Augustine and Philosophy

Henry of Ghent (before 1240–1293)1 is frequently characterized as one of the chief representatives, if not the chief representative of the neo-Augustinian reaction to the Aristotelian philosophy of the 13th century. The influence of the thought of the bishop of Hippo on the thought of the Solemn Doctor, as Henry has been called, is immense and would take much more than a single article to treat even somewhat adequately.2 Augustine’s words and ideas are present throughout Henry’s work. For example, in Summa 21–24 I have counted one hundred and six quotations or allusions to twenty-two works, sermons, or letters of the bishop of Hippo, and I have no reason to think that this is atypical. The number of references to Aristotle is, I suspect, almost as many, if not more. But the influence of one thinker upon another cannot be correctly determined simply by counting references.

What this article will attempt to do is focus upon Augustine’s influence on three important aspects of Henry’s thought: (1) his rejection of skepticism, (2) his account of knowing, and (3) his metaphysical argument for the existence of God.3

HENRY’S REJECTION OF SKEPTICISM

In his History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Étienne Gilson began the section on Henry of Ghent with a claim that unjustly minimizes the content of the philosophy of Augustine: “The philosophical doctrine of Saint Augustine had largely been a neo-platonist answer to the semi-skepticism in which he himself had lived for some time between his repudiation of Manichaeism and his conversion to Christianity.”4 According to Gilson, Augustine not only transmitted to his medieval readers a battery of skeptical arguments, but also imposed on them the task of refuting them. Augustine did do that in the case of Henry, as the first section of this paper will show, but he also had a much more extensive influence on the Solemn Doctor, as the second and third parts of this paper will show.

In the very first article of his Summa quaestionum ordinarium Henry asks about the possibility of our attaining any knowledge.5 Acknowledging the influence of Augustine, he says in the introductory lines to the whole Summa:

In order that, in accord with the procedure of Augustine and his intention in the books, On the Academics,6 there may be removed by reasons, to the extent we can, “those people’s arguments that induce a despair of finding the truth for many people,” that is, the arguments of those who say that “everything is uncertain” and that “nothing can be known,” we must start a bit more profoundly and ask here, first, about knowledge and what is knowable in general.7

In his first article on the possibility of knowledge Henry poses twelve questions, the first of which is: “Whether it is possible for a human being to know anything.”8 Henry offers seven arguments against our being able to attain knowledge and six arguments to the contrary in defense of the possibility of human knowledge. In his resolution of the question he begins with a definition of knowledge in the wide sense as “every certain apprehension by which a thing is known as it is without any error and deception”—a definition that includes knowledge based on the external testimony of others and knowledge derived internally from one’s own experience.

In defense of knowledge based on the testimony of others, Henry appeals to the words of Augustine,

against the Academics in book fifteen of On the Trinity, chapter twelve. “Heaven forbid,” [Augustine] says, “that we deny that we know what we learn by the testimony of others. Otherwise, we do not know the ocean, nor do we know lands and cities that their high repute commends to us. We do not know that human beings and their actions existed, of which we learn from reading history. . . . Finally, we do not know in what places and from what people we came to be, since we learn all these things by the testimonies of others.”9

In defense of knowledge derived from one’s own experience Henry again appeals to Augustine, first, concerning the reliability of sense knowledge: “Heaven keep it from us that we should doubt that those things that we learn through the senses of the body are true. For through them we learn of heaven and earth and those things that are known to us in them.”10 Henry also appeals to Cicero’s work against the Academic Skeptics on the possibility of both sensory and intellective knowledge. On the latter knowledge he again cites Augustine who distinguished “two kinds of things that are known, one of them that the mind perceives through the senses of the body, the other of them that it perceives through itself.” Henry continues, still quoting Augustine that, although the Academics

“say many foolish things against the senses of the body,” they still “could by no means call into doubt certain perceptions of true things, which are most solid through themselves . . . such as this one: I know that I am living. . . . On this we are not afraid of being deceived . . . by some likeness of the truth.” For “it is certain . . . that one who is deceived is living.” Here even “an Academic cannot say: Perhaps you are asleep and do not know it, and you are seeing in a dream,” because “in that knowledge one cannot be deceived even by dreams, because even sleeping and seeing in dreams are marks of someone who is living. Nor can an Academic say” this: “Perhaps you are insane and do not know it, for what the insane see is like what those who are sane see. But someone who is insane is living,”11 and the Academic does not contradict this. He, therefore, is not deceived “nor can he lie who says that he” is living, and no other proof is required for this than what one has by the exercise of his intellect and has through evident signs from experience.12

In the resolution of the question Henry provides arguments against seven errors that flourished in antiquity from the side of the senses and from that of the intellect: five that Aristotle refuted in book four of the Metaphysics, the error of Meno that the Philosopher refuted in the beginning of the Posterior Analytics, and the error of the Academics refuted by Cicero and Augustine.13

