The Revolutionary Intellectualism of St. Albert the Great

Extract

It was not, perhaps, without a certain over-simplification that, in the course of the Middle Ages, men were pleased to qualify the great Masters of thought and Doctors of the Church by some epithet which expressed the most typical feature of their intellectual and spiritual make-up. St. Thomas was the Angelic Doctor, St. Bonaventure the Seraphic Doctor, Tauler the Ecstatic Doctor, and so on. At any rate, we must not stop short at the obvious implication of these epithets, nor limit the rich genius of these Masters under pretext of determining its characteristic. Bonaventure the Seraphic was an extremely vigorous speculative thinker, Thomas the Angelic admirably described the powers of Love, and Tauler the Mystic analysed in a most detailed manner the demands of simple asceticism. We must penetrate to the profounder significance of these epithets, and see in them, with the superabundance and variety of gifts, the type of an intellectual and spiritual life, the unifying point in which all these gifts are rooted and co-ordinated.