Albert the Great on Soul: Some Hermeneutical Issues

Abstract

Aristotle’s theory of soul was a hot topic in the Late Middle Ages and it sparked a great series of debates with serious theological and philosophical implications. The medieval commentators of Aristotle played a crucial role in the dissemination of these debates since their explanations and commentaries on Aristotle’s theory of soul served as a springboard for further discussions. One of the most important medieval commentators of Aristotle was Albert the Great (ca 1200–1280) who dealt extensively with the topic of soul and its connection with the doctrine of intellect. Albert discussed the subject of soul not only in the Aristotelian commentaries but also in many genuine works of his which delineated Albert’s theory of soul in great detail. This paper will primarily focus on two works of Albert, De homine and Liber de natura et origine animae; it aims to provide a coherent account of Albert’s early theory of soul and to shed some light on important hermeneutical issues that derive from these two works.

1. Introduction

The problem of soul forms the doctrinal focal point of life sciences in the natural philosophy of Albert the Great. This applies not only to his writings on psychology and psychophysiology in general, such as the commentaries on Aristotle’s works De Anima and the so-called Parva Naturalia, but also specifically to his botanical, zoological, anthropological, and intellectual–theoretical writings. In these, Albert reflects on the principles, the foundations, the prerequisites, and the processes of life in all its biological and intellectual manifestations and stages. The reception of the corpus Aristotelicum provided Albert with the key natural philosophical textual foundation and the methodological tools to develop a Peripatetic theory of soul, mediated by Platonic–Neoplatonic elements and biblical Christian faith. He devoted more attention and space to this issue in his works than any of his contemporaries, including Thomas Aquinas [1,2,3]. The topic of soul is the subject of several writings in the corpus of Albert, the series of which begins with the two-part Summa de creaturis—specifically its anthropological part De homine—which synthesizes knowledge about humanity at the intersection of theology and metaphysics, natural philosophy, and natural science [4].1 Also worth mentioning are Albert’s reflections on the soul of man after death in his work De resurrectione, which serves as a commentary on the eschatological part of Peter Lombard’s Sententiae, written partly immediately before the Summa de creaturis and partly concurrently with it.2 Additionally, there are the Quaestio de origine animae, Quaestio de intellectu animae, Quaestiones de visione Dei in patria, De dotibus sanctorum in patria, De sensibus corporis gloriosi and Quaestio de aureola, all from the author’s collection of questions [5]. The work De homine, however, is largely a commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima and his psychophysiological writings (Parva Naturalia), insofar as these were available to Albert in Latin translations in the first half of the 13th century.3 Furthermore, it contains a two-part treatise on the intellect and its object, with each part titled De differentia intellectuum and De differentia intelligibilis. A few years later, Albert revisited all of Aristotle’s writings commented on De homine, including the treatise De intellectu et intelligibili, in the form of paraphrases, and thoroughly reworked the intellectual–theoretical treatise from the ground up [6]. Following the psychological, psychophysiological, and intellectual–theoretical part of De homine, there are discussions on the topic of soul in Albert’s commentaries on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard (Book I [7] and Book II [8]),4 as well as in his commentary on the Neoplatonically influenced theological work of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, De divinis nominibus [9],5 and further questions, partly compiled from his early works and transmitted in the Summa theologiae, Book II [10].6 In these writings, Albert reflects on soul from a theological–systematic standpoint. With the beginning of his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae, he develops the epistemological doctrine of theology and draws a clear boundary between the epistemic orders of theology and philosophy, which is considered a pioneering achievement of historical significance in the theory of science [11,12].7

Albert’s philosophical works on the theory of soul date to the period after theology had been established as a science according to the expanded concept of science in Aristotle and after its separation from philosophy. The first philosophical treatises on soul appear in Albert’s lectures on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Super Ethica, Book I, lecture 15, which he likely held at the Dominican studium generale in Cologne, between 1250 and 1252, after his commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae and the corpus Dionysiacum [13,14,15].8 The core of his soul theory from a life sciences perspective is found in his psychological, psychophysiological, botanical, and zoological commentaries [16,17,18,19,20,21,22].9 Also noteworthy are Liber de natura et origine animae [23] and the intellectual–theoretical treatises De intellectu et intelligibili and De unitate intellectus, which are not commentaries but independent creations of Albert [24,25].

