  Aquinas agrees with his Franciscan contemporaries that intellective cognition is incomplete without some sort of supernaturally infused insight. The only difference is that Aquinas wants that insight to be given all at once, from the start — bottled up within agent intellect, as we might think of it. His opponents, in contrast, think of illumination as an ongoing process, as necessary as the air we breathe. It is easy to see how, at the time, this difference might have seemed important. But from our present perspective the differences seem rather slight: they seem to be arguing simply over the means of transmission. Aquinas conceives of illumination as a deep well within us, whereas the Franciscans conceived of it as raining down in drops. (This is a summary of the account in Pasnau 2002, Chapter 10.)