The Universal Doctor — Dominican Friar, Teacher of Thomas Aquinas, Naturalist of Cologne, Bishop of Regensburg, Doctor of the Church (c. 1200–1280)
If you have ever been told that faith and science are enemies, that you must choose between loving God and loving the world he made, Albert is the saint who looked at that choice and refused it.
He was a German friar of the thirteenth century who spent his days weighing minerals, studying how bees build their hives, cataloguing plants, and arguing with the greatest philosophers of the ancient world, and who then went to the chapel and prayed the Divine Office with the same attention. He did not think the two activities were separate. He thought that every true thing he learned about creation was a small word spoken by its Creator, and that a Christian who refused to read it was ignoring half of what God had written.
He was also, by every account, a man who could not stop. He taught in half a dozen cities. He ran an entire province of his order on foot. He served as a bishop, then gave up the office. He preached a crusade, settled a civil war in Cologne, and wrote more than any other scholar of his age. And his greatest student, a quiet, heavy young Italian whom the other students mocked as slow, would become the most important theologian in the history of the Church.
Albert is for the curious. He is for the person whose questions seem too large for the pews, for the believer who works in a laboratory or hospital or classroom, and for anyone who has ever wondered whether a mind that wants to understand everything can still belong wholly to God.
A Knight's Son on the Danube
Albert was born around the year 1200, in the town of Lauingen on the Danube in Swabia, in what is now southern Germany. The exact year is uncertain; the traditional sources place his birth anywhere between the early 1190s and about 1207, and a date near 1200 is the most commonly used. His family belonged to the lower nobility, a family of knights who served the powerful Hohenstaufen emperors, and his father is remembered as a military man in the service of the Emperor Frederick II.
The world he was born into was intellectually restless. Europe in the early thirteenth century was in the middle of a revolution in learning. The first universities had been founded at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, and Padua was only a few years old. Across the Mediterranean, in the libraries of Muslim Spain and Sicily, scholars were translating the lost works of Aristotle and their Arabic commentators into Latin. For the first time in centuries, European students could read the full range of the ancient philosopher's thought about nature, the soul, and the cosmos, and many in the Church did not know what to make of it. Some saw a treasury. Others saw a threat.
The century was also the century of the friars. Francis of Assisi and Dominic de Guzmán had both died only a few years before Albert came of age, and their new orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, were pouring into the cities and universities to preach among the crowds. These were not monks behind walls. They were mendicants, men who owned nothing, begged their food, and walked from town to town. It was a young person's movement, and the best young minds of Europe were being drawn into it.
A Student of Nature at Padua
Albert's family sent him south to study at the University of Padua, probably to prepare him for a respectable career. In Padua, he studied the liberal arts and above all Aristotle, and he became fascinated by the natural world.
This was where his lifelong method took root. Albert was a man who wanted to see for himself. When others in the schools repeated what the ancients had said about animals, plants, stones, or stars, he wanted to know whether it was true. In later life he would write that the task of natural science was not simply to accept what others had said, but to investigate the causes at work in nature. That conviction made him one of the great pioneers of observation in the Middle Ages.
But the young man also had a restless, unsettled heart. He was intelligent, ambitious, and privileged. His family had plans for him. The Church was not necessarily among them.
The Sermon That Undid Him
In the summer of 1223, a Dominican friar came to Padua. Jordan of Saxony was the second Master of the Order of Preachers, the successor of Saint Dominic himself, and he had a very specific task: to recruit the brightest young men in the universities of Europe into the Order. He was extraordinarily good at it. Students who went to hear him out of curiosity came away changed, and he left a trail of university men who had abandoned prospects, wealth, and sometimes angry families to put on the white habit.
Albert went to hear him. He was, one tradition says, deeply torn. Part of him was drawn, powerfully, to the life Jordan described: poverty, study, and preaching, the pursuit of truth in the service of souls. Part of him was horrified. His family was not going to approve. It was one thing to be devout. It was another to give up a noble name and a secure future to beg in the streets.
