Quaestiones ordinariae — for a fuller analysis of the whole process and a more complete listing of authorities. As in the earlier account, here, too, there had to be a judgment, facilitated by divine illumination, to raise the mind to knowledge of the pure truth — what Henry now called, taking a term from his Augustinian text, “truthful knowl-

edge” (verax notitia).'9 Here, too, as in his earliest writings, Henry 11. See below, n. 16. 12. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 264). This part of the paragraph is almost totally composed of excerpts from Augustine, De Trinitate, VI, 10, and IX, 6 and 7 (ed. Mountain and Glorie, I, 241 and 303-4). Again, Henry had quoted all these texts just before (Quod. IX, q. 15 [ed. Macken, pp. 262-63]). 13. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 264). 97

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insisted that in this procedure the divine ideas did not act as objects known but rather as the means for knowing something else.'4 They permitted certain judgment, but they could not themselves be seen with the clarity of a direct object of the mind. Here, too, this judgment, and the knowledge of the pure truth it produced, formed the basis for science, at least science at its most secure level. Out of the intellectual acts that constituted the very judgments by which the mind came to see the pure truth, the mind developed those habits that were the flesh and bones of scientific knowledge. In this sense science — the

ideal of human certitude — depended more on the eternal Truth and on eternal reasons than on the sensations and phantasms from which the process of intellection actually began.!° It might be remarked that the way Henry described God’s action in this procedure was slightly less ambiguous than the way he had done so at the beginning of the Summa. He still characterized God, or God’s Truth, as a light shining upon the mind, allowing it to see the standards for a judgment of pure truth. But now he went so far as to suggest explicitly that God acted in this way as a second agent intellect. Like the agent intellect that was a power of the mind itself, God provided the light in which intellectual activity took place. The difference was that in God’s light the mind saw the pure truth of the formal objects of its knowledge, while in the light of the created agent it saw the universal without any way of knowing whether it conformed to a higher ideal. !®

Raymond Macken, as well as Theophiel Nys and Faustino Prezioso, has seen in this suggestion a formal sign of Henry’s conscious accommodation to an epistemological point of view that has been called Avicennizing Augustinianism, and Macken takes special note of the fact that the first evidence for this open accommodation comes quite late in Henry’s career.!’ Yet perhaps we should not make too much of this.

14. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 262). 15. Ibid. Henry’s references here to scientific habits recall the more explicit comments he had made about them in Quod. IV, q. 8 (see above, pp. 90-91). 16. “Ut secundum hoc intellectus agens illustrans mentem ad cognoscendum sinceram veritatem formae materialis in conspiciendo universale in essentia formae secundum se abstractae, licet non secundum se existentis sed in sola mentis notitia, primo increatae, deinde creatae, existentis, dicatur ipse Deus, quaemadmodum intellectus agens illustrans mentem ad cognoscendum imaginariam veritatem formae materialis in conspiciendo universale in phantasmate, abstracto a forma particulari existente in materia extra, dicitur aliqua virtus creata, ut potentia animae vel aliquid aliud.” Quod. LX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, pp. 264-65). 17. See above, p. 31, nn. 66 and 67. 98

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Henry himself was not fully satisfied with the image of light alone, and he indicated that he intended the statement that God acted as a light illuminating the mind to be taken as a rather loose metaphor to explain the way things actually happened. He was himself more comfortable explaining God’s action as that of an art, a storehouse of forms working on the material of the artifact.!® Again Macken has seen this latter description — God as an ars — as particularly characteristic of Henry’s later work. It was, however, as Macken admits, present from the very first articles of the Summa. In fact, Henry’s early description of how

God worked as an art was so complete and detailed that there is no reason to suppose he had expanded the idea at all by these later years. !? Macken’s point is surely more unexceptionable if we take it as drawing

our attention to the fact that in Quodlibet IX Henry laid more emphasis on this image as a way of accounting for what was special about

God’s role. The agent intellect, part of the mind, acted strictly as a light shining on the phantasms; in contrast, the agent that was God could be described more correctly as an art imposing form on matter.” In short, whatever increased clarity there was in Henry’s later description of divine illumination, it constituted only a minor change.

On all the fundamentals the language examined so far comes very close to what Henry had already said in the first articles of the Summa.

Henry seems simply to have reverted to his earliest position, going back on the Aristotelian innovations of the middle years to reaffirm the purely Augustinian doctrine of a divine light. If this view is correct, then Henry had come full circle. Or perhaps he had never abandoned his earliest position; he had merely put it aside temporarily while he investigated other, more Aristotelian ways of describing human knowledge. This would appear to be the impression Henry wanted to give. Several times in Quodlibet IX he referred to his very earliest works without so much as a hint that he had changed his mind or even modified the way he interpreted his initial theories by 1286.2! All these indications would lead to the conclusion that he was

just as committed to his original theory of divine illumination in knowledge of the truth in his later career as he had been when he first formulated it before 1276. Many historians have, indeed, defended 18. “...agens enim qui Deus est, agit sicut ars quae ponit formam in materia artificti; agens vero qui est potentia animae, agit sicut lumen circa phantasmata. .. .” Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 265). See also the reference to ars in the passage cited above, n. 12, as well as in Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, pp. 265-66). 19. See above, p. 34, n. 75, and p. 36, n. 84. 20. See above, n. 18. 21. See, for example, the passage cited above, p. 94, n. 4. 99

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this view. Theophiel Nys concluded as much, adding that Henry had merely worked out his psychology of illumination more clearly by Quodlibet IX than he had early on.” Yet a closer look at all of Henry’s work reveals that this conclusion

is neither necessary nor the best way to explain the pattern of his thought. If what I have said about the importance of his middle years is true — that they represented a new departure for Henry — then assuming that he merely came back to his first thoughts on truth implies that he either jettisoned his new ideas or was content to live with conflicting views. Neither alternative would have been impossible, but in this instance there is no reason to suppose that either was the case. In fact, there is evidence in the language of Quodlibet LX, question 15, itself, that leads to a very different interpretation. This language was passed over in the explication of the passage given above, and it is, indeed, so unassuming that it is generally overlooked by scholars interested in Henry’s epistemology. Yet it suggests that for all the echoes of the early articles of the Summa, Quodlibet [X, question 15, together with a related question, number 12 of Quodlibet VIII, represents a considerable development in Henry’s notion of cognition and knowl-

edge of the truth, a development that can be considered a final, or third, stage in Henry’s thought on the matter. In this third stage Henry returned to the image of illumination and the idea of godly intervention fashioned in his earliest work, but he did not merely repeat the same image or resurrect the same idea. Instead, he raised them both to a new level of meaning considerably dif-

ferent from what they had had before. Elevated to these heights, Henry’s language explaining how God acted on the mind did not cancel out or even contradict the more Aristotelian and worldly theories of knowledge and truth he had elaborated in his middle years. He was instead able to preserve everything from those years, down to the letter of his thought, and to continue to elaborate on the same Aristotelian trend up to the end of his literary activity.23 What the language of Quodlibet IX, question 15, and Quodlibet VIII, question 12, represented was a synthesis. It was somehow old and new at the same time, in a way that revealed the dramatic reshaping of Henry’s thought over the years. In effect Henry managed to build upon the foundations of his sec22. See Nys, De werking, p. 119 (cited by Macken, “La théorie,” p. 95, n. 57). 23. As has been shown, as late as 1290, in Quodlibet XIV, Henry would return to the terms of his more purely Aristotelian explanation of truth without so much as a nod to the general schema he outlined in Quodlibet IX. 100

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ond phase, now situating the precise logical considerations he had drawn from Aristotle within a larger framework that preserved a major role for the divine. He simply retained, or rehabilitated, the language and insights of both of his earlier phases by combining them in a novel way. That he had no interest in pointing out this development to his readers should not prevent us from recognizing the facts for what they are. Henry was a philosopher and theologian, so his responsibilities to his readers were exhausted when he had done all he could to make sure they understood his newly deepened and expanded truth. We, on the other hand, approach Henry with the historian’s concerns in mind, and we must make explicit the chronological progression of

Henry’s ideas. This is, for us, a great part of what constitutes their meaning.

To suggest that the ideas of Quodlibet [X, question 15, were not precisely the same as those Henry had expounded at the beginning of his career is not altogether new. Raymond Macken has already led the

way to such an interpretation. His argument that in Quodlibet [X Henry shifted his emphasis from seeing God acting as a light to seeing him as an art or storehouse of forms has already been noted, as well as

his point that it was in the same work that Henry first explicitly described God as a second agent intellect.” It has been shown, however, that neither of these ways of describing God’s activity in human cognition constitute in themselves a major departure from Henry’s earliest ideas. Both could be supported with quotations from the first articles of the Summa. Yet Macken continues his argument by turning to matters of greater importance. He notes that both of these relatively superficial changes were related to a more profound transformation in Henry’s noetics.*°

To show what he means, Macken refers to the notion of a double species.2° In Henry’s early works he at times clearly stated that God impressed on the mind a second intelligible species representing the intellectual object. By comparing this godly species with the abstracted species garnered from sensory cognition, the mind was able to make a judgment about its knowledge and come to see the pure truth.’ After 1279, however, Henry could not logically have appealed to such an ex-

planation. Theophiel Nys has demonstrated how Henry gradually worked his way to an absolute rejection of the notion that intellection 24. See above, nn. 17 and 19. 25. See above, p. 8, n. 16. 26. Macken’s analysis can be found in “La théorie,” pp. 93-96. 27. Henry’s description of this process is discussed above in Chap. 2. 101

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depended on the formation of intelligible species impressed on the mind (species impressae). From 1279 on, the very idea of impressed intelligible species drops out of his noetics.”* This means that it was no

longer possible for him to say that knowledge of the truth resulted from a comparison the mind made between two species, one from the world and one from God. Instead he had to turn to other analytic images more amenable to his new view of knowledge through mental concepts or words generated by the mind itself. Of course, the mental words or species expressivae themselves could not be made to perform the same service as the earlier impressed species, since with the single exception of the primitive word by which the mind knew id quod verum est, they were the content of considered or

“judged” knowledge and therefore not available for comparison before the mind made its judgment of truth. No wonder Henry began to describe God as a divine agent and to characterize him more as an

art than as a light streaming into the mind. God as art was both a storehouse of perfect forms and an active principle. He might thereby refashion an earlier concept or word on a lower cognitive level so as to make it a more perfect representation of the truth — that is, he might transform a lower species expressiva into a new, more scientific one. There no longer had to be two species the mind itself was required to

compare. It is along these lines that Macken accounts for the subtle changes in emphasis Henry gave to his theory of divine intervention in Quodlibet IX. In Macken’s words, the superstructure of the theory of divine illumination remained fundamentally the same; it was merely adapted somewhat to fit the terms of Henry’s new noetics, on which it had necessarily to depend.?? Macken is surely right when he maintains that Henry had to modify his theory of illumination to accommodate changes in his noetics. No one can deny the importance of rejecting the notion of an impressed intelligible species. It was connected with adjustments in many more

areas of Henry’s thought than the question of knowledge of truth 28. Demonstration of the point is precisely the valuable contribution Nys made to medieval studies in his book De werking van het menselijk verstand. See especially chap. 3 of that work. 29. Macken, “La théorie,” p. 93. On p. 95, n. 57, Macken explains that he feels Henry’s modification to his theory of illumination was restricted to matters of detail. It is interesting to note that Henry had taken some initial steps towards such an understanding of the higher judgment of truth — that leading to sincera veritas — in his earliest works, on those occasions where he described God’s influence not so much as a species but as a figure or mark. See the discussion above, pp. 34-39.

102

| THE FINAL SUMMATION alone. Yet even more fundamental than the change in noetics manifested by the rejection of impressed species was a subtle and complicated process that seems to have unfolded slowly over the years of Henry’s literary activity. To understand this process we have to consider Henry’s metaphysics. It is not so much that Henry developed or changed his metaphysical ideas, although with time he surely sharpened his understanding of them and deepened his knowledge of how they fit together. Instead it was other areas of Henry’s thought that had to be altered as he progressively realized that they did not correspond to the

fundamental insights of his metaphysics and as he then made major realignments to rectify the problem. Indeed this is most likely what explains the change in Henry’s noetics to which Macken has drawn our attention.*° It accounts for the developments in Henry’s epistemology as well. If we are sensitive to this more profound or far-reaching modulation,

we can see that Henry’s final theory of divine intervention is much more different from the earlier theory of illumination than historians have generally recognized. The change involved more than just a minor

modification. By calling upon the peculiar presuppositions of his metaphysics, Henry actually transformed the import and significance of what he had said about science and knowledge before. Thus his description of how God intervened in human knowledge of the truth, as

he gave it in Quodlibet [X, had to mean something different from anything he had said previously because his theory of truth and the fundamentals of his epistemology, both of which determined the functions God’s actions were meant to serve, had been largely refashioned. They had been recast in accordance with a deepening awareness of the implications of his metaphysics that Henry had worked towards in the

intervening years. It is this deep development, this realignment of separate areas of his thought, that made possible the synthesis of all Henry’s previous ideas on the knowledge of truth. The evidence that Henry had come to view God’s role in knowledge of the truth in quite a different way by the time he wrote Quodlibet [X lies in the very language of question 15 of that Quodlibet, especially in a few passages not covered in the brief analysis given above. In order to interpret those passages correctly, however, it is necessary to look back over Henry’s theory of essence and being as he had been working 30. In his review of Nys’s De werking Paulus criticized Nys for his reluctance to consider metaphysical presuppositions that may have lain behind the changes in Henry’s views on noetics. See Paulus, “A propos,” pp. 494-96.

103

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it out since the earliest years of his literary activity.*! The theory itself was complete long before he used it in Quodlibet IX. Yet it was not until 1286 — that is, the year of that Quodlibet — that he explicitly applied it to his noetics and his epistemology in a way that made it possible to reconcile his earlier views on divine intervention into human cognition with his later, more worldly ideas, founded firmly in Aristotelian notions of logic and demonstrative science.

, Among all the problems of metaphysics that have arisen in the Western philosophical tradition, certainly the problem of the relation of essence (essentia) to being (esse) has been one of the most celebrated and most controversial. Its roots go back at least to Boethius in the Latin tradition and to Avicenna among the Arabs, but it was Thomas Aquinas who, with his classic statements in the third quarter of the thirteenth century, made the problem a lively issue among scholars in the medieval universities.2* Henry of Ghent’s literary activity came at the

time when the issue was being hotly debated in the schools of Paris, and he frequently took the opportunity in his writings to clarify his own stand on the matter. From the beginning he firmly rejected any real distinction between being and essence. Whatever the two terms meant, they did not refer to two different things (res) that came together to form a third or composite thing.*? Yet Henry did maintain 31. One of the best analyses of Henry’s ideas on essence and being can be found in Jean Paulus, Henri de Gand, especially pp. 67-135 and the diagram on p. 27. See also Riissman, Zur Ideenlehre, pp. 73-76 and 133-34; Paulus, “A propos,” p. 495; Jose Gomez Caffarena, Ser participado y ser subsistente en la metafisica de Enrique de Gante, Analecta Gregoriana, 93 (Rome, 1958); Walter Hoeres, “Wesen und Dasein

bei Heinrich von Gent und Duns Scotus,” Franziskanische Studien 47 (1965), especially pp. 124 and 154-56; and John F. Wippel, “Godfrey of Fontaines and Henry of Ghent’s Theory of Intentional Distinction between Essence and Existence,” in Sapientiae procerum amore: Mélanges médiévistes offerts a Dom JeanPierre Miller O.S.B., ed. Theodor W. Kohler (Rome, 1974), pp. 289-321; “The Reality of Nonexisting Possibles according to Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines,” Review of Metaphysics 34 (1981), 729-58; but most importantly, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, especially pp.

