Alberto Magno

Albert the Great (1200–80)

Albert the Great was the first scholastic interpreter of Aristotle’s work in its entirety, as well as being a theologian and preacher. He left an encyclopedic body of work covering all areas of medieval knowledge, both in philosophy (logic, ethics, metaphysics, sciences of nature, meteorology, mineralogy, psychology, anthropology, physiology, biology, natural sciences and zoology) and in theology (biblical commentaries, systematic theology, liturgy and sermons). His philosophical work is based on both Arabic sources (including Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes) and Greek and Byzantine sources (such as Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus). Its aim is to insure that the Latin world was properly introduced to philosophy by providing a systematic exposition of Aristotelian positions.

Albert’s method of exposition (paraphrase in the style of Avicenna rather than literal commentary in the style of Averroes), the relative heterogeneity of his sources and his own avowed general intention ‘to list the opinions of the philosophers without asserting anything about the truth’ of the opinions listed, all contribute to making his work seem eclectic or even theoretically inconsistent. This was compounded by the nature and number of spurious writings which, beginning in the fourteenth century, were traditionally attributed to him in the fields of alchemy, obstetrics, magic and necromancy, such as The Great and the Little Albert, The Secrets of Women and The Secrets of the Egyptians . This impression fades, however, when one examines the authentic works in the light of the history of medieval Aristotelianism and of the reception of the philosophical sources of late antiquity in the context of the thirteenth-century university.

1 Introduction of philosophy to the Latins

After studying in Padua and Cologne, Albert entered the Dominican order around 1220. He was the first German to become master of theology at the University of Paris (1245–8). He then taught at the Dominican studium at Cologne (where his students included Thomas Aquinas (until 1252) and Ulrich of Strasbourg). Between 1254 and 1257 he was the Dominican Provincial of Teutonia (Germany). As bishop of Ratisbon (Regensburg) in 1260, at the express request of Pope Urban IV, he preached the crusade ‘in Germany, Bohemia and other Germanic countries’. After various visits to Würzburg (1264) and Strasbourg (1267), he lived in Cologne until his death in 1280.

Albert’s teaching in Paris was dominated by his writing the Summa de creaturis (Book of the Creatures) before 1246. Despite the censure imposed on the study of Aristotle during the preceding decade, Albert made extensive use of Greek–Arabic Aristotelianism in his theology (see Aristotelianism, medieval). The same tendency can be seen in his commentary on the Sentences, begun in Paris and finished in Cologne in 1249. It was also in Cologne, while at the studium generale of the Dominican Order, that Albert wrote most of his works in natural philosophy, including the Physics, the commentary on On the Heavens, the Liber de natura locorum (The Nature of Places) and the De causis et proprietatibus elementorum (The Causes and Properties of the Elements) . In 1250–2, he presented in lectures his first commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (the Super Ethica, a question-commentary). He returned to the Nicomachean Ethics in 1262–3, this time producing a paraphrastic commentary, the Ethica .

Albert’s large-scale paraphrases on the Organon were written between 1252 and 1256, based on Arabic works by Avicenna (see Ibn Sina) and Alfarabi (see al-Farabi) which are for the most part lost today, and also on Latin works (the Logica modernorum and commentaries by Robert Kilwardby, with which Albert became familiar in Paris). The works on botany (De vegetabilibus et plantis libri VII) and on mineralogy (De mineralibus) were written in 1256–7; the treatises on biology and zoology (Quaestiones super De animalibus) are drawn from disputed questions held in 1258. In 1262–3, Albert wrote his commentary on Euclid (Super Euclidem). The last years of his life were devoted to metaphysics and theology; his paraphrase of the Metaphysics was written in 1263–7. At the same time he wrote the De causis et processu universitatis (The Causes and Development of the Universe) , a general exposition of an Aristotelian natural theology in which Albert brings together all the intellectual themes of late antiquity that were available in the second half of the thirteenth century.