The Dominican tradition preserves a story about this crisis. It says that Albert, struggling with the decision, was visited by the Virgin Mary, who encouraged him to enter the Order and not to be afraid. The same tradition adds a second part, which becomes important at the end of his life, and which we will come to. It is a pious tradition and cannot be historically verified, but it tells us something about how the early friars understood his vocation: not as a clever career move, but as an answer to a call he had tried to resist.
Whatever happened in the quiet of his own soul, the outward facts are clear. Around 1223, Albert received the Dominican habit at Padua. His family did not welcome the news. He had given up the privileges of his birth, and he never took them back.
Learning to Be a Friar
The Order sent him to study theology, and then to teach. Over the next two decades he taught in several German houses of the Order, in Cologne, Hildesheim, Freiburg, Regensburg, and Strasbourg. He was a gifted lecturer, devoted to his students, and absorbed in the new Aristotelian learning. By the early 1240s, he was ready for the greatest stage in Europe.
In about 1241 he arrived at the University of Paris, the intellectual capital of Christendom, to lecture on theology. He was appointed a master of theology in the mid-1240s, one of the highest academic honors the Church could offer. He drew crowds. The students loved him.
And among the students who gathered around him was a heavy, silent young man from southern Italy, the son of a count, who had joined the Dominicans against the fierce opposition of his family, and who sat at the back of the room taking careful notes. His classmates, who took him for slow, nicknamed him the Dumb Ox.
The Dumb Ox
His name was Thomas Aquinas.
The Dominican tradition tells a story about the first time Albert realized who he had in his class. One day, the story goes, a fellow student found Thomas's notes and, noticing how good they were, brought them to the master. Albert examined them carefully. Then, he is said to have told the class: "You call him the Dumb Ox. I tell you that this ox will one day bellow so loud that his bellowing will fill the world."
Whether or not he used those exact words, Albert was the first to recognize what Thomas was. In 1248 the Order sent Albert to Cologne to found a studium generale, a house of advanced studies, and Thomas went with him. For several years the two men worked together. The older man taught the younger; the younger quickly began to see further than the older. Their friendship lasted until the end of their lives.
It is a mark of Albert's humility, and of his real greatness, that he was not threatened by his student's brilliance. Albert's genius was breadth: he took in everything. Thomas's genius was synthesis: he made it fit together. Albert gathered the materials and cleared the ground. Thomas built the cathedral. Albert knew this, and he rejoiced in it.
The Man Who Wrote About Everything
In Cologne, Albert did something no one had done before. He set out to give the Latin West a complete, ordered account of everything Aristotle had to teach about the natural world, the human soul, the physical universe, and the nature of being, and to place it in conversation with the Christian faith.
The scale of the project is difficult to imagine. Albert wrote paraphrases and commentaries on nearly all of Aristotle's known works. He wrote on logic, ethics, politics, the heavens, the soul, and metaphysics. He wrote theological works: a commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, commentaries on Scripture, on the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, and a massive Summa theologiae. He also wrote devotional works, including a treatise on the Mass and writings on the Blessed Virgin.
And then there were his works on nature. He wrote on plants, on animals, on minerals, on the movements of the stars, on meteorology, on geography. He kept gardens. He collected specimens. Where the ancient sources were wrong, he said so. He is credited with some of the first systematic study of minerals in medieval Europe, and some historians credit him with isolating the element arsenic.
His method was practical. He wrote that he wanted to know not only what the authorities said but what was actually the case, and that experience, careful and repeated observation, was the only reliable test. He walked in the fields. He watched the animals. He questioned hunters, farmers, and craftsmen about what they knew.
It was this combination, deep Christian faith and relentless curiosity about the real world, that made him the Universal Doctor. The word universal did not mean he knew everything. It meant he refused to leave any part of creation outside the domain of thought.
His theological conviction was exactly what Scripture and the Church teach. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made (Romans 1:20). From the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their Creator (Wisdom 13:5). The Church would later say it in the plainest possible way: "Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 159). Albert did not argue this as a clever defense. He lived as if it were true.
