Henry’s Summa does not open with a direct treatment of God, but with a detailed analysis of the problem of human knowledge, beginning with the classical skeptic’s question: can man know anything at all? Taking knowledge in its most generic meaning, for Henry it is undeniable that man is able to know something through the senses and without divine intervention. Moving on to knowledge in the strict sense, things get more complicated. Following Augustine’s Soliloquia, it is important to distinguish between what is true and truth itself: sensation only grasps id quod verum est (‘‘what is true’’), while knowledge of the truth implies the knowledge of the nature or essence of a thing, which can only be gained by comparing the thing itself to its exemplar.
There are, however, two exemplars: (a) the universal species of the object that the mind obtains by abstraction, on the basis of sensible data (in this case, the truth of the res is the conformity between the really existing thing and its mental representation); (b) the ideal form present in the divine mind that acts as the formal cause of creatural essences, and from this perspective the truth of a thing is its ontological conformity to its eternal model. This double relation thereby produces two different levels of truth: on the one hand, the truth of Aristotelian science, deriving from the purely natural faculties, through an abstracting process; on the other, the ‘‘sincere truth’’ (sincera veritas), obtained only through divine illumination. The first truth does not have the same infallibility, purity, and absolute certainty as the second; nevertheless, it is necessary for the fulfillment of the second: the action of the divine exemplar can only work on a concept already obtained by the intellect through abstraction. For Henry, divine illumination does not directly provide the mind with any content, but rather certifies definitively the representation of a thing present in the human intellect as coinciding with the representation existing ab aeterno in the divine intellect. The action of divine illumination is therefore neither a direct donation of intelligible contents, independent of the conditions of sensible knowledge, nor is it a simple purification, preparation or refinement of the mind in order to predispose it to intellectual knowledge; rather, it is the certification of our created exemplar by the uncreated one (Macken 1972).
Over the years, however, Henry seems gradually to abandon this theory of the double exemplar in order to make room, on the one hand, for a reworking of the defining process of essences through their progressive determination, as described by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics (Marrone 1985, 2001), and on the other, for a reinterpretation of illumination as the constant presence in act, albeit in a recess of the mind (abditum mentis), of the image of God (Quodl. IX, q. 15; cf. Emery 2001).
In this evolution, the partial rejection of the function of intelligible species (Quodl. III, q. 1; Quodl. IV, q. 7) is particularly important, and anticipates the similar solution adopted by ‘‘nominalists’’ a couple of decades later. For Henry, the particular phantasm is made immaterial and universal by the abstraction of the agent intellect and imprints itself on the potential intellect without the mediation of an intelligible species that is numerically different. The phantasm is therefore the efficient cause of intellectual knowledge, or better, of the first operation of the intellect (that of simple understanding). Henry does not eliminate sensible species, however, nor does he eliminate all types of representation in the sphere of intellectual activity. Indeed, after the phantasms are impressed on the possible, or potential, intellect, making simple understanding possible, the intellect then forms complex judgments and produces its own species, or verbum (mental word), as a result of this activity.
Concerning the relation between will and intellect (an issue to which he dedicates no less than 20 quodlibetal questions), Henry can be considered a voluntarist (Muller 2007), even though with regard to the more ‘‘radical’’ voluntarists, such as Walter of Bruges, he does not confine himself to interpreting the role of reason as that of a mere ‘‘advisor,’’ but instead as that of a cause (albeit a causa sine qua non): without the prior knowledge of the intellect, the will cannot desire anything (Macken 1975,1977). In other words, for Henry the intellect and the good that it proposes are not the sole or necessary origin of the motion of the will; however, by presenting the objects that this faculty can freely choose, reason is the conditio sine qua non of the action of the will itself, which otherwise would be prey to sensible appetites and the determinism of the passions.
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Moral action is therefore performed both by the intellect, which presents the kinds of good to choose, and by the will, which freely chooses one of these, yet without being forced to opt for that which is judged best by reason.
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