At this time, the mendicant orders vigorously denounced the intrusion of philosophy into theology. For instance, Bonaventure in the Collationes de Decem praeceptis (Discourses on the Ten Commandments) in 1267 attacked the ‘arrogant presumption of philosophical investigation’ that ‘corrupts all of Holy Scripture’ and denounced not only those who ‘create’ the philosophical ‘fictions’ but also those who ‘sustain and reproduce them’. In that context, Albert’s project to ‘bring Aristotle to the Latins’ constitutes a genuine defence of philosophical endeavour, not only in the medieval university but also in Christian society in general. In Albert’s view, the enemies of philosophy who ‘killed Socrates, threw Plato out of Athens… and forced Aristotle into exile’ (he openly criticizes them in his paraphrase of the Politics VIII, 6) are comparable to the ‘brute beasts’ of his time who ‘blaspheme against what they don’t know’, university ‘preachers’ who in their sermons ‘attack the use of philosophy with all possible means’, ‘without anyone’s being able to answer them’ (commentary on the VIIth Letter of Dionysius).

In opposition to these critics, Albert asserts the need to know and assimilate the philosophy of the ancients. His insistence on the need for philosophy might seem ambiguous in so far as it gives rise to a distinction between two disciplines ‘distinct in their principles’: theology, which is ‘founded on revelation and prophecy’, and philosophy, which is ‘founded on reason’ ( Metaphysica XI, 3, 7). This distinction, however, corresponds to a deeply rooted tendency in the thirteenth century. The condemnations of 1277 at Paris are evidence of its strength and efficacy. Nihil ad me de Dei miraculis, cum ego de naturalibus disseram (God’s miracles mean nothing to me, since I am discussing natural things and events), the rallying cry of the ‘Latin Averroists’ popularized by Siger of Brabant (De anima intellectiva (The Intellective Soul) III), was originally Albert’s (De generatione et corruptione I, 1, 22). He borrowed it consciously and simultaneously from two authorities, one philosophical (Averroes (see Ibn Rushd)) and the other theological (Bernard of Clairvaux , reformulating a passage from Augustine). Albert wrote all his philosophical paraphrases in order to develop fully the discipline of philosophical research, a discipline that is autonomous in its own domain, the domain of rational argumentation.

The nature of Albert’s commentaries might also seem ambiguous, in so far as his avowed Aristotelianism covers a complex mix of Aristotelian and Neoplatonic theses. This ambiguity, however, cannot be blamed on Albert as it is present in his own Arabic ‘Aristotelian’ sources, which were for the most part permeated with the syncretic view of Aristotle inherited from the Neoplatonic commentators of the fifth and sixth centuries (see Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy; Neoplatonism in Islamic philosophy). In asserting that ‘philosophical perfection’ can only be attained with both Aristotle and Plato as its foundation ( Metaphysica I, 5, 15), Albert, who knows little of Plato, is really taking up the ‘harmonizing’ reading of the Neoplatonic philosophers of late antiquity (see Neoplatonism), which was adopted by the Arabic Aristotelians. If his vision of Aristotle seems more Neoplatonic than Aristotelian, it is precisely because it is based as much on the philosophies of Arabic commentators on Aristotle (Alfarabi, Avicenna, the Liber de causis and Averroes) as it is on the philosophy of Aristotle himself.

As the principal engineer of the introduction of philosophy to the Latins, Albert tried to portray as homogeneous a philosophy that is not and cannot be homogeneous in the eyes of the philologist. It is, however, this Arabic–Latin version of Aristotelianism which was successfully installed in the Schools and was opposed to other versions of Aristotle in the fifteenth century, Thomistic Aristotelianism and the Aristotelianism of the school of John Buridan, which present Aristotle in a form more recognizable to us (see Aristotelianism, medieval ).

2 Logic

Although he paraphrased all of the Organon, in expositions that were used frequently until the end of the fifteenth century, it is not on account of its contribution to the development of the logica modernorum that Albert’s logical work is most noteworthy. His principal contribution is in connection with the problem of universals (see Universals). Porphyry, in the Isagōgē , had wanted to keep this problem separate from the thought of the logician, and to make it the domain of metaphysics and theology. It was Albert who first systematically formulated the theory of universals that prevailed in scholastic and neoscholastic thought, the doctrine that there are three types of universals (ante rem, in re and post rem). This doctrine is characteristic of the harmonizing tendency that dominates all of Albert’s thought. It is also evidence of the continuity which, thanks to this doctrine, was established between the philosophy of late antiquity and the philosophy of the late Middle Ages.

