Background

Albertus Magnus was born the eldest son of Count Bollstadt in Lauingen, Bavaria, Germany on the Danube, sometime between 1193 and 1206. The term "magnus" is not descriptive; it is the Latin equivalent of his family name, de Groot.

Education

Albertus Magnus received his early education at Padua, Italy, where he was instructed in the works of Aristotle. In 1223, he became a member of the Dominican order, and began studying theology under the Dominicans at Bologna and later in Cologne. Upon the completion of his education, he began teaching theology in Cologne. In 1245, he decided to move to Paris, where he received his doctorate and soon established himself as a prominent teacher.

Career

Albert subsequently served as a lecturer in Cologne, Germany, for several years. Later, he held the same position in universities in Regensburg, Freiburg, Strasbourg, and Hildesheim. While he was in Cologne, Albert authored his Summa de bono following his conversation with Philip the Chancellor on the transcendental properties of being.

In 1245, he obtained his master’s degree in theology. He subsequently became a full-time professor of theology at the University of Paris. He was associated with the College of St. James as the Chair of Theology. It was during this period that Aquinas joined his class.

He has the distinction of being the first scholar to provide commentary on almost all the writings of Aristotle. This led to his introduction to the teachings of Muslim academics like Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, and that, in turn, took him to the center of academic debates.

In 1254, he was appointed a provincial of the Dominican Order. Sometime later, he advocated for the order after it was criticized by the secular and regular faculty of the University of Paris.

In 1259, he participated in the General Chapter of the Dominicans at Valenciennes. Along with Thomas Aquinas, masters Bonushomo Britto, Florentius, and Peter (future Pope Innocent V), he set up a ratio studiorum or program of studies for the Dominicans which included the study of philosophy as an innovation for the students who were not adequately prepared to pursue a degree in theology.

A renowned scientist, philosopher, astrologer, theologian, spiritual writer, ecumenist, and diplomat, Albert was the only scholar of his age to receive the cognomen, "the great."

With the support of Humbert of Romans, Albert created the curriculum of studies for all Dominican students, taught Aristotle in the classroom, and looked into the works of Neoplatonists like Plotinus.

Albert was appointed the bishop of Regensburg by Pope Alexander IV in 1260. However, he stepped down from that position three years later. During his tenure, he became even more respected for demonstrating his humility by declining to ride a horse.

The rules of the order required him to travel on foot, and he did just that, despite the fact that his diocese was quite large. Because of this, his parishioners started calling him "boots the bishop."

Pope Urban IV requested his resignation as the bishop in 1263 to serve as the preacher for the eighth Crusade in German-speaking countries. Albert subsequently gained a reputation as a mediator between disputing parties.

In Cologne, he set up Germany’s oldest university. He is also popular there for "the big verdict" of 1258, which concluded the dispute between the citizens of Cologne and the archbishop.

In the last years of his life, Albert advocated for the orthodoxy of his former pupil, Thomas Aquinas. In 1274, Aquinas passed away, which troubled Albert greatly. However, the tale of Albert making his way to Paris to advocate for the teachings of his former student cannot be corroborated.

In 1278, Albert's health began to deteriorate. On November 15, 1280, he passed away in the Dominican convent in Cologne, Germany. His relics have been kept in a Roman sarcophagus in the crypt of the Dominican St. Andreas Church in Cologne since November 15, 1954.

During the first exhumation three years after his passing, his body was found to be incorrupt. However, in 1483, his remains were exhumed once again. This time, only a skeleton was left.

Achievements

• The achievement of the Dominican friar Albertus Magnus was of vital importance for the development of medieval philosophy. A person of immense erudition and intellectual curiosity, he was one of the first to recognize the true value of the newly translated Greco-Arabic scientific and philosophical literature. Everything he considered valuable in it he included in his encyclopaedic writings. He set out to teach this literature to his contemporaries and in particular to make the philosophy of Aristotle, whom he considered to be the greatest philosopher, understandable to them. He also proposed to write original works in order to complete what was lacking in the Aristotelian system. In no small measure, the triumph of Aristotelianism in the 13th century can be attributed to him.
  