Without a doubt, Albert’s approach to the topic of soul has attracted the interest of many scholars and there is a good deal of scholarship connected to this subject. In what follows, we limit ourselves to a discussion of some hermeneutical issues of Albert’s theory of soul, while this discussion will be associated and in conversation with the exegetical and structural framework of exitus–perfectio–reductio. Specifically, our contribution focuses on Albert’s genetic conception of the soul in light of the hermeneutical structure of reflection exitus–perfectio–reductio, which is characteristic of his thought and work as a whole and which we will consider on the basis of the Aristotelian–Averroist theory of the inchoatio formarum, as laid out by Albert in the first treatise of De natura et origine animae, the textual foundation of our study. With his theory of the inchoatio formarum, which Albert uses for the genetic interpretation of the human soul, he explicitly distances himself from Avicenna’s competing concept of the dator formarum, already in his Sentences commentary (2.1.12, ed. Borgnet, 34a–b) and in several places in his commentary on De divinis nominibus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (e.g., Super Dionysium De divinis nominibus, ed. P. Simon, 1, 15, 23–64; 2, 72, 36–73, 62). This is the main reason for Avicenna’s absence in the first treatise of De natura et origine animae and in our contribution, in which the human soul is presented genetically in light of Albert’s theory of the inchoatio formarum and the hermeneutical, Neoplatonic structure of reflection exitus–perfectio–reductio reflection (adapted by Pseudo-Dionysius from Proclus and transmitted to Albert). Therefore, we will discuss hermeneutical issues pertaining to soul’s “course of life” from the moment it enters the human body until it leaves it.

Taken together, all the aforesaid writings pertaining to Albert’s theory of soul illustrate not only the breadth of Albert’s engagement with the problem of the soul but also the methodological and hermeneutical challenges involved in interpreting his position. Yet for the purposes of this study, it is neither possible nor necessary to account for the entire corpus. Instead, we concentrate on two key works—De homine and Liber de natura et origine animae—because they mark the transition from Albert’s early synthesis to his mature philosophical account. By reading these texts through the lens of the hermeneutical scheme of exitus–perfectio–reductio, we can trace how Albert conceptualizes the soul’s origin, perfection, and return and thereby clarify some central issues in his interpretation of Aristotelian psychology within a Christian framework.

2. Concept and Origin of the Rational Soul in Albert’s Early Work

With the definition of soul as a substance, Albert begins the soul-theoretical part of his anthropological synthesis in his De homine, which belongs to the early writings of this author.10 In this work, he presents and discusses the most well-known theological and philosophical definitions of soul in the scholastic tradition of the first half of the 13th century.11 The focus is on the “anima humana” and its sensory and vegetative faculties and on the souls of non-human animals and plants. The fundamental question aims at determining the soul in terms of its substance and nature, and it is initially approached by following the theological sources and authorities of Pseudo-Augustine (De spiritu et anima), Pseudo-Remigius (Nemesius of Emesa, De natura hominis), John of Damascus (De fide orthodoxa), and Pseudo-Bernard of Clairvaux (William of St. Thierry, Epistula ad fratres de Monte-Dei). All these authors, except William of St. Thierry, define soul as an incorporeal substance connected to the body, while William of St. Thierry describes it as “an incorporeal thing, receptive to reason, adapted to the body for its animation.”12 The distinction and discussion of soul as an incorporeal substance and res lead Albert to a categorical definition and systematic classification of soul as a concept (ratio) in the domain of logic in terms of difference, as a natural thing (res secundum quod habet esse in natura) in the domain of natural philosophy, and as a substance separate from the body (secundum quod est substantia non comparata ad corpus generabile et corruptibile) in the domain of metaphysics.13

Before Albert proceeds to the discussion of the definitions of soul and its parts or faculties, as handed down through Aristotle’s De anima and the Parva Naturalia, in his early work De homine in the form of questions (Quaestiones), he similarly addresses some definitions of soul which are considered relevant in the scholastic tradition and which he declares to be philosophical.14 Among these, he considers the definitions attributed to Plato and Seneca, as well as the definition by Alfred of Sareshel, along with its philosophical-historical and doctrinal context. If we take a closer and comprehensive look at Albert’s view of soul in his early anthropological writings and compare it with the more developed forms in his philosophical works, we find nearly all the essential elements of his most mature soul-theoretical work, which, as mentioned, he presented in Liber de natura et origine animae. If we trace the development of the teachings back from this work, we notice several significant differences from the early works, which reveal transformations in both form and content.15 These differences are externally evident in the shift from the literary genre of Quaestio, which Albert used as a method for interpreting Aristotle’s De anima and Parva naturalia in teaching and in the written composition of De homine, to the paraphrasing with extended explanations of the source material in the commentaries on these works of Aristotle. Albert often organizes his more extensive discussions, which go beyond the source texts, into separate digression chapters.