In answer to Porphyry’s problem (whether genera or species exist in themselves or reside in mere concepts alone; whether, if they exist, they are corporeal or incorporeal; and whether they exist apart from or in and dependent on sense objects), Albert does not repeat the arguments and theses of the realists and nominalists of the twelfth century (though he knows them), and he does not choose between realism, conceptualism and nominalism. Instead, he takes up and develops a distinction between types of universals which allows him to give a three-part answer to the problem posed by Porphyry, an answer that is neither realist nor nominalist in the sense of the twelfth century but is meant to transcend the conflict itself. Universals, then, are neither universal extramental ‘things’ (as the realists believed), nor simple words or concepts (as the nominalists believed). Rather, a universal is one entity with three different aspects, three modi essendi (modes of being), which differ depending on whether the universal is considered in itself (in divine thought or the separated Intellects), in natural things or in human thought. Albert draws this three-part distinction from Avicenna’s Logica, reinforced by certain remarks from Eustratius of Nicaea’s Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics . This view of universals makes the Platonic notion of separated Forms compatible with the Aristotelian notions of immanent forms and abstract concepts, and makes it possible to preserve both notions within the same theory.

In reviving this doctrine, Albert unwittingly takes up the Neoplatonic solution to the problem of universals, the distinction between universals that are before particulars (pro tōn pollōn), after particulars (epi tois pollois) and in particulars (en tois pollois), a distinction that was systematized most notably by Ammonius, David and Elias (see Neoplatonism ). Albert’s extensive use of Arabic and Byzantine sources to illuminate Latin knowledge of the twelfth century had at least two clear consequences: the subordination of logic to metaphysics and, in metaphysics itself, the subordination of Aristotle’s ‘Aristotelianism’ to a Greek–Arabic version of Aristotelianism (which became the foundation of early neoscholasticism). Indeed, it is on this structure that Albert’s disciples (the ‘neo-Albertians’) built their school’s most characteristic positions as early as the fifteenth century. Jean de Maisonneuve, Albert’s principal disciple in Paris in the early 1400s, criticized the nominalist followers of Buridan (the epicuri litterales) for reducing the universal to the simple abstract concept, a criticism which Heimeric of Campo levelled against Thomists as well. On the other hand, Heimeric also criticized the formalizantes (such as Jerome of Prague) for believing in the existence of separated universals such as Plato’s Ideas. In short, Albert’s disciples criticized other views of universals for being unilateral philosophies that consider only one aspect of the being of universals.

3 Psychology

In the field of psychology, Albert worked primarily on the exposition of the fundamental concepts of Aristotle’s theory of the soul, especially of the theory of the intellect. Albert tried to correct and contribute to the exposition of Aristotle in two areas. He fought against the doctrine of the unity of the intellect (or ‘monopsychism’ as Leibniz called it), which tradition attributed to Averroes but which Albert attributed to ‘all of the Arabs’; and he followed Averroes in criticizing the materialism of Alexander of Aphrodisias . In addition to his critical work, Albert also tried to integrate the essence of the Greek–Arabic theory of the intellect, beginning with Averroes’ version, from which he ‘dissents little’ (‘in paucis dissentimus’, De anima III, 3, 11). Indeed, it is clear that the monopsychism Albert criticizes is the same as that which Averroes already criticized in his ‘Great’ commentary on On the Soul: Avempace’s thesis that there is only one intellect for all men, which is joined to the human soul ‘by means of images’ (phantasmata) (see Ibn Bajja; Ibn Rushd ). This view is unacceptable, says Averroes, because it reduces the material intellect to a simple ‘faculty of imagination’.

Albert only occasionally extends his criticism of monopsychism to Averroes. There are two reasons for this reticence: first, Albert is too dependent on Averroes to criticize his theory of intellect without making his own theories incoherent; and second, he does not interpret Averroes in the light of the Averroists’ extrapolations, as Aquinas does. Far from seeing Averroes as the ‘debaser’ and the ‘corrupter of Aristotelianism’, Albert on the contrary wants to show that Averroes is the only one to have successfully opposed Alexander’s materialist theory on the grounds that it is a ‘very grave error which entails the denial of all the nobility and even of the immortality of the human soul’ ( De anima III, 2, 5). Therefore, Albert holds the view that the possible intellect is external to man, not because he understands it as a monopsychist thesis, as Aquinas does, but because, like Averroes, he understands it in the more precise and limited sense that the possible intellect is not the perishable ‘form’ of a perishable body, nor a ‘corporeal power caused by the elements’ that constitute the body.