Administrator, Arbitrator, Walker
Albert's talents did not go unnoticed by the Church, and his quiet life of research was repeatedly interrupted by demands from above.
In 1254, the Dominicans elected him Provincial of Germany, the superior of all Dominican houses in the German lands. It was an enormous job, covering a vast territory, and he did it in a way that astonished people. He insisted on visiting every house in his province, and he did it on foot, in keeping with the Dominican rule of poverty, walking hundreds of miles across Germany, Switzerland, and the Low Countries. He stayed three years.
Even then, he was not left in peace. In 1257 he returned to Cologne, but he was constantly called on by popes, bishops, and princes as an expert and a mediator. In 1258 he was asked to arbitrate a bitter dispute between the Archbishop of Cologne and the citizens of the city, which had been raging for years and threatened to turn violent. His settlement held. The people of Cologne regarded him with trust and affection for the rest of his life.
Stories of the sort that grow up around any famous teacher gathered about him. People said he was a magician. A legend tells that he once entertained the King of the Romans at a banquet in the open air in the middle of winter, and that, as the meal began, the snow melted away and the garden burst into bloom. It is a legend, and it was told about him because the common people could not understand how one man could know so much. The truth was less spectacular: he was simply a man who had spent his life looking closely at things.
Bishop Against His Will
In 1260, Pope Alexander IV named Albert Bishop of Regensburg. The diocese was in disorder. Its previous bishop had been removed, its finances were in ruins, and the clergy were in need of reform. The Pope wanted a man of integrity to set it right.
Albert did not want the job. He resisted, pleaded, and in the end obeyed. And then he did something that scandalized the people of Regensburg: he continued to live as a friar. He refused to ride a horse, as a bishop of his rank was expected to do, and he walked everywhere in his simple religious habit. The nobility and many of the clergy, who were used to a very different style of bishop, mocked him for it.
He worked hard. He restored the diocese's finances, disciplined its clergy, and settled its quarrels. But it was not the life he was made for, and by his own judgment it was not where he could best serve the Church. After a little more than two years, he asked to be released, and the Pope allowed him to resign. He returned to teaching, and he never again held high office in the Church, though the popes continued to rely on his counsel.
This is a part of his story that deserves to be told honestly. He did not turn out to be a gifted bishop, and he did not think he was. He accepted a task he did not want, did what he could with it, recognized his limits, and stepped aside. Not every saint is excellent at everything.
Fighting for Aristotle
If the first half of Albert's career was a flood of learning, the second half was a defense of it.
Many in the Church were deeply suspicious of Aristotle. The philosopher was a pagan, and some of his ideas, as interpreted by his Arabic commentators, seemed to contradict Christian teaching. Aristotle's followers in the Paris faculty of arts sometimes pushed those ideas to extremes: some taught that the world had no beginning, or that all human beings share a single intellect. Conservative theologians reacted with alarm. Church authorities began condemning propositions and banning books.
Albert was in the middle. He loved Aristotle, and he also understood the danger. In the 1250s, at the request of the Pope, he wrote a treatise against the errors of Averroes, the Muslim commentator who had been taken up by the radicals. In his view, the answer to bad philosophy was not less philosophy but better philosophy. A faith that was afraid of reason would be a poor kind of faith.
Meanwhile, the Pope called on him in other ways. In 1263 and 1264, he preached a crusade throughout Germany and Bohemia, a task he is said to have taken up out of obedience rather than enthusiasm. In 1274, he was summoned to the Second Council of Lyons.
And then Thomas died.
"Thomas Is Dead"
On March 7, 1274, Thomas Aquinas died at Fossanova, on his way to the Council of Lyons. He was about forty-nine. Albert was more than seventy and still alive.
The news struck him hard. By the account that comes down to us, the old man wept openly whenever Thomas's name was mentioned. And within a few years, Thomas's teaching came under attack. In 1277, the Bishop of Paris condemned a long list of propositions, some of which seemed to touch on Thomas's work, and there was real concern that his legacy would be destroyed.
