  It is this seemingly contradictory task that Henry of Ghent (c.1217–1293) took upon himself in the years immediately after Aquinas’s death. When Peter John Olivi remarked that he would accept the theory of illumination because it “belongs to men who are highly venerable” (sec. 4 above), he would have had in mind among others Henry of Ghent, who would indeed become known as the “Venerable Doctor” (Doctor solemnis). Ghent was neither Dominican nor Franciscan, but a so-called “secular” master at the University of Paris. His project was to defend an Aristotelian theory of cognition while at the same time reviving divine illumination in its traditional Augustinian form. To those, like Aquinas, who were arguing for the self-sufficiency of the human cognitive powers, Ghent replies,