Justified True Belief

(●) The friar who put the whole of Aristotle into Latin, taught Thomas Aquinas, and argued that looking hard at the natural world is a Christian thing to do. + In the year Albert was born, a Christian in western Europe who wanted to think about the physical world had almost nothing to read. Two of Aristotle’s books on logic had been in Latin since Boethius translated them seven centuries earlier, the rest of the logic had arrived in the twelfth century, and everything else he wrote (the physics, the astronomy, the biology, the psychology, the metaphysics) was either lost to the West or newly arriving in rough translations from Greek and Arabic, trailing commentaries by Muslim and Jewish philosophers and a reputation for danger. In 1210 a church council at Paris forbade lecturing on those new books at all. By the time Albert died, that had changed, and largely through him. From about 1250 to about 1270 he worked at making those books available, and he did it in the most laborious way imaginable: by writing a book of his own on every one of them. Not summaries. Full expositions, book by book, with long digressions where he thought his source had gone wrong or stopped too soon, and fresh treatises on subjects Aristotle had never covered. He wrote on logic, motion, the heavens, weather, minerals, plants, animals, the soul, the mind, ethics, politics, metaphysics, the sacraments, the prophets, the Gospels, and the mystical theology that came down under the name of Dionysius. His collected works run to thirty-eight volumes. His contemporaries called him Doctor universalis, the universal teacher, and he is one of the very few people in history to be called "the Great" while still alive. The signature fact about him is smaller and stranger than the size of the shelf: this immense theologian kept stopping to look at things. He dissected plants. He described birds he had watched. He wrote down what he found when he cut open an egg, and he told his readers that the only way to settle a question about nature is to go and see. His birth year is not certain. An older tradition put it at 1193, the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia at about 1205, and most scholars now settle on around 1200 or a little before, reasoning back from an old man’s death in 1280. Every date counted from his birth is therefore approximate, and is marked as such.

(●) c. 1200 AD: He was born at Lauingen on the Danube, into a family with land and expectations. + Lauingen is a small town in Swabia, in what is now Bavaria, sitting on the upper Danube where the river is still narrow enough to argue about. Albert’s family were minor nobility of the region, people with land and a name, and the sons of such families went into arms or into the service of a bishop. Whether Albert spent his youth soldiering or studying is not recorded, and the honest answer is that we do not know. What is clear is that he went south to Italy, to Padua, where the university had a strong faculty of arts. Arts meant the seven liberal arts, the standard first degree of a medieval student: grammar, rhetoric and logic, then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. It also meant, increasingly, Aristotle. Padua was one of the places where the new translations were arriving, and a young man reading there in the 1220s was reading the most exciting and most suspect books in Europe.

(●) 1223 AD: A visiting preacher talked him into the Dominicans, and his family tried to stop it. + The Order of Preachers, founded by Dominic of Caleruega only seven years earlier, was doing something new. Its friars did not stay in one monastery for life. They travelled, begged their bread, and preached, and they had decided from the beginning that preaching required study, which meant that a Dominican house was expected to be a school. That combination, poverty plus a library, drew students in numbers that alarmed their families. In 1223 Jordan of Saxony, the order’s second master general, which is to say the man at the head of it, and by all accounts an irresistible recruiter, was at Padua. Albert joined. A story preserved in the order says that his uncle tried to get him out of it, and that Jordan moved the young man to another city to keep him. However that went, Albert took the habit and never left it. He would spend the next fifty-seven years as a friar of an order that expected its members to own nothing and to read everything, and he obeyed both halves of that with a thoroughness that became proverbial. He was sent north for his theology and then put to work teaching in the Dominican houses of Germany: Cologne first, then Hildesheim, Freiburg, Regensburg, Strasbourg. Two decades of lecturing to friars in provincial convents is not the biography of a man being groomed for fame, and it was the best training he could have had. He learned to explain difficult things to people who had not read the difficult things.

