Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus on Divine Illumination

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Intellectual Background

Henry of Ghent lived during the peak of the Scholastic movement, a period of heightened intellectual activity in the latter part of the 13 th century. Among his contemporaries were St. Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. Like the other scholastics, he drew largely from Aristotle, but he also worked from the major philosophers from Plato through St. Augustine. He was strongly opposed to St. Aquinas and he raised many criticisms of his work and those of his followers.

As his works are largely unpublished and his place in history obscure, Henry is mostly known through his relation to John Duns Scotus and a couple of other more notable figures who rejected his writing. Worthy of note is that he was one of the last supporters of the idea of divine illumination.

John Duns Scotus was an ordained priest at Oxford, one of the most important locations to the Franciscan order (followers of "The Rule of St. Francis"). Like other scholastics, he worked extensively from the works of Aristotle, as well as Plato, Augustine, and other popular philosophers and theologians of the time.

He came to spend much of his time rebutting the writings of Henry of Ghent. His refutation of Henry's writing dealt a crippling blow to the idea of divine illumination.

His temporary exile from France demonstrates some of the tensions that existed between religion and government at the time. Such events distracted scholars from their works, as it interrupted Scotus's work on the Sentences.

For both Henry and Scotus, as well as the other Scholastics of the time, the typical career consisted of climbing the positions within the church, as well as within the prestigious universities of the day, primarily in Oxford and Paris. Theology and philosophy were basically treated as the same thing. The Roman Catholic Church was firmly in power, and the works of the Ancients were being reevaluated in an effort to make them fit with and supplement the teachings of the Church.

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Sources

1. "Henry of Ghent" at Encyclopedia Britannica.
2. "John Duns Scotus" at New Advent.
3. "Henry of Ghent" at New Advent.
4. "John Duns Scotus" at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.