What Albert judges to be fundamental in Averroes, then, is the criticism of Alexander’s theory of the ‘eduction’ of the intellect, not his thesis of the unity of the possible intellect. That is why Albert often asserts his perfect agreement with Averroes who, better than any other, was able to prove the thesis which ‘from antiquity, all Aristotelians have held’, excepting Alexander, that ‘the intellect enters the soul from the outside, it does not arise from the composite or the mix of the elements, and does not pre-exist in potentiality in them’. To apply the eductio formarum (eduction of forms) to the intellect implies denying its ‘divinity’ and ‘depriving man of his nature’, and that poses a greater danger than giving an unsatisfactory explanation of the manner in which the possible intellect is united to human beings.

The essence of Albert’s criticism of Averroes thus centres on the difficult notion of the ‘acquired intellect’ (intellectus adeptus). Averroes reduces the acquired intellect to a momentary union of the human soul and the separated intellect (each time there is an act of intellection), when instead one should think of it as a real power and part of the soul, emanated in it, which is developed and strengthened by the acquiring of more intelligibles. In Aristotelian language, one should think of the acquired intellect as a stable disposition (habitus) and not as a transitory state (qualitas passibilis). Thus, Albert does not reject Averroes’ view of the union of the soul with the separated intellect: he adapts and perfects it. It is also on the basis of this view that Albert reorganizes the entirety of the Aristotelian doctrine of the intellect; and that he establishes, as early as the Summa de creaturis, a correspondence table for the different classifications found in tradition. In this, Albert and Aquinas are fundamentally opposed. Albert takes Averroes as his guide to reinterpret Aristotelianism, while Aquinas tries to distinguish Averroes from the Arabic sources (Avicenna and al-Ghazali) and the ‘Greek’ sources (Alexander, Themistius and Theophrastus) in order to interpret Aristotle anew against him (see Averroism ).

4 Metaphysics

In the field of metaphysics, Albert’s work takes an original direction, again characterized by a certain syncretism. Drawing from Aristotle, Avicenna (see Ibn Sina), the Liber de causis (see Liber de causis) and Pseudo-Dionysius, he formulates a system which again places him very much at odds with Aquinas. Albert’s philosophy is set in the context of Aristotelian cosmology, which he claims is valid from the point of view of natural reason. As a consequence, Albert admits in his philosophy the system of Intelligences, which he carefully distinguishes from angels. (He considers that identifying the two is a theological error, though not a specifically Christian one since he denounces it primarily in two Jewish thinkers, Moses of Egypt, also called Maimonides, and Isaac Israeli.) This distinction was taken up and made more rigid by Albert’s German Dominican followers, including Dietrich of Freiberg and Berthold of Moosburg, together with the distinction between the order of ‘natural providence’ (the order to which Aristotle, the Arabic philosophers and Proclus refer) and the order of ‘voluntary providence’ (the order to which the Bible and theologians refer). This is a strictly philosophical way of contrasting the world of nature and that of miracles, the world of the natural and that of the supernatural, a contrast which theologians capture by the strictly theological division between the ‘ordered’ and the ‘absolute’ power of God.

However, in his formulation of an Aristotelian metaphysics, Albert adds two important corrections to the elements he adopts from the Arabic sources. First, while adopting Avicenna’s metaphysics of emanation, he radically modifies the theory of formal emanation (fluxus or influentia). The fluxus formae from which the intelligible and material universe arises does not consist in an ‘overflowing’ (infusio, effusio) of the forms from an emanating Principle (Avicenna’s and al-Ghazali’s dator formarum). Rather, it consists in an anagogical process, the final causality of the ‘appeal of the good’ (advocatio boni), a view Albert draws from Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scottus Eriugena and Maximus the Confessor, all of whom he would have read in the Dionysian corpus of the University of Paris. As a partisan of the unity of substantial form, who holds at the same time that the forms of things are contained in matter in an inchoate state (‘the inchoation of forms’), Albert views all form-generating processes as ruled by the celestial spheres and their movers by means of a causality of attraction rather than strict emanation. The first principle or ‘First Cause’ does not infuse forms into matter: form and matter are con-created. The function of the first principle is to call to itself all forms that are contained in matter, to unify them and to assemble them by means of the ‘final attraction’ that it exerts on everything that is.