In his reply to the fourth objection that knowledge requires an object that is unchanging, Henry sketches a history of epistemology from Heraclitus, who held that everything is in flux, and Protagoras, who introduced the mathematicals into natural things, to Aristotle, who,

held that universal genera and species are abstracted by the intellect from singular things, in which they have being in terms of the truth. . . . And in this way he held that fixed knowledge is had concerning particular, natural, sensible, changeable things through their universals existing in the intellect.14

In what seems to be a conscious, but unacknowledged quotation from Aquinas, Henry says, “Augustine, however, was imbued with the philosophy of Plato, and if he found anything in it in harmony with the faith, he took it up in his writings, but what he found opposed to the faith, he interpreted for the better to the extent that he could.”16 As evidence of Augustine’s Platonism Henry points to the divine Ideas, which Aristotle had located outside the divine mind and at which God looked in creating the world. Augustine, however,

interpreting the statements of Plato in a better way than Aristotle did, held that the principles of certain knowledge and cognition of the truth consist in eternal, immutable rules, and that by participation in them through intellectual knowledge any pure truth is known in creatures. As a result, [God] is by his entity the cause of existing for all things insofar as they are, and he is by his truth the cause of knowing for all things insofar as they are true.17

In the following section we shall see how Henry accounted for our coming to a knowledge of the truth and how he followed Augustine in this as he did in his refutation of skepticism.

HENRY’S ACCOUNT OF HUMAN KNOWING

Henry’s account of human knowing is a strange combination of Aristotelian and Platonic or Augustinian philosophy. In fact, it has seemed to some scholars that, given the extent of the Aristotelian influence on Henry, the Augustinian addition is superfluous. Jerome Brown has written: “This is one area where we can see very clearly how the introduction of Aristotle has affected the Augustinianism of the latter part of the thirteenth century. . . . You can see Henry presenting a complete theory of knowledge derived from Aristotle and Averroës, struggling to make room for an Augustinianism that is quite unnecessary.”18 Henry clearly does offer an account of how human beings know that is thoroughly Aristotelian and that might seem to render the Augustinian elements needless. Henry, however, is being quite Augustinian in his efforts to combine both accounts of human knowing.

For the Academics had certain knowledge of the truth and did not want to disclose it rashly to souls that were ignorant or had not been purified. “Why, then,” as [Augustine] says in book three, “did such great men decide to behave so that it seemed that no one attained true knowledge? Listen now,” he says, “a little more attentively, not to what I know, but to what I think. . . . Plato” was “the wisest and most learned man of his time,” and it is certain that “he held that there were two worlds, one intelligible in which the truth dwells, but the other this sensible world made to the image of that one, and from that intelligible world the truth is polished, as it were, and made clear in the soul that knows itself. From this world, however, not knowledge, but only opinion can be generated in the minds of the foolish.”19

Henry continues to quote from the bishop of Hippo’s Contra Academicos in his explanation of the secret doctrine of the Academics:

These and other such truths seem to have been kept and guarded as secrets among his successors, as far as they could be. For they are not easily perceived except by those who purify themselves from all the vices and enter upon another manner of living that is more than human, and anyone who knows them sins gravely if he wants to teach them to just any human beings.20

Hence, according to Augustine and according to Henry, the Academics, who were regarded by others as skeptics, actually held the real teachings of Plato on the intelligible world and knowledge of the pure truth. In his Letter to Dioscorus, which Henry cites, Augustine explained how the errors of the Epicureans and Stoics lasted down to the Christian era:

And “the errors, whether concerning morals or the nature of things or the method of investigating the truth,” lasted “up to Christian times, but we now see that they have ceased. . . . From this it is understood that those philosophers of the Platonic kind, after changing a few things of which Christian doctrine does not approve, ought to bow pious heads to Christ, the one unconquered king . . . who gave the command and the people believed what the Platonists were afraid even to utter.”21

Augustine, Henry explains, followed the teaching of Plato, and Henry quotes again from the end of Contra Academicos, where he said:

No one has any doubt that we are driven to learn by the twofold weight of authority and of reason. I am, therefore, resolved never to depart from the authority of Christ. For I find none stronger. But with regard to what must be pursued by very subtle reason—for I am so disposed that I desire to grasp what is true, not only by believing, but also by understanding—I am confident that I will find in Plato what does not disagree with our sacred teachings.22

And then in words of touching exhortation to his students, Henry adds that this “is the view [Augustine] maintains in all his books, and let us also maintain it with him, by saying that no certain and infallible knowledge of the pure truth can be had by anyone except by looking at the exemplar of uncreated light and truth.”23

