Henry of Ghent c. 1217 – 1293

Henry of Ghent was a Flemish secular master of theology at Paris in the late thirteenth century and one of the most influential scholastics of the generation between Aquinas and Scotus. His Quodlibetal Questions and Summa of Ordinary Questions developed a distinctive metaphysics of essence and existence and defended the primacy of the will over the intellect. He participated in the commission that prepared the Condemnations of 1277 at Paris, restricting the teaching of certain Aristotelian doctrines, and was given the honorific Doctor Solemnis.

Henry of Ghent — Henricus Gandavensis, also called doctor solemnis — was born around 1217 in or near Ghent in Flanders. He was a secular cleric rather than a friar, studied and held canonries in Flanders and at Tournai, and from 1276 until 1292 was master of theology at the University of Paris. He served on the commission convoked by bishop Stephen Tempier that produced the celebrated 1277 condemnation of two hundred and nineteen Aristotelian propositions.

His major works are the long Summa Quaestionum Ordinariarum and the fifteen Quodlibeta — disputed questions in winter and summer university sessions — that together cover the whole of philosophical theology. To these are added his Commentary on the Hexaemeron and a treatise on syllogisms. He wrote in close engagement and frequent disagreement with Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Giles of Rome.

Henry was the most influential secular master of late-thirteenth-century Paris. His distinction between the essential and the existential being of creatures, his doctrine of divine illumination as the ground of certain knowledge, and his account of intentional being prepared the ground for John Duns Scotus and shaped Servite, Augustinian, and Carmelite scholasticism for two centuries after his death at Tournai in 1293.