(●) 1245 AD: Paris made him a master of theology, and a large silent Italian began following him about. + The University of Paris was the theology faculty of Europe, and the Dominicans held two of its chairs. Albert arrived in the early 1240s, lectured his way through the required apprentice work (a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the textbook every medieval theologian had to gloss), and in 1245 took the master’s degree, which was the licence to teach, under Guerric of Saint-Quentin. He then held the Dominican chair reserved for friars from outside France. It was at Paris that he met the student who would outshine him. Thomas Aquinas was a young Italian nobleman’s son, heavy, slow to speak, and so quiet in the classroom that the other students nicknamed him the Dumb Ox. Albert’s reported answer to them, told in the earliest life of Aquinas and repeated ever since, is one of the great lines of academic history: that they called him a dumb ox, but that his bellowing would one day be heard through the whole world. Whether the words are exactly Albert’s or a biographer’s polish, the judgment was his, and it was right. Paris also showed him what was missing. Within a few years he had begun his own expositions of Aristotle, book by book, and he did not intend to stop until they were finished.

(●) 1248 AD: Cologne called him back to build a school, and he brought Aquinas with him. + In 1248 the Dominican general chapter, the assembly where the order made its decisions, decided to found four new houses of advanced study across the order, one of them in Germany, and sent Albert to Cologne to build it. It was the first studium generale (a school open to students from every province, not just the local one) that the order had in German lands, and it made Cologne a centre of learning it had not been before. That same August, a few streets away, the archbishop laid the foundation stone of a new cathedral there; the building would not be finished for six hundred and thirty-two years. Aquinas came north with him and stayed four years, and those four years are the reason the two names are always spoken together. What Albert handed him was not a system. It was a permission and a method: that Aristotle could be read whole, that a Christian could take the natural world seriously as a subject in its own right, and that when the Philosopher, which is simply what the schools called Aristotle, was wrong you said so and moved on. Aquinas built the cathedral of theology; Albert quarried a good deal of the stone. Albert would come back to Cologne again and again, and would die there. It was, as much as anywhere, home.

(●) 1254 AD: Elected head of the German friars, he walked his whole province on foot. + The Dominican province of Teutonia ran from the Low Countries to the Baltic and down into Austria, dozens of houses scattered across a territory that took months to cross. Its new provincial, the friar answerable for the whole of that territory, visited them, and he did it the way his order’s rule preferred, which is to say on foot. Contemporaries remembered the detail, and it is worth pausing over: a man in his fifties, already the most learned person in Germany, walking from convent to convent through mud and snow because friars were not to travel like lords. In 1256 the job took him to Italy. Pope Alexander IV had summoned a commission of cardinals to Anagni to hear an attack on the mendicant orders by William of Saint-Amour, a master of the University of Paris who argued that begging friars had no business holding university chairs. Mendicant simply means begging: the Dominicans and the Franciscans lived on what was given them rather than on the rents of land, which was the whole point and also, to their critics, the whole problem. Albert went to answer him while Bonaventure fought the same attack at Paris for the Franciscans, and the friars won: William’s book was condemned on 5 October 1256. While he was there Albert finished something else, a short and angry treatise called On the Unity of the Intellect, against Averroes (T4). He gave the office back in 1257 and returned to Cologne and his books, though the city would not leave him alone. In 1258 the citizens of Cologne and their archbishop, at each other’s throats over rights and taxes, asked Albert to arbitrate. His settlement, the Große Schied or Great Arbitration, was accepted by both sides.

(●) 1260 AD: The pope made him a bishop, and he got out of it after two years. + Regensburg was a mess. Its previous bishop had left the diocese in debt and disorder, and in 1260 Alexander IV appointed Albert to clean it up. He did not want it. The master general of his order is said to have written begging him to refuse, on the grounds that a Dominican in a bishop’s mitre was a scandal to the order’s poverty and that Albert’s reputation would never survive the job. He took it anyway, went, and did the work: he paid down the debts and put the diocese back in order. He also kept walking. The clergy of the diocese, used to bishops on horseback, took to calling him Bishop Boots. Two years was enough. In 1262 the new pope, Urban IV, accepted his resignation, and Albert went back to being a friar. Urban then sent him round Germany and Bohemia for a year preaching a crusade, which came to nothing when the pope died. After that he taught, wrote, preached and arbitrated for eighteen more years, mostly out of Würzburg, Strasbourg and finally Cologne, and he never held office again.