Before we examine why Henry held this Platonic or Augustinian position on the knowledge of the pure truth, it is important to see why he thought that an Aristotelian account of knowing was not simply incompatible with the Platonic-Augustinian appeal to the divine exemplar. The reason is that Henry sees Aristotle as one of those Academics who concealed from others the real teaching of his master—a teaching that, Henry believes, Aristotle himself held. Though Henry regards the Platonic-Augustinian view as truer than the so-called Aristotelian account of knowing, Henry believes, as he tells us, that Aristotle himself held the view of Plato, and he supports his claim with an appeal to what the Philosopher said in a Platonic passage from his Metaphysics. The Platonic-Augustinian way, Henry says,

is a truer way of acquiring knowledge and the apprehension of the truth than that which Aristotle set forth on the basis only of the experience of the senses—if Aristotle did in fact understand it in that way and did not agree with Plato on the same position. In fact, as is more correctly believed, even if he deviated from Plato in his way of speaking by concealing the divine doctrine of his master, as the other early Academics did, he had the same view about the knowledge of the truth along with Plato, in accord with what he seems to have implied when, speaking about the knowledge of the truth, he says in book two of the Metaphysics that what is “most true” is “the cause of the truth of those” things “that come afterward,” and that for this reason “the disposition of each thing in being is its disposition in the truth.”24

Hence, if Aristotle himself held the doctrine of his master, then Henry, following Augustine, can maintain that the Aristotelian and Platonic views of knowledge of the truth are not incompatible, but complementary, although of the two views the Platonic view is in Henry’s eyes preferable.

Henry does give an account of knowing that is thoroughly Aristotelian and that can leave one wondering why he thought it necessary to add the Augustinian elements. For example, in Summa 1.5 Henry asks “whether it is possible for a human being to know by himself by acquiring knowledge without a teacher.”25 In his resolution of the question Henry gives an account of human knowing that is basically derived from books two and three of Aristotle’s De anima. The human intellect is, Henry explains, initially knowing only in potency, and it “does not go into act of itself, but through what it receives from the species of intelligible things.”26 As these species are in sensible things outside the intellect, they are not intelligible in act, but only in potency. Hence, there must be “another power existing in act that makes the intelligibles in potency intelligible in act so that they can move the passive intellect. This is the power that we call the agent intellect.”27 Once the passive intellect has been informed by the intelligible species, “the possible intellect naturally conceives the first intentions of non-complex intelligibles . . . and in that way the intelligence of the mind is first informed by the first concepts of things . . . such as the intentions of being and one, number and magnitude. . . .”28 From such an understanding of non-complex intelligibles “the intellect that composes and divides . . . naturally conceives without any discursive reasoning the first conception of complex intelligibles, such as that a whole is greater than its part, or that, if you take equals from equals, those that are left are equal.”29

From such first principles we can go on to attain the conclusions of any sciences naturally understood through themselves that are naturally to be acquired by purely natural abilities. That is, Henry excludes from the knowledge that human beings can naturally acquire “the apprehension of the pure truth and also . . . the apprehension of supernatural objects of knowledge, such as those that pertain to faith and revelation.”30 But apart from such knowledge of the pure truth and of supernatural mysteries, the first principles include in potency “the apprehension of all the particular conclusions that follow, which are brought from potency into act through study and hard work.”31 Henry goes on to describe how the intellect can acquire habits of the principles and of conclusions and explains that at times human beings—if sufficiently clever and industrious—are able to acquire such knowledge by themselves without the aid of a teacher.

With regard to intellective knowledge, however, Henry draws an important distinction because “it is one thing to know about a creature that which is true in it, and it is another to know its truth,” that is, “there is one knowledge by which a thing is known and another by which its truth is known.”36 Every cognitive power, even the senses, Henry claims, “that apprehends a thing through its knowledge, as it has being outside the knower, apprehends what is true in it. But by this it does not apprehend its truth.”37

Henry explains this distinction between knowing what is true in a thing and knowing the truth of a thing from the side of the intellect and from the side of what is known. From the side of the intellect the difference lies in the distinction between knowledge by simple intelligence, which grasps what the thing is, and knowledge by the intelligence that composes and divides, that is, that judges affirmatively or negatively. In simple intelligence the intellect can grasp the thing as it is, but it does not understand the truth of a thing, for example, that it is a true human being or true color.

At this point the Augustinian influence on Henry’s account of knowing becomes apparent for he insists,

And it must be said . . . that the truth of a thing can only be known on the basis of the knowledge of the conformity of the thing known to its exemplar, because, according to what Augustine says in On the True Religion: “True things are true insofar as they are like the principal One,” and Anselm says in On the Truth: Truth is the conformity of a thing to its truest exemplar.39

That is, according to Augustine and Anselm, to know the truth of a thing is to know that the thing conforms to the exemplar in the divine intellect according to which it has been created.

