Albert the Great
Albert the Great set out to make the whole of Aristotle intelligible to the Latins, wrote a paraphrase of every book of it with additions from his own observation of plants, animals, minerals and falcons, taught Thomas Aquinas, and was called Great in his lifetime, which no other scholastic was. He was born about 1200 at Lauingen on the Danube into a family of knights, studied at Padua, entered the Dominicans there around 1223 against his family's wishes, and taught in the order's houses along the Rhine before going to Paris, where he took the chair of theology in 1245 and found among his students a silent Italian the others called the dumb ox. He said the ox would bellow so loud the world would hear him, and took Aquinas with him to Cologne in 1248 to found the order's studium there. The work of the next twenty years was the commentaries. He covered logic, physics, the heavens, generation and corruption, the soul, the animals in twenty-six books, the plants in seven, the minerals in five, ethics, politics, metaphysics, with the Arab commentators read alongside and his own experiments and questions. He asked whether an ostrich eats iron, which he tested, and whether the earth was round, which he held. He also wrote on theology, and defended the mendicant orders at the papal court in 1256 against the secular masters of Paris. The order made him provincial of Germany in 1254, which he walked, and the pope made him bishop of Regensburg in 1260, which he resigned after two years to go back to teaching, having reformed the diocese's finances on foot. He preached the crusade in Germany, arbitrated the quarrels of Cologne with its archbishop, and went to Paris in 1277, old, to defend his dead pupil's teaching when the bishop condemned it. He died at Cologne in November 1280. Because he wrote on alchemy and astrology as parts of natural science, later centuries made him a magician; the church made him a saint in 1931 and the patron of scientists.
- Lived: 1200 CE – 1280 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: theologian, philosopher, bishop, saint