(●) 1280 AD: He died at Cologne, six years after the student who had surpassed him. + In 1274 Albert travelled to the Second Council of Lyon, summoned to try to heal the split between the Latin and Greek churches. Aquinas had been summoned too, and died on the road in March, at about fifty, while Albert, some twenty-five years his senior, went on and outlived him by six years. Three years later, in March 1277, the bishop of Paris condemned two hundred and nineteen propositions being taught in the arts faculty, which meant excommunication for anyone who went on teaching them or sat and listened, and some of the list brushed uncomfortably close to positions Aquinas had held. A tradition going back to the fourteenth century says that the old man made one last journey to Paris to defend his dead pupil’s memory. Modern historians doubt the trip actually happened, and it is fair to say only that the story was told early and that it fits everything else we know of him. His last years were quiet. One account has his memory failing before the end, which for a man who had held that much in his head is a hard thought. He died at Cologne on 15 November 1280 and was buried in the Dominican church there. The church was slow to formalise what everyone had said about him for centuries. He was beatified in 1622, which is the step before sainthood and means only that he could now be publicly called blessed, and not until 1931 did Pius XI canonise him and name him a Doctor of the Church, the title held back for writers whose teaching the church wants the whole body to learn from. Ten years after that, Pius XII made him the patron saint of those who study the natural sciences.

What He Taught

(T1) The whole of Aristotle belongs in Latin, and a Christian loses nothing by reading him. + Imagine that a library you had heard about all your life, and whose catalogue you had memorised, suddenly began arriving in crates. That is roughly what happened to the Latin West in Albert’s lifetime. Aristotle’s books on nature, the soul, and first philosophy came through in Greek and in Arabic versions, wrapped in commentaries by the Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, and the crates were opened in a hurry. Not everyone was pleased. In 1210 a provincial council at Paris forbade teaching Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy; the ban was repeated in 1215, and in 1231 Gregory IX appointed a commission to purge them of errors before they could be taught. The worry was not stupid. Aristotle held that the world had always existed, which contradicts Genesis, and his Arabic interpreters had drawn conclusions about the human soul that no Christian could accept. Behind it stood a verse that objectors have reached for in every century since: "See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ." (Colossians 2:8) Albert’s answer was not an argument. It was twenty years of work. He set out to write, in Latin, an exposition of every book Aristotle had written, and he did it by paraphrase rather than by line-by-line commentary: he retold each book in his own words, in Aristotle’s order, and broke off into long digressiones (digressions) whenever the argument needed filling out or correcting. Where a book was missing he supplied one. Aristotle had written nothing usable on minerals, so Albert wrote De mineralibus. The botany that reached him under Aristotle’s name was a thin and badly translated compendium, so Albert’s seven books on plants are largely his own. The point of the whole enterprise was that Paul’s warning is against being taken captive, not against reading. A Christian who understands Aristotle is harder to take captive than one who has only heard rumours about him. And there is a particular danger in rescuing a great author, which Albert saw coming. A generation that has fought to be allowed to read someone tends to read him on its knees. Some of his contemporaries had begun treating Aristotle’s text the way they treated Scripture, as a thing to be harmonised rather than examined, and the Latin Averroists of the next generation, the Paris masters who took Averroes for the authoritative reader of Aristotle and followed that reading wherever it went, would go further still. Albert refused. He corrected Aristotle wherever he judged him wrong (the eternity of the world, which Aristotle held and Albert did not, is the standing example), and he refused the quieter error of supposing that the work was finished. "Not all the demonstrative sciences have been made," he wrote in his exposition of the Posterior Analytics; "many remain still to be discovered." A demonstrative science, in Aristotle’s sense, is a body of knowledge in which conclusions are proved from first principles, the way geometry proves its theorems. Albert is saying that the list of such sciences is open, and that there is work left for people not yet born. That is an unusual thing to believe in the thirteenth century, and everything he did with his hands followed from it (T3). The habit has a scriptural name. "But test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21) is Paul telling a young church to weigh what it is given rather than swallow or refuse it whole, and it is exactly the posture Albert took toward the crates arriving from Toledo and Constantinople.