66-89 and 124-45. | | | | | ,

32. The classic work on the subject is Roland-Gosselin’s Le “De ente et essentia” de s. Thomas d’Aquin. It was Etienne Gilson, more than anyone else, who brought modern scholars to appreciate the importance of the distinction for Thomas. See espe-

cially Gilson, Le thomisme: Introduction a la philosophie de saint Thomas d’Aquin, 6th ed. (Paris, 1965). 33. See Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (1, 127vS). Henry made the same assertion in his nearly contemporary Quod. I, q. 9 (ed. Macken, p. 55). See also the articles by Edgar Hocedez: “Gilles de Rome et Henri de Gand sur la distinction réelle (1276-1287),”

Gregorianum 8 (1927), 358-84; and “Le premier quodlibet d’Henri de Gand (1276),” Gregorianum 9 (1928), 92-117. 104

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that there was some difference between the two, and he made various attempts throughout his career to show what he thought this difference was. Indeed it is hard to imagine that any scholastic coming after Thomas, who had made so much of the fact that in God alone did being and essence coincide, would not make some attempt to show how being and essence differed in creatures. Henry’s own view on the matter was considerably more complicated than that of Thomas or even most of his own contemporaries. The origin of his ideas went back to Avicenna. According to Henry’s interpretation Avicenna, in his Metaphysics, had meant to imply that there were two kinds or states of being, each of which had to be taken into account in describing the ontological underpinnings of created things. The first being was, in Henry’s words, the being of the essence (esse essentiae), which each thing had of itself insofar as through its own essence it participated in a divine exemplar. The second being was the being of existence (esse existentiae), and it came more from the outside (ab alio). This was the being that each thing had as a real object existing in the world, a being that could be seen as an effect of the divine will looking over the exemplars and choosing to realize some of them through the creative act.**

It should be noted that some recent scholars have claimed that Henry posited a third kind of being, equal in importance to the other two and indicative of a third level of reality. In making their interpretation these scholars confess their dependence on Godfrey of Fontaines, who made it clear that he thought this was the way Henry ought to be

read.2> According to such a reading, Henry held that in addition to esse essentiae and esse existentiae there was also esse rationis, what we 34. See Quod. I, q. 9 (ed. Macken, pp. 53-54). Macken (p. 53n, in the edition) suggests that the part of Avicenna’s Metaphysics Henry had in mind was — contrary to

the citation given in the text — Treatise VI, chapter 1 (and one might also add 2) (Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima, Tract. VI, 1 and 2, ed. Van Riet, II, 295 and 304). It would appear that Macken is right, although there are also passages at the beginning of Treatise V where Avicenna touched on nearly the same idea. See Liber de philosophia prima, Tract. V, 1 (ed. Van Riet, II, 233-35 and especially

237-38). ) | :

Henry also referred to esse essentiae in his early work, Summa, art. 3, q. 1 (1, 28rC). Paul Bayerschmidt, Die Seins- und Formmetaphysik des Heinrich von Gent in ihrer Anwendung auf die Christologie, Beitrage, 36/3-4 (Minster, 1941), p. 117, has noted that the terms esse essentiae and esse existentiae can also be found in Richard of Mediavilla.

35. The two most convincing expositions of this view are Wippel’s Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 67-78 and 73-74; and Paulus’s Henri de Gand, pp. 121-25. See also Wippel, “The Relationship between Essence and Exis105

THE THOUGHT GF HENRY OF GHENT

might call cognitive being. It is generally added that Henry had come to this view by taking the mere traces of a threefold analysis of being he had found in Avicenna’s Logic and converting them into a rigid and overly realistic scheme.*©

, To give this interpretation its due, it must be admitted that in one passage, in Quodlibet III, question 9, Henry did speak of three types of being (tres modi in esse). These were, in his words, esse naturae, esse rationis, and esse essentiae, terms which might well appear to cor-

relate with a threefold notion of a being of existence, a cognitive being, and a being of essence.*’ But we would be wrong to take this as evidence that Henry did indeed have such a simple, threefold scheme in mind. Elsewhere in his writings he made it plain that the fundamental division he saw among the ways things could be said to be was between the being of essence and the being of existence alone.*® Any further

subdivision was necessarily subordinate to this first and most basic one. There were, to be sure, further subdivisions one could make, at least

within the category of being of existence, for things could be said to exist either in the singular reality of the extramental world (in singularibus) or in the mind (in anima). These were the two kinds of existence that Henry was thinking of when, in Quodlibet III, he spoke of esse naturae and esse rationis. Yet this means that these latter two terms referred not to being of existence and some third being of comparable theoretical worth, but merely to two ways being of existence might be made manifest. If one reads Quodlibet III, question 9, carefully, one can see Henry taking pains to make this very point.?” He states quite clearly that he interpreted the passage from Avicenna’s Metaphysics tence in Late-Thirteenth-Century Thought: Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and James of Viterbo,” in Philosophies of Existence. Ancient and Medieval, ed. Parviz Morewedge (New York, 1982), p. 159, n. 68. For Godfrey, one must turn to his Quodlibet II, q. 2 (Godfrey of Fontaines, Les quatres premiers quodlibets, ed. Maurice De Wulf and Auguste Pelzer, Les Philosophes Belges, 2 [Leuven, 1904], pp. 59-60); and Quodlibet VIII, q. 3 (Godfrey of Fontaines, Le huitieme quodlibet, ed. Jean Hoffmans, Les Philosophes Belges, 4/1 [Leuven, 1924], pp. 35-36). 36. See Avicenna, Logica, I (in Avicenna, Opera in lucem redacta [Venice, 1508; rpt. Frankfurt am Main, 1961], fol. 2rb [first numeration]). Wippel, following Godfrey of Fontaines, draws attention to this passage in Avicenna. See Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, p. 67, n. 69. 37. See Henry, Quod. III, q. 9 (I, 61rO). 38. See not only the reference to Quod. I, q. 9, given above in n. 34, but also Summa, art. 28, q. 4 (I, 167vT), where Henry’s language could not be plainer. 39. See Quod. Ill, q. 9 (I, 60vO, 61rO, and 61vO). 106

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cited above to mean that the mind could conceive of every real object without simultaneously deciding whether this object actually existed in the mind or in external things — that is, without determining which of the two possible types of existence it possessed. Nevertheless, it did possess one of them, for otherwise this as yet indeterminate real object, considered so far only on the level of being of essence, would be some separated object, existing along the lines of Plato’s exemplary world. And to Henry this was patently false.*? In other words, the object had to have some being of existence, and either one of the two subtypes would do. It is sufficient, then, for our purposes to take into consideration just the two fundamental categories, being of essence and being of existence. Exactly what Henry meant by these two ways of being and how he thought they related to essence pure and simple can be determined only by examining what he had to say about them over his whole career. As has been noted, it would seem that on this metaphysical question Henry did not so much change his ideas over time — a pattern otherwise frequent in his philosophy — as deepen his awareness of how the terms of his analysis fit together and could be used.*! Here one could make reference to passages from among Henry’s very earliest writings to those composed towards the end of his life. The most important, however, are concentrated in the years of his greatest literary activity. They are article 21, questions 2 and 4, of the Summa, dating from no later than 1276; Quodlibet III, question 9, dating from Easter of 1278; and question 2 of Quodlibet V as well as the Summa, article 40. See Quod. III, q. 9 (1, 60vO): “Non autem dico quod quantum est de se habet esse absolutum absque eo quod habet esse in intellectu vel singularibus: tanquam sit aliquid separatum: sed dico quod hoc ipsum quod est habet conceptum in se absolutum absque omnibus conditionibus quae sequuntur: ut conceptus quo concipitur esse in anima, vel esse in rebus. . . . Ipsum enim hoc quod est in se natum habere secundum se conceptum absolutum sine omnibus conditionibus quae sequuntur illud, habet esse in istis: and non nisi in istis: quia aut est in anima, et universale, aut in rebus extra et singulare.” See also, in the same question, fol. 61rO. Paulus (Henri de Gand, p. 85) actually reveals that he appreciates this fact about the precise configuration of Henry’s so-called levels of being, even though in the pages referred to above, n. 35, he still comes down on the side of believing that Henry created an almost existential reality in his category of esse essentiae. Wippel, too, is willing to concede that for Avicenna the fundamental theoretical division lay between essence and existence. He simply does not believe the same was true for Henry. See Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, p. 68, esp. n. 74. 41. A notable exception to this rule was Henry’s vacillating position on the precise way

the sorts of being should be distinguished from essence. On this problem, see below, p. 117, n. 65. 107

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

34, question 2, both of which questions probably date from 1280.” These five questions provide the core of our understanding of Henry’s theory of being and essence. Henry began his analysis by thinking of reality in the broadest possible sense. For him the most common, most fundamental metaphys-

ical category, one that contained all others in a sort of analogical although not generic unity, was that of “thing” (res) as it was opposed to nothing else except that which was purely nothing. Included in this category was absolutely everything, both that which had a real existence outside a mind and that which was only a concept in some intel-

lect. Excluded was only that which could not even be thought.* In _ other words, this was reality stretched out to its rarest extreme, not only beyond any existence, but up to the limits past which the most acute mind, even that of God, could not go.” Within this most general of all categories, Henry discerned three concentric fields. The one of broadest expanse was, of course, coincident with the general category itself. This was the level of thing (res) as it included what could have being (ens) and what could not (non ens). It was “thing” extended as far as the imagination could reach, encom-

passing even the wildest fictions of the mind. Henry associated this level with the word res insofar as it was supposed to derive etymologically from reor, reris, the verb meaning “to suppose” or “to think.” He identified it simply as res a reor reris. Inside this field lay a more restricted set of things. These were things that could actually have exis-

tence in the world (although they might not have it yet), and the 42. On the dating see again Gomez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 133. As will be seen below, there are also significant treatments of this issue in Quodlibet I, q. 9; Quodlibet VII, qq. 1 and 2; Quodlibet X, qq. 7 and 8; Quodlibet XI, q. 3; and Summa, art. 28, q. 4, many of which contain passages dealing specifically with the troublesome question of how the two beings differ from essence. There are also references to the general problem of being and essence in Quodlibet VII, q. 13; Quodlibet VIII, gq. 12; and Quodlibet IX, qq. 1 and 2. 43. Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (1, 258rB). 44. For Henry, then, the idea of res (intentio de re) was purely and simply the first of all analytical categories, prior even to the idea of being (esse). This was so even though Henry agreed that the first and most basic concept available to the human mind was ens — that which was to become the foundation for Scotus’s transcendental

category of being. On ens see, for example, Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rR and S). There is an enormous literature on the notion of ens as first concept or first intention. For the problem as dealt with by Henry alone, one might begin by looking at Marrone, “Augustinian Epistemology after Bonaventure,” esp. pp. 278-85; and Stephen F. Brown, “Avicenna and the Unity of the Concept of Being: The Interpretations of Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, Gerard of Bologna and Peter Aureoli,” Franciscan Studies 25 (1965), esp. pp. 120-23. 108

THE FINAL SUMMATION

reason was that they all possessed or related to an exemplar in the mind of God. Such exemplars were, after all, the basis for all creation, the ultimate foundation for whatever eventually came into actual be-

ing in the world. Henry associated this level with “nature” (natura) and “essence” (essentia), although he also identified it with res as it could be said to derive from the word ratitudo, itself a cognate of reor but here meaning “reason” or “rational thought.” In this sense, the second set could be called simply res a ratitudine. A third field lay within the second, and it was the most restricted of all. This was the set of all things that were not just thought but had actual existence in the real world. It was drawn from the set of things that had divine exemplars, and it included all of creation at any time. Henry identified it simply as res existens in actu. These three names, res a reor reris, res a ratitudine, and res existens in actu, were the most common ones Henry used to describe his three, _ progressively more limited sets of “thing.” They were the terms employed in his Summa, article 21, questions 2 and 4.* In another pasSage in the same article 21, question 4, he referred to them as res absoluta, ens secundum essentiam, and ens secundum existentiam.™ It has already been noted that a common way for him to refer to the second set was as “essence” or “nature.” Other ways he described this group of things were as “quiddity” (quiditas), “quidditative entity” (ens quiditativum), or just “entity, simply construed” (ens simpliciter dictum).“’

His third set he sometimes called “entity existing in actuality” (ens

naturae).*® |

existens in effectu) or, more simply, the set of everything that could be

called a “natural thing” (res naturalis) or a “thing of nature” (res Whatever the language, the meaning of the three remained the

same. And they all revolved around God’s ideas as the fulcrum of reality, that which ultimately explained what was real and determined the shape of nature. The first level was in all ways the least “real.” It con-

tained some things that had no idea or exemplar (ratio exemplaris) 45. See Summa, art. 21, q. 2 (I, 124vK), and art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127rO). The first two terms also appear in Summa, art. 28, q. 4 (1, 167vV), and art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rR); Quod. V, q. 2 CI, 154rD); and Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (I, 258rB). 46. Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127vS). 47. For “quiddity” see Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (1, 258rB); for “quidditative entity” see Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rR); for “entity, simply construed” see Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127rM). 48. For “entity existing in effect” see Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127rM), and art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rS); for “natural thing” see Quod. III, q. 9 (1, 61rO); for “thing of nature” see Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rS). 109

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in the divine mind, and this meant for Henry that it contained some things that were purely nothing so far as the world of essence was con-

cerned (purum nihil in natura et essentia).” This did not mean that they were purely nothing in the most extreme or absolute sense, for some mental notion could be formed to represent them. If they had been strictly and absolutely nothing, then nothing could be thought or imagined about them, and they would have escaped “reality” in even this minimal sense.*° Yet such minimally real things would never be capable of taking shape in the real world; they would never be found to exist. What is more, Henry insisted that in the true sense of the word they could not even be understood. They could be imagined in a mental faculty below the intellect, such as the imaginative power, but they could never, in themselves, be the object of full intellectual comprehension.>! As examples of these minimally real things that made his first cate-

gory of reality the widest of all, Henry cited the traditional “golden mountain” and Aristotle’s “goat-stag.”>* He apparently accepted as a fact that neither object would ever exist, but he also recognized that upon hearing the words that named them, the mind could form some notion of what they might have been like had they ever come to be. It would seem, therefore, that what Henry had in mind was fictitious objects the mind itself constructed by putting together bits and pieces of

concepts taken from things it had actually encountered in the real world. Of course this would mean that for none of these objects could the mind produce a simple concept by which it could be directed to them as to a proper object of cognition. This is why Henry insisted that in themselves such objects could not truly be understood. Yet the mind could be said to grasp them, to have formed something like a concept of them, insofar as it could reduce them to components that were in fact more real. This did not make them objects of intellectual comprehension in the strict sense of the word. It did not even make them — according to Henry — candidates for actual existence. They were, quite simply, imaginary objects. And the only reason one could 49. Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127vS). 50. Henry said that the mind could form of such so-called objects “conceptus aliquis in anima” (ibid.). For “purely nothing” in the strict sense, which lay on the other side of reality no matter how broadly construed, see above, n. 43. 51. See Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (1, 212rS). 52. Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (1, 258rB). Aristotle spoke of the imaginary goat-stag in Posterior Analytics, II, 7 (92b5-8). See the translation by William of Moerbeke, which uses the Latin term Ayrcocervus, in Aristoteles Latinus, 4/1-4, ed. MinioPaluello and Dod, p. 326. 110

THE FINAL SUMMATION

imagine them was because, through the conceptual parts of which they were composed, they made contact with the firmer things of Henry’s second or third level. The second level brought reality closer to the solidity we associate with the word “real.” It was, perhaps, for Henry the realest level of all. Here we enter the realm of possible objects of the intellect that have, each one, exemplars in the mind of God. In terms of Henry’s philosophy this is what it meant to be a nature or to have essence.*? Indeed, entity began here. It was among the ideas of God that the structure of the real world was set out, and it was from those ideas that God chose what he would create. What is more, it was this level, the level of essence, that provided the basis for real understanding. The intellect could form authentic concepts only of those things for which there was an idea in God’s mind. This meant that it was only what God had thought of — that is, what he had formally enshrined in some divine idea — that was, in the strict sense, open to the scrutiny of the human mind, even though not all of God’s thoughts would ever be known by men. What God had not conceived was totally beyond human comprehension. Another way to put this is to say that being an essence was what was required to be an object of the intellect and that in the final analysis essence was limited to

that which possessed an exemplar in God. Even in the imaginary examples cited above, it was after all real essences that provided the components with which the mind exercised its imagination. To that extent the human intellect could never escape the limits of possibility conceived by God.

Of course, the fact that there was essence did not mean that the essence had been actualized. If God had fashioned the ideal of an essence, even if the human mind had understood what it was, the thing still might or might not exist outside some mind.°*° Actualization de-

- manded going on to the third level, passing out of essence pure and simple and into the world as it was. Here lay the natural world — not the nature spoken of before on the essential level but solid, reified nature as it confronted every living being. There was, of course, a con53. See Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (1, 127rM and O). 54. Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rR and S). Henry supported his strong emphasis on essence or quiddity as the foundation for reality with a reference to Avicenna, probably Liber de philosophia prima, Tract. I, 5, ed. Van Riet, I, 34-35. 55. Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rR and S). Strictly speaking, an essence that had been instantiated by being conceived in a mind, whether divine or human, had thereby been actualized. It had become a res rationis, and as shown above this was just as actual as any other piece of existence. Therefore the difference between res a rati111

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

nection between the two. The actual world grew out of nature as it was conceived by God, and in this way it was the expression of the divine order, the extension of God’s ideas into actual existence. Yet this actual world was something more than essence pure and simple, for it had passed beyond the ideal, beyond that which was suitable simply to be an object of the mind, and into the territory we associate with concrete reality. ‘It is against the background of these three fields of “thing” that one can begin to make sense of Henry’s distinction between the being of essence (esse essentiae) and the being of existence (esse existentiae). From his earliest works he had insisted upon the fact that these two ways of being were not the same.” Yet he realized that the distinction would not be immediately obvious to many of his readers. It had become almost commonplace to hold that there was a difference in creatures between essence and being, if being was taken to stand for actual

existence in the real world. Thomas Aquinas had driven the point home years before Henry began to set down his ideas in written form. God alone gave actual existence to things; it did not arise inherently out of their essential nature. But Henry was saying that there was yet a further distinction, not just between essence and the being that marked its actual existence but also between essence and a being that separated it from nonessence, from nothing at all. This was the esse essentiae, the being each essence had on its own and that seemed to arise out of it

| as a quality inseparable from essenceness itself.°>’ What could this additional being be?