This notion of ‘attraction’ by the Good presupposes an identification of the First Cause of Arabic Aristotelianism with the Platonic Good. Albert makes this identification consciously by showing that the Latins who reduce emanation to a simple metaphysical mechanism corrupt all of philosophy. The true theory of emanation is the one that makes the Good into a principle that is ‘diffusive of itself and of being’ (diffusivum sui et esse), not by overflowing but by attracting. Albert explains that the supreme Good, the First Cause, ‘calls all things to be’, that is, to ‘resemble’ it, because the nature of goodness is to call (bonum comes from boo, boas, that is, voco, vocas, to call), and its diffusion is nothing other than its calling (diffusio and boatus are synonyms). He supports this view, not without paradox, by appealing to Paul’s letter to the Romans 4: 17: ‘God calls those things that are not as well as those that are’.

Second, in order to certify that this assimilation of the First Cause with the final cause of being qua being is authentically Aristotelian, Albert claims that Aristotle’s metaphysics is not the last word of Aristotelianism. Metaphysics must be completed by theology. Albert claims that he finds this theology in the Liber de causis. Far from seeing in the Liber de causis an Arabic adaptation of Proclus’ Elements of Theology (as his student Aquinas did), Albert asserts that it is a work compiled by the mysterious ‘David the Jew’ (possibly Ibn Daud?) on the basis of one of Aristotle’s letters On the Principle of the Universe (really a work of Alexander of Aphrodisias, which has survived only in Arabic translation) and other elements borrowed from Aristotelian philosophers. Albert’s belief in the Aristotelian authenticity of the Liber (widely accepted in Paris in the 1250s), allows him to spell out a complete Aristotelian system that comprises metaphysics (the theory of being as being) and theology (the theory of the cause of being) and goes further than the rudiments available in Book XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics . The supreme principle is not a mere first mover (primum movens), it is also a first producer (primum agens) that produces (emanates) all things and draws back (attracts) all things into one.

In his De causis et processu universitatis, the height of his speculative philosophy, Albert offers us the most important ‘reconstruction’ of Aristotelian theology we have received from the middle ages. This complete theology is composed of a theory of the First Cause which draws from all the Arabic sources, (in particular al-Ghazali), and a theory of emanation drawn from the Liber de causis . It is thus clear that, unlike his contemporaries, Albert does not merely contrast revealed theology and rational philosophy, but within philosophy itself he contrasts natural theology and simple metaphysics. Aristotle’s metaphysics is therefore completed twice.

Book I of De causis et processu universitatis , titled De proprietatibus primae causae et eorum quae a prima causa procedunt (On the Properties of the First Cause and of the Beings That Emanate From It), reveals the character of Albert’s general inquiry by characterizing the three philosophical positions of antiquity (Epicurean, Stoic and Aristotelian) on the basis of their relation to the fundamental problem of theology: de primo omnium principio (the first principle of all things) or de universi esse principio (the universal principle of all things). Then comes the analysis of the fundamental themes of Aristotelian theology: De scientia primi (the knowledge of the first principle), De libertate, voluntate et omnipotentia primi (the freedom, will and omnipotence of the first principle) and De fluxu causatorum a causa prima et causatorum ordine (the outpouring of causal things from the first cause and their ordered relationship), all of which are profoundly influenced by al-Ghazali’s views. In fact, Treatise IV, which constitutes the transition between Books I and II, corresponds exactly to the programme of metaphysics that al-Ghazali formulates at the beginning of Book I, V, of his own Metaphysica : Quomodo omnia habent esse a primo principio et quomodo omnia perveniunt ad unum qui est causa causarum (How all things have their being from the first principle, and how all things return to the One that is the cause of causes).