Although the soul theory of the early work differs significantly in literary form from Liber de natura et origine animae, which is written as a treatise, and also differs in its sources and theological–systematic approach, the hermeneutical framework of the teaching structure remains essentially the same. In contrast to the commentaries, to which De homine largely belongs as a question-based commentary on Aristotle’s De anima and Parva naturalia, Liber de natura et origine animae follows no source text. It therefore most clearly expresses Albert’s original thinking, inspired by the Peripatetics, and the mature form of his philosophical theory of soul. The detachment of the treatise from its sources allowed Albert to develop Aristotle’s philosophical theory of soul, which he largely assimilated and followed, according to his own discretion. He expanded it by determining the nature and mode of knowledge of the soul separated from the body by death, and elaborated the final segment of his hermeneutical, onto-theologically grounded reflection structure on the understanding of reality as exitus–perfectio–reductio, here applied to the soul [34,35,36,37,38].16

Against the backdrop of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, which focuses on the soul in the body and lacks a clear view of the transcendent origin, immortality, and fate of the soul separated from the body by death, Albert was already faced with the task in his early work De homine of identifying Aristotle’s approaches to these questions and developing them in harmony with the positions of biblical Christian faith. From the corpus Aristotelicum, he derived two philosophically significant indications of the divine origin of the “anima rationalis”, more precisely the intellect, which he regarded as rational evidence for the theological doctrine of the soul’s creation by God.17

Albert found the first indication of the divine origin of the human soul in Aristotle’s work De generatione animalium II 3 (736b28–29), which he had in a Latin translation from Arabic by Michael Scotus, included in the corpus of zoological works of the philosopher under the collective title De animalibus. From the wording of the mentioned passage in the Latin translation, Albert understood that “only the intellect enters (into the embryo) from outside” and that “it alone is divine because its activity in no way involves a bodily function.”18 Based on this statement, and on “the view of all the saints, philosophers, and natural scientists that the vegetative, sensory, and rational faculties in humans are one substance, one soul, and one act,” Albert affirms that the origin of the human soul, due to its divine power, lies in an external giver. This distinguishes it from the vegetative and sensory faculties of plants and sensory beings, which are generated from the material of the plant seed and through the influence of the heavenly forces, or from the material with which the male’s seed substantiates and moves them.19 Albert also derives philosophical arguments for the divine nature of the intellect and its transcendent origin, its separation from matter, and its indestructibility in De homine from Aristotle’s work De anima I 4 (408b18–19), connecting them with the interpretations of Avicenna and Averroes.20

Albert derived the second indication, attributed to Aristotle and linked to the first, regarding the divine origin of the human soul, from the pseudepigraph De causis proprietatum elementorum, which in the Middle Ages was considered part of the corpus Aristotelicum. He notes that, unlike in plants and all non-human animals, the soul in humans does not arise from any seed but is created by God within the body. God is its origin, and it is introduced into the body through creation, as expressed in Aristotle’s statement in the first chapter of the work On the Causes of the Properties of the Elements: “When the male’s seed is poured into the womb of the woman, it is cooked by the warmth of the womb and mixed with her blood until a lump forms; then it is shaped, and at God’s command, the spirit of life arises within it.”21

Albert summarizes the core of his creationist view of the origin of the human soul in De homine as follows: “We say that God creates the soul by infusing it, and He infuses it by creating it; anything else claimed in this regard we consider nonsense.”22 The substrate for the infusion of the soul, according to Albert, is a developed and viable embryo (corpus iam organizatum). The origin of the vegetative and sensory soul forms in the developed embryo before the addition of the rational soul seems, in Albert’s understanding, to oscillate between a successive and a simultaneous ensoulment with the entry of the rational soul.23 His above-quoted statement conveys a sense of ambivalence. Albert rejects as a plausible solution the idea, as attributed to Augustine, that the soul created by God exists prior to the body, which would imply a universal pre-existence of human souls. While Albert appears inclined toward the idea of simultaneous ensoulment of the embryo, he also allows for the possibility of a mediating path between the two extreme positions. According to this view, the “anima rationalis” enters a developed embryo; in this respect, the material principle takes temporal precedence over the soul’s principle. However, Albert attributes to the soul a twofold priority over the body, of a higher order than that of time—namely, the priority of substance and of concept. In other words, the soul has an ontological and logical precedence. This twofold priority of the rational soul over the simple temporal priority of the embryo’s material corresponds to the philosophical coordinates by which Albert formulates and explains his creationist view of the soul’s genesis in De homine—its creation by God out of nothing within the body.24

