  It is not at all clear, here or elsewhere, how the agent intellect carries out the two tasks he describes. (If Aquinas had given us a satisfactory account of this, he would have thereby solved two of the leading problems of epistemology.) But for present purposes it is enough to notice how Aquinas seems to replace Augustinian illumination with the Aristotelian agent intellect. Thus the traditional verdict has been that Aquinas replaced Augustine with Aristotle, and exchanged illumination for abstraction. 