Albert gives his paraphrase of the Liber de Causis in Book II, which he devotes to the analysis of the elements of the noetic cosmos (Intelligences and ‘noble souls’, movers of the heavens), the description of the outpouring of beings (de fluxu entis) and the theory of the government of the universe by the First Cause. On almost every point, he holds views opposed to those of Aquinas in the latter’s commentary. The strength and appeal of Albert’s reading of the completed ‘Aristotelian’ system is such that it resists Aquinas’ philological discovery. Until his death, Albert continued to assert the Aristotelian authenticity of the Liber de causis, and the necessity of it for completing the Metaphysics with a theology.

The distance between the philosophical positions of Albert and Aquinas can be seen even more clearly in their more specific and detailed theories. In the field of ontology, for example, Albert holds Avicenna’s theory of the ‘indifference of the essence’ (the essence itself is neither universal, in the way empirical abstract concepts are, nor particular, in the way particular beings existing outside the soul are), and he draws a connection between this theory and the theory of the three states of a universal. Thus he provides a picture of the process of abstraction that is entirely different from Aquinas’ Aristotelian view. This distance between the two was later reinforced by the neo-Albertians: neither Jean de Maisonneuve nor Heimeric of Campo, for whom ‘in its essence, the universal is one, though it can occur in the soul, in the thing and in itself’ according to three modes of being, viewed the universal as it is in the soul using nominalist and/or Thomistic models of abstraction. The formation of the universal in anima is not the result of abstractive induction on the basis of particulars, but rather the result of a complex illumination of the human soul by the Intelligences, according to the process of mental unification and simplification described in the theory of attractive causality. The formation of the concept called abstract is the result of the fact that the ‘human soul is the instrument of the light of the First Intelligence’ and that the First Intelligence uses it in order to draw back everything into one.

Similarly, while Albert, like Aquinas , is a resolute supporter of the analogy of being, his view, described long before that of Aquinas, combines in an original way the ‘focal’ analogy of Averroes (analogia attributionis or analogia accidentis, the coordination of the different ways in which being is accepted by the category of substance), and Pseudo-Dionysius’ analogy ‘of reception’ (analogia recipientium, the defining of each being by its ‘measure’ or ‘receptive capacity’ which places it in a hierarchy). The problems which Albert’s and Aquinas’ theories of analogy set out to solve are entirely different. Albert’s understanding of analogy is primarily meant to correct the static version of emanationism that dominates the Latin interpretation of the ‘Aristotelian’ cosmology and noetic. He rejects the Latin analogy between the overflowing of the first cause and the way in which the light of the sun is incorporated into different bodies: God’s communication with beings, according to the analogia recipientium, is not the simple overflowing of the ‘giver of forms’ into the universe of beings subordinated to him. For the Latin disciples of Avicenna, the light (lux) of the First Cause, unique and identical in itself, applies indifferently and uniformly to all beings, shining (superlucens) the same light (lumen) on all. It gets differentiated within them, according to their receptive capacity, which is determined by their nature or essence. For Albert, the axiom according to which the ‘received’ (receptum) is found in the ‘receiver’ (recipiens) according to its analogy or receptive capacity, is not sufficient to characterize the analogical communication of the Principle (as long as this capacity is conceived as a mere passive reception, and not rather as an active assimilation performed for all beings by the intellectual beings only). The communication of the Principle is fully realized only in the intellectual conversion of the entirety of being. In turn, this conversion occurs through the mediation of those beings that are capable of intellective activity and who insure the anagogical assimilation of the universe to the principle from which it emanates. The diffusion of the Good or the First Principle is not a simple ‘exit’, it is a double movement of exit (exitus) and return (reditus), of descending and rising, to which all thinking beings contribute.

For Albert, the theory of analogy is thus not primarily meant to answer the problem of the ‘multiple meanings of being’. It is not an ontological or semantic theory meant to solve the aporias of the ‘problem of being’ formulated by Aristotle in Book IV of the Metaphysics . Rather, it is a theological doctrine which, under the name of ‘Aristotelianism’, sets out a peculiar version of the Neoplatonic theory of the intellectual procession of the universe. Despite the fact that Albert and Aquinas share a certain language (indifference of essences, the analogy of being, the analogy of reception), they are answering different problems and their philosophical intentions are not congruent. On all important points of metaphysics, therefore, the historiographical notion of an ‘Alberto–Thomist Aristotelianism’ seems quite fragile, if not unfounded.