(Q) "It is our intention to make all the said parts intelligible to the Latins." + Source: Albert the Great, Physica, opening of Book I, as translated by Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (1911). "The said parts" are the three divisions of real philosophy Albert has just named: physics, mathematics and metaphysics. "The Latins" are his own people, the scholars of western Europe who read no Greek and no Arabic. It is a statement of intent at the head of a life’s work, and Taylor’s comment on it is three words long: "And he did."

(Q) "He who believes that Aristotle was God, ought to believe that he never erred. If one regards him as a man, then surely he may err as well as we." + Source: Albert the Great, Physica, Book VIII, tract 1, chapter 14, as translated by Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (1911). Albert is in the middle of expounding Aristotle on motion, and stops to say what kind of authority his author has. The sentence is a fair summary of his whole practice: total seriousness about the text, and no worship of it.

(T2) Natural science asks what nature’s own causes can do, and leaves the question of miracles to another discipline. + Take your car to a mechanic and ask why it will not start. Suppose he is a believing man. He still does not say "because God permitted it." He says the battery is dead. He is not denying that God upholds every atom of the battery; he is answering the question you asked, which was a question about batteries. Theologians have a name for what he is doing: he is looking for the secondary cause, the created thing that does the work, as against the primary cause, God, who holds the whole arrangement in being and without whom there would be no batteries at all. Albert made that distinction a working rule for the study of nature, and stated it about as clearly as it has ever been stated. When you are doing physics, he says, the question of what God might do by miracle is simply not the question in front of you. You are asking what this stuff, with the powers that belong to it, can bring about on its own. Nothing in this is deism, the idea that God wound the world up and walked away. Albert wrote more theology than natural science and believed every article of the creed. The claim is narrower and more useful: that the world God made has a nature of its own worth investigating, that its regularities are real and not divine whim, and that tracing them is not impiety. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork" (Psalm 19:1) is a reason to study the sky, not a substitute for studying it. Historians of medieval science point to this rule, in Albert and in those who learned it from him, as one of the conditions that made the later natural sciences possible.

(Q) "In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power: we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass." + Source: Albert the Great, De caelo et mundo, Book I, tract 4, chapter 10, in the translation given in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907). "Immanent" here means belonging to the thing itself, built in, as heat belongs to fire. Albert is expounding Aristotle on the heavens and pauses to say what kind of answer a student of nature is looking for. He is not ruling miracles out of the world. He is ruling them out of the syllabus.

(T3) You find out about nature by looking at it, and by looking more than once. + A medieval scholar’s normal way of settling a question about the natural world was to find out what an authority had said about it. The authorities were very good (Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, Avicenna) and the method was efficient, and it has one fatal property: it cannot correct itself. If Pliny says the ostrich digests iron, then the ostrich digests iron, forever. Albert kept breaking the method. Reporting on plants, he complains that his supposedly Aristotelian source is so badly translated as to be useless and announces that he will take the questions up himself. He describes trees and herbs he has seen, filling seven books where his source had two, and the historian of botany Ernst Meyer judged that no botanist before Albert bears comparison with him except Theophrastus, the Greek who had taken over Aristotle’s school and whose work Albert never saw, and that nobody after him studied nature so deeply until Gesner and Cesalpino three centuries later. In his twenty-six books on animals, nineteen are a retelling of Aristotle and the last seven are Albert’s own survey of beasts, birds, fish, snakes and insects. Again and again he interrupts himself to say what he has seen on his travels. He turned it into a rule, twice. "Experiment is the only safe guide in such investigations," he wrote of plants, and in his commentary on the Ethics he made the sharper point that one trial is not enough: a thing must be tested "not in one way only, but according to all the circumstances." That second sentence is the germ of a controlled experiment, which is what we call it when you run the same trial again with the conditions changed one at a time, until you know which condition was doing the work. Centuries before anyone made a method of it, and written by a Dominican friar reading Aristotle on virtue. Scripture had been telling people to do this for a long time, and Albert’s generation heard it. "But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you" (Job 12:7). "Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them." (Psalm 111:2) And the proverb that has hung over every laboratory since: "It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out." (Proverbs 25:2)

