Albertus Magnus

Albertus Magnus, COUNT OF BOLLSTÄDT, the great scholastic philosopher of the first half of the 13th century, was born at Lauingen, in Swabia, in 1193. After finishing his studies at Padua, he entered the lately-founded order of the Dominican friars, and taught in the schools of Hildesheim, Ratisbon, and Cologne, where Thomas Aquinas became his pupil. In 1245 he repaired to Paris, where for some years he publicly expounded the doctrines of Aristotle. In 1254 he became provincial of the Dominican order in Germany. In 1260 he received from Pope Alexander IV. the bishopric of Ratisbon. But in 1262 he retired to his convent at Cologne to devote himself to literary pursuits, and here he composed many of his works. He had fallen into dotage some years before his death, which occurred in 1280. The extensive chemical and mechanical knowledge which, considering the age in which he lived, Albertus Magnus possessed, brought upon him the imputation of being a sorcerer and magician. Jammy, a Dominican, published the works of Albertus in 21 folio vols. in 1651; and some of them, as also the apocryphal De Secretis Mulierum attributed to him, have been published separately. The most notable are the Summa Theologicæ and the Summa de Creaturis. Albertus excelled all his contemporaries in the wideness of his learning; he was not inaptly termed the doctor universalis. He was not so remarkable for originality; and was to the best of his ability a faithful follower of Aristotle as presented by Jewish, Arabian, and western commentators. He stood midway between Realists and Nominalists in philosophy; and did more than any predecessor to bring about that marvellous union of theology and Aristotelianism which is the basis of scholasticism. Both in physics and metaphysics he mainly repeats Aristotle. See SCHOLASTICISM, and works by Sighart (1857; trans. 1876), D'Assailly (1870), and Bach (1881).