3. Hermeneutic Aspects Concerning Albert’s Development on His Teaching on the Topic of Soul

A. In Albert’s synthesis De creaturis, systematically embedded in creation theology and essentially based on Aristotle and his Arabic–Islamic commentators concerning the view of the soul in the body and the intellect, the first two segments of his hermeneutical, onto-theologically grounded reflection structure—exitus–perfectio–reductio—are explicated. The focus is thus on the emergence of the soul from the transcendent origin and the first completion corresponding to the soul–body nature of human beings as the prerequisite for its self-responsible perfectio. Albert understands this second perfectio as an intellectual and virtuous, dianoetic and ethical realization of the human being as a human, pursued through experience and study under contingent conditions, i.e., in time, space, and matter.25 The final segment of this structure, the return of the soul to its origin (reductio), is treated by Albert from a theological perspective in the treatise De resurrectione, which, along with the treatises De sacramentis and De incarnatione and the subsequent Summa de creaturis, belongs to his early writings. This part is later addressed in the Sententiae Commentary, Book IV, as well as in the Quaestio de visione Dei in patria, the Quaestio de sensibus corporis gloriosi and the Quaestio de aureola [5]; it is absent from the unfinished Summa theologiae [45,46].26

Two further features that characterize the early work and are of significantly greater hermeneutical relevance than the difference concerning literary genre and the scientific-systematic classification of the topics of the doctrine of soul into logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics are: on the one hand, the yet-to-be-clarified conception of theology as a science and its relationship to philosophy, and, on the other hand, the possibilities and limitations of philosophical knowledge regarding the nature of the human soul, its state, and its completion after death.

As noted at the beginning, De homine dates from Albert’s period before the scientific-theoretical foundation of theology as a science and its separation from philosophy. In his early work, Albert places natural philosophy and natural sciences at the service of theology and develops a theological–philosophical synthesis that becomes a unified science of soul.27 His epistemic reductionism explains why, in the discussion of definitions of soul in De homine, theologians appear first, followed by philosophers, including Plato and the thinkers Seneca and Alfred of Sareshel, who are more inclined towards Plato than Aristotle, and finally Aristotle and his Arabic–Islamic commentators, Avicenna and Averroes. The distinction and separation of theological and philosophical definitions and theories of soul in De homine is an initial step towards a systematic scientific demarcation between theology and philosophy. For the time being, he does not aim for a scientifically–theoretically grounded separation of the discourses. In his subsequent explanations of soul definitions and theoretical concepts, he assumes a permeability peculiar to both theology and philosophy, whose epistemological permissibility he later grants to theology as a science when developing the science of theology at the beginning of the Sententiae Commentary. He passes over Plato’s conception of soul as a substance per se existing with a reference to the equivalence of the discussions of this determination of soul by theologians.28 The doctrinal focus and main content of the early anthropological work are made up of the Aristotelian psychology and psychophysiology, enriched by Arabic–Islamic and Jewish sources. From a philosophy-systematic perspective, although the Aristotelian parts of De homine constitute the main part of the work, hermeneutically–structurally they cover only the middle portion of Albert’s theory of soul, which begins with a theological–Platonic structural section and ends with reflections on the soul in the body, the original state of man, and his immortality. The questions regarding the soul after its separation from the body by death, as noted above, are already addressed by Albert in the treatise De resurrectione;29 he will revisit them in the Sententiae Commentary, Book IV.

B. In the presentation and development of the philosophical theory of soul in his natural philosophical writings, Albert approaches things differently than in his early work, with two distinct methods being observed. One is typical for the commentaries with few exceptions, which begins with a scientific-theoretical prologue to the respective discipline—here to the foundation of natural philosophical “scientia de anima” and in the middle of the zoological commentary De animalibus in a separate chapter on “scientia de animalibus”—followed by a paraphrase of the source with detailed explanations and content expansions through digression chapters. In this way, Albert presents Aristotle’s views on the soul, its powers, and functions in the body based on his work De anima and the small natural philosophical treatises of psychophysiological content (Parva naturalia). He applies the same method to Aristotle’s zoology, with the difference that the scientific theory of this discipline is presented not at the beginning of the commentary but, due to its source, in the middle of it (De animalibus XI).

The other approach is characteristic of Albert’s own creations [23,24,25], in which he freely develops his natural philosophical, metaphysically grounded theory of the origin and nature of the soul in the body and separated from the body by death without being bound to a source. He conveys Aristotle’s definition of the soul as “forma and actus corporis” with the Platonic conception of the soul as a substance per se existing. He supplements Aristotle’s teaching on the separateness and immortality of the intellect by opening the epistemic perspective of the doctrine to the post-mortem mode of being and activity of the soul and elaborates on it in the sense of the Peripatetic tradition.