(Q) "The aim of natural science is not simply to accept the statements of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature." + Source: Albert the Great, De mineralibus, Book II, tract 2, chapter 1, in the translation given in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907). De mineralibus is one of the books Albert wrote because Aristotle had not. The sentence stands at the head of a discussion of stones, a subject on which the received literature was mostly a list of marvels copied from earlier lists of marvels, and it is Albert explaining why he is about to stop copying.

(T4) Each person has his own mind, and so each person stands before God as himself. + The most alarming idea in the new Aristotle did not come from Aristotle. It came from his greatest Muslim commentator, Ibn Rushd, whom the Latins called Averroes, and it went like this. Understanding a universal truth (that a triangle has three sides, that betrayal is wrong) is not the sort of act a physical organ can perform, because universals are not physical things. So the intellect is immaterial. But whatever individuates you and me, making us two people rather than one, is our matter, our separate bodies. An immaterial thing therefore cannot be individual. Conclusion: there is one intellect, and all human beings think by sharing it, the way a room full of people share one light. Follow that out. When you die, your body goes and your senses go, and what is left is not yours. The one intellect continues; you do not. There is no you to be raised, judged, forgiven or loved. Whatever else is true of that doctrine, it is not compatible with the gospel, which promises a resurrection to particular people who are still themselves. Albert wrote against it at the papal court in 1256 and returned to the attack for the rest of his life. His reply worked from the inside out. The evidence that you have an intellect is that you catch yourself using one: you notice yourself seeing, hearing, fearing, understanding, and the noticing is as much yours as the fear is. A shared intellect cannot account for that, because what needs explaining is not that understanding occurs somewhere but that it occurs to me. From there he built outward, and the chain is worth taking one link at a time. A mind that can think about triangles in general, and not merely about the one scratched in the sand in front of it, is doing something no lump of matter has ever been caught doing, so a mind is not just another part of the body like a kidney. Neither is a mind that can hold two courses of action side by side and choose between them: matter gets pushed, and choosing is not being pushed. Whatever is not made of matter, however, cannot be taken apart the way matter is taken apart, and what cannot be taken apart does not fall to pieces when the body does. Put the links together and the thing that outlasts you is not an impersonal light shining in a crowded room. It is you. Aquinas would take the same fight up fourteen years later in a treatise of the same name, and win it more famously. The position he defended was his teacher’s.

(Q) "Each of those intellects will be existing in us, and not a separate substance." + Source: Albert the Great, De homine, the treatise on man that forms the second part of the Summa de creaturis, in the question on the agent intellect. Latin: "Uterque istorum intellectuum erit in nobis existens et non separata substantia," Cologne critical edition, edited by Henryk Anzulewicz and Joachim Söder (2008), page 411, lines 46 to 53. There is no published English translation of the work; the rendering here follows Richard C. Taylor’s of the same sentence. The two intellects are the pair Aristotle’s readers argued over: the agent intellect, which strips the universal out of what the senses hand up, and the possible intellect, which receives it. Seeing the dog in the road is the work of the senses; knowing what a dog is takes both of the others. Averroes placed the pair outside the individual and left each man borrowing them, and Albert put them inside, as powers of this soul. He had staked the position out in his treatise on man years before he carried it to the papal court.

