Albert the Great

Albert the Great was a German philosopher and Dominican who lived during the first half of the thirteenth century, and a teacher to Thomas Aquinas. Known among his contemporaries as doctor universalis, he wrote, amongst other works, paraphrases and commentaries on Aristotle’s works, thereby exercising considerable influence upon Dante’s cultural development, to the extent that some scholars hold Dante’s philosophical culture to rely mainly on Alberto’s speculations. Dante most certainly used a significant number of Alberto’s works, many of which are explicitly mentioned in the Convivio and used in the first instance as a source of scholarly details: the numerous references in both the Convivio and the Commedia to the theories of Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, Avicenna and other philosophers almost certainly come from Albert. There are many definite parallels between Albert’s reflections and certain key areas of Dante’s ideological cosmos, including the view of Aristotelian science as a unified body in which the various scientific domains are organized hierarchically. Even more importantly, the second treatise of the Convivio describes, verbally echoing Albert’s texts, a Neoplatonic model of the cosmos in which divine goodness spreads into, thereby participating in, separate substances without losing its own unity, similarly to light which remains one even as it reflects, illuminating single bodies to different degrees. An idea straight out of Albert’s commentary on Ethics concerns humanity’s indiarsi (“becoming God”) through knowledge, a mental happiness that Dante believes can be achieved in the earthly life by following the path of science and philosophy. Albert is also the source of the awareness that as far as truths concerning God and eternity are concerned, no human science, not even Aristotelianism, can offer definitive answers.