Tradition says that Albert, by then in his late seventies, traveled to Paris to defend the memory of his student. Historians debate whether he actually went, but the story has endured because it fits the man. The teacher who had spent his life defending the harmony of faith and reason was not going to let the best student he ever had be disgraced.
The Light Goes Out
Around 1278, Albert's health began to fail. His memory, once so extraordinary that he seemed to hold the whole body of human knowledge in his head, began to leave him. The Dominican tradition says that, while teaching or dictating, he suddenly lost the thread, forgot what he was saying, and could not recover it. His mind slowly went dark.
Here the old Marian tradition returns. It says that when the Virgin had appeared to him as a young man, she had promised him great learning, and she had also told him that before he died, he would lose it, so that he would end his life in the simple faith of a child, and not die proud of what he knew. Whatever we make of the story, it is hard to read the last years of the greatest mind of his age without being moved. The man who wrote about everything ended his life unable to remember his own name.
It is also a kind of gift to ordinary believers. Many people will live their last years in a fog, forgetting the names of their children, the prayers they once knew, the arguments they once won. Albert shows that this too is a way to God. The Church does not value us for our memory. She values us because we are loved.
The Death in Cologne
Albert died on November 15, 1280, in the Dominican convent at Cologne, at about eighty years of age. He had lived a very long life, and he had spent most of it on the road, in the lecture hall, or in the fields. He died surrounded by his brothers, in the city he had served for decades, and which had come to love him as one of its own.
He was buried in the choir of the Dominican church of the Holy Cross. When his tomb was opened three years later, tradition says his body was found intact. In 1483, a second examination found only a skeleton. Neither detail was ever treated as the basis of his veneration. What drew people to his tomb was not a sign but a memory: the memory of a man who had been, in the words of his contemporaries, the wonder of the world.
Legacy and Patronage
His fame never faded in Germany, where he was regarded as a saint from the day of his death, but formal recognition in Rome was slow. Pope Gregory XV confirmed his cult and declared him Blessed in 1622. Then, after another three centuries, on December 16, 1931, Pope Pius XI declared him a saint of the universal Church and a Doctor of the Church in the same act. He is one of the few figures to be canonized and named a Doctor at once, and the Church gave him the title he had earned in the medieval schools, the Universal Doctor.
Ten years later, in 1941, Pope Pius XII named him the heavenly patron of all who cultivate the natural sciences. It was a deliberate act, made in the middle of a world war, in a century that had set science against faith. The Church was saying that the two were not enemies, and pointing to a thirteenth-century friar as proof.
His relics now rest in a Roman sarcophagus in the crypt of Saint Andrew's Church in Cologne, a Dominican church, where they were placed after the French occupation of the Rhineland had closed the convent where he died. Pilgrims still come to pray. He is not incorrupt, and the Church makes no claim that he is.
His patronages are not mere titles:
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Natural scientists and those who study creation. He did the work himself. He looked at plants, stones, and animals, and he trusted what he saw. A scientist who prays to Albert is praying to someone who actually did what she does, centuries before there was a profession for it.
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Philosophers. He gave the Latin West Aristotle and taught it how to think about being, soul, and nature. Every philosopher in the Catholic tradition stands on ground he cleared.
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Medical technicians. By devotion, those who work in laboratories, handling samples and instruments and measuring what cannot be seen by eye, find in him a patron. He was one of the first Christians to treat the careful study of bodies, substances, and causes as a form of respect for God's work.
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Students. He loved teaching, and he was a patient master to a student the others dismissed. Anyone who has been underestimated in a classroom has a friend in him.
He was also named a patron of the World Youth Day of 2005, held in Cologne, the city where he spent most of his life and where he is buried.
Prayer
O God, Creator of all that is seen and unseen, you gave your servant Albert a mind to seek you in your works and a heart to love you above them. Through his prayers, grant to all who study the world you have made the humility to learn, the courage to question, and the wisdom to see your hand in everything. When our minds grow weak and our memories fail, let us rest in you, as he did, with the simple faith of a child. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
