The philosophical and theological vision of Henry of Ghent¹, regent master in theology at the University of Paris from 1276 until his death in 1293², was a dominant one in Europe during his career and beyond. This vision, a comprehensive and original synthesis, was also seminal. Quickly, it impacted a tradition then recently informed by two other masters from the same Paris faculty, Bonaventure (d. 1274) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Significantly, it fed different and important currents, such as Scotism, Mysticism and Nominalism.³ “Those who taught with Henry during his long stint at the University of Paris and in...

Henry’s account of the Trinity is motivated and inspired by faith. (In turn, his account of creation as a free act of God is based on the Trinity, and to this extent it also relies on faith.) This he intimates when speaking about the difficulty in understanding the real, divine relations according to origin, “which preoccupies us exceedingly in regard to divine matters, where we must posit according to the Faith and the sayings of the Saints that among the divine persons there exists real relation, lest we posit that the persons are distinguished only by reason.”¹ Moreover, specifying what...

Henry devotes the second question of his sixth series of quodlibetal disputations specifically to the question of “whether the production of the persons in God is presupposed by the production of creatures in a causal sense.”¹ He begins in the first sentence of his solution by claiming that this question altogether (omnino) depends on the previous one of the same Quodlibet (q. 1: “Whether there are only three persons in God, and no more or less”), where he relies on his basic tenets, developed later in greater detail in hisSummaarticles² treated in the previous chapter. He solves this...

As explained in the third paragraph of the Introduction to this book, the three chapters in this book correspond to Henry’s three chief areas of theological investigation, namely 1) God himself, 2) God as a principle of creatures, and 3) creatures insofar as they reflect God. After tracing Henry’s view of the Trinity in itself and of creation as based on the Trinity in the previous two chapters, this third and last chapter will assess the role of the Trinity in Henry’s metaphysics of uncreated and created being. One of the central tasks of Henry’s overall project is to show...

Henry of Ghent’s account of the Trinity contains a thoroughly developed conception of divine being. This conception sheds light on Henry’s system as a whole, as it develops the proper nature of the Creator, whom all reflect. The conception of the Trinity is more adequate than the conception of God’s unity apprehended absolutely. The former conception elucidates, albeit analogically, the mode in which (the simple unity of) God actually subsists, namely as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is a conception of God as subsistent intellect and will, whose intrinsic perfection consists in his self-communicating, thus distinguishing...