4. Transformations in Albert’s Conception of the “Anima Rationalis”

The list of works in which Albert treated the doctrine of soul, mentioned in the introduction, is extensive. The earliest presentation of this is outlined in broad strokes in the previous section through the anthropological synthesis provided by the early work De homine. This early work represents the starting point of the development of the doctrine, which reaches its peak in Liber de natura et origine animae. Looking back from this work at the development of Albert’s doctrine of soul, it can be seen that De homine already contains or outlines the essential components and approaches of his theories on the soul and indicates their further development. We have highlighted that there were some formal and content-related shifts and transformations that give the early and late works on the doctrine of soul their respective individual character. In the following, we will address some of these shifts and transformations from the end of the development and clarify the most mature form of Albert’s views.

In general, it should be noted that Albert’s philosophical theory of soul in Liber de natura et origine animae corresponds in content and fundamental structure with the section on the doctrine of the soul in the Summa de creaturis but no longer deals with the various definitions of the soul and the individual powers of its faculties. However, the a posteriori view makes the hermeneutic structure of exitus–perfectio–reductio, which was already valid in De homine but not yet fully implemented, more apparent.30 This is because De homine is part of Albert’s theological–systematic writings, which are based on the Sententiae of Peter Lombard and conclude with the work De resurrectione. The subject of this work corresponds hermeneutically to the structural part reductio and is accordingly treated by Albert in the early work, while this segment of the hermeneutic structure in Liber de natura et origine animae corresponds to Treatise II. In a structural comparison of the works, it should be noted that Liber de natura et origine animae and De homine, including De resurrectione, implement the same hermeneutic-structural concept under different scientific-systematic orders. The separation of theology and philosophy, which Albert established on the basis of principles and scientific theory at the beginning of the Sententiae commentary, had immediate consequences for the conceptual, substantive, and methodological aspects of analogous structures in the doctrine of soul. The heterogeneity of the principles of theology and philosophy as sciences no longer allowed for a synthesis of theological and philosophical knowledge in the sense of a unified science, which was characteristic of the early work. With this scientific-theoretical rupture, theology and philosophy were designated as autonomous sciences and confined to their respective domains. This limitation was asymmetric in that theological subjects and arguments from philosophy were fundamentally excluded, whereas theology retained the unrestricted right to employ philosophy.31 Albert’s stringent delineation of the boundaries of philosophy in relation to theology concerning knowledge about the immortality of the “anima rationalis” and its state after separation from the body through death is evident in his lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics from the early 1250s. He writes there:

“Philosophically, there can be no sufficient knowledge as to whether the souls of the deceased survive death. Even if they do survive, nothing philosophical can be known about their state and their relation to what happens to us; this is known only through a higher, infused, non-natural light, which is the habitus of faith.”32

Less than ten years after the editing of the Cologne lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics, Albert wrote Liber de natura et origine animae, a philosophical work inspired by Aristotle and the Peripatetics as well as the Platonic–Neoplatonic tradition, which, unlike Super Ethica, is not a commentary work. He dedicates the second treatise of the work to “the nature of soul not connected with the body, insofar as it exists in itself after being separated from the body through death.” His earlier skepticism expressed in the Ethics lectures about the possibility of a philosophical understanding of the immortality of the human soul, its state after death, and its relationship to the here and now has been evidently overcome by his turn to the philosophical tradition of Plato, his engagements with ancient Greek philosophers of various kinds, and the Judeo-Arabic–Islamic and Greek Peripatetics. For the chapter on the postmortem perfection of the soul through the intelligibilia, he begins in Liber de natura et origine animae by announcing that he will only treat those matters about which more probable statements can be made and philosophically proven. He expresses this as follows:

“After all this has been carefully considered, we will discuss what can naturally be said with greater probability. And we will now mention only what can be philosophically proven.”33

Albert’s announcement of a purely philosophical discussion of the perfectio of the “anima rationalis” after the death of the human being, which was new to the Latin tradition, is only partially surprising. He addressed the immortality of the human soul, both theologically and philosophically, in his early work De homine and in the Sententiae commentary. A reflection of his views from the early work can be seen in the Summa theologiae II. In a digression in the commentary on De anima (III.3.13), he argues that the soul does not die with the death of the body; he also rejects the pre-existence of the soul in relation to the body. The question of the individual immortality of the “anima rationalis” is touched upon in the commentary on De morte et vita and in the writings De intellectu et intelligibili, De unitate intellectus, and De XV problematibus. In Liber de natura et origine animae, Treatise II, Chapter 6, he presents eight logically compelling proofs of immortality.34 A philosophical theory of the postmortem perfection of the human soul through the intelligible (intelