656 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
gunpowder, but got his knowledge from others.1 The suc ceeding age associated his name, as also the name of Roger Bacon, with magic and the dark arts, but probably without sufficient reason.
The world has had few such prolific writers as Albertus Magnus. In Borgnet's edition of thirty-eight volumes, there are, excluding the valuable indexes, no less than 27,014 pages of two columns each. These writings may be said to take up not only every topic of physical knowledge but to discuss every imaginable subject in religion and philosophy. His activity combined the travail of the original thinker with the toil of the compiler. Twelve volumes in Borgnet's edition are devoted to philosophy and the natural sciences, one to ser mons, one to a commentary on Dionysius the Areopagite, ten to commentaries on books of the Old and New Testaments, and fourteen to theology. He freely used some of his pred ecessors among the Schoolmen as Anselm, Bernard, and Hugo and Richard of St. Victor, as well as the Fathers and the Greek and Arabic philosophers.
Albert's chief theological works are a Commentary on the Sentences of the Lombard, a Study of Created Things 2 and an independent summa of theology, which was left un finished, and stopped with the discussion of sin. These three works, in many subjects of which they treat, run parallel. But each is fresh, elaborate, and has its own peculiar arrange ment. The Study of Created Things, or System of Nature is an attempt, whose boldness has never been exceeded, to explain the great phenomena of the visible universe above and below, eternity and time, the stars and the motion of the heavens, angels and devils, man, his soul and body, the laws of his nutrition, sleep, reason, intellect, and other parts of his constitution, and events to which he is subject.
Albert's commentaries cover the Psalms in three volumes, the Lamentations, Daniel, the Minor Prophets, Baruch, the Gos pels, and the Apocalypse. His commentary on the Worthy
1 An interesting survey of Albert's knowledge of nature is given by Sighart, pp. 302-356 ; also Stockl. II. 3-VJ sqq.
2 Summa de creaturis, vols. XXXIV., XXXV., in Borgnet's ed.
§ 107. ALBERTUS MAGNUS. 657
Woman of Proverbs 31 : 10-31 is drawn out to two hundred pages of two columns each.
Theology, Albert defined to be a science in the truest sense, and what is more, it is wisdom.1 It is the practical science of those things that pertain to salvation. The being of God is not susceptible of positive a priori proof. It may be proved in an indirect way from the impossible absurdities which would follow from the denial of it.2 The existence of God is not, properly speaking, an article of theology, but an antecedent of all articles. In his Summa he quotes Anselm's definition, " God is greater than anything else that can be conceived." The objection was made to it that what is above what can be conceived we cannot grasp. He answers the objection by showing that God can be known by positive affirmation and by negation. The cosmological proof was most to Albert's mind, and he argued at length the proposi tion that motion demands a prime mover. Matter cannot start itself into motion.3
The Trinity is matter of revelation. Philosophy did not find it out.4 Albert, however, was not prevented from enter ing into an elaborate speculative treatment of the doctrine.
Following Augustine, Anselm, and Richard of St. Victor, he argued for the procession of the Spirit from the Son as well as from the Father as a necessity,5 and laid stress upon love as the chief principle within the sphere of the persons of the godhead.
The usual scholastic list of questions about the angels, good and bad, is treated by Albert with great exhaustiveness. A number of angels, he decides, cannot be in one and the same place at the same time, not because of the spatial incon venience it might seem to imply, but on account of the possi-
1 Theologia verissima scientia est et, quod plus est, sapientia. Summa theol., I. 1, 1 ; Borgnet's ed., XXXI. 9.
2 Summa, I. 3, q. 17 ; Borgnet's ed., XXXI. 116.
3 Physic, VII. ; Borgnet's ed., III. 483-502.
4 Philosophi pro propria ductu naturalis rationis non potuerunt cognoscere trinitatem personarum. Borgnet, XXXI. 60.
5 Summa, I. 7, q. 31 ; Borgnet, XXXI. 326 sqq.