The story of who Albert was can be summarized briefly enough in its external details. He was a German theologian, philosopher, scientist and churchman, born before 1201 plausibly in Lauingen (on Bavarian-Swabian Danube) to the knightly family “de Lauingen”; he died in Cologne on November 15, 1280: a long life for medieval times. He studied at Padua, where he joined the Dominicans in the 1220s, moving to Cologne for his initial theological formation. He then served as a conventual lector from the 1230s on for the priories and their priory schools at Hildesheim, Freiberg (Saxony), Regensburg and Strasbourg. In the early 1240s Albert was sent by the Order to Paris, becoming a master of theology in 1245.
Soon after his Parisian regency as a professor of theology (1245-48), Albert began his extracurricular project of paraphrases (at points more corrective and complementary than the term “paraphrase” suggests) for the entire works of Aristotle. Albert’s goal was to provide a comprehensive account of natural knowledge, utilizing Neoplatonic and Arabic sources and his own deliberate observations of the natural and cultural worlds. In its scope, critical methodology and detail, his learning was legendary (thus the name given him by his contemporaries, “Albertus Magnus,” Albert the Great), but his work was not without critics, including Dominicans, due to its at least seeming secularity.
This remainder of this excellent article is published by the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology and is excerpted here with kind permission.