According to Henry, being of essence (esse essentiae) was what came to “thing” and made it more than res a reor reris, made it rather essence, a proper object for thought and an exemplar for God’s creation. In other words, every essence already possessed a sort of being, not precisely as a part of it or another “thing” added onto it, but as an aspect of what it was to be essence. This brought “thing” to the level of res a ratitudine. Being an essence, however, still did not account for

actual existence in the world. For this, another being was required, tudine and res existens in actu was not the difference between idea and extramental existence. It was nevertheless true that the mind could conceive of an essence, and thus give it one sort of existence, without thereby knowing whether the essence had also been actualized outside any mind. It was also true, according to Henry, that every essense was, in fact, actualized in a mind, at the very least in the mind of God. (See above, pp. 106-7, nn. 39 and 40.) Consequently the important matter was as

stated here, to determine whether the essence also had extramental existence. 56. See above, p. 105, n. 34. 57. See Henry’s explicit comments on this score, Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127rN). 112

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and this was the being more commonly recognized by Henry’s contemporaries, the being of existence (esse existentiae). It, too, was not another “thing” added onto essence, but rather an aspect of what it was to be more than mere essence — to be an actually existing object. This

was the being that God gave in creation, and it drew essence out of eternity and inserted it firmly into time. It made “thing” a res existens in actu.*®

A diagram can best show how all these elements related.>?

res a reor reris

| esse essentiae res a vatitudine(essentia)

. | esse existentiae res existens in seme

Being of essence came to “thing as essence” and explained how it was different from that more general category of “thing” that had no more

connection to reality than the power of imagination. Being of existence came to “existing thing” and explained how it was different from essence alone, which of itself did not exist and in any case did not need

to have existence in the extramental world. One must focus on the vague words “came to,” for there was no real composition here, 1f that

meant a substantial or even accidental addition to “thing” along the way.©? What happened was instead a change or transformation that 58. On this, see the same passage as cited above, n. 57. 59. This diagram extrapolates from what Henry said in Summa, art. 21, qq. 2 and 4, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 124v, 127r-v and 212r); and Quod. V, q. 2 (I, 154r); as well as from Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (I, 258r); and Quod. XI, q. 3 (II, 443r). It represents, however, no more than one way of depicting how all these elements combine. The general schema is certain, but the precise connections are hard to specify with precision,

since Henry’s accounts are ultimately ambiguous about the fiendishly difficult problem of how essence and being combine. Thus one is torn between seeing esse essentiae, for example, as a component of res a ratitudine, as something added to res aratitudine, or as something that happens along the way from res a reor reris to res a ratitudine. 60. Henry was adamant on this score. See, for example, p. 104, n. 33 above. It should be noted that in one case, Quodlibet X, question 7, Henry spoke of essence as if it 113

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT

was revealed in the different existential texture the “thing” possessed.

Or perhaps one should not speak of change at all. For moving from one sort of “thing” to another did not, Henry insisted, necessarily entail any movement over time. Rather it indicated a hierarchical differentiation in the nature of a thing.®! Instead of change, perhaps what Henry was describing could best be characterized as the different ways “things” could be said to be as one scanned the various fields of reality. One might still ask how Henry explained the relation among these elements or categories in more precise, more technical, metaphysical were a composite of esse essentiae and a more fundamental, more-or-less quidditative element — not, however, res a reor reris but rather what he obliquely referred to as aliquid de propria ratione generis sui or aliquid per essentiam or even res generis. (See Quod. X, q. 7 [ed. Macken, pp. 152, 163, 169-70, 190].) Henry justified the idea by citing a distinction he found in Gilbert of Poitiers’s commentary on Boethius’s De hebdomadibus (Quomodo substantiae), a distinction between being (esse) and being something (esse aliquid). (See Gilbert of Poitiers, The Commentaries on Boethius, ed. Nikolaus M. Haring, Studies and Texts, 13 [Toronto, 1966],

p. 193.) This remarkably, perhaps even absurdly, subtle position was as far as Henry was to go in describing the ontological composition of reality in concrete terms. On this see also Jean Paulus, “Les disputes d’Henri de Gand et de Gilles de Rome sur la distinction de l’essence et de l’existence,” AHDLMA 13 (1940-42), 337. Ludwig Héodl, “Neue Nachrichten tiber die Pariser Verurteilungen der thomasischen Formlehre,” Scholastik 39 (1964), 178-96, has interesting remarks on another, equally complicated issue from another of the questions of Henry’s Quodlibet X. 61. See Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (1, 127rN). It is interesting to note, however, that in Quodlibet X, question 7, Henry did talk about a sort of movement or transformation that was involved in the creation of a thing. Perhaps this question, which, as has _ already been pointed out in n. 60, is incredibly complicated and abstruse, should be taken as an exception to the rest of Henry’s work. It was composed to answer Giles of Rome’s criticisms of Henry’s position on the relation of essence and existence (see Hocedez, “Gilles de Rome et Henri de Gand,” pp. 359-60), and in it Henry struggled to make his own views consistent, adding refinements so subtle that it is hard not to reject them as ultimately fruitless. At any rate, in that question Henry spoke of a kind of movement into actual existence, so that in a certain, not purely strict, sense, creation could be seen as generation (generatio). (See Quod. X, q. 7 [ed. Macken, pp. 153, 154, and esp. 172-75].) Hocedez, “Gilles de Rome et Henri de Gand,” p. 364, and Paulus, “Les disputes,” pp. 340-41, have pointed out that by making this claim Henry was accommodating his views to those of his opponent in this question, Giles of Rome. What is perhaps most interesting here is that in his desire to preserve creation ex nihilo, Henry placed esse essentiae first, with the other layers of reality such as essence being added to it through creation, in much the way form was said to be generated out of the potential of matter. This would seem to violate Henry’s more common insistence that essence was the fundamental kernel of all reality. In Quod. XI, q. 3 (II, 442rX-Z), Henry was back to speaking about essence as primary, naturally prior to being, although it is not exactly clear from the discussion whether this should be taken as a contradiction of what he said in Quodlibet X. 114

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terms. The occasion for drawing such distinctions had been his discussion about the relation of being to essence, and the terms of his explanation did not stray far from the original problem. One must keep in mind, however, that unlike the case for most of his contemporaries, for Henry there were not just two key elements whose relation he had to explain, but three: essence, the being of essence, and the being of existence. According to Henry there were three ways objects available to our understanding could be said to differ.© The first was if they differed by ratio, which formed the basis for Henry of the slightest, most tenu-

ous distinction capable of being analyzed. A ratio was, technically speaking, a purely mental characterization, and Henry explained that if two objects differed only because they could be referred to with dif-

ferent rationes, then the intellect could literally not understand one without simultaneously understanding, or at least already having all that was necessary to understand, the other. Thus it could not not know that its two objects coincided in the same thing. Objects that dif-

fered in this way were, therefore, so much the same that they could

| never be separated or severed one from the other, even in the mind. Their distinction was what we might call logical, or perhaps even better, conceptual. An example would be the definition “rational animal” and its definitum, “man.” Although the literal conceptual content of

these two terms was different, they were really the same thing, and either necessarily implied the other. Henry’s second kind of distinction was a bit greater; it applied when 62. On these three forms of distinction or difference, and especially on the differences by ratio and by intentio, see Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127vS); and Quod. X, q. 7 (ed. Macken, pp. 163-66). Although by any understanding, difference by ratio and difference by intentio both fell short of real difference, exactly what the two meant and how or whether they were to be distinguished was a hotly debated issue in the late thirteenth century. No study has yet adequately investigated the various ways they were used by different scholastics. An attempt to define them as Henry used them can be found in Brown “Sensation,” pp. 252-56, and “Abstraction,” pp. 8586. This marks a beginning, but I do not altogether agree with Brown’s analysis. For other recent (and more successful) efforts, see Wippel, “Godfrey of Fontaines”; and The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 80-85; Macken, “Les diverses applications de la distinction intentionelle chez Henri de Gand,” Sprache und Erkenntnis im Mittelalter, Akten des VI. internationalen Kongresses fiir mittelalterliche Philosophie, 29 August-3 September 1977, Miscellanea Mediaevalia, 13 (Berlin, 1981), II, 769-76; and Ludwig Héodl, “Neue Begriffe und neue Wege der Seinserkenntnis im Schul- und Einflussbereich des Heinrich von Gent,” in Die Metaphysik im Mittelalter, ed. Paul Wilpert, Miscellanea Mediaevalia, 2 (Berlin, 1963), p. 614. 115

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each object could be referred to with a different intentio. An intentio was a mental characterization that was more connotatively exclusive than a ratio. If two objects differed by intentio, this meant the mind could actually conceive of one without thereby conceiving of, or having already the basis for conceiving of, the other. More important, the mind could know that whatever was represented by one intentio applied to a specific referent of its knowledge without knowing whether whatever was represented by the other intentio did or did not. The reason for this was that a distinction by intentio was more firmly grounded in objective conditions than the weaker distinction by ratio. The objects, qualities, or states designated by different intentiones were more truly different, and there was nothing about one of them that necessitated the presence of the other, although when they did occur together they might by that fact and in that particular case be necessarily and inseparably united. In other words, this distinction, for which there can be no more appropriate word than Henry’s own “intentional,” was in some way more “real” than the former. An exam-

ple of two terms that differed this way can be found in the genus “animal” and the specific difference “rational.” These two were not coincident, either conceptually or in all real objects, yet when they did happen to come together, as in the case of any man, they could not be separated except in the mind. The difference between two objects intentionally distinct was not, however, so real as to imply the presence of two different things or res. For this, one had to progress to Henry’s third way of differing, by a real difference, as among two different objects that were not only not combined by any natural or precedent necessity, but which could never be so combined as to make them really one. Here Henry mentioned the example of a substance and its accident, although of course any two substances were also “really” distinct. Throughout his whole career Henry maintained that the first and third of his basic metaphysical elements, essence and being of existence, differed in his middle way, more than by ratio, less than as two things. This was to say that they were different by an intentional distinction.*? The mind could conceive of an essence without knowing whether that essence possessed being of existence — that is, whether, in addition to the obvious circumstance that by being conceived it received existence in the mind, it also existed in actual fact outside. For 63. See, for instance, Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127vQ and 128rS-V), art. 27, q. 1 (I, 161rG), art. 28, q. 4 (I, 168rX); Quod. I, q. 9 (ed. Macken, p. 55); and Quod. X, q. 7 (ed. Macken, pp. 163-64, 166, and 195-96). 116

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Henry this is what it meant to say that essence and existence were not really distinct, but also not exactly the same. When it came to essence and being of essence, on the other hand, Henry found the difference more difficult to pin down. Early in his

career he seems to have felt that these two were indeed all but conceptually the same, so that they did not represent different intentiones but only different rationes by which the mind understood a simple essence.™ There is evidence, however, that by 1280 he had changed his mind on this matter and come to believe that essence and its own pe-

culiar being of essence differed as greatly as essence and being of existence, or at least almost as greatly (guodammodo contraria intentione).®> Whether he again changed his mind is hard to say with any certainty, but it would appear that by 1286, when he wrote his somewhat eccentric question 7 of Quodlibet X, he was at least equivocating, if not returning to his original view that the distinction was only by

ratio. Whatever the case, it would seem that Henry generally held that the difference between essence and being of existence was at least

marginally more objectively based and easier to draw than that between essence and being of essence, although the latter two were still in some way to be kept distinct. 64. See Quod. I, q. 9 (ed. Macken, p. 55), a question that dates from 1276, and Summa, art. 28, q. 4 (I, 168rX), datable to around 1279. 65. Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127vO-Q). Gémez Caffarena has argued that this passage, found in a part of the Summa that in its original form was composed no later than 1276, is an insertion entered later by the author. According to his calculations this addition was made at least after Henry had written article 28, q. 4, of the Summa and perhaps as late as Quodlibet V, datable to 1280. Gdmez Caffarena reads Quod. V, q. 2 (I, 154r-v[D]), as positing an intentional distinction between essence and being of essence, and so in his view this provides a firm date by which we can be sure Henry had come to hold his new position. (See Gémez Caffarena, “Cronologia,” p. 132; and Ser participado, pp. 264-69.) In fact, it is difficult to be confident about exactly what point Henry was trying to make in Quodlibet V, question 2, so obscure is his language, but Gomez Caffarena’s interpretation is at least possible. There can be no doubt, moreover, that Henry did hold to something like an intentional distinction between essence and being of essence when he wrote the passage in the Summa, art. 21, q. 4, cited at the beginning of this note. And finally there must have been some revision in either this question of the Summa or in the more-or-less parallel Quodlibet I, q. 9, for each refers to the other (see Summa, art. 21, q. 4 [I, 127vP], and Quod. I, q. 9 [ed. Macken, p. 55]). It is therefore reasonable to accept Gomez Caffarena’s arguments on this matter, but only provisionally, taking care not to rest any crucial part of one’s interpretation of Henry upon them. It is to be hoped that the critical edition of Henry’s Summa will shed more light on this matter. 66. Gomez Caffarena (see the passages from his works cited above, n. 65) has maintained that from the time of Quodlibet V Henry consistently held to the view that 117

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Nevertheless it is important to remember that for all their differences, Henry’s three fundamental elements were in some way very much the

same. After all, Henry had insisted that the distinction among them did not involve any real difference — a difference re or in re.®’ This was to say that when all three were present — as, for example, in every created object in the world — they could not be distinguished in any way that made one a different “thing” from the other two. They were

not, therefore, even so different as two elements like substance and | accident or —to press this point even farther — matter and material form, which could not exist apart but nevertheless could be considered from a metaphysical point of view to be two “things.” To show how this was possible Henry drew an analogy to several other cases he thought were similar, specifically, “light,” “running,” and “life.” In each case one could talk about a single object in at least

three ways. In the first, for instance, one could talk about “light” (/ux), or one could talk about “shining” or “a shining thing” (/ucens), or one could talk about “to shine” (/ucere); in the second, one could speak of “a running” (cursus), or of “a running thing” (currens), or of “to run” (currere). Life could be described as “life” (vita), as “living” or “a living thing” (vivens), and, finally, as “to live” (vivere). To focus on the third case alone, if one were to imagine a life that was totally immaterial, such as was the case in a separated soul, then the three different terms would in reality come to designate much the same thing. essence and being of essence differed intentionally. Paulus, Henri de Gand, pp. 313-14, and esp. p. 134, n. 2, admitted that Henry played with the idea of an intentional distinction between essence and being of essence, as evidenced in the Summa, art. 21, q. 4, but he added that Henry shortly returned to the position he originally held in Quodlibet I, q. 9, that the two were different only by ratio. As evidence Paulus cited not only the Summa, art. 28, q. 4 (see above, n. 65), which predated Quodlibet V, but also Quodlibet X, q. 7, composed long after, in 1286. The evidence of Quodlibet X, q. 7, is in fact not quite so clear. A passage that Henry struck out while making his final redaction for publication does say explicitly that essence and being of essence differ only by ratio. (See Quod. X, q. 7 [ed. Macken, p. 169, critical apparatus].) Yet in the text as it appears in the final version, this conclusion is only hinted at, never explicitly stated. (See, for instance, p. 163.) The difficulty Henry would have faced in holding to only the lesser distinc-

tion is that it would have made it harder for him to show how God, in whom essence and being of essence could differ by no more than by ratio, was essentially simpler than created essence. Perhaps this is why Henry took such pains in this question to introduce his peculiar distinction between being of essence and aliquid per essentiam, two elements he said differed intentionally and of which every created essence was composed. (See above, p. 113, n. 60.) On this matter see also Macken in his edition of Henry’s Quodlibet X, pp. li and lv. 67. See above, p. 104, n. 33. 118

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“Life” would describe the nature of the soul itself; “living” would indi-

cate it as a substance, something in which there was a disposition to life; and “to live” would point to the act that characterized the soul for what it was. Since each of the terms described the object according to a different state of being, they would in an important way each have a different meaning. Yet given the fact that the object they referred to itself possessed no real composition, their diversity would not correspond to any more than a difference of ratio or, at the very most, of intention. In the final analysis they would all denominate exactly the same “thing.” © The same was true when it came to essence and the two sorts of being. When they were stretched over all the fields of reality, it was clear how they were different, but in the case of any single thing, they were all really the same. In the end the distinction came down to the differ-

ent ways a thing could relate to God. “Thing” in the widest sense implied no relation at all. The res a reor reris could be so fictional that it had no reflection in God, no tie to an exemplary ideal.© Below this, on the level of essence or res a ratitudine, there was a relation. A “thing” became an essence insofar as it had a relation to God (ex respectu ad

68. For this discussion see Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127vP and 128rT and V). It must be noted, however, that here, too, Henry changed his mind over time. In the passages from Summa, art. 21, q. 4, and in Quod. I, q. 9 (ed. Macken, p. 56), he maintained that cursus, currens, currere or vita, vivens, vivere differed by intention, while in Summa, art. 27, q. 1 (1, 161rG), and art. 28, q. 4 (I, 168rX), he explicitly took back what he had said before, holding now that they were different only by ratio. Correspondingly, in the first two questions he said that the difference among the three verb derivatives was similar to that between essence and being of existence, while in the second two questions he said it was analogous only to the difference between essence and being of essence. It is interesting to note that this might be taken as evidence against the view of Gomez Caffarena outlined above in n. 65, for in the passage in Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 127vP), that Gomez Caffarena says was added later, Henry supported his argument for the intentional distinction between essence and being of existence by drawing an analogy with the distinction between /ux and lucere, vita and vivere. Yet seeing these verbal correlatives as themselves intentionally distinct would seem to be Henry’s earliest position, one he abandoned in the later articles 27 and 28 of the Summa. This would suggest that the so-called insertion was also composed before articles 27 and 28. 69. Henry was careful to add that this was true only for the res a reor reris in its totality. If it was broken down into its parts, each part would be an essence with an exemplar in God. Thus the golden mountain as a whole was fictional, but gold and mountain taken separately were real essences (see above, p. 110, n. 52). If even the parts did not have a relation to God, then the res a reor reris would have been completely unimaginable — that is, it would have been absolutely nothing in the purest sense.

