[The jocular title of this entry
playing on sine qua non, is however serious, in making the point that
without St. Albertus Magnus’s meticulous groundwork, St. Thomas Aquinas would
have had to start from scratch, and might not have achieved everything that he
did building on the foundation already laid by his teacher. I had some initial
doubts about including Albertus here as a separate entry, but I don’t have them
anymore.]
Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) is
not normally listed among major philosophers, which may be objectively true,
but historically unfair to the man by whose efforts the Latin translations of
Aristotle from Averroes’s Arabic became organized, systematized, and made ready
for Christian consumption. Albertus was also the principal teacher and mentor
of Thomas Aquinas, eventually disappearing in Aquinas’s shadow, yet not to be
forgotten by those who wish to set the record straight. This record ought to
remind us that it was not St. Thomas Aquinas, but his German-born teacher St.
Albertus, who was, historically, the very first Christian Scholastic
philosopher in the Aristotelian fashion. (Roscelin was the first Scholastic per
se as the founder of nominalism, but
he was not familiar with Aristotle.)
To his considerable credit, he
was not a religious bigot, but he strove to reconcile science and religion in a
fair manner (using the modern analogy of trying to reconcile creationism with
evolution, the reader might get a good appreciation of this mission
impossible). There is also a curious legend about him, which gets a renewed
freshness against the new background of the Potteriana, asserting that
it was none other than he, who had discovered the Philosopher’s Stone; but,
for all intents and purposes, it is best that it remain with Nicholas Flamel
and his friend Albus Dumbledore in the enchanted land of classic
fiction.
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