There is, however, a twofold exemplar, as Henry learned from Plato’s Timaeus 28A–29A, one that has been made and one that is perpetual and eternal.40 In Henry’s interpretation of Plato the two exemplars amount to the species of a thing derived in Aristotelian fashion from the thing through sensory knowledge and “the divine art that contains the ideal reasons of all things.”41 Henry holds that it is necessary to have a species acquired from a sensible thing in order to have knowledge of it, but also insists that “it is absolutely impossible that an entirely certain cognition and infallible knowledge of the truth is had through such an exemplar.”42 He gives three reasons: first, because “an exemplar . . . abstracted from a changeable thing . . . necessarily has the character of something changeable.” In support of this Henry cites from Augustine that “the pure truth is not to be sought from the senses of the body.”43 The second reason is that “the human soul is mutable and subject to error.” In support of this Henry again cites from Augustine that “the law of all the arts in absolutely immutable, but . . . the human mind that is permitted to see such a law can suffer the mutability of error.”44 The third reason is that, because it is abstracted from a phantasm, such an exemplar has a likeness both with what is true and with what is false so that one cannot distinguish between them. For Augustine had said that the immutable truth above the mind “does not have an image of something false from which it cannot be distinguished.”45

Hence, Henry held that “the concept of the mind informed by the species and exemplar received from the thing is not sufficient for knowing . . . the knowledge of the pure truth.”46 Rather, he insisted that,

there is required the species and eternal exemplar that was the cause of the thing and that also does not act for generating the apprehension and knowledge of the truth in us, in accord with the common course of knowledge and the apprehension of the truth, except by means of the temporal exemplar.47

Thus the accounts of Aristotle and Plato have to be joined together, and in that way, Henry claims, “there will be filtered out one discipline, the truest philosophy, as Augustine says at the end of On the Academics.”48 Hence, as Henry sees it, the teaching of Aristotle, taken alone, is deficient because it attributes too much to particular causes, and the teaching of Plato, taken alone, is also deficient because it attributes too little to particular causes.49 However—and here’s the rub—Henry claims that any knowledge of the pure truth by knowing the divine exemplar is a matter of a free illumination on the part of God which “God offers to whom he wills and takes away from whom he wills.” As Carlos Steele has well said, “The problem of the illumination theory as developed by Henry is that it introduces the notions of ‘grace’ and ‘divine will’ to explain what is supposed to be a natural process of our minds, namely the grasping of the eternal truth.”50 But in this respect too, as Steele says at the conclusion of his article, “Henry is much more an Augustinian than a Platonist.”51

KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

In Summa 22.4 Henry asks whether the existence of God can be demonstrated from creatures, and he answers that “the fact that God exists certainly can be demonstrated to a human being,” and he immediately points out that the being of God that is demonstrated is not “the being of God that he has in himself, but the being that signifies the composition of the intellect, that is, this proposition that says, ‘God exists,’ is true.”52 This being that consists in the truth of the proposition—what Henry calls “the diminished being” of God in our intellect—can be demonstrated irrefutably from creatures.53 In support of this claim Henry appeals to passages from Augustine’s Homilies on the Gospel of John and from On the True Religion.54

In Summa 22.5, however, Henry presents another proof, a metaphysical proof—that is, one that pertains to first philosophy as opposed to physics or natural philosophy. He also gives an a priori proof—that is, one that does not move by the ways of causality from creatures to God, but one that moves from the concept of the divine essence or quiddity to the existence of God.60 The metaphysical proof is a hallmark of Henry’s philosophy, and although Henry calls it “the way of universal intelligible propositions,” taking the name from Avicenna’s Metaphysics,61 the content of the proof is purely Augustinian. For, when Henry offers an explanation of this a priori and metaphysical proof he appeals to two puzzling and difficult passages in Augustine’s De trinitate. In the first Augustine addresses his reader and tells him:

See if you can, O soul weighed down by the corruptible body and burdened by many and various earthly thoughts. See if you can that God is truth. For it was written that God is light (1 Jn 1:5); see not as these eyes see, but see as the heart sees, when you hear “truth.” Do not ask what truth is, for the fog of bodily images and the clouds of phantasms will immediately present themselves and disturb the clarity that shone forth for you at the first moment when I said “truth.” Behold; remain, if you can, in the first moment in which you were struck as if by lightning when “truth” is said. But you cannot. You will fall back into these familiar and earthly things.62

And in a second passage to which Henry returns again and again, the bishop of Hippo wrote in words of great beauty but no less difficulty:

When you hear “this good” and “that good,” which can be said to be not good in other respects, if you can, see without those good things that are good by participation the good itself, by participation in which they are good. For you understand it at the same time when you hear “this good” or “that good.” If you are able to set aside those good things and see the good by itself, you will have seen God.63

Avicenna, I believe, understood this when he said that a human being can know that God exists by way of universal intelligible propositions, not by way of the testimony of the senses. But those universal propositions are about being, one, good, and the first intentions of things, which are first conceived by the intellect and in which a human being can perceive being without qualification and the good or the true without qualification.64

The two passages from De trinitate are often taken as representative of Augustinian mysticism rather than as any sort of rational proof of the existence of God.65 Yet Henry claims that the Avicennian proof in the way of universal intelligible propositions, which he identifies with what Augustine does in these passages, is a distinct proof, one that is metaphysical and a priori, and one that is “much more perfect” than the a posteriori proofs from sensible creatures that he presented in Summa 22.4.66

Although Henry claims that his metaphysic proof is a priori, he insists that it is not completely a priori since the concepts of being, one, good, true, beautiful, etc. must be derived from sensory experience.67 But the proof is a priori in the sense that it moves from a concept of God to the existence of God in much the same way as Anselm’s argument does in the Proslogion.68 On the other hand, Henry argues that the existence of God is not self-evident, as Thomas Aquinas took the Proslogion argument to be.69 The reason why Henry denies that the argument is self-evident is that the concept of God is not one that is naturally and immediately known, like the concepts of being and non-being, whole and part, etc., but requires a great deal of rational development before one attains a concept of the essence or quiddity of God that includes existence.70

In order to have an argument from the concept of the divine quiddity or essence to God’s existence, one obviously needs to have a concept of the divine quiddity or essence. In Summa 24.6 Henry argues that we can attain knowledge of God either as natural philosophers or as metaphysicians:

In the first way knowledge of whether God exists is obtained from created, sensible substances, that is, from the relation of effect to cause and of something moved to its mover. . . . But in the second way our knowledge of whether God exists and our knowledge of what he is . . . is obtained from created, sensible substances in another way, that is, in another way than by deduction from creatures.71

We cannot, of course, know what God is by a vision of his bare essence, as the blessed do in heaven, but we can, Henry claims, know what God is through his general attributes that he has in common with creatures by analogy.

In what is basically a commentary on Augustine’s words in De trinitate 8.3.4, Henry says that “the abstraction of form from an individual thing that partakes in this form is twofold: in one way as related to the individual things, in another way as completely abstracted from the individual things.”72 In the first way we have “the abstraction of the universal from the particular, for example, of good from this or that good.”73 In the second way we have “the abstraction of a form considered completely separate from matter, that is, as subsisting in itself, for example, the good separate from anything participating in that good . . . the self-subsistent good.”74 In the first sort of abstraction we “abstract good from the particular good” and “consider good without qualification as it is a certain common and universal good.”75 Through the second sort of abstraction “we come to know . . . the good through its essence of the creator himself.”76 But as we can do this with good, we can do this “with all the other attributes that belong in common to a creature and the creator.”77

What God is can be known through creatures in three degrees of knowledge—general, more general, and most general. In knowledge that is most general and most confused, we know what God is by understanding whatever has excellence and worth in a creature. In this way, Henry says, we know what God is, as Augustine said in book eight of De trinitate. Most general knowledge itself has three degrees. In the first there is this sensible good, such as a tree or a dog.

For, when I say “this good,” I say two things, both that it is good and that it is this. That it is said to be “this” belongs to the creature; that it is said to be “good” is common to the creator and to the creature. If you abstract from it “this” and “that,” this is the second way of understanding the good. . . . And this is the analogous good common to God and a creature.78

But if you can distinguish one from the other by understanding the good as subsistent and as not existing in another, not as a participated good, but as other than the goods that are good by participation—as that by participation in which other things are good, this is the third way of understanding the good. . . . This is the good of the creator only.80

Again Henry reminds his reader that, as it is with good, so it is with being, true, beautiful, just, and the other first intentions that express some dignity and nobility in the creator and creatures.

Before turning to more general knowledge and general knowledge of the quiddity of God, one should note that in Summa 24.7 Henry distinguishes two sorts of knowledge of God from creature: a natural knowledge and a rational knowledge. Natural knowledge of God’s quiddity “is conceived immediately and naturally with the first intentions of being,” while rational knowledge is “obtained by way of rational distinction.”81 In rational knowledge “what God is is not the first thing that a human being knows from creatures, but rather the last.”82 Henry illustrates what he means by such rational knowledge of what God is by repeating his account of the twofold abstraction in moving from this or that good, first, to the universal participated good and, secondly, to the unparticipated, subsistent good.83 Rational knowledge enters in at the point where one distinguishes the subsistent good from the universal participated good. In natural knowledge, which is found in the first two degrees of most general knowledge, what God is is the first thing known (primum cognitum) by a human being in the first intentions because Henry claims that our intellect always knows what is indeterminate before what is determinate:

“The intellect always understands about anything whatsoever . . . that it is a being before understanding that it is this being, that it is good before it is this good . . . always understanding the confused universals before what is more particular and determinate.”84 Moreover, Henry distinguishes a privative indeterminateness and a negative indeterminateness. When one understands “this good,” one understands good as determined in the highest degree. But when one understand the good as the universal participated good, which “is naturally able to be determined by this or that good,” one understands it with privative indeterminateness.85 When one understand goods as good “as subsisting good, not as this or that, nor as of this or of that, because it is not a participated good and cannot be determined,” one understands good with negative indeterminateness.86 But since negative indeterminateness is greater than privative indeterminateness, “our intellect understands [in any good] by a natural priority the good that is indeterminate in the negative sense. And this is the good that is God. As it is with good, so it is with all the other things understood about God from creatures.”87 Hence, in the first two degrees of most general knowledge, that is, in natural knowledge,

what God is is the first object that has to be understood from creatures so that nothing can be known in creatures and understood from creatures to be true, good, beautiful, just, being, one, and anything else of the sort . . . unless by a natural priority . . . there is known what is unqualifiedly and indeterminately true, good, beautiful, being, one, and anything else of the sort.88

Hence, Henry can conclude that what God is in the first two degrees of most general knowledge is the beginning of all our knowledge, just as the vision of what God is in heaven is the end of our knowledge.