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deum), and this relation consisted in the fact that it was exemplified by a divine exemplar for all eternity. Beneath essence there was the possibility of an even further relation. An essence became an existing thing, a res existens in actu, when it related to God not just as something exemplified by an ideal but as a real effect of God’s will (effectus [dei] ex tempore), an effect of him who had the power to bring things

into creation from nothing more than his own idea.” Seen from this point of view it is clear how the two kinds of being were not really (re) different from the “things” to which they came. They were the concomitants of a new relation to God — the sign of an increased ontological texture, perhaps — but not truly anything more than the essence or thing itself. Looking back up from a real thing in the world, a res existens in actu, it was as if one could see a telescoping series of relations, each one becoming sharper, involving more of reality itself, as one approached the viewer. Yet the object to which these relations attached was in a way always one and the same. Whether one saw it at its vaguest, limited only by the quality of being imaginable, or at its most concrete, an existing thing, it was always “thing,” the kernel to all reality and the principle behind all that was known by the mind. If “thing” was, however, the most general term, the most inclusive category that could be applied to reality, in the end one is struck by the central place that essence or res a ratitudine held in Henry’s scheme. Despite his insistence that, strictly speaking, “thing” and “essence” and “existing entity” were analytical categories and not stages in the onto-

logical development of an object, nevertheless there remains in his work the less emphatic but equally significant recognition that objects did, in fact, move from one of these general levels to another and were progressively transformed in the process.’! Furthermore this movement did not go in a straight line, but rather tended outward from the center, from essence. A fictitious thing did not become an essence as God thought of an idea for it. Instead things went just the other way.

As the mind denatured essences and combined them in monstrous ways, they became nothing more than fictions with no essential reality. They lost the ontological texture founded in an exemplary relation to God. On the other hand essences — at least insofar as they were ideas in God’s mind — did become existing entities. As God chose to create 70. On these two relations (respectus or relationes), see Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 170vQ and 128rS). See also Quod. III, q. 9 (I, 61rO); Quod. V, q. 2 (I, 154rD); and Quod. X, q. 8 (ed. Macken, pp. 201-2). 71. On this movement or transformation see above, p. 114, n. 61. 120

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things and construct a different relation between himself and what he had in mind, a new being flowed into essence and transformed the way it could be said to be. Henry himself admitted that unlike the being of essence the being of existence did come to essence de novo — that is, in time and external to the nature of the thing.” This emphasis on essence, and the concomitant asymmetry in the way the two beings were inserted into Henry’s metaphysical scheme, is likewise evident in the different ways, already hinted at above, he explained to what the two sorts of being could be reduced.”? Both beings were something the subject participated in, which was to say that they both came not from the thing itself but from God. But the first being,

the being of essence, was a being the thing participated in formally (esse participatum formaliter). Since the form was what defined the essence, this meant that in some way the essence, by its very essenceness, possessed this being. This made sense, given the terms of Henry’s

system. A thing was an essence because it had an exemplar in God, and it had being of essence for the same reason. This is why Henry maintained that the difference between essence and being of essence was at least slightly less marked than that between essence and being of existence. The second being, being of existence, was, in contrast, a being the thing participated in effectively (esse participatum effective). This being came as an effect of God, as if God took an essence that in some way already existed — on an ideal plane, of course — and added an existence that put it in the world outside the divine mind. In other words this kind of being was not an inherent attribute of essence, and it consequently had to differ from essence by intention.

The core to “thing” was, then, the essence, the permanent center around which the other forms of reality seemed to revolve. This is what it meant to say — as indicated above — that entity began on this level.’* Indeed Henry explicitly stated that the very character of being

an essential thing, a res a ratitudine, derived from the more fundamental character of entity (ratio entis), what he also called quidditative

being (esse quiditativum).'> Here, at last, one is at the very heart of Henry’s understanding of essence and being. Essence provided, first 72. Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (1, 127vO). 73. See Quod. I, q. 9 (ed. Macken, p. 55) and also above, n. 70. 74. See my discussion above, p. 111. 75. “Sciendum quod ratio rei dictae a reor reris prima est in unoquoque ente creato, et super illam rationem rei prima ratio quae fundatur est ratio entis sive esse quiditativi, quae convenit ei ex respectu ad formam divini exemplaris, a quo accipitur ratio

rei dictae a ratitudine, quae eadem est cum ratione entis quiditativi.” Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rR). 121

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of all, the foundation for the mental world, since everything that was truly an object of the mind had to be an essence. Yet essence also laid the basis for the world of being. Entity began with essence; the first sort of being was inextricably involved with it; and actual existence came to it de novo, through creation and presumably even in time. There can be no clearer indication of the importance of this piece of Henry’s philosophy. In his theory of essence and existence we see the convergence, on the element “essence” itself, of the world of mind and the world of being. Being and thought were at this point one. It was also at this point that God, through his ideas, had constant and immediate contact with the world of reality. As early as article 21, question 4, of the Summa Henry explained that the first kind of being that came to a thing, the being of essence that made it a res a ratitudine, involved the thing in a relation that was eternal.’° According to what he had already said this was, of course, the relation between the thing — which was, at this level, a pure essence and not yet a created actuality — and an exemplar in God’s mind. In adding that this con-

nection held throughout all eternity (in other words, that the two terms of the relation, exemplar and exemplified, were engaged in their mutual dependence from before the beginning of time), Henry was,

however, setting up a problem that would lead deep into his metaphysics. After all, he now had to account for the eternity of both the terms that went into the relation, not only the exemplar, which all scholastics would admit was identical with God, but also the exempli-

, fied itself — in this case, the pure essence. This meant that he had to account, with some ontological precision, for what this eternal essence was or where it was to be located, at the very least explaining what it was or where it was located before time began.”’

Henry never dealt with this problem in absolutely unambiguous terms. Instead one has to extract a solution from his writings, largely by extrapolation. According to one interpretation the inevitable inference to be drawn from Henry’s theories was that absolute essence was some eternal actuality, alongside God and different from him. Those of Henry’s contemporaries who drew this inference rejected his theories 76. Summa, art. 21, q. 4 (I, 128rS). See also Quod. IX, q. 1 (ed. Macken, pp. 10-11). 77. It was this notion of an essence, eternal and prior to the reception of being of existence, that gave rise to the critical views of such as Godfrey of Fontaines, who pointed to the implications he thought Henry’s theory of esse essentiae held for the notion of creation. For example, Godfrey said that if Henry were to be consistent, he would have had to deny that creatures were created from nothing as well as accept the possibility of the creation of the world from eternity. On this, see Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 140-41. 122

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as unsatisfactory, and their position has been seconded by a number of modern critics who have adopted the same interpretation. ”® After all, Henry had unquestionably set up a relation between two terms, exemplar and exemplified, a relation that he insisted was real on the part of the exemplified if only logical or conceptual (relatio rationis) on the part of the divine exemplar in God.’? Furthermore he indicated how

important it was for him that the two terms not be confused or thought of as merely two synonyms for a simple subject. This was already evident in his insistence that the relation was real on the part of one of the two correlatives; it could not therefore be a relation of mere identity.°° Yet the same point was equally apparent in the care he took to show how the two correlative terms had to be analyzed or defined in sharply different ways. The exemplar or divine term was an ideal reason (ratio idealis) in God’s mind. The exemplified term was, on the other hand, the essence of the thing, that “something” that the thing was of and for itself (id quod est ad se aliquid per essentiam).®' This being the case, was it not reasonable to suppose that the essences were, already on the level of being of essence, something in some way

really different from God? And did this not mean that there was, at least in some minimal way, something besides God that existed for all eternity? ®2

78. Godfrey of Fontaines was perhaps Henry’s most persistent and incisive critic on this score, and for his arguments one can do no better than begin with the analysis given by John Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, pp. 70-71 and 132-36. For other modern studies of Henry that draw many of the same conclusions, see Paulus, Henri de Gand, especially pp. 90-92 and 291-303; and Gomez Caffarena, Ser participado, pp. 30-32; as well as Wippel’s “Reality of Nonexisting Possibles,” pp. 140-51; and W. Norris Clarke, “The Problem of the Reality and Multiplicity of Divine Ideas in Christian Neoplatonism,” in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. Dominic J. O’Meara (Albany, 1982), esp. pp. 124-25. 79. In Quod. IX, q. 1 (ed. Macken, p. 16), Henry explained that God could have no real relation to anything outside him, yet as he noted in the same question (ed. Macken, pp. 7-8) creatures, through their exemplified essences, did have a real relation to God. Wippel makes much of the reality of this side of the relation (see The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, p. 71, n. 83). 80. As Henry pointed out in Quod. IX, q. 1 (ed. Macken, pp. 6-7), any relation of identity was purely and simply a relatio rationis or secundum rationem. 81. Quod. IX, q. 1 (ed. Macken, p. 22): “Et est inter Deum et creaturam relatio secundum genus causae formalis quae est inter exemplar et exemplatum: et est secundum rationes ideales, a quibus formaliter, licet non effective, sunt creaturarum essentiae id quod sunt ad se aliquid per essentiam.” The distinction is drawn perhaps even more forcefully in Quod. IX, q. 2 (ed. Macken, pp. 36-37 and 44). 82. This is precisely the point made by Wippel and, before him, Godfrey of Fontaines. See Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines, p. 133, esp. n. 91. 123

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It is tempting to read Henry in this way. Indeed he practically invited such criticism by the fact that he never provided a fully adequate philosophical explanation of how he would render his ideas invulnerable to such interpretation. Yet this does not mean that these implica-

tions represented what Henry had in mind. As awkward, perhaps ultimately unsatisfying, as Henry’s attempts to clarify the nature of eternal essences may have been, it will not do to accuse him of propounding or even condoning these inferences that others have drawn from his thought. If one looks deeply into the foundations he laid for his theory of essence, one can see that he took pains to preempt such inferences from the start. The fact is that Henry’s general scheme of essence was designed with the express purpose of marking out a field of analysis that abstracted from all considerations of real existence or actuality, whether this be in time or not, in the created cosmos or in

God. To project onto his theories some notion of an actuality coeternal with God, as if the idea formed an integral and intentional part of them, is seriously to distort what he wanted to say.

It was perhaps in Quodlibet VII, questions | and 2, where Henry made this point most plainly. Henry’s purpose in those questions was to discuss what sorts of things were represented by ideas in the mind of

God. This naturally brought him to examine essence, that aspect of “thingness” he had said arose out of or was characterized by a relation to a divine idea. To clarify his thoughts on the subject Henry felt compelled to distinguish among ways essence could be viewed. It must be recognized that although the quiddity or essence of a thing [can] have being in only two ways (solum duplex esse habet) — that is, one way in singulars outside the intellect, the other in the intellect itself — nevertheless it can be considered in four ways (quadruplicem habet considerationem): one way as it is in external singulars, another as it has being (esse) in the in-

tellect, another as it is abstracted from singulars and thus predicable of them. The fourth way it can be considered is absolutely and in itself (secun-

dum se et absolute), and when considered in this way it is, as Avicenna says, quiddity pure and simple (non est nisi id quod est).”

It should be clear that the first two ways Henry thought essence could be considered were as it had existence, esse existentiae, either in the mind or in nonmental objects — and these were the only two ways essence could ever actually be. The third way essence could be considered was as a logical marker, a universal predicate or term. It is the fourth, however, that is of interest to us, for here Henry was talking 83. Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (II, 256v-257r[X]). 124

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about essence in and of itself, his own category of res a ratitudine. As always he claimed he had taken the idea from Avicenna; on this occasion his reference was to Avicenna’s Metaphysics, Tractatus V, chapter 1.54 This fourth way was essence considered absolutely, exclusive of

any conditions of actuality.® It was essence considered in this way whose ontological status provoked such debate. In pointing to essence considered absolutely and in itself Henry was not suggesting that in any specific instance the essence was not con-

nected with conditions of actuality. He was not, as his opponents charged, trying to set up a world ontologically independent of God or his creation. Immediately after the passage from Quodlibet VII, questions 1 and 2, quoted above, he insisted that no one would rationally maintain that such essence or quiddity could be in itself (esse secun-

dum se) outside of singulars or its mental realization in some intellect. There was no separate world of essential being; all essences were

in fact realized in some particular, existential way.®’ That essence could be abstracted from being of existence, that it could even be considered as not existing at all, was possible only because in such instances the essence assumed ontological actuality as it resided as a mental fact in a mind.®8 In other words absolute essence could be abstracted from actuality or existence, but it could never really be separated from it. Even the process of abstraction brought the essence into contact with existence, the existence furnished by the abstracting mind. The point of Henry’s category of absolute essence was not, therefore, to clutter up metaphysics with a third realm of actuality in addition to the divine and the created, but simply to make possible the analysis of essence in complete isolation from questions of existence, or what modern philosophers might call existential import. It was this theoretical attitude toward absolute essence, res a ratitudine, that determined the ontological status Henry gave it before time, as it was an essence over all eternity. Before creation there were essences, the “something” that things were of and for themselves, but 84. See Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima, V, 1 (ed. Van Riet, II, 233-34). See also the reference to Avicenna’s Logic given above, p. 106, n. 36. 85. See also Quod. III, q. 9 (I, 60vO), a passage quoted in part above, p. 107, n. 40.

86. Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (II, 257rX). 87. Quod. III, q. 9 (1, 60vO). See the passage quoted above, p. 107, n. 40. 88. Quod. X, q. 7 (ed. Macken, p. 166): “Et quod propterea unum illorum, ut essentia, potest intelligi sub opposito esse existentiae, non dico quod possit esse nisi in mente tantum: aliter enim simul existeret et non existeret.” Also Quod. III, q. 9 (1, 61rO):

“ ..Tes essentiae . . . est secundum se in intellectu tantum: inquantum scilicet concipitur sine omni conditione rei alterius.” 125

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they were or existed not by and from themselves but by and from something else (ab alio). Like any other essence that was not realized in some external singular, they were in understanding alone, in some intellect, only in this case the intellect was that of God.®? They were, then, something essential because they were in the divine knowledge.” This meant, of course, that they had only the diminished being Henry attributed to any conceptual entity. Yet for Henry this was sufficient to say that before creation there was some naturally prior, essential basis for created reality.7! Still, one might ask, would Henry concede that these eternal essences were not different from God? The answer appears to be: yes, he would. In the end the prior, essential foundation for created reality was God himself. As the criticism of Henry’s opponents serves to remind us, no orthodox Christian could easily maintain that there was something other than God, no matter how insubstantial, that was coeternal with him and existing before the creation of the world. Henry, too, recognized this and on several occasions took it upon himself to criticize such a view. As he saw it, this was the position that Aristotle had attributed to Plato. According to Aristotle, said Henry, Plato had maintained that the ideas of things were identical with pure essences — something like Henry’s absolute essence — and that they existed on their own in some eternal world, separate from the material world here below but also separate from the divine mind. Henry countered that

Plato had never intended to imply this. For him, as for Henry, the ideas resided in the divine mind and were either God’s ideal reasons or the absolute essences as God knew them over eternity.?* Yet if ideal 89. Quod. IX, q. 1 (ed. Macken, pp. 22-33): “Nos ergo qui debemus ponere quod nec creaturae sunt, etiam ut obiecta cognita existentia in divina cognitione, id quod sunt ad se aliquid per essentiam, nisi ab alio, et id quod sunt per essentiam aliquid existentia in sola cognitione, non est ab alio effective secundum genus causae efficientis, quia illud solum respicit rerum existentias, necesse habemus ponere quod est ab alio, sed secundum genus causae formalis exemplaris tantum. .. .” See also above, n. 81. 90. Quod. IX, q. 2 (ed. Macken, p. 28): “. . . quae sunt per essentiam aliquid in divina cognitione.” See also the same question, p. 34. 91. Quod. IX, q. 2 (ed. Macken, p. 31): “Ista autem non sunt sic diminuta respectu entis quod Deus est, et existentia in esse cognito, quin in illo esse sint aliquid ad se per essentiam, quod natum est, Deo efficiente, etiam existere extra divinum intellectum praeter esse cognitum, in esse existentiae quod est esse verum et perfectum.” This is the passage that Wippel and Godfrey have taken as arguing strongly for their quite different interpretation. (See above, p. 123, n. 82.) On diminished being see above, Chap. 3, nn. 7, 33, 46, and 47. 92. There are two key passages where Henry discussed this matter. In Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (I, 257rX), he said that Plato identified the ideas with the ideal reasons in 126

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reasons and absolute essences both resided in God’s mind, then they must both be identical with God’s own essence. All scholastic theologians would have readily accepted that the ideal reasons were identical with God. It was the peculiarity of Henry’s theory of absolute essence that he was forced to admit that, for all his efforts to distinguish between essence and ideal reason, over eternity the essences, too, were identical with God. The philosophical complexity of such a position is, indeed, astonishing. Yet it is practically impossible to escape the conclusion that Henry did intend to defend this view. For all his tendency to obscurity on this final point, there are two places where he dealt with the issue more or jess head-on. His language on these two occasions argues strongly for

the interpretation given above. According to the first passage, to be found in Quodlibet VII, the ideas as ideal reasons in God’s mind served as exemplary forms for existing things in the created world. They also served as exemplary forms for the pure essences, irrespective of where these essences found their actual manifestation. Yet outside creation — perhaps more correctly, before creation but over eternity — the es~ sences had no actuality except that provided by the ideas to which they were related. The almost inescapable conclusion was that, in this case, the essences fell back upon this ideal and purely divine support, so that over eternity the exemplified essences were actually nothing other than the divine ideas that exemplified them.?? And if the objection is made

God’s mind. By Quod. IX, q. 2 (ed. Macken, pp. 36-37), he was ready to concede that perhaps Plato had meant the ideas to be the essences of things as they existed in the divine mind. At any rate, by either interpretation Aristotle’s accusations were unfounded. Aristotle’s exposition of Plato’s views on the ideas comes in Metaphysics, I (A), 6. Henry quoted Plato’s Timaeus, II, 1, as evidence Plato did not hold to the views Aristotle ascribed to him. See Plato, Timaeus a Calcidio translatus commentarioque instructus, ed. Jan H. Waszink, Plato Latinus, 4, 2nd ed. (London, 1975), p. 32. 93. See Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (I, 257rX). The precise wording of this passage is at times ambiguous, but its general meaning is clear. I would translate it as follows: Therefore, such essences of things are not in themselves the ideas of particular things in the external world. Instead, the ideas of the essences themselves are those [ideas] that are in the divine wisdom [and that are] in no way different from it. Now the essences of things themselves, of which [these divine exemplars] are the ideas, are also in [the divine wisdom], and they have being nowhere else before they have being in particular things in the external world, or in an angelic or human mind.

Although Henry still shows here his determination to distinguish the notion of essence from the notion of the idea, he leaves no doubt that the essences have eternal being in God. For the orthodox Christian this meant that they were God. 127

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that this conclusion is based partially on inference, the second passage I have in mind would seem to provide no cause for such hesitation. Here, in Quodlibet IX, Henry made the point explicitly. Essences and divine ideas were, from the perspective of eternity, the same.™ In short, both extremes in the eternal relation making up being of essence — the exemplified as well as the exemplar — could ultimately be reduced to the divine. It was, in this way, God himself who constituted the foundation for — in a sense, the substance of — essence or res a ratitudine, short of any particular manifestation of the essence as a created thing or a concept in a created mind. Another way of putting it was to say that God’s knowledge made things what they essentially were; it constituted things in their essence for all eternity.” This point of view provided the key to the ontology behind Henry’s theory of essence. By or from itself, the essence had no being. Yet this was not to say that it could be separated from being altogether, something that was true only of res a reor reris. In speaking of being, one had to remember that there were two sorts of being in Henry’s system. One sort was being of existence. In the real world of actuality all es-.

sence had some particular manifestation, some being of existence, either as an external thing or as a concept in an existing mind. But over eternity there was no real thing or real mind except God, and it was in

him that essence found its ultimate, unchanging actualization. What about that other sort of being, the being of essence? If being of essence was not precisely from essence, nonetheless all essence possessed it. And this was, after all, one of the ideas that prompted Henry’s critics to accuse him of creating a special ontological world for essence alone. Yet here, too, God was more central than Henry’s critics were willing to believe. It was from God that essence received the being of

essence, a sort of being that, if not identical with essence itself, still accounted for its essenceness. Such being was, furthermore, nothing 94. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 262): “Sunt enim eadem cognita et praedicta intellecta in phantasmatibus, et ipsae incorporeae rationes in ipsa veritate aeterna: non sunt enim aliud quam ipsae naturae et essentiae rerum.” 95. See Quod. IX, q. 2 (ed. Macken, p. 34). The interpretation I have made of the relation between Henry’s idea of absolute essence and God is similar to that suggested by Hodl, “Neue Begriffe,” p. 609; and also to that found in Jaroslav Benes, “Valor ‘possibilium’ apud S. Thomam, Henricum Gandavensem, B. Iacobum de Viterbio,” Divus Thomas (Piacenza) 29 (1926), 612-34, and 30 (1927), 94-117, 333-55. 96. One might finally ask why Henry bothered to defend this troublesome metaphysical concept, being of essence. The simplest answer is that he wanted to use it to show how essences were to be distinguished from imaginary objects (res a reor reris) as well as to indicate how the essence of a creature, on no matter what level it was considered, was radically different from the absolutely simple essence of God. 128

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more than a relation to God, an eternal correspondence to a divine ideal. In short, being of essence (esse essentiae) was the ultimate ontological ground upon which all essence resided, and this ontological ground was in the long run — over eternity — identical with God himself. Being of essence came from the thoughts of God (dei intentione); it was, so to speak, an extension of the divine mind out towards a not yet created world.”’ This was what allowed Henry to say that through its essence, each thing was in a way a participation of the divine Being (participatio quaedam divini esse).?8 Essence, lying at the center of all entity, arose from God and in some way always drew back into him, regardless of how it was manifested in any particular case.” This brings us back to the question of how Henry integrated his theory of being and essence into his epistemology. The way lay through the idea of truth. Throughout his early works Henry had claimed that a created object could be said to be true insofar as its essence reflected or corresponded to a divine exemplar. As late as 1280, in the Summa, article 34, question 2, he had insisted on the point.! Yet this implied

that the relation that brought to a thing its being of essence and accounted for its very essenceness — which was, by Henry’s definition, a relation to a divine exemplar — was also the thing’s truth. In fact, Henry

drew precisly this conclusion. In that same question of article 34 he explicitly stated that the truth of a created thing was founded in the fact that each such thing was also a res a ratitudine.®! Essence, which

| derived its very being from a relation to a divine exemplar, was what gave each thing its truth and could even be said to be the truth of each existing thing. Indeed, it was on the level of essence that “thing” could be said truly to be: “thing according to essence” (res a ratitudine) was “thing in truth” (res secundum veritatem).'* 97. Quod. III, q. 9 (I, 61rO). Henry drew the idea of a kind of being Dei intentione from Avicenna. Despite the citation given in the text of the quodlibet, the reference would seem to be to Avicenna, Liber de philosophia prima, V, 1 (ed. Van Riet, II, 237). 98. Quod. V, q. 2 (I, 154rD). 99. This side to Henry’s metaphysics carries strong overtones of pantheism, although he certainly would have rejected any such charge had he been confronted with it. On this tendency within Henry’s thought, see Hoeres, “Wesen und Dasein,” especially p. 124, and Rissman, Zur Ideenlehre, pp. 73-76. 100. See above, pp. 45-48. 101. Henry’s words were: “Et ideo veritas cuiusque rei subsistentis in creaturis non dicitur fundari nisi in re secundo modo. Quanto enim aliquid in re plus habet ratitudinis sive firmitatis, tanto plus habet entitatis: quare et veritatis. .. .” Summa, art. 34, q. 2 (I, 212rS). 102. This is the language Henry used in Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (I, 258rB). 129

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The path from essence to truth led directly into the processes of human intellection. If essence constituted the foundation for the truth of a thing, it also provided the basis for the truth of human knowledge. In Quodlibet III, question 9, Henry had explained that the concept of the mind seized on the quiddity or essence of a thing without any of its material or existential conditions. This was to say that the primary mental concept was of the pure essence or of the res a ratitudine. Yet as has been shown, the essence of a thing never had full being in itself. Full being, or being of existence (esse existentiae), came only through a particular manifestation in a substance or in a mind. For this reason the concept of the essence in a human mind was simply one manifestation of the essence pure and simple. It was, as Henry said, a diminished variation on the essence of the thing itself (diminuta rei entitas).'°3 But the concepts of the mind were the bases for the statements of human knowledge. Consequently the essences of things as realized in such concepts were in themselves the foundation for the truth of the same statements, and in particular of those statements or propositions concerning the essential nature of things.! It was on the level of essence, not on the level of real existence in the world, that one had to look for the ultimate source and the logical guarantor for all certain knowledge, for science (scientia) itself.!© It should now be clear what wide ramifications Henry’s concept of essence, in particular the notion that there was a special being of essence that in effect reduced to an eternal relation with an exemplar in God’s mind, would have for his idea of science and the truth of human knowledge. Essence not only lay at the ontological core of each thing. It also stood at the core of human knowledge, within the human mind itself. Henry’s very language bore witness to the connection. Being of essence was also, he said, defining being (esse definitivum).' It was quidditative being (esse quiditativum) or, putting the two together, the quidditative being indicated by the definition.'©’ _ This was the very vocabulary Henry had used over and over again in his discussions of epistemological issues. From his earliest writings Henry had associated quiddity with science and knowledge of truth. Scientific knowledge could be defined as knowledge of quod quid 103. See above, p. 42, n. 7. 104. For this analysis of the relation between truth and essence, see Quod. III, q. 9 (1, 62rQ).

105. Ibid. See also Quod. VII, qq. 1 and 2 (I, 258rB). 106. Quod. III, q. 9 (1, 61rO). 107. Quod. V, q. 2 (1, 154rD), and Quod. VII, q. 13 (I, 267vT). See also above, p. 121, n. 75. 130

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est.'°8 The same held true even when he came to explaining science in a

more Aristotelian way as knowledge of the definition. In those, his middle years, he kept his eyes on the quiddity, as well as the definition; in fact, he once even called knowledge of the definition knowledge of

the quidditative being.! Exactly the same term had appeared in his discussion of truth reminiscent of the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, and in that case the way he used the term seemed to beg for an interpretation along the lines fully drawn in his theory of essence and existence.!!°

He said that the truth of knowledge that was the conformity between idea and the object’s essence had its most perfect being in the intelligence or mind. Yet it had this perfect being not lying in the intelligence as in a subject but residing in it as in something participating in the truth itself. And the truth the intelligence participated in was the pure quiddity, the bare essence, abstracted from all particulars and from any particular being.'!! This could be nothing else than the essence or res a ratitudine, which insofar as it touched the human mind or was

participated in by it gave to the mind the truth and permitted its knowledge to be called scientific. The way the mind seized this essence, the way it came to the plane of quidditative being, could be explained in simple noetic terms through

Henry’s theory of the agent intellect. As he said, the agent intellect illuminated the phantasms in the imaginative faculty and made them shine before the possible intellect not as the particular and material objects they actually were, but insofar as in them resided essence pure and simple (sub ratione qua essentiae simpliciter sunt)."* Out of this confrontation the possible intellect was able to form a word (verbum), a simple concept, that was the perfect representation of essence, which it in some way touched on the level of being of essence itself.!!3 Yet

now, in the light of Henry’s full theory of essence, this language of 108. See, for example, above, p. 19, n. 14. 109. See above, p. 79, n. 123. 110. See above, p. 64, n. 81, and p. 65, n. 84. 111. “Per hunc ergo modum, perfectum esse veritatis non habet veritas nisi in actuali perceptione intelligentiae: et sic in intelligentia habet esse non ut in subiecto: sed ut in participante: participando scilicet eam non ut habet esse in aliquo sicut in subiecto: sed secundum esse quiditativum abstractum a quolibet subiecto: non abstractione universalis a particulari logice: sed formae et quiditatis ab eo cuius est metaphysice.” Summa, art. 34, q. 5 (1, 218rP). Compare this with the similar text cited above, p. 64, n. 82. 112. Quod. VIII, q. 12 (II, 324rB). 113. See Quod. Ill, q. 15 (I, 76rA). There is a marked similarity between Henry’s idea of the object of intellection lying in a special being of essence and Aureoli’s later notion of an intentional being attached to the object of knowledge. On Aureoli see 131

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essence and quidditative being can be seen with all the metaphysical implications it contained. Truth, and human knowledge of it, involved contact with essence and the world of its special being. Behind that world lay God’s ideas, and as its existential buttress God transferred to it, by participation, something of his divine Being. At this juncture the boundary between natural and divine dissolved — the mind, working in the world, was confronted with a reality that could be explained only in terms of the reality of the eternal ideas. It was here, at last, that Henry’s theory of being and essence became significant for his notion of human knowledge of the pure truth (sincera veritas) and linked up with his use of the image of divine illumination. One of the earliest ways Henry had explained divine illumination was by turning to the notion of a double exemplar. According to this view God’s light provided the mind with a second, more perfect exemplar of the object it already knew by means of a lower exemplar drawn from sensory cognition. When the mind compared these two exemplars, it was able to form a judgment of truth. From a purely formal point of view this was the most satisfactory model for describing how the intellect perceived pure truth. There could be no confusion over the process, because everything seemed to follow along explicit, almost

mechanical lines. Yet, as has been pointed out, Henry found it practically impossible to apply this theory of two exemplars later in his career, after he had come explicitly to reject the idea that intellection depended on the recep-

tion of impressed intelligible species.!* After all, without impressed species there remained little hope of saying in precise noetic or psychological terms just what these exemplars really were. Furthermore, we

have seen that for a large part of Henry’s mature career he played down, even ignored, the theory of divine illumination and put his emphasis instead on a theory of truth related in part to the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and in which the Aristotelian notion of definitive knowledge of a quiddity clearly understood replaced the notion of a cognitive intervention on the part of God. On both counts — the rejection of impressed species and the acceptance of a more purely Aristotelian vision of truth — Henry would have found it hard to revive his ideas on knowledge of the pure truth in precisely the form they took in his earliest works. Paul Vignaux, “Note sur la relation du conceptualisme de Pierre d‘Auriole et sa théologie trinitaire,” Annuaires de l’Ecole pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences religieuses (1935-36), 5-23. 114. See the discussion above, pp. 101-2. 132

THE FINAL SUMMATION

But perhaps this is not just the right way to state the problem. It suggests that Henry faced a dilemma — how to deal with contradictory tendencies in his thought — when in fact we have no reason to suspect that he felt any pressure to overcome a conflict between his earlier and later ideas or that he even recognized any great tension between them. On the contrary, his own deepening awareness of the implications of his metaphysics, which ultimately led him to reject the notion of im-

pressed species — his full appreciation of the idea that pure essence was available to the mind without such intermediaries — also gave him the means whereby to explain away the apparent necessity of accounting for knowledge of the truth through a comparison of two different

species or exemplars in the mind. Likewise, this same metaphysical understanding allowed him to reinterpret divine illumination in a way that did not jeopardize his more Aristotelian notion of truth. Once Henry had come fully to terms with his theory of being and essence and recognized its potential significance for epistemology, he came to see that the two elements in the mind that needed to be compared to make a judgment of pure truth were not, as he had previously thought, two distinct things coming from two absolutely irreducible worlds of reality. They were instead exactly the same thing, considered from two different points of view. The mind that had not yet perceived

the truth knew its object as an essence in the world, and the mental image that stood for its understanding was still directed towards the phantasms and the materiality they represented. The mind that perceived the truth, on the other hand, knew its object as an essence pure and simple, one whose ultimate ontological basis lay in God. In short,

coming to know the truth was simply a matter of recognizing that what the mind had seen in the phantasm was also in God and that the two objects, or essences, were not only congruent but also, on the level of being of essence, precisely the same thing. In this way the apparent multiplicity of a double exemplar was swallowed up in the simple unity of essence itself.!!°

115. This implication of Henry’s theory of being and essence explains the ambivalence in article 34, q. 5, of the Summa: did Henry think of truth as a comparison of two things or as a single entity seized by or residing in the mind? (See the discussion on pp. 63-66, above, the full resolution of which was promised in n. 88.) After all, by the time Henry wrote that article he had come to see truth as a comparison of the essence of the object in the mind with its essence in the real world outside. But on the level of being of essence — which was where the mind found truth — these two came down to the same thing, the res a ratitudine. Seeing truth amounted to seeing the continuity between these two essences. 133

THE THOUGHT OF HENRY OF GHENT | But the same theory of being and essence also permitted Henry to imbue his Aristotelian account of knowledge of the truth with a meaning that came very close to his early statements about divine illumination, without forcing him to sacrifice any of the worldliness of the Aristotelian language itself. The process of coming to know the definition — and thereby the definitive truth — was, in Aristotelian terms, coming to know the essence or quiddity clearly and in itself. Yet was this not the same as coming to know the pure essence, which, as had been explained in Henry’s theory of being and essence, included in itself a relation to God, from whom it received its ontological density, its being of essence? In other words, once Henry’s theory of being and essence was taken into account, coming to know the pure essence of scientific truth actually implied coming to see the object as it related to God, abstracted from any relation to existence in the created world. If Henry’s theory of truth from the middle years of his activity had encouraged him to bypass the language of illumination, his mature appreciation of his own notion of being and essence permitted him to reinvest this new theory with much the same theological significance that had originally attached to the theory of illumination. It also allowed him to return to the language of illumination without threatening his Aristotelian insights or even superseding the terms of their analysis. Illumination became a phenomenon immanent in the process of coming to seize the Aristotelian quiddity or essence. With this in mind we can go back to Quodlibet IX, question 15, and see at last exactly what Henry had in mind. A few isolated passages, which would previously have seemed insignificant, now take on a meaning that reveals not only how different Henry’s final statement of divine illumination was from anything he had said before but also how much it represented a fusion of the position of his earliest years with his more exclusively logical analysis from the middle of his career. The process of coming to know the pure truth began, as Henry always insisted, with sensory knowledge in the material world. Only after the intellect had in some way perceived intelligible objects in the phantasms provided by the senses could it withdraw from all material considerations and attain the incorporeal reasons — the ideas — of things residing in God.!!© Contact with these incorporeal reasons was what allowed the mind to judge the value of its initial knowledge of the object and form the word or concept that was true and lay at the basis of all science. All this appears in Quodlibet IX, question 15, and 116. See above, p. 96, n. 8.

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to this extent Henry’s discussion of truth in that question did not go beyond what he had set out in his earliest writings, prior to 1276. Yet immediately after this reaffirmation of the need for the mind to gain access to the world of divine ideas in order to know pure truth, Henry added a comment that directed the reader specifically to the kind of considerations he had been concerned with in his theory of being and essence. He pointed out that the incorporeal reasons residing in the eternal Truth of God were in fact identical to the objects the mind perceived originally in the phantasms. Both of them were purely and simply the nature or the essence of the objects to be known.!!’ _ There is no way to make sense of this statement without having recourse to the theory of being and essence. According to that theory the essence of any single species or genus was, once it had been abstracted from particular being of existence, all one. What is more, the metaphysical level on which this unity was manifested — the level of essence or res a ratitudine — was the proper ontological field for all matters of

epistemology, since it was on this plane that Henry located the object of the intellect. Of course, any mental object, insofar as it was considered to have only the being of essence, was not fully real. Full reality, with the necessary being of existence, demanded some particular actualization as a concept in a particular real intellect, that of God or a human mind. In either case the concrete expression of the essence as an idea was what insured there would be some being of existence behind the purely epistemological category of essence abstracted unto itself."8 But what was more important, this essence — one could even

say form —that the mind knew on the abstracted level of being of essence was in a real sense identical with the essence of the object in the external material world. The latter was, after all, just another actualization of that absolute essence, this time as a particular being among

extramental objects rather than as a concept in the mind.! Thus in coming to know the abstracted, absolute essence the mind did not

way.

come to know another reality different from that of the objects of the material world. Instead it simply came to know this reality and these objects, as it had originally perceived them in the phantasms, in a new

_ This was the ultimate significance of Henry’s theory of divine illumination. By shining on the intellect God revealed to it a level of being 117. See the passage from Quod. IX, q. 15, as quoted above, p. 128, n. 94. 118. See Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 264). See above, p. 98, n. 16.

119. See below, n. 120.

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it had not been aware of before. He brought the mind to see the essence,

absolute and in itself. And this awareness — this perception of the object or essence, now not as tied to particular material being but as founded in the ideas of the divine mind — allowed the intellect to make a judgment about its previous understanding. It permitted knowledge

of the pure truth. In short, in coming to know pure truth the mind did not have to see two different exemplars or objects. It merely had to see the same object in a new way. One might almost say that in making its judgment of truth, the mind compared the object with itself. The difference between this higher act and knowing the object in the phantasm alone came from the fact that now the mind reconsidered the object in the

light of an understanding that could be offered only by God. In Henry’s own words: Thus, in knowing the forms [ per formas] that are the [absolute] essences of things, as they are seen in themselves by means of the uncreated light, we know with a true knowledge the very same forms that, as they have existence in matter, are seen in the phantasms by means of the created light that comes from the agent intellect.!”°

All this meant that knowing the essence of a thing, which was in the Aristotelian model the basis for science, was for all intents and pur-

poses the same as knowing the truth of the object in Augustinian terms, because for Henry knowing the essence entailed knowing the object on that level of being that revealed its naked dependence on God. The easiest way to talk about this was to speak of illumination, and that is partly what Henry did. Indeed he even went so far as to describe God as a kind of second agent intellect, reinforcing the power of the agent that was a part of the mind and helping the possible intellect see the absolute essence in the objects it had abstracted from the phantasms.!@! Yet in precise terms the process was not the same as the 120. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 264). See also the passage cited above, p. 97, n. 12, which in the text precedes the one quoted here. Henry’s express language in that passage was that the mind used the forms as it perceived them in themselves in the mind of God — that is, as absolute essences on the level of being of essence — to judge the very same forms (iudicamus de eisdem) insofar as they had being in matter. 121. See above, p. 98, n. 16. There would seem to be some difficulty in reconciling this account of the two agents with the noetics presented in Quod. VIII, q. 12 (see above, p. 131, n. 112), whereby the created agent, a power of the mind, was enough to explain the mind’s grasp of absolute essence. The problem can be explained away, however, in light of Henry’s statements about God’s illumination acting as an innate knowledge — statements discussed below. According to this 136

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illumination Henry had described in his early years —a largely mechanical procedure tied to the notion that the mind made reference to a divine ideal radically different from its object as known through the initial processes of cognition. Instead the illumination of Henry’s latest years could best be described as a deepening of the mind’s original knowledge from the phantasms. The mind did not have to shift from one objective field to another in coming to know the pure truth; it had only to push farther towards the ultimate metaphysical basis

essence. !27 |

upon which its initial knowledge rested, towards the absolute

To explain this deepening, Henry found other analytical metaphors even more congenial than that of illumination by a higher light. From his earliest years he had noted that, while the agent intellect of the mind acted as a light shining on the phantasms, God acted more as an art, the source of the form from which all artifacts were shaped.!* Yet it was even more appealing to Henry in Quodlibet IX, question 15, to speak of God acting as a hidden knowledge (intelligere abditum), buried deep in the mind and coming to the fore only gradually as the intellect worked its way to truth. The question of whether or not there was a hidden knowledge was, after all, the major problem Henry addressed in that question, and his answer has led some scholars to claim that there was in Henry at least the trace of a theory of reminiscence similar to Plato’s.!4

view God was always present to the mind and worked alongside the created agent when the mind came to know the truth. Strictly speaking, Henry would have had to mention this fact only when he was explicitly discussing God’s role, as in Quodlibet IX, q. 15. Whether this is indeed why he did not bring in God as an agent in his account in Quodlibet VIII cannot be known. _ 122. To the impartial viewer it would seem that there ought to have been a psychological component to this theory — that is, it should have been a necessary concomitant of the difference between the imaginary intellect and knowledge of the truth that the mind which knew the truth should somehow be aware that its knowledge was deeper, which in this case came down to the fact that it had somehow attained to essence at a divine or ideal level. Naturally, this would have been a difficult matter for any orthodox Christian to handle, and it posed a perennial problem for those who leaned towards any of the variants of a doctrine of divine illumination. Short of scattered remarks to the effect that most minds were not aware of God’s con-

stant action on them and an essentially ambiguous attitude about whether the mind reaching the truth had to recognize the full import of its knowledge (see below, nn. 127 and 128), Henry simply skirted the issue.

123. See above, p. 99, nn. 18 and 19. | 124. Paulus, Henri de Gand, pp. 9-12, and Prezioso, La critica, p. 107, have both indicated that they see evidence of innatism in Henry, even though they admit it remained unreconciled with the rest of his epistemology. See also Macken’s com137

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If, however, Henry did feel that there was a way to accept the notion

of an innate or hidden knowledge stemming from God, he did not mean this to be taken in a strictly Platonic sense. His idea was that there was an act of understanding that came before every other such act — specifically all those stimulated by impressions coming to the mind from the senses — and that worked in the mind solely by means of an action from God himself.'*> He took pains to say that he did not mean by this that there was some hidden habit of knowledge (habitus) from which the mind generated each actual case of cognition in this life. That was how Henry interpreted Plato’s doctrine of reminiscence, and like Augustine before him Henry rejected it as totally unaccept-

able. Instead, Henry held that the hidden knowledge was actual. It was the often unrecognized process by which God acted on our mind when we came to generate the habits of scientific knowledge. Hidden knowledge was, in short, the process Henry intended to describe when he talked about God’s light shining into the intellect.!2° The reason this knowledge was both actual — in some way, actualized cognition — and at the same time hidden was that although God acted

constantly on the human mind in this way, few people were free to perceive his action or, even less, able to draw upon it in order to judge the value of their concepts.!’ Since the Fall human minds were caught up in the passions and perceptions of the body. Only a small number learned to purge themselves morally and to discipline themselves intellectually to a degree sufficient to make use of this benefit that in paradise had been open to all.!28

In the end, then, Henry had to fall back on a combination of the images of a divine Light and of a godly art in order to characterize this hidden act of God. It was as if God had left an impression in the mind ments on this view, “La théorie,” p. 100. Other scholars, as, for instance, Macken himself and Dwyer, Die Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 44-45, have dismissed the idea as unfounded, at least for the later Henry. 125. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, pp. 265-66). 126. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 267). The reading in the 1518 edition (II, 383vB),

“Sed Augustinus non ponit illos habitos, sed luce aeterna illustrari.. .” (italics mine), which Macken shows is also that to be found in most of the manuscripts, makes more sense here than the reading secundum lucem aeternam, which apparently has more authority and which Macken has chosen for his edition. 127. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 260). 128. Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, p. 266), and Quod. VIII, q. 12 (II, 324vC). It is interesting to note that in this passage in Quodlibet VIII, q. 12, Henry seems to have accepted the notion that there was a hidden knowledge in all people that consisted of innate habits from which the mind could draw its actual knowledge. This was precisely the position he was to reject less than two years later in Quodlibet IX. 138

THE FINAL SUMMATION

from the very start, while the effects of this impression were realized in each act of understanding the pure truth as God somehow shone in the mind to reveal the ultimate standards for cognition.'”? Yet this multiple metaphor, coming as it does after Henry’s statements about the unity of the object of the intellect in the pure essence, forces the reader back to the very terms of the theory of being and essence for an explanation. God acted as an art, impressing a form on the mind, not so much before sensory cognition — for Henry had insisted there was no hidden habitual knowledge — as somehow at the heart of every act of intellect in the world. God acted as a light shining into every intellective act, always present but not always seen or even used by the mind. In the more abstract terms of metaphysics God was, as we might say, the ground of the cognitive field. Being of essence was a participation in God, and so all cognition in some way led back to him. The mind that had discovered this path had entered the world of pure truth, a world where being dissolved into essence and essence was revealed as a participation in the divine mind. Nowhere did an almost Platonic insistence on the priority of essence over existence, and the priority of the world of the mind over the world of concrete fact, shine forth more clearly in Henry’s works than on this point. But if only a limited number of intellects actually came to recognize the ultimate scheme of things, all minds, insofar as they attained their object in any way, in effect trod upon the same ground. God’s action was indeed prior to all other processes of cognition, for he was implanted at the center of the world of the mind, the foundation of all true knowledge and the generative source for all acts of cognition. This was the way that Henry’s theory of being and essence allowed him to fuse all of his earlier ideas on the nature of truth and human knowledge of it. Since he saw God at the heart, even at the beginning, of all knowledge, he was able to confirm the strongest interpretation of Augustine’s epistemological language in the midst of what would appear to be a purely Aristotelian system of thought. This is what permitted him to say that divine illumination was natural to the mind, for it did not break with any of the processes explained in Henry’s version of Aristotle’s natural world.!2° In fact, by the terms of his metaphysics and the noetics dependent on it Henry’s Thomistic or Aristotelian the-

ory of truth had become his theory of illumination. Perceiving the truth meant seeing the continuum that led from the object as seized in 129. See Quod. IX, q. 15 (ed. Macken, pp. 265-66). 130. On illumination as natural (intelligentia quaedam naturalis) see Quod. IX, q. i5 (ed. Macken, p. 266). 139

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the phantasm to the essence as enshrined in the definition. But the same continuum also led straight on to God, so that the mind that saw the truth had gained access to the divine ideas, whether it knew so or not. Henry had found a way of resolving the potential conflict between his two ways of explaining truth, the more Augustinian one of his early years and the more logically oriented one from 1279 on. By recogniz-

ing the unity of the path leading from the ill-conceived object to the essence and on to God, he could now guarantee a connection between God’s action and knowledge of the truth without having always to speak in explicitly Augustinian terms. Naturally he was free to use the language of Augustine when he wanted — as is clear in Quodlibet IX, question 15 — but he did not have to resort to it. Armed with his full theory of being and essence he could speak the language of Aristotle and Thomas and still maintain his old position, that all knowledge of the truth led directly back to God. For Henry, Aristotle and Augustine had become one. The theory of being and essence had not only bridged the gap between the created world and God’s ideas, thereby eliminat-

ing the need for any explicit theory of two exemplars in the mind; it had also made Henry’s two types of truth, the scientific truth of the analytic mind and the pure truth of the illumined intellect, the same.