5 Ethics

In moral philosophy, Albert is a resolute supporter of Aristotle’s view that the ‘contemplative’ or ‘speculative life’ surpasses all other forms of life. Albert describes philosophical contemplation as the height and end of human life. These ideas on ‘intellectual happiness’ were later taken up both by the Latin Averroists (from John of Jandun to Nicoletto Vernia) and by Dante in his Convivio. Here again, Albert is close to Averroes and far from Aquinas. Paradoxically, Averroes’ claim that the philosophical life is necessary and pre-eminent (see Ibn Rushd §4 ) finds its clearest exposition in Albert’s Aristotelianism. It is in Albert’s work that psychology, the science of animate life, manages to grow naturally into a theology, in so far as psychology is in its highest branch a science of human beings, or more precisely in Aristotle’s terms, ‘a science of the most fundamental and best part of the being of men’.

The achievement of Albert’s Aristotelianism, then, is that it naturally links psychology, ethics and philosophical theology. Aristotle’s definition of the humanity of man receives an essentially practical interpretation: what defines man is his aspiration to ‘live according to the noblest part of himself’ (secundum optimum eorum quae in ipso). Since this ‘noblest’ (principale et melius) part is the intellect (considered both as a ‘divine element present in human beings’ and as ‘what is in the highest degree man himself’) it is by giving a new interpretation of the doctrine of the acquired intellect (intellectus adeptus) that Albert builds an ethical system. This ethical system, though it is set ‘against the contemplation of love’ described by Aquinas and theologians, and despite the condemnations of 1277, imposed itself as a kind of corporate ideal to the masters of arts, both Averroists and others.

The new doctrine of the acquired intellect can be easily summarized. The acquired intellect designates the state of the human soul when it is joined (conjunctio, connexio) to the separated agent intellect. This union can be in potentiality – since the agent intellect is naturally joined to us as a power and faculty of the soul – or it can be causal – since the agent intellect is the efficient cause of the actualizing of intelligibles in the soul and since, in the acquired intellect, the agent intellect becomes the form of the soul. Their union produces in the soul the state of contemplative wisdom described by Aristotle as ‘the speculative life’. The state of union or speculative life is the state which philosophers define as the ‘supreme end’ of human life, the object of a specific longing (fiducia philosophantium). Thus, there is here on earth a form of life which, while it anticipates the happiness promised to the elect in the next world, is none the less self-sufficient (it is in this sense that Alfarabi defines the ‘other life’ as the union of the philosopher with the separated Intellect, in De intellectu et intellecto (see al-Farabi )). In the most literal sense of the term, this form of life is ‘acquired’: it is the result of work and implies a progression (moveri ad continuationem). The content of this form of life is precisely what Aristotle defined as the object of philosophical theology, the contemplation of the separated beings. The kind of life that is characterized by philosophical contemplation can be called ‘intellectual happiness’.

This conception of philosophy as a contemplative form of life is indissolubly speculative and ethical. Albert arrives at it by drawing from diverse sources, not only the Islamic Aristotelians (Alfarabi, Avicenna and Averroes), but also the Byzantine commentators on the Nicomachean Ethics , Eustratius of Nicaea and Michael of Ephesus, whom he was one of the first to read (see Byzantine philosophy ). Albert’s often repeated identification of the Arabic doctrine of the acquired intellect (intellectus adeptus) and the ‘Greek’ doctrine of the ‘possessed intellect’ (intellectus possessus) is meant to establish the authentically Aristotelian character of Albert’s reformulation of the goal of philosophical endeavour. Albert makes his view of this goal an ethical view, by describing philosophy’s culmination as a state which he is not afraid to characterize, with Aristotle, as ‘divine’ (intellectus divinus). In comparison with authentic Aristotelianism, however, Albert’s position is marked by something remarkably novel: the idea of an ascetic progression of the human soul, rising progressively from the knowledge of the sublunar world to the intellectual intuition of the separated realities.

The central idea in Albert’s thought is that here on earth, there is a happiness that rewards a philosophical effort understood as a progressive detachment of the human soul from sensible things and the ‘acquisition of the intellect’. Albert’s metaphysics, his psychology, his ethics and his natural theology all converge in this central thought. It is this idea that the so-called ‘Latin Averroists’ in Paris inherited from Albert. It is also, probably, by this aspect of his work that the master of Cologne exerted his most long- lived and varied influence.