In more general knowledge one understands what God is in his general attributes “under a certain preeminence—insofar . . . as he is a most excellent nature.”89 In this degree of knowledge each of the general attributes is “conceived under the some character that belongs to God alone.”90 This level is attained by the simultaneous application of the ways of eminence and of removal in which the concept is raised to its highest degree with the removal of all the imperfection with which it is found in creatures.91 In support of such knowledge of what God is Henry quotes from a variety of works of Augustine. For example, he quotes from the Homilies on the Gospel of John on how we are to know God by transcending all creatures: “Transcend . . . the body, and think of the mind; transcend . . . the mind, and think of God. You do not reach God unless you also transcend the mind. . . . Remove yourself from the body; transcend even yourself. . . . For no one will reach him unless he has transcended himself.”92 Similarly Henry cites a passage from On True Religion:

One should not aimlessly and in vain gaze upon the beauty of the heavens and the order of the stars. . . . which preserve their proper limit and natures in their own kind. In considering them, we should not display idle and fleeting curiosity, but we should make a step towards immortal and everlasting things.93

In this more general knowledge we conceive what God is in his general attributes by the ways of eminence and removal.

by reducing all his attributes of nobility and dignity to this one, first, most simple attribute, that is, through understanding that whatever is in him is his essence and that his essence is absolutely nothing else, either really or intentionally, than his being or existence.94

Thus by removing all composition we come to a concept of what God is and come to understand that at the level of general knowledge all the general attributes, such as being, one, good, true, etc., in their highest degree are identical with the divine essence, which is nothing other than the divine being or existence. Again Henry quotes from Augustine, stressing that our knowledge of what God is in this life is slight in comparison with what is known about him in heaven in the vision of his bare essence. Quoting from the Homilies on John, he says: “We speak about God. Why is it surprising if you do not comprehend him? For, if you comprehend, it is not God. . . . To touch him a little is great blessedness. But to comprehend him completely is impossible.”95 And from De Genesi ad litteram Henry quotes: “For to perceive him in part, however slightly, is more excellent in incomparable happiness than to comprehend all these [created] things.”96

In this section we have seen that Henry’s metaphysical argument for the existence of God is essentially an unpacking of Augustine’s lines from De trinitate 8.3.4, a passage that, I confess, had always left me baffled. Whether Henry has interpreted Augustine correctly or not is a matter of debate, but he has at least provided an account of the words of the bishop of Hippo that makes what Augustine said intelligible and has made it something less than pure mysticism. In unpacking Augustine’s words we have also seen why Henry claimed—another hallmark of his thought—that God is the first known object of the human intellect.97

CONCLUSION

What I have done in the preceding pages is show how Henry followed Augustine in three areas. First, in his refutation of the Academic Skeptics, Henry allowed Augustine to speak for him concerning knowledge of the truth from others and through one’s own sensory and intellective knowledge. Secondly, in how we attain knowledge Henry combined in typically Augustinian fashion the accounts of knowing in both Aristotle and Plato, maintaining that knowledge of the pure truth requires a twofold exemplar, one derived from the sensible thing through the senses and intellect and the other the eternal exemplar in the mind of God by which alone the human mind can judge that the thing known is a true thing of its kind, for example, a true tree or true human being. Thirdly, in explaining how we can know the existence of God, Henry accepted a posteriori proofs in the ways of causality and eminence, but then added an a priori metaphysical proof, which he called, following Avicenna, “the way of universal, intelligible propositions,” but which he explained by doing an exegesis of Augustine’s words in De trinitate 8.3.4 about how in seeing this good and that good, we at the same time see the unparticipated good that is God. Henry’s metaphysical proof and his claim that God is the primum cognitum of the human intellect are hallmarks of his philosophy, and both are, as Henry claims, grounded in the thought of Augustine of Hippo. Hence, I have shown Augustine’s influence on Henry of Ghent in three areas that were important to the philosophical thought of both men. Augustine had claimed that Plotinus was so like Plato in his philosophy that one might be tempted to think that he was Plato come back to life.100 So too, Henry is so steeped in the thought of the bishop of Hippo that one might be tempted to think that he is Augustinus redivivus, albeit in a century in which the Stagirite’s philosophy was much better known than it was in the age of Augustine.

NOTES

1. In his “An Historiographical Image of Henry of Ghent,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on the Occasion of the 700th Anniversary of his Death (1293), ed. W. Vanhamel (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996) 377, Pasquale Porro notes that the dates usually given for Henry’s birth are 1217 and 1223, but adds that they have no objective foundation.