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V

Conclusion

Now that we have come to the end of this study, it must be clear how extraordinarily complicated Henry’s ideas actually were. Perhaps he was too complicated, too much a clever metaphysician, so that he deserved the rigorous criticism he received from those like Duns Scotus who followed him in the medieval schools. There can be no doubt that the system he fashioned was not taken up by anyone after his death

and that the careful balance of his ideas was more notable for the attacks it received than for its ability to win support. But whatever estimate we make of the intrinsic worth of Henry’s thought, whatever reception it got from medieval scholastics, no one can deny its importance for the history of the philosophy and theology of his time. Even as it was opposed, Henry’s thought exercised an enormous influence on those who followed him. It is therefore incumbent upon all of us who study the period to come to some understanding of this most difficult piece of the larger scholastic corpus. I hope I have demonstrated by now how critical it will be, if we are to have any chance of achieving such understanding, to approach Henry’s ideas with an eye to their chronological development. If there is any general conclusion to be drawn from what I have said so far, it is that we cannot read Henry correctly if we assume that his thoughts formed a seamless, unchanging whole or if we look at what he wrote during any one period as representative of his views throughout his career. Yet I want to say more about Henry’s philosophy than that it was complicated and strongly developmental. I have one final generalization, drawn from my examination of just one part, to make about the

character of the whole of his thought. To appreciate my point, we need to review the ways scholars have described his work. Everyone has recognized the importance of Augustine. Although there was no medieval theologian who was not influenced by this most popular of Latin Fathers, the general tenor of Henry’s thought seems to have been particularly sympathetic to the Neoplatonism that underlay Augustine’s philosophical world. If one is willing to admit that there was a school of thought in the thirteenth century that should be called Augustinianism, then Henry must have been one of its leading

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members.! He was, of course, one whose ideas drew almost as much from that other Neoplatonist, Avicenna. Yet for the moment we need

not decide which of Henry’s forebears contributed the most to his thought. It suffices to say that in terms of epistemology alone, Henry’s frequent reference to the image of light and his willingness to call upon a theory of divine illumination insure him a place in this strongly Neoplatonic side of thirteenth-century philosophy. Some scholars would go so far as to single Henry out among all the

Augustinians, the Neoplatonists of the thirteenth century, and say there was something special about his work. The tradition goes back at least to Huet, who claimed that Henry was the only scholastic who could be truly called a Platonist.2 Hauréau was of this view, and a number of recent scholars have come to a similar conclusion that there was something particularly pure about the Platonism Henry seemed to

draw out of Neoplatonic doctrines that had long been a part of the Western intellectual tradition.’ There can be no question that in his theory of being and essence, especially as it came to lay such extraordinary emphasis on essence as the core of all reality, Henry drew very close to the spirit of Plato, closer, it would appear, than even the most sympathetic of his contemporaries. Henry’s metaphysics was more than just complicated; it also brought right to the surface a number of the Platonic themes that had long been somewhat obscured in the Aristotelian-Platonic mixture we call Neopiatonism. In fact, one is inclined to believe that the attention Henry gave to convoluted metaphysical argument was the result of his determination to purify what were actually the Platonic elements in a scholastic language whose lexicon, drawn from the thirteenth-century education in arts, was otherwise largely Aristotelian. But the strong Augustinian, even Neoplatonic, elements in Henry’s thought cannot obscure the fact that he was also profoundly influenced by Aristotle. And although nineteenth-century scholars laid almost 1. Among recent surveys of medieval philosophy see, for example, Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York, 1955), pp. 447-48, and Van Steenberghen, La philosophie au XIIle siecle, p. 499. Both works characterize Henry as firmly in the Neoplatonic or Augustino-Platonic camp. 2. Huet, Recherches historiques, p. 96. 3. See Barthélemy Hauréau, Histoire de ia philosophie scolastique, 2/2 (Paris, 1880), pp. 66-67 and 73-74; and Karl Werner, “Heinrich von Gent als Reprasentant des christlichen Platonismus im dreizehnten Jahrhundert,” Denkschriften der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Classe, 28 (Vienna, 1878), p. 98; and more recently, Paulus, Henri de Gand, pp. 392-93 as well as elsewhere in his work; and Bourgeois, “La théorie,” pp. 244-45 and 258-59. 142

CONCLUSION

exclusive emphasis on Henry’s Platonism, more recent work has not neglected to point out how not only much of his language but also a good part of his analytical technique was drawn from the Aristotelianism of his day. Here, however, there has been some dispute as to the precise role Aristotelian themes played in Henry’s thought and exactly when they exercised their greatest influence on his ideas.

: Nys led the way in suggesting that Henry “completed” the largely Aristotelian theory that lay at the heart of his noetics with an Augustinian doctrine of illumination by the divine intellectual light. And although Nys fully understood that Augustinian illumination played a large role in Henry’s earliest works, he claimed that Henry’s noetics

moved progressively away from a strongly Aristotelian and Averrois- | tic beginning towards a more Augustinian position over the span of his career.* The most important sign of this was, for Nys, Henry’s abandoning the idea of an impressed species while speaking more and more of the word or quidditative form by which the mind seized its object.

In a similar vein, Macken and Prezioso have described Henry as becoming more Avicennian in his later years, moving, in Prezioso’s words, from an Aristotelianizing Augustinianism to an Avicennizing Augustinianism by the end of his life.” These two scholars have in mind not only the transformation singled out by Nys but also what they see as Henry’s increasing tendency to characterize God’s action on the mind as that of a separate agent intellect. It is nevertheless possible to look at Henry’s work in just the opposite way. Already in 1933, Dwyer characterized Henry’s epistemology as strongly Platonic and Augustinian, but with a considerable Aristotelian influence. And while Nys, Macken, and Prezioso have said that Henry moved progressively away from Aristotle towards a more Augustinian or Neoplatonic position, Dwyer thought the direction of change was just the reverse. He felt that Henry increasingly distanced himself

from pure Augustinian illumination, and if he did not become an outright Aristotelian, at least he modified his noetics and epistemology in a way that took increasing account of the principles of Aristotle’s thought.°®

In short, opinion about Henry ranges from the view of those who see him as essentially Platonic to that of others who recognize how 4. See Nys, De werking, pp. 117-18, 120, and 137. Macken, “La théorie,” p. 82, also speaks of Henry “completing” the noetics of Aristotle with Platonic and Augustinian elements. 5. See Macken, “La théorie,” pp. 87-88 and 92-93, and Prezioso, La critica, p. 62. 6. Dwyer, Die Wissenschaftslehre, pp. 35 and 41-43. 143

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much he was influenced by Aristotle’s ideas about mind and knowledge. Among scholars of the latter stamp, there are some who feel that Henry was more Aristotelian early in his career, and others who hold that he relied more upon Aristotle in his later years. I believe that if one accepts the analysis of Henry given in this book, then one can begin to chart a path among these conflicting interpreta-

tions that will allow us to recognize an element of truth in them all. Naturally this argument can apply at present just to Henry’s epistemology and noetics, the only areas of his philosophy for which I have in the present study produced evidence for change. Yet if the pattern I suggest is correct, perhaps it would be fruitful to look for signs of a similar development elsewhere in his thought. At the very least, we should be prepared for an explanation of Henry’s progress that sets up a less exclusive alternation between Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. For if I have correctly understood the peculiar dynamics of Henry’s

intellectual evolution in matters of noetics and epistemology, then I think we are permitted to say that against the backdrop of his profound Augustinianism Henry moved over the years in a way that was at once more Aristotelian and more purely Platonic than had been the case at the outset of his career. Henry’s early ideas on epistemology were, as nearly all scholars have admitted, very largely drawn from Augustine and medieval commentators on the Augustinian notion of divine illumination. His theory of pure truth as dependent on a judgment or comparison of two exemplars, one worldly, the other divine, and his full use of the image of divine light mark him clearly as one of those who thought that the heights of human knowledge on earth were obtained along the lines Augustine had described centuries before. Yet in his noetics — in his notion of exactly how the mind operated — Henry was in those early years to a large degree dependent on his understanding of Aristotle. From the first sensory perceptions to the reception of the impressed species in the possible intellect, Henry accepted the essentials of Aristotelian doctrine as it had been worked out in the schools over the more than half century before he came to write his first work. Yet Henry’s early ideas were not stable, and over the next two decades he was to change his mind in a way that shows how volatile this early mixture of Aristotle and Augustine actually was. The interesting point is that Henry did not advance in a way that we can characterize as emphasizing either one of the two poles of his thought at the expense of the other. Instead, what we find is a development that deepens

his Aristotelianism and extends what has been called his Augustinianism — but now comes to look more like the Neoplatonic and even 144

CONCLUSION

Platonic foundations upon which Augustine built — in precisely those areas of his philosophy where each of the original influences had, respectively, been weakest before. As we have seen, by the time Henry moved into what I have called his second phase, he had begun to work out his epistemology in a way that reveals an increasing debt to, or perhaps a clearer understanding

of, Aristotle —in particular, the scientific Aristotle of the Posterior Analytics. Now, in place of the simple comparison of exemplars, Henry described the truth as a deeper understanding of the essential or quidditative nature of the mental object, much as Aristotle had established his epistemology — his science — upon an understanding of

essences in the external world. And when Henry came to examine more closely how this new theory of truth was to be worked out in strict philosophical terms, he had almost nothing to say about Augustine’s divine light, but instead spoke of a complicated procedure of arriving at the definition, just as Aristotle had described the process of coming to the fundamental truths of scientific thought. Even what I have characterized as a more Thomistic explanation of truth worked in this same direction, away from the language of Augustine and more towards that of science as it was conceived in the Aristotelianism that was becoming ever more pervasive in the schools. What is curious about this increased place for Aristotle in Henry’s epistemulogy, and this deeper appreciation of Aristotle’s logic of science and the search for definition, is that it was closely followed by what can be described only as a greater attention to Neoplatonic themes — even Platonism — in the area of noetics. This development was largely conditioned by Henry’s metaphysics, in which he had, from his very earliest years, been working out a theory of essence that put essence at

the center of all being, creating an almost Platonic world of pure essence prior and ontologically superior to the world of real existence.. Yet it was only well into the mature years of Henry’s career that he drew the full implications of this metaphysics for his view of the workings of the mind. What happened, quite simply, was that Henry took advantage of Aristotle’s insistence that essence was the object of the intellect to claim that the realm of the mind was actually the same as the world of essence he had come to describe in such strikingly Pla-

tonic terms. In short, the reality the mind confronted in intellection was nothing more than the reality of Henry’s purely essential world. Viewed from this perspective, understanding and reality came together because they were each grounded in a realm that was both eternal and

ontologically deeper than the ever-changing world of existence in which the mind began. 145

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We must be sure to remember that, for all the differences between these two developments in Henry’s thought — the progressive shifts in his epistemology and in his noetics — it would not be correct to conclude that they were, for him, in any way contradictory. In fact, one can argue that it was precisely the deep commitment to Platonism of Henry’s metaphysics, and his gradually awakened awareness of the opportunities to extend these principles to other areas of his thought, that made possible the stronger Aristotelianism of his later epistemology. Henry’s move towards an understanding of truth so dependent on Aristotle’s vision of science shook his attachment to the authentically Augustinian notion of illumination of his earlier years. Yet his new application of the theory of being and essence to noetics made it possible to accommodate this shift in attitude without abandoning the profoundly Augustinian idea that God had a fundamental role to play in the most important acts of human intellection here on earth. Rather than having to explain the process according to a comparison of exemplars (a view that would not have sat well with Henry’s scientific notion of truth), he could now claim that in coming to know the essence —in following the very path Aristotle had sketched out — the mind did, once more, make contact with something of the divine. In knowing essence the mind, in a real sense, fell back on God. Here lies the significance of Henry’s final explanation of the business of knowing truth. Although Henry’s epistemology had become increasingly Aristotelian, his noetics, now newly enriched by an infusion from his peculiar system of metaphysics, compensated by leading him more in the direction of Neoplatonic and even Platonic thought. In such a world Henry could speak about knowledge just as Aristotle had done, but his language would be read against the background of his view of the ontological foundation of reality, and mind, in the ideas of God. Aristotle’s theory of knowledge, in Henry’s metaphysical

world, took on just the same religious significance that Augustine’s would have had in a more worldly metaphysical scheme. Years ago Martin Grabmann brought to our attention how the theory of divine illumination, most particularly in the classic form of a vision of the truth in the light of divine exemplars as worked out by Bonaventure and his disciples, John Pecham, Matthew of Aquasparta, and Roger Marston, in the 1260s and 1270s, quickly faded from the scene in the ensuing decades of the thirteenth century.’ Yet few scholars 7. See Grabmann, Der goéttliche Grund menschlicher Wahrheitserkenntnis, especially p. 41.

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CONCLUSION

have paid much attention to what Grabmann said. When we consider the course of Henry of Ghent’s career, Grabmann’s claim becomes not only more plausible, but also easier to understand. Henry is surely the

leading figure, outside of Bonaventure and his immediate school, whom modern scholars would associate with the theory of divine light and the epistemology to which it was attached. But even with Henry it is necessary to admit that over the years of his literary activity the doctrine of illumination progressively retreated in the face of a growing understanding of Aristotle’s idea of scientific knowledge and a willingness to incorporate this idea into his own epistemological scheme. All this happened, however, without any reduction in the Augustinian, or Neoplatonic, flavor of Henry’s thought. If Henry became more

firmly attached to the increasingly popular Aristotelian scientific methodology of his day, this occurred without his having to give up any of the more fundamental religious attitudes, even moral concerns, associated with the so-called Augustinian current with which he has been linked. In fact, he retained the full religious resonance of Augustine’s, and Bonaventure’s, doctrine of divine illumination — most espe-

cially its insistence that knowledge of the truth involved an opening into the world of the divine — in the midst of the more worldly Aristotelian language of his new epistemological ideas. Such a maneuver was possible because of the deeper shifts, not at all Aristotelian in character, on other levels of Henry’s thought. It is ironic but true that Henry was able to become in some ways more a follower of Aristotle because he was simultaneously working towards attitudes that must be identi-

fied with Plato. This brings us back to the general character of Henry’s thought. Again, although we have looked only at epistemology, noetics, and a bit of metaphysics, there may be patterns here that are of greater significance for the history of scholasticism in general. With Henry we would appear to be leaving the world of the great scholastics of the middle of the thirteenth century, when Aristotle’s doctrines were being fully absorbed and debates raged around the effects this assimilation would have on the purity of Christian teaching. We would seem to be moving into a world beyond the simple confrontation of traditional Augustinian and novel Aristotelian points of view, a world where a wide acceptance of much of Aristotle’s method and doctrine could be taken for granted and where theoretical disputes would not be expressed in such clear, take-it-or-leave-it terms. This surely would account for the difficulty of finding a precise label for Henry’s thought. It would

also help to explain the curious way scholars have seen Henry as at 147

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once a reactionary idealist and a precursor of the nominalist tendencies of the fourteenth century.’ With Henry medieval scholasticism may at last have been setting out on its own, in a way that was not simply derivative of any of the themes or schools of the ancient or Arab worlds. If so, it becomes necessary from this point on to approach

scholastic thought more and more on its own terms. The intellectual revolution that had shaken Western Europe from the twelfth century on was now essentially complete, and the path was set for an inner development that extended over several centuries and to a large degree leads up into the modern world. 8. Whether Henry foreshadowed nominalism, and how he did if the assumption is true, has been a recurring theme in modern scholarship on his thought. See, for example, De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique dans les Pays-Bas, pp. 134, 225-26, and 267; Hoeres, “Wesen und Dasein,” pp. 122-24, 158-59, and 185; Ephrem Longpré, La philosophie du B. Duns Scot (Paris, 1924), passim (cited by Paulus, Henri de Gand, p. 387, n. 3); and Paulus, Henri de Gand, pp. 257, 378, and 389-90.

