Saint Albert (1200-1280), whose life spans what William Walsh called the ‘greatest of centuries’ was himself, even during his own lifetime, given that title, ‘the Great’: scholar, Dominican, bishop, and Doctor of the Church, he was considered the most learned man of his century, with an encyclopedic knowledge of just about everything under the Sun, in an age when one could truly be a renaissance man before the inaccurately-named era of the same name. His writings, which fill 38 volumes (!) include such variegated topics as love, music, theology, botany, geography, astronomy, astrology, mineralogy, alchemy (the precursor to chemistry), zoology, physiology, phrenology (for all its future problems, it was the precursor to neuroscience), justice, law (human, natural, eternal, divine), friendship and love. He even wrote a very accurate and helpful treatise on falconry. No wonder he is called ‘Doctor Universalis’, the ‘teaching of everything’, or just ‘Expertus‘.
Albert was the first to comment on the newly-rediscovered and translated works of Aristotle, which would shape the course of philosophy for centuries, into our own era (say what one likes of some of Aristotle’s conclusions, his principles still form the basis of all human reasoning). Albert also wrote much on what is now known as ‘science’, the empirical investigation of the world, and may be considered as one of its founders, centuries before dismissiveness of Bacon and the hubris of Galileo. Contrary to the myth that the scholastics uncritically accepted the opinions of authorities, here is Albert with a caution to all scientists, including modern ones, so given to an unbending ‘consensus’ on issues from climate change to evolution:
The aim of natural philosophy (science) is not simply to accept the statements of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature