Scholarship of recent decades has begun to fill in a picture of Albert the Great as a distinctive theologian, philosopher, and scholar of natural science in his own right, and not just the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. In the French version of his lectures From Averroes to Meister Eckhart, medieval specialist Kurt Flasch emphasizes that the great Christian theologian Albert follows Aristotle in holding that there is such a thing as natural beatitude (see The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More than Human; Errors of the Philosophers; 1277).

I recently suggested that there have been at least three other “Enlightenments” before the modern one: the beginning of philosophical ethics with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; Arabic hybrid neoplatonic-Aristotelian falsafah in the tradition of Alfarabi; and the spread of Greco-Arabic learning to the Latin West. Albert the Great was at the center of this last one. Flasch documents a whole cluster of Albert’s attitudes that are consistent with this.

Beatitude is a specifically Christian religious term for the highest state of blessedness and joy that a human could experience. It is often understood to be capable of existing only as a special supernatural gift from God, intervening in the natural order of things. It is also often understood to apply only to the souls of the chosen in heaven, and not as part of earthly existence at all.

Albert is a deep and sincere Christian theologian and philosopher, who nonetheless finds the Latin West of his own day to be quite primitive compared to the enlightenment of the Greek and Arabic philosophers. He devoted his life to spreading Greco-Arabic enlightenment and education in the Christian world. Reportedly, he was the first European to publicly lecture on Aristotle, after the teaching of Aristotle had been banned in the earlier 13th century.

Flasch characterizes Albert’s vast literary output as pluralistic and exploratory. Albert accepts the monotheistic-neoplatonic Book of Causes as a work of Aristotle, and the Christian neoplatonic theologian (pseudo) Dionysius the Areopagite as a contemporary of Paul. But he avoids appeal to theological presuppositions in his philosophy, and at the same time brings philosophical concerns and sophistication to bear in his theology. Overall he shows great respect for secular reason and learning, and for Aristotelian ethics, which he reads in a context of broadly neoplatonic metaphysics fused with an Aristotelian ethical notion of intellect. He seems to see revelation as what I would call a kind of poetic truth, and as confirming rather than contradicting the higher ethical conclusions of natural reason.