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157

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Index

Abstraction, 18, 19, 85; according to 26; Soliloquia, 30n Aristotle, 71, 81, 82-83; logical, 64, Averroes, 82-84, 91-92, 143; Commentary

124, 131n; metaphysical, 64-66, on De anima, 70, 83n; Commentary on 124-25, 131n; according to Thomas, Metaphysics, 70

77n. See also Universal Avicenna, 21n, 31, 142, 143; on being and

Accident, 116, 118 essence, 104, 107n; Logic, 106, 125Sn;

tion as truth 129n

Accommodation as truth. See Adequa- Metaphysics, 85n, 105, 106, 111n, 125, Act of understanding (actus intelligendi), | Avicennizing Augustinianism, 31n, 98-

72-73, 87, 96, 138, 139 99, 143. See also Agent intellect, God as Adequation (adaequatio) as truth, 21-23, 27, 35-36, 47, 51, 58, 65n, 68. See also

Conformity as truth; Rectitude as Beatitude, 28, 59n, 70n, 86n truth; Relation, as truth; Similitude, as _ Being (esse): cognitive (esse rationis),

truth 105-7, 111n, 124-25, 126n; defining

Agent intellect, 31, 71, 83, 85, 97, 98-99, (esse definitivum), 130; divine, 132; of 131, 136-37; God as, 31, 98-99, 101, essence (esse essentiae), 42n, 46n, 105-

102, 136, 143 7, 108n, 112-15, 117-22, 128-30, 43-44, 47 | (esse existentiae), 105-7, 108n, 112-

Anselm: De veritate, 44, 45n; on truth, 131n, 133-34, 135, 139; of existence Argumentation, art of. See Syllogisms, 15, 116-22, 124-25, 126n, 128, 130,

knowledge of 135; quidditative (esse quiditativum),

Aristotelianizing Augustinianism, 143 64n, 65-66, 73n, 130-32. See also Aristotle, 26, 43, 50, 69, 84n, 94, 99, 100- Being and essence, theory of 101, 132-33, 134, 139-40, 142-47; De Being and essence, theory of, 42, 65n, anima, 18n, 34n, 35n, 61n; De interpre- 87n, 103-34, 135, 139-40, 146 tatione, 61n; Logica nova, 76, 90n; Being or entity (ens), 109, 111, 121-22; Metaphysics, 19n, 46n, 54n, 61n, 74, concept of, 20n, 108n; diminished (see 75n, 127n; Nicomachean Ethics, 74, 90; Being or entity [entitas], diminished); noetics of, 22, 58, 71, 81, 82-83, 97; on quidditative, 79, 109, 121. See also Plato, 21n, 95, 126; Posterior Analytics, Essence; Quiddity; Res a ratitudine 18n, 70, 76, 79, 89n, 110n, 145; on Being or entity (entitas): diminished, 41truth, 60-61. See also Logic, of Aris- 42, 46n, 49, 54-55, 73, 126, 130; per-

totle; Science, according to Aristotle fect or true, 46, 54n Art, divine (ars divina), 21, 30-31, 34-39, Boethius, 104; De topicis differentiis,

68, 97, 99, 101, 102, 137-39 76n; Liber de divisione, 76; Philoso-

Arts, faculty of, 2, 9, 90 Dhiae consolatio, 85n

Augustine, 43, 61n, 76, 136, 139-40, 141- Bonaventure, 1, 10, 146-47 47; De diversis quaestionibus 83, 26n; Brown, Jerome V., 6, 10 De Trinitate, 34n, 35n, 72n, 78n, 87n, 95, 96, 97n; De vera religione, 47n; and divine illumination, 10, 14, 15, 29-31, | Cause: efficient, 126n; formal, 123n, 99, 144; on Plato, 21n, 138; and science, 126n; universal, 1Sn 159

INDEX

Certitude, cognitive, 13-18, 19n, 20, 23- tiva), 80, 86n. See also Definition, 25, 28-29, 39-40, 94, 98, 130. See also knowledge of

Science Distinction: conceptual, 115-17, 118n,

Comparative intellection (intelligentia 119, 121; intentional, 115-17, 118n, collativa), 59. See also Comparison 121; real, 104, 115n, 116, 118 Comparison (collatio), 21-23, 27, 33, Divine illumination, 7-9, 10, 14-15, 2359-60, 61-62, 64n, 67, 69n, 102, 132- 24, 25n, 26-40, 68, 69n, 88, 93-100, 33, 136, 144-46. See also Judgment 102-3, 132-40, 142-43, 144-47. See Complex cognition, 17-18, 59-63, 75- also Exemplar, divine; Light, divine 76, 81-82, 88-90. See also Compari- Division, 73-74, 76, 81-82, 84-86, 89son; Discursive process; Division; 90, 91. See also Compounding and di-

Propositions, knowledge of viding

Compounding and dividing, 17-18, 60, Duns Scotus, John, In, 108n, 141 76, 82, 84-85, 88. See also Division Dwyer, Edward, 143

also Word

Concept, 34, 61, 110, 111, 130, 138. See

Concept, first simple. See Intention, first Eclipse of sun, 88-89, 90

Conceptual distinction. See Distinction, Ehrle, Franz, '

conceptual Entity. See Being or entity (ens); Being

Conclusions of science, 19n or entity (entitas)

Condemnation of 1277, 3, 83 Essence, 43, 44-46, 68, 107, 109, 1ilConformity (conformatio, conformitas) 13, 116-37, 139-40, 145-46; abstract, as truth, 21-23, 25, 27, 33, 35-36, 51, 65-66. See also Being and essence, 55, 58-60, 61, 63, 64n, 65, 67, 69n, theory of; Quiddity; Res a ratitudine 93-94, 131. See also Adequation as Exemplar, 20-21, 36; divine, 21-22, 24, truth; Rectitude as truth; Relation, as 25, 27-39, 46-48, 59n, 68-69, 109-10,

truth: Similitude, as truth 111, 119-20, 121, 122-23, 127-29, Confused knowledge (notitia confusa), 130, 132-33, 136, 140, 144-45 , 146 78, 80, 85. See also Simple intellec- (see also Idea, divine); in human mind,

tion; True, knowledge of 21-24, 29, 36-37, 47-48, 59, 67, 69, Correspondence as truth. See Relation, 97, 132-33, 136, 140, 144-45 (see also

as truth Species, intelligible, impressed); quid-

Creation: and being of existence, 105, dity as, 55 113; and divine ideas, 21, 111, 127; as | Exemplary world, 107, 125-26, 145

generation, 114n, 120-21, 122n Exemplified (exemplatum), 122-28. See

Critical thought, 13, 16 also Res a ratitudine

Dati Fall of man, 138

11, 117n, 119n . ,

ating Henry’s works, problems of, 4n, Figure, divine. See Art, divine

Declarative k led fitia deel Force of mind (vis mentis), 71n eclarative knowledge (notitia declarati- Form, 63-64, 121, 135, 136, 139; cogni-

va), 86. See also Word, second . ae

oo _ tive,79, 21;82, divine,art36, 97, 99, 101, Definition, of (see Diviar 102, ; 137 (see also 89; Idea, divine); expressed,

sion); of God, 86n; knowledge of,also7622-23, 63n, 72 (see Word);;God 88, 91, 130-34, 140, 145 _ Demonstration, 19n, 91, 104. See also ; .

as, 30, 32--34; intelligible, 53, 54, 55, 58 (see also Word); material, 98n,

Syllogisms, knowledge of 118: sensible. 96

Discursive process (discursus), 74-75, , ,

80-85, 88, 91n Disintegrative knowledge (notitia discre- Genus, 78, 79, 82, 116, 135 160

INDEX

Gilbert of Poitiers, 114n Intentional distinction. See Distinction,

Giles of Rome, 114n intentional

Gilson, Etienne, 29-30 Isaac Israeli, 21n, Sin Goat-stag, 110 Godfrey of Fontaines, 48n, 105, 106n,

122n, 123n, 126n Judgment, 18, 23n, 29, 41, 61-62, 68,

Golden mountain, 110, 119n 97-98, 102, 132, 136, 138, 144. See

Grabmann, Martin, 146-47 also Comparison

Grace. See Light, of grace Grammar, 48-49

Grosseteste, Robert, 81n, 90n; Commen- Life, living, to live, 118-19 tary on De caelesti hierarchia, 28n; Light: of agent intellect, 85, 97, 99, 136Commentar. y on Posterior Analy tICS, 37 (see also Agent intellect); divine, 75n; De veritate, 44; translations by, 30, 31-32, 33-34, 36, 48, 92, 99, 101-

74n 2, 136-37, 138-39, 144 (see also Divine illumination); of glory, 28; of grace,

. a 15, 25, 27-28, 29; intelligible, 30; ma-

Habitual knowledge (notitia habitualis), terial, 31, 32, 95 72-13, 87, 138; scientific habit, 74, 1 ogic, 49n, 90; of Aristotle, 61n, 81-82,

75, 90-91, 98, 138 85, 91-92, 101, 104. See also Abstrac-

Haureau, Barthelemy, 142 tion, logical; Science, according to Hidden knowledge. See Innate knowledge Aristotle

Hilary of Poitier s, 26n, 51n Logica nova, See Aristotle, Logica nova Huet, Francois, 142

Idea: divine, 21, 68, 93-94, 95, 97-98, Macken, Raymond, 6, 8, 10, 98-99, 101,

111-12, 124, 126-28, 132, 134-37, 1430 7

140, 146 (see also Exemplar, divine); Mark, divine. See Art, divine

Platonic, 21n, 28, 126 Marston, Roger, 10, 146 Id quod est. See True, knowledge of Martin IV, Pope, 3

of Matter, 118

Id quod verum est. See True, knowledge Material intellect, 83

Illumination, special, 15, 27-28, 29. See | Matthew of Aquasparta, 10, 146 .

also Divine illumination Means to knowledge (ratio cognoscendi),

Imaginary apprehension, 22 22, 23, 27, 28, 54, 98 Imaginary truth. See Truth, imaginary Memory, 71-72, 91, 96

Imaginary understanding (imaginarius Mendicant orders, 3 es intellectus). See Truth, imaginary Mode of knowledge (modus scientiae),

Imaginative power, 71-72, 77, 96-97, 12-13

110, 131 Mover, universal, 15n

Induction, 74-75, 90 Influence, general, of God, 15, 29

Innate knowledge, 95, 136n, 137-39 Natural science, 90 Innatism, 137n. See also Innate knowl- Nature (natura), 43, 44, 45-46, 48-49,

edge 58n, 62, 109, 111. See also Essence

Intelligible. See Species, intelligible; Uni- | Neoplatonism, 14, 141-47

versal Nominalism, 64n, 148

Intention (intentio), 41n, 116-17; first, Nothing, 108, 110, 119n

20n, 108n; term of second, 64n Nys, Theophiel V., 5-6, 10, 98, 100, 143 161

INDEX

Pantheism, 129n real (incorporea), 95-96, 128n, 134Participation: and being, 121, 129, 132, _ 35. See also Idea, divine 139; in divine ideal, 46, 48; in truth, Reason (ratio), as act or power of mind,

131 80-81. See also Discursive process

Paulus, Jean, 5 Rectitude (rectitudo) as truth, 43-45,

Pecham, John, 10, 146 47-48, 51-52. See also Adequation as

Peter Aureoli, 131n truth; Conformity as truth; Relation, Phantasm, 72, 98; and agent intellect, as truth; Similitude, as truth 85, 99, 131; object in, 128n, 133, 134, | Reflexivity of mind. See Truth, and re135-37, 140; universal abstracted from, flexivity of mind

36, 71, 96 Regula aeterna, 34. See also Reason,

Philip of Thory, 3 eternal

Philosophy, 23 Relation (relatio, respectus): of actual Picture, as analogy for exemplar, 22, 27, thing to God, 120; conceptual (ratio-

55, 59 nis), 123; of essence to God, 119-20,

Plato, 107, 139, 142-47; and divine ideas, 122-23, 128-29, 130, 134; of identity,

21, 28, 126; and reminiscence, 95, 123n; real, 123; as truth, 20-23, 27,

137-38; Timaeus, 127n 38-39, 47, 48, 49, 52, 59, 65, 68, 81n,

Possibility, 111 129 (see also Adequation as truth; Possible intellect, 71-72, 83-85, 86, 88, Conformity as truth; Rectitude as 91, 131, 136, 144 truth; Similtude, as truth) Power of mind (potentia mentis), 71n Reminiscence, Platonic. See Innate

Practical intellect, 71n knowledge

Prezioso, Faustino A., 98, 143 Res a ratitudine, 23n, 46n, 108-9, 111,

Principles of science, 19 112-15, 116-37, 139-40. See also

Proclus, 57n, 84 Essence; Quiddity

Propositions, knowledge of, 18n, 19n, Res a reor reris, 108-111, 112-14, 119-

76, 81, 88-90, 91, 130 20, 128. See also Being and essence,

Propter quid knowledge, 88-89, 91 theory of

God 114n, 118n

Providence. See Influence, general, of Res generis or aliquid per essentiam, Richard of Mediavilla, 105n

Quiddity (quidditas), 23n, 27n, 51-52,

55, 64, 66, 109, ll1n, 124-25; in in- Science (scientia), 9-10, 13, 43, 103-4, tellect (see Being or entity [entitas], 134. See also Certitude, cognitive; diminished); knowledge of, 18-19, 39, Truth, scientific 58, 68, 77, 80, 86-87, 130-31, 132, — according to Aristotle, 9, 16, 19, 23, 134, 145. See also Essence; Res a rati- 28, 69, 73-74, 75, 77-78, 88, 92,

tudine 131, 136, 145-46, 147

Quid est knowledge. See Quiddity —according to Augustine, 26, 87n Quod quid est, 18n, 19, 46, 79, 130-31. —Henry’s theory of, 14n, 19-20, 23-24,

See also Quiddity 28-29, 39-40, 50, 73-92, 94, 98, 13031

—levels of, 76, 88-91

Real distinction. See Distinction, real —perfect, 24-26, 69n. See also Truth,

Realism in Henry’s thought, 63 pure

Reason (ratio): eternal (aeterna), 98; — principle or foundation of, 74 ideal (idealis), 123, 126-27; incorpo- —theology as, 9-10, 16, 19

162

INDEX

—two kinds of, 21, 24-26, 39-40 131, 132, 139-40, 145; on being and Seal: of God on mind, 37, 39; in wax, essence, 104-5, 112; Commentary on

34, 38 De anima, 56n, 58n; Commentary on

Sensation, 35n, 59, 139, 144; and intel- Metaphysics, 56n, 60n; Commentary lection, 18, 77, 91, 96, 98, 101, 134; on Peri hermeneias, 56n; Commentary

and vision, 31, 32, 95. See also on Posterior Analytics, 81n; Commen-

Phantasm tary on Sentences, 56n; epistemology

Siger of Brabant, 84n of, 58, 66, 68; noetics of, 88; QuaesSignet ring. See Seal, in wax tiones disputatae de veritate, 56n;

Signification, 49 Summa theologiae, 56n, 59n, 60n. See Similitude (similitudo): as exemplar, 35; also Truth, according to Thomas as truth, 39n, 47, 58, 66 (see also Transcendental concept. See Intention,

Adequation as truth; Conformity as first truth; Rectitude as truth; Relation, as True (verum), knowledge of, 16-19, 20n,

truth); as word, 37, 39 23n, 25n, 39, 55, 57-59, 61, 67-68,

Simple cognition, 18n, 60-62, 63, 75-76, 73-81, 83-88, 97, 102

81, 88 Truth (veritas). See also Adequation as

Simple comprehension (comprehensio truth; Conformity as truth; Rectitude simplex), 73, 74. See also Simple in- as truth; Relation, as truth; Similitude,

tellection as truth

Simple intellection (simplex intelligentia), — absolute, 59n, 62n, 63, 64-66 17-18, 57-58, 72n, 75, 77-78, 83, 85, — abstract. See Truth, absolute

86n, 87. See also True, knowledge of —in act, 52-53, 54-55 Simple knowledge (simplex notitia), 74, —as concept, 65

78. See also Simple intellection —of concept (veritas cogitationis), 49, Species (category), 46, 78, 79, 82, 135 52, 62-63 Species, intelligible, 30, 32; expressed — diminished, 54 (see Word); God as, 30-31, 32-34; —as essence or quiddity, 18-19, 23n, 27n, impressed, 6, 21-23, 32-33, 36, 37, 42, 45-46, 47n, 66, 77, 129-31 38, 67, 101-3, 132-33, 143, 144 (see —of God, 27n, 43, 54, 98, 135 also Exemplar, in human mind) —imaginary (imaginaria veritas), 96-97,

Species, visible, 32 98n, 137n. See also Truth, imperfect Specific difference, 78, 79, 82, 86, 116 —imperfect, 22-24, 69. See also Truth,

Speculative intellect, 71n, 83-85 imaginary; Truth, two kinds of

Substance, 116, 118 —as intelligibility, 20, 45n, 50-51

Syllogisms, knowledge of, 76, 81, 88-89, —knowledge of, 16-20, 23n, 55-56, 58-

90, 91 63, 68, 73-74, 77-88, 94-98, 103-4, 130-37, 139-40, 144-45. See also Comparison; Divine illumination;

Tempier, Bp. Etienne, 2-3 Judgment; Science, Henry’s theory of;

Term, 64n, 124 Truth, pure; Truth, scientific; Truth, Theology. See Science, theology as two kinds of

Thing (res), 108-14, 120; actual (res —logical, 26n existens in actu), 109, 111-13, 120- —nature of problem, 6-11, 13-14 21, 128; diminished (res diminuta), — ontological, 26n 54n; of nature (res naturae, res natu- —perfect, 54, 69 ralis), 109. See also Res a ratitudine, —in potency, 52-53, 54

Res a reor reris — pure (sincera veritas), 24-40, 45n, 69, Thomas Aquinas, 1, 3, 43, 73, 77, 84, 95-98, 102n, 132-40

163

INDEX

—and reflexivity of mind, 17n, 55-60, tion, 78, 79-80, 82, 86; in soul or in62-63, 68, 69, 73, 77, 81n, 84, 92, 94 tellect, 107n, 124; term, 64, 124, 131n. — scientific, 52, 69, 73-74, 87-88, 140 See also Abstraction —of sentence (veritas orationis), 49, 63 —of sign (veritas signi), 44-45, 48-50,

51-55, 58, 62-63 Will: divine, 105, 120; human, 71, 85

—in soul, 42, 54 William of Auvergne, 48n —of thing (veritas rei), 27n, 42, 44-48, William of Ockham, In

51-53, 54 Word (verbum), 22n, 35-36, 61, 68,

— according to Thomas, 50, 53, 56-57, 70n, 102, 131, 134, 143; perfect, 22,

59, 60-61, 63, 75-76 27, 33, 35-39; scientific, 87; second,

—two kinds of, 21-26, 38-40, 4Sn, 140 62, 63-66, 67, 86-88; simple, 22-23, 27n, 37-39, 41-42, 61-62, 67, 72-73,

| 86. See also Being or entity (entitas),

Universal, 71, 81, 83, 85, 98; and defini- diminished

164