  Albertus's observations and discoveries in the natural sciences advanced botany, zoology, and mineralogy. In philosophy, he was less original and creative than his famous pupil Aquinas. Albertus produced a synthesis of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism, blending together the philosophies of Aristotle, Avicenna, and Ibn Gabirol and, among Christians, Augustine, and Pseudo-Dionysius.
  
  Numerous schools have been set up that bear his name, including Albertus Magnus High School in Bardonia, New York; Albertus Magnus Lyceum in River Forest, Illinois; and Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, Connecticut.
  
  In 2004, the Albertus Magnus International Institute, which is a business and economic development research institution, was established in Managua, Nicaragua.
  
  There is a typeface named Albertus. The Netherlands' second-largest student fraternity, Albertus Magnus, was named so to commemorate the saint. In Rottweil, Germany, there is an institution called the Albertus-Magnus-Gymnasien. A statue of Albert has been erected in the central square at the campus of the University of Cologne.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Grand Albert: Admirable Secrets of Albert the Great

    (The Grand Albert is one of the most famous grimoires of t...)

    1703
  • Egyptian Secrets: White and Black Art for Man and Beast 1919
  • On Union with God 2016

Religion

During the thirteenth century, the study of philosophy was not distinct from the study of the physical sciences. Albertus organized the form and method of Christian theology and philosophy. Together with Alexander Hales, he pioneered the application of Aristotelian methods and principles to the study of Christian doctrine, and initiated the scholastic movement which attempted to reconcile faith with reason. After Averroes, Albertus was the main commentator on the works of Aristotle. During the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, so many errors had been drawn from Jewish and Arabic commentaries on Aristotle's works that from 1210-1215, the study of Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics was forbidden at Paris. Albert realized that the enthusiasm of scholars for philosophical studies could not be stifled, and set out to follow the directive of Saint Augustine, that the truths of the pagan philosophers should be adopted by the faithful, and the "erroneous" opinions should be discarded or given a Christian interpretation.

To counter the rationalism of Abelard and his followers, Albertus made the distinction between truths which could be inferred from nature and mysteries which could only be known through revelation. He wrote two treatises against Averroism, which claimed that there was but one rational soul for all men and thus denied individual immortality and individual responsibility during earthly life. To refute pantheism Albertus clarified the doctrine of universals, distinguishing among the universal ante rem (an idea or archetype in the mind of God), in re (existing or capable of existing in many individuals), and post rem (as a concept abstracted by the mind, and compared with the individuals of which it can be predicated).

Views

Albert's early identification as a precursor of modern science undoubtedly stemmed from his empiricist methodology, which he learned from Aristotle but which he practiced with a skill unsurpassed by any other Schoolman. From boyhood he was an assiduous observer of nature, and his works abound in descriptions of the phenomena he noted, usually in great detail. Considering that his observations were made without instruments, they were remarkably accurate. Some of the "facts" he reported were obviously based on hearsay evidence, although he was usually at pains to distinguish what he had himself seen from what he had read or been told by others. Fui et midi experiri ("I was there and saw it happen") was his frequent certification for observations. Sometimes, as Lynn Thorndike has well illustrated in his A History of Magic and Experimental Science, even these certifications test the reader's credulity; what is significant in them, however, is Albert's commitment to an empiricist program. He stated that evidence based on sense perception is the most secure and is superior to reasoning without experimentation. Similarly, he noted that a conclusion that is inconsistent with the evidence cannot be believed and that a principle that does not agree with sense experience is really no principle at all. He was aware, however, that the observation of nature could be difficult: much time, he remarked, is required to conduct an experiment that will yield foolproof results, and he suggested that it be repeated under a variety of circumstances so as to assure its general validity.