2. Although many scholars mention the influence of Augustine on Henry of Ghent, I have found only a few studies that are explicitly devoted to this theme, such as Raymond Macken, O.F.M., “Henry of Ghent and Augustine,” in Ad Litteram: Authoritative Texts and their Medieval Readers, ed. Mark D. Jordan and Kent Emery, Jr. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992) 251–274; and Jerome Brown, “Henry of Ghent on Avicenna and Augustine,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings, pp. 19–42. Carlos Steele, “Henricus Gandavensis Platonicus,” in Henry of Ghent and the Transformation of Scholastic Thought: Studies in Memory of Jos Decorte, ed. Guy Guldentops and Carlos Steele (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003) 15–39, should be included among these since Henry’s Platonism is the Christian Platonism of the bishop of Hippo, as Steele clearly acknowledges.

3. For a discussion of many other points on which Henry is indebted to the philosophy of Augustine, see Macken’s article. As the originator of the new critical edition of Henry’s works, which is still not complete, Macken has a much broader knowledge of Henry’s thought than I can claim. In the conclusion to his article, Macken says, “It seems to me that one of Henry’s great preoccupations was to give a satisfactory scientific foundation to the thought of his beloved Augustine” (p. 270)—a claim with which I totally agree and which I hope to confirm in this essay.

4. Étienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955) 447.

5. Henry’s principal works are the Summa quaestionum ordinarium and Quodlibeta. The Summa represents his ordinary lectures at the University of Paris and remains incomplete with only the seventy-five articles on God, although Henry had intended to write articles on creatures as well. His Quodlibeta represent the public disputations held at the University in Advent or Lent from 1276 to 1292. As their name indicates, the disputations dealt with questions on any topic of theology, philosophy, or ecclesiastical law. A new critical edition of Henry’s works is being produced, and many volumes have already been published with Raymond Macken, O.F.M, as the first coordinator, and Gordon Wilson as his successor.

6. See Augustine, Contra Academicos 2.1.1; PL 32: 919. The title, De Academicis, which Henry uses, is also found in many manuscripts of Augustine’s work.

7. Summa, Proemium; Badius, fol. 1r. Within this passage Henry cites Augustine’s Retractationes 1.1.1 (PL 32: 585) and Contra Academicos 2.5.11 (PL 32: 925) and 3.5.12 (PL 32: 940). The new critical edition of articles 1 to 5 by Gordon Wilson became available only after this paper had been completed. Hence, I used the reprint of the 1520 Badius edition. Henry of Ghent: Summae quaestionum ordinarium (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1953). I have included the folio numbers as well as the paragraph letters from the Badius text, as is customary in referring to the Summa. The translations are my own. See Henrici de Gandavo: Summa (Quaestiones ordinariae) art. I-V, ed. G. A. Wilson (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2005).

9. Summa 1.1; fol. 1vB, quoting Augustine, De trinitate 15.12 (PL 42: 1075).

10. Summa 1.1; fol. 2rB, quoting Augustine, De trinitate 15.12 (PL 42: 1075).

16. Ibid. See Aquinas, S.T. I, q. 84, art. 5. Steele notes in “Henricus Gandavensis Platonicus,” p. 27, “This unacknowledged quotation from Thomas is Henry’s means of using Thomas against ‘Thomist philosophy.’”

18. J. Brown, “Henry of Ghent on Avicenna and Augustine,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium, pp. 19–42, here p. 38. Brown’s article is, in fact, not speaking primarily about human knowing, but about a closely related topic, namely, how an angel can teach a human being, according to Henry.

19. Summa 1.2; fol. 6rH, quoting Augustine, Contra Academicos 3.17.37 (PL 32: 954).

21. Summa 1.2; fol. 6vI, quoting Augustine, Epistolae 118.3.21 (PL 33: 442).

22. Summa 1.2; fol. 6vL, quoting Augustine, Contra Academicos 3.20.44 (PL 32: 958).

24. Summa 1.2; fol. 7vL, quoting Aristotle, Metaphysics 2.1.993b27–31, in Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis VIII (Venice: apud Junctas, 1562), fol. 29vLM.

33. Summa 1.2; fol. 4rB, quoting Augustine, De civitate Dei 11.10.2 (PL 41: 326).

39. Summa 1.2; fol. 5rE, quoting Augustine, De vera religione 36.66 (PL 34: 152) and paraphrasing Anselm, De veritate 13 (PL 158: 486).

40. Henry relied upon the translation by Chalcidius in referring to the first exemplar as “made and developed” (factum et elaboratum). See Plato, Timaeus 29A, ed. J. Waszink, pp. 14–15.

43. Ibid., quoting Augustine, De octaginta tribus quaestionibus 9 (PL 40: 13).

45. Ibid., quoting Augustine, De octaginta tribus quaestionibus 9 (PL 40, 14).

52. Summa 22.4; fol. 132vL. For the translation of Summa 21–24, see Henry of Ghent’s Summa: Questions on God’s Existence and Essence. Trans. Jos Decorte (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and Roland J. Teske, S.J. (Marquette University); Latin Text, Introduction, and Notes by Roland Teske, S.J., Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations 5 (Leuven: Peeters, 2005). The Latin text preserves the folio numbering of the Badius text.

53. On the source of “diminished being” (ens diminutum), see Armand Maurer, “Ens diminutum: A Note on its Origin and Meaning,” Mediaeval Studies 12 (1950) 216–222.

