  Ghent’s argument is interestingly different from that of Augustine and his Franciscan followers. Whereas they had dismissed the physical world as too changeable to be a fit subject for human knowledge, Ghent believes that pure truth and certain knowledge can be had of the physical world, provided we manage to grasp the real essences of things. Since we cannot do so on our own, we need divine illumination to go beyond sensory appearances, to have genuine insight into the nature of reality. At its most basic level, Ghent is offering a critique of the agent intellect. Although he accepts the doctrine of agent intellect, he refuses to give that faculty the kind of efficacy that it has for Aquinas and other medieval Aristotelians. Not surprisingly, Ghent proposes reviving the earlier thirteenth-century tradition of referring to God himself as a kind of agent intellect (Quodlibet 9.15). The way Ghent would synthesize Augustine and Aristotle, in this area, is by identifying those aspects of Aristotle that are incomplete and supplementing them with the necessary Augustinian illumination. (This is a summary of the account in Pasnau 1995. All of Henry’s important initial article from his Summa on the possibility of knowledge is now available in a translation from Roland Teske.)