In the second book, having again bewailed the insufficiency of his source, Albert takes up the classification of plants, and proceeds with a description of their various parts, then passes on to the shape of leaves, the generation and nature of flowers, their colour, odour, and shape. Liber III., still as an independent digressio, discusses seeds and fruit. In Liber IV. Albert returns to his unhappy source, and his matter declines in interest; but again, in Liber V., he frees himself in a digressio on the properties and effects of plants, gathered from many sources, some of which are foolish enough. His sixth book is a description of trees and other plants in alphabetical order. The last and seventh is devoted to agriculture.[571]
In the De vegetabilibus, Albert, as an expounder of natural knowledge, is at his best. A less independent and intelligent production is his enormous treatise De animalibus libri XXVI., which fills the whole of Tome IV. of Albert’s Opera. A certain Thomas of Cantimpré, an admiring pupil of Albert, may have anticipated the above-named work of his teacher by his own compilation, De naturis rerum, which appears to have been composed shortly before the middle of the thirteenth century. Its descriptions of animals, although borrowed and uncritical, were at least intended to describe them actually, and were not merely fashioned for the moral’s sake, after the manner of the Physiologus,[572] and many a compilation of the early Middle Ages. Yet the work contains moralities enough, and plenty of the fabulous. But Thomas diligently gathered information as he might, and from Aristotle more than any other. Thus, in his lesser way, he, as well as Albert, represents the tendency of the period to interest itself in the realities, as well as in the symbolisms, of the natural world.
Albert’s work is not such an inorganic compilation as Thomas’s. He has paraphrased the ten books of Aristotle’s natural histories, his four books on the parts of animals, and his five books on their generation. To these nineteen, he has added seven books on the nature of animal bodies and on their grades of perfection; and then on quadrupeds, birds, aquatic animals, snakes, and small bloodless creatures. Besides Aristotle, he draws on Avicenna, Galen, Ambrose (!), and others, including Thomas of Cantimpré. Thus, his work is made up mainly of the ancient written material. Moreover, Albert is kept from a natural view of his subject through the need he feels to measure animals by the standards of human capacity, and learn to know them through knowing man. His digressiones usually discuss abstract problems, as, for instance, whether beyond the four elements, any fifth principle enters the composition of animal bodies. As for his anatomy, he describes the muscles, and calls the veins nerves, having no real knowledge of the latter. He corrects few ancient errors, either anatomical or physiological; and his own observations, occasionally referred to in his work, scarcely win our respect. Nor does he exclude fabulous stories, or the current superstitions as to the medicinal or magical effect of parts of certain animals. On the whole, Albert’s merit in the province of Zoology lies in his introduction of the Aristotelian data and conceptions to the mediaeval Latin West.[573]
After Tome IV. of Albert’s Opera, follow many portly tomes, the contents of which need not detain us. There are enormous commentaries on the Psalms and Prophets, and the Gospels (Tomes VII.-XI.); then a tome of sermons, then a tome of commentaries on the Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius; and three tomes of commentaries on the Lombard’s Sentences,—commentaries, that is to say, upon works which stood close to Scripture in authority. With these we reach the end of Albert’s labours in paraphrase and commentary, and pass to his more constructive work. Of course, the first and chief is his Summa theologiae, contained in Tomes XVII. and XVIII. of the Opera. With Albert, theology is a science, a branch of systematic knowledge, the highest indeed, and yet one among others. This science, says he in the Prologue to his Summa,
“... is of all sciences the most entitled to credence—certissimae credulitatis et fidei. Other sciences, concerning creatures, possess rationes immobiles, yet those rationes are mobiles because they are in created things. But this science founded in rationibus aeternis is immutable both secundum esse and secundum rationem. And since it is not constituted of the sensible and imaginable, which are not quite cleared of the hangings of matter, plainly it, alone or supremely, is science: for the divine intellect is altogether intellectual, being the light and cause of everything intelligible; and from it to us is the divine science.”
Albert’s dialectic is turgid enough, and lacks the lucidity of his pupil. Yet his reasoning may be weighty and even convincing. Intellect, Reason and its realm of that which is known through Reason, is higher than sense perceptions and imaginations springing from them: it affords the surest knowledge; the science that treats of pure reason, which is in God, is the surest and noblest of sciences. Albert clearly defines the province and nature of theology.
“It is scientia secundum pietatem; it is not concerned with the knowable (scibile) simply as such, nor with the knowable universally; but only as it inclines us to Piety. Piety, as Augustine says, is the worship of God, perfected by faith, hope, charity, prayer, and sacrifices. Thus theology is the science of what pertains to salvation; for piety conduces to salvation.”[574]
The Summa theologiae treats of the encyclopaedic matter of the sacred science, in the order and arrangement with which we are familiar.[575] It is followed (Tome XIX.) by Albert’s Summa de creaturis, a presentation of God’s creation, omitting the special topics set forth in the De vegetabilibus and De animalibus. It treats of creation, of matter, of time and eternity, of the heavens and celestial bodies, of angels, their qualities and functions, and the hierarchies of them; of the state of the wicked angels, of the works of the six days, briefly; and then of man, soul and body, very fully; of man’s habitation and the order and perfection of the universe. Thus the Summa de creaturis treats of the world and man as God’s creation; but it is not directly concerned with man’s salvation, which is the distinguishing purpose of a Summa theologiae, however encyclopaedic such a work may be.
Two tomes remain of Albert’s opera, containing much that is very different from anything already considered. Tome XX. is devoted to the Virgin Mary, and is chiefly made up of two prodigious tracts: De laudibus beatae Mariae Virginis libri XII., and the Mariale, sive quaestiones super evangelium, Missus est angelus Gabriel. These works—it is disputed whether Albert was their author—are a glorification, indeed a deification, of Mary. They are prodigious; they are astounding. The worship of Mary is gathered up in them, of Mary the chief and best beloved religious creation of the Middle Ages; only not a creation, strictly speaking, for the Divine Virgin, equipped with attribute and quality, sprang from the fecund matrix of the early Church. The works before us represent a simpler piety than Albert’s Summa theologiae. They contain satisfying, consoling statements, not woven of dialectic. And the end is all that the Mary-loving soul could wish. “Christ protects the servants of His genetrix:—and so does Mary, as may be read in her miracles, protect us from our bodily enemies, and from the seducers of souls.”[576] The praises of Mary will seem marvellous indeed to anyone turning over the tituli of books and chapters. There is here a whole mythology, and a universal symbolism. Symbolically, Mary is everything imaginable; she has every virtue and a mass of power and privileges. She is the adorable and chief efficient Goddess mediating between the Trinity and the creature man.
Tome XXI., last tome of all, has a variety of writings, some of which may not be Albert’s. Among them is a work of sweet and simple piety, a work of turning to God as a little child; and one would be loath to take it away from this man of learning. De adhaerendo Deo is its title, which tells the story. Albert wished at last to write something presenting man’s ultimate perfection, so far as that might be realized in this life. So he writes this little tract of chamber-piety, as to how one should cling to Christ alone. Yet he cannot disencumber himself of his lifelong methods of composition. He might conceive and desire; but it was not for him to write a tract to move the heart. The best he can say is that the end of all our study and discipline is intendere et quiescere in Domino Deo intra te per purissimum intellectum, et devotissimum affectum sine phantasmatibus et implicationibus. The great scholar would come home at last, like a little child, if he only could.