Feast day: November 15

St. Albert the Great

Bishop & Doctor of the Church · c. 1200–1280

Patron of Scientists, natural sciences, philosophers

Dominican polymath who wrote on physics, botany, zoology, astronomy, and theology — and taught a student named Thomas Aquinas.

Albert was born about 1200 in Germany, of a noble family, and as a young student in Italy joined the new Dominican order, devoting himself to a life of study and teaching. His curiosity was boundless: he set out to master and explain the whole range of human knowledge, and his learning was so vast that even in his own lifetime he was called 'the Great' and 'the Universal Doctor.'

He taught at Paris and at Cologne, where he founded a great house of studies, and among his pupils was a quiet, heavy young man his classmates mocked as 'the dumb ox' — Thomas Aquinas. Albert recognized his genius at once and declared that the bellowing of this ox would be heard around the world; he became Thomas's master and lifelong defender, and the two together reshaped Christian thought.

Albert's special achievement was to bring the rediscovered philosophy of Aristotle, and with it the serious study of the natural world, into the service of Christian theology — insisting that faith and reason, revelation and the patient observation of nature, could not finally contradict one another. He wrote on logic, theology, and metaphysics, but also on plants, animals, minerals, astronomy, and chemistry, much of it from his own careful observation, making him one of the foremost scientists of the Middle Ages.

Despite his learning he was humble and devout, served for a time as a bishop and as a peacemaker, and traveled on foot in poverty. He died at Cologne in 1280, outliving his great pupil Thomas, whose teaching he defended to the end. Canonized and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1931, he is the patron saint of natural scientists.

He insisted on observing nature directly rather than trusting old books — an experimental instinct centuries ahead of schedule. The Church made him patron of scientists.

Image: Vicente Salvador Gómez (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/01264a.htm