(T5) Theology is a different kind of knowing, aimed at godliness rather than at information. + If a man spends his life putting pagan philosophy into the hands of friars, sooner or later someone asks him whether he still thinks theology is worth doing. Albert answered at the head of his Summa theologiae, and the answer settles the relationship between the two things he had given his life to. Theology is a scientia, he says, using the Latin word that means an organised body of knowledge with its own subject and method, not the narrower modern "science." It is one science among others, and it is the highest. But it differs from the rest in what it is for. The other sciences take the knowable simply as knowable: a botanist wants to know about plants, and that is the end of it. Theology takes what is knowable only so far as it inclines a person toward piety, and piety, as Augustine defined it and Albert quotes him, is the worship of God, made complete by faith, hope, charity, prayer and sacrifice. So theology is the knowledge that bears on salvation. That is a sharper claim than it looks at first. A man can read a great deal about God, and keep it all straight, and put the book down no different from the man who picked it up, and what he has been doing is not quite what Albert means by the word. That single distinction does a great deal of work. It means philosophy and theology are not two contestants for one chair, which is what both the frightened churchmen and the bolder Averroists assumed. They ask different questions and answer to different ends, and a man may do both without treachery to either. It also means theology is not, at bottom, an accumulation of information about God. Albert worked his way through the whole of Dionysius in his first Cologne years, around 1250, with the young Aquinas at his elbow. Dionysius is the mystical theologian whose treatises reach toward a God who exceeds everything that can be said of him, and Albert never thought the two enterprises were in tension. "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face" (1 Corinthians 13:12) is the position of every theologian who has understood what he is doing.

(Q) "It is scientia secundum pietatem; it is not concerned with the knowable (scibile) simply as such, nor with the knowable universally; but only as it inclines us to Piety. Piety, as Augustine says, is the worship of God, perfected by faith, hope, charity, prayer, and sacrifices. Thus theology is the science of what pertains to salvation; for piety conduces to salvation." + Source: Albert the Great, Summa theologiae, part one, tract 1, question 2, as translated by Henry Osborn Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind (1911). Scientia secundum pietatem is "knowledge according to godliness." Taylor keeps the Latin phrase because no English word covers it: not learning about godliness, but learning shaped by it and pointed at it.

(Q) "Though, because they know nothing of it, they want by every means to attack the use of philosophy in support of the faith, and most of all among the Preachers, where nobody stands up to them, like brute animals blaspheming the things they do not know." + Source: Albert the Great, commentary on the Letters of Dionysius, Letter 7 (Cologne critical edition of the Opera omnia, volume 37/2, page 504), translated from the Latin; there is no public-domain English version. The seventh letter answers a man who had accused Dionysius of turning Greek learning against the Greeks, which is why Albert’s own complaint comes where it does. "The Preachers" are his Dominicans, and that is what gives the sentence its edge: the opposition he minds is the one inside his own order, where, as he says, nobody argues back. It is the closest thing in his writings to losing his temper, and he wrote it around 1250, with the work of (T1) barely begun.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His pupil built the system, and the system is still standing. + Thomas Aquinas sat under Albert at Paris and followed him to Cologne, and much of the frame of the mature Thomistic synthesis was standing before Thomas touched it: Aristotle read whole and corrected where he errs, philosophy and theology distinguished without being divorced, nature granted its own causes and its own dignity, the human intellect defended as each person’s own. Aquinas did it better. He wrote the true commentaries where Albert had written paraphrases, and he had the architectural gift his teacher lacked, so that the Summa Theologiae holds together in a way nothing of Albert’s does. But the ground had been cleared, and Albert cleared it. The clearing was not safe work. In 1277 the bishop of Paris condemned two hundred and nineteen propositions, and the list caught the edges of Aquinas’s teaching three years after his death. Whether or not the old man went to Paris to answer it, the condemnation shows what had been at stake all along. Within fifty years the verdict had gone the other way: Aquinas was canonised in 1323, and the reading of Aristotle that Albert had fought for became the ordinary furniture of Catholic theology, and, through the Protestant scholastics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Lutheran and Reformed teachers who set out their doctrine with the same tools the medieval schools had used, of a good deal of Reformed theology too. The two of them are remembered in the same breath, and it is worth saying which way the debt runs. Aquinas is the greater theologian. Albert is the reason there was anything for him to be great with.

