St. Albert and the Theory of Abstraction

ST. ALBERT AND THE THEOHY OF ABS1'HACTION IN thirteenth-century Europe the Platonic philosophical system, which had held sway almost uncontestedly from the time of Plotinus and St. Augustine, was challenged by its irreconcilable rival, Aristotelianism. While St. Albert is given credit for endeavoring to preserve and disseminate the writings of Aristotle, St. Thomas ordinarily receives all the acclaim for extricating the true Aristotle from the centuriesold accretions of neo-Platonism. That is, Albert, although he admired the Stagirite, was a Platonist at heart, or an eclectic, or one of those dreamers who hoped to synthesize a Peripatetic Academy. At any rate, he was certainly not the first of the medieval Aristotelians. This, in general, is the judgment historians of philosophy seem to have made. While science has not yet devised a litmus paper for separating thirteenth-century Aristotelians from Augustinians, there are certain properties which are taken as characteristic of each. First of all, an Aristotelian will place a very miserly limit of one on the substantial forms any being may have; the Augustinian neo-Platonist generously concedes any number of forms. The Aristotelian reserves his hylomorphic theory for corporeal beings; the Augustinian extends it to all beings except the Divine. Although these two characteristics constitute the binarium famosissimum, the modern preoccupation with epistemology makes a third property perhaps even more important. Augustinians are divine illumi~ationists; Aristotelians are abstractionists. It is with respect to this last criterion that we propose to examine St. Albert, to ascertain as nearly as possible whether his theory of knowledge was one of divine illumination or one of abstraction. Despite the fact that even a completely satis69 70 ROSEMARY ZITA LAUER factory settlement of this problem would not of itself turn St. Albert into either a Peripatetic or an Academic, our investigation should serve to demonstrate to some degree how Academic a Peripatetic or how Peripatetic an Academic he was. Even a cursory inspection of the available summaries of St. Albert's thought makes it evident that the interpretation of this philosopher is far from being something upon which everyone agrees or something about which anyone should presume to make many unqualified statements.1 The quantity of material to be read, the difficulty of determining when Albert is simply expounding the thought of another and when he is setting down his own conclusions, and the present state of his works contribute toward making the study of the Albertine corpus difficult and not notably fruitful thus far with respect to any definitive interpretation.2 However, one can hope to attain some degree of certitude in investigating one minute phase of the problem. The question to be considered in detail, then, is St. Albert's attitude toward the theory of abstraction, and even more precisely, whether his abstraction theory accounts for all natural knowledge or whether he has recourse also to a theory of illumination. The principal sources of information are St. Albert's paraphrase -commentary on Aristotle's De anima, the Summa de creaturis, the commentaries on Dionysius, and the Summa theologiae. That his De unitate intellectus and his De intellectu et intelligibili are not included is due to their seeming to contain nothing which clea:rly indicates an illumination theory -except insofar as the soul receives a natural light which enables it to perform abstractions-or which directly supports a theory that the natural light of the intellect is sufficient for all natural knowledge. 1 See F. J. Thonnard, Precis d'histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Desclee et Cie, 1945), pp. 315-818. 2 Perhaps Albert himself is not entirely blameless with respect to the state of the present Albertine studies, for, according to De Wulf, "Sa langue est inculte, souvent embarrassee et imprecise." La philosophie medievale au XIII• siecle, !'!nd. ed. (Louvain, 1905), p. 820. ST. ALBERT AND THE THEORY OF ABSTRACTION 71 In De anima,3 the following subjects relative to abstraction are treated: the nature of universals, the distinction between forma partis and forma totius, the manner in which the soul is known, knowledge of mathematicals and corporeal things, whether the soul has operations which are independent of the body, the soul as separable from the body, and the...