Bernhard Blankenhorn presents Aquinas’s account of Augustinian illumination as a creative continuation of Albertus Magnus’s project rather than a clean rupture with it. Albert’s De homine adopts an Arabic-Aristotelian account in which the agent intellect explains knowledge of material things, while Augustinian elements address knowledge of God and immaterial realities. His later engagement with Dionysian and Proclan thought emphasizes knowledge mediated through the senses, the soul’s union with the body, and the limits of human understanding.

Aquinas distinguishes truths proportioned to natural reason from those exceeding it, arguing that the agent intellect is a stable, natural power sufficient for ordinary cognition without a new supernatural illumination at every moment. Against a direct, interior vision of divine ideas, he explains human knowledge through sense experience, abstraction, and participation in God’s truth as first cause. The article traces Aquinas’s movement from early attempts to harmonize Augustine, Aristotle, and Albert toward a historically conscious synthesis that preserves divine causality through primary and secondary causes while affirming the intrinsic operation of human reason.