54. See Augustine, In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 2.4 (PL 35: 1390) and De vera religione 39.52 (PL 34: 145).

56. See Summa 22.4; fol. 133rP–Q, where Henry summarizes arguments found in Augustine, De vera religone 29.52–36.67 (PL 34: 145–52), and De libero arbitio 2.3.8–12.34 (PL 32: 1244–60).

58. See Summa 22.4; fol. 133vR where Henry cites Richard’s De trinitate 1.11 (PL 196: 896) and Anselm’s Monologion 4 (PL 158: 148–49).

60. The question of whether the existence of God can be proved in metaphysics arose in Averroës’ criticism of Avicenna for having offered a proof of the existence of God in his Liber prima philosophia, sive scientia divina, which is commonly referred to as his Metaphysics. See Averroës, Aristotelis De physico auditu libri octo cum Averrois Cordubensis variis in eosdem commentariis (Venice: Junctas, 1562, fol. 47vGH). Avicenna, it seems, held that his argument in first philosophy could proceed completely a priori, that is, without any sensory input since his “floating man” could attain the concept of being without any sensory experience and could—at least theoretically—move from there to the distinction between being possible through itself and being necessary through itself. For the “floating man” argument, see Avicenna, Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus, ed. S. Van Reit (Leuven: Peeters, 1972) 1.1, p. 36.

61. See Summa 22.5; fol. 134rB–134vB, where Henry cites Avicenna’s Liber de philosophia, sive de scientia divina 1.3 (ed. Van Reit) p. 23.

65. In his “Note complémentaire” on p. 574 of the BA edition and translation of De trinitate, F. Cayré says, on De trinitate 8.2.3, “La question du mysticisme de saint Augustin se pose dans le De Trinitate á l’occasion des pages philosophique d’inspriation plotinienne, du livre VIII notamment, oú certain voient une sorte de mystique naturelle.”

66. Summa 22.5; fol. 135rE. Henry claims that the metaphysical is superior because through it one sees that existence belongs to the divine quiddity and knows the divine essence more in particular and more distinctly.

68. Scholarly opinion on whether Henry’s argument in Summa 22.5 is basically like Anselm’s Proslogion argument is divided. See my “Henry of Ghent’s Metaphysical Argument for the Existence of God,” forthcoming. For example, Jean Paulus, in “Henri de Gand et l’argument ontologique,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 10 (1935–36): 265–323, argues that the metaphysical proof is a version of the ontological argument. But José Gómez Caffarena, in Ser Participado y Ser Subsistente en la Metafisica de Enrique de Gante (Rome: Gregorian University Press, 1958), and Raymond Macken, in “The Metaphysical Proof for the Existence of God in the Philosophy of Henry of Ghent,” Franziskanische Studien 68 (1986) 247–260, link the argument with the ways of formal causality and eminence.

69. See Henry, Summa 22.2 and Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2.1. Both St. Thomas and Henry argue that the existence of God is not self-evident. Aquinas takes the Proslogion argument as an example meant to show that the existence of God is self-evident, while Henry raises the criteria for a proposition’s being self-evident and explicitly claims that the Proslogion argument does not show that the existence of God is self-evident. See Summa 30.3, where Henry examines the Proslogion argument and explains how it is quite possible to think that God does not exist if one lacks the proper concept of God.

79. See ibid, where Henry says, “And although the good of the creator and the good of the creature in themselves produce different and distinct concepts, as ‘being’ also does concerning God and a creature, our intellect, nonetheless, conceives the two of them in a confused way as one, because they are very close to each other.”

92. Augustinus, In Iohannis evangelium tractatus 20.11 (PL 34: 1562), as quoted in Summa 24.6; fol. 143rY.

93. Augustine, De vera religione 29.53 (PL 34: 145), as quoted in Summa 24.6; fol. 143rY.

95. Augustine, Sermones 117.3.5 (PL 38: 663), as quoted in Summa 24.6; fol. 143vZ.

96. Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram 5.16.34 (PL 34: 333), as quoted in Summa 24.6; fol. 143vZ.

97. On the quiddity of God as primum cognitum, see Matthias Laarmann, Deus, primum cognitum: Die Lehre von Gott als dem Ersterkannten des menschlichen Intellekts bei Heinrich von Gent (1293), Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters, N.F. Band 52 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1999) as well as idem., “God as Primum Cognitum. Some Remarks on the Theory of Initial Knowledge of Esse and God according to Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent,” in Henry of Ghent: Proceedings of the International Colloquium, pp. 171–191. Also see R. Macken, “God as ‘primum cognitum’ in the Philosophy of Henry of Ghent,” Franziskanische Studien 66 (1984) 309–315.

Augustine’s Influence on thePhilosophy of Henry of Ghent

HENRY’S REJECTION OF SKEPTICISM

HENRY’S ACCOUNT OF HUMAN KNOWING

KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

CONCLUSION

NOTES

Augustine’s Influence on the
Philosophy of Henry of Ghent