(†) The German Dominicans turned his commentaries on the mystic Dionysius into a school of prayer. + There is a second line of descent from Cologne, and it looks nothing like the first. Albert’s commentaries on Dionysius, with their language of the soul going out from God and returning to him, were read hard by the friars he had taught and by the friars they taught, and out of that reading came the German Dominican mystics: Dietrich of Freiberg, Berthold of Moosburg, and above all Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso, whose preaching in German put contemplative theology into the hands of people who had no Latin at all. That tradition runs on into the Theologia Germanica, the little anonymous book of the fourteenth century that Martin Luther edited and published twice, calling it the book from which he had learned most after the Bible and Augustine. The line from Albert’s lecture room to a Wittenberg friar’s bedside reading is long and indirect, and it is real. Cologne also kept a school of his own name. Into the fifteenth century the university there taught a distinct "Albertist" way of reading metaphysics, arguing with the Thomists on one side and the followers of Ockham on the other, which is a strange fate for a man who never tried to found a school and mostly wanted to explain things.

(†) The church eventually made him the patron saint of people who study nature. + The honours came late and they came in the right order. Beatified in 1622, canonised in 1931 by Pius XI, who declared him a Doctor of the Church in the same act, and in 1941 named by Pius XII the patron of students of the natural sciences. It is the last of the three that says something a Protestant reader can use as readily as a Catholic one. There is a story, still repeated, in which faith and the study of nature are natural enemies, and the Middle Ages are the long stretch during which the church sat on the sciences until the seventeenth century pushed it off. Albert is a hard man to fit into that story. He is a bishop, a friar, a canonised saint and a Doctor of the Church, and he is also the man who told his readers to stop trusting what the books said about stones and go and look at some stones. The medieval universities that trained him were church institutions, and the rule of (T2), that nature is to be explained by nature’s own causes, was worked out inside them. The theological reason is not complicated, and it is older than Albert. "For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made." (Romans 1:20) If the world is a made thing, and its maker is faithful, then it will have regularities, those regularities will be worth learning, and learning them is a way of paying attention to God. That is not a modern apologetic laid over a medieval life. It is what he said he was doing.

(†) Where his own record falls short: a rule he did not keep, a crusade he preached, and two books of Marian praise carrying his name. + The ledger has another column, and the first entry on it is his own. - He did not always obey his own rule. The man who wrote that experiment is the only safe guide also copied a good deal of inherited marvel down beside the things he had seen. In the third tract of the second book of De mineralibus he gives cautious approval to the old belief that a figure carved on a stone adds to the power of the stone, and sets out a little list of engraved gems and what each is good for. He had no general account of how natural processes work, which meant he had no way of telling a plausible report from an impossible one, and so the sorting went by whether a source seemed respectable. The lesson is not that his rule was wrong. It is that a good rule announced is not the same as a good rule practised, and that it took centuries of other people’s labour to build the habits that would let anyone keep it. - He spent a year preaching a crusade. In 1263 and 1264, at Urban IV’s commission, he travelled Germany and Bohemia raising men for an expedition that never sailed. His contemporaries thought it an honour; a reader today will find it the hardest year of his life to admire, and it is his, not something later generations did with his books. - One entry belongs on the ledger only conditionally. Two enormous books of Marian praise come down under his name, the twelve books On the Praises of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Mariale, and their language heaps on Mary titles and powers that the New Testament gives to Christ. Christians differ, genuinely and in good faith, about how Mary should be honoured, and nothing here settles that longer argument; the narrower thing that can be said is that where these books go, the New Testament does not follow. Whether Albert wrote either of them is disputed, with much modern scholarship against him, so this counts against him only if they are his. A reader who meets them shelved under his name deserves to know both halves of that. None of that touches what he is remembered for. A man who reads everything will believe some things he should not, and Albert’s remedy for that was the rule he announced and half kept: go and look again.