Albert mentioned the term impetus when discussing projectile motion, but spoke of it as being in the medium rather than in the projectile, thus defending the original Aristotelian teaching; certainly, he had no treatment of the concept to match that found in the work of fourteenth-century thinkers. His analysis of gravitational motion was also Aristotelian: he regarded the basic mover as the generator of the heavy object, giving it not only its substantial form but also its gravity and the motion consequent on this. He knew that bodies accelerate as they fall, and attributed this to their increasing propinquity to their natural place.

The cause of sound, for Albert, is the impact of two hard bodies, and the resulting vibration is propagated in the form of a sphere whose center is the point of percussion. He speculated also on the cause of heat, studying in detail how light from the sun produces thermal effects; here his use of simple experiments revealed a knowledge of the method of agreement and difference later to be formulated by J.S. Mill. He knew of the refraction of solar rays and also of the laws of refraction of light, although he employed the term reflexio for both refraction and reflection, as, for example, when discussing the burning lens and the burning mirror. His analysis of the rainbow was diffuse in its historical introduction, but it made an advance over the theory of Robert Grosseteste in assigning individual raindrops a role in the bow’s formation, and undoubtedly prepared for the first correct theory of the rainbow proposed by another German Dominican, Dietrich von Freiberg, who was possibly Albert’s student. In passing, he corrected Aristotle’s assertion that the lunar rainbow occurs only twice in fifty years: "I myself have observed two in a single year."

On the structure of matter, when discussing the presence of elements in compounds, Albert attempted to steer a middle course between the opposed positions of Avicenna and Averroës, thereby preparing for Aquinas' more acceptable theory of "virtual" presence. In a similar vein, he benignly viewed Democritus' atoms as equivalent to the minima naturalia of the Aristotelians. He seems to have experimented with alchemy and is said to have been the first to isolate the element arsenic. He compiled a list of some hundred manerals, giving the properties of each. During his many travels, he made frequent sidetrips to mines and excavations in search of specimens. He was acquainted with fossils, and made accurate observations of "animal impressions" and improved on Avicenna’s account of their formation. Albert suggested the possibility of the transmutation of metals, but he did not feel that alchemists had yet found the method to bring this about.

On plant evolution, Albert proposed that existing types were sometimes mutable and described five ways of transforming one plant into another; he believed, for example, that new species could be produced by grafting. Here he registered an advance over most medieval thinkers, who accounted for the succession of new species not by modification but by generation from a common source such as earth.

He studied embryology by such simple methods as opening eggs at various intervals of time and tracing the development of the embryo from the appearance of the pulsating red speck of the heart to hatching. He was acquainted, too, with the development of fish and mammals, and understood some aspects of fetal nutrition. His studies on insects were especially good for their descriptions of insect mating, and he correctly identified the insect egg. He showed that ants lose their sense of direction when their antennae are removed, but concluded (wrongly) that the antennae carry eyes.

Among the larger animals, he described many northern types unknown to Aristotle, noting changes of coloration in the colder climates, and speculating that if any animals inhabited the poles they would have thick skins and be of a white color. His knowledge of internal anatomy was meager, but he did dissect crickets and observed the ovarian follicles and tracheae. His system of classification for the animal kingdom was basically Aristotelian; occasionally he repeated or aggravated the Stagirite's mistakes, but usually, he modified and advanced Aristotle's taxonomy, as in his treatment of the ten genera of water animals. His anthropology was more philosophical than empirical in intent, but some have detected in it the adumbration of methods used in experimental psychology.

Quotations: "The greater and more persistent your confidence in God, the more abundantly you will receive all that you ask."

"I have never gone out to mingle with the world without losing something of myself."

"Natural science does not consist in ratifying what others have said, but in seeking the causes of phenomena."

"Banish, therefore, from thy heart the distractions of earth and turn thine eyes to spiritual joys, that thou mayest learn at last to repose in the light of the contemplation of God."

Connections

Albertus Magnus neither married nor father any children.

Father:

Markward Von Lauingen

pupil:

Thomas Aquinas

Albertus Magnus made a great contribution as the mentor and teacher of Thomas Aquinas, whose Summa Theologica was inspired by that of Albertus.

References

• St. Albert the Great: Champion of Faith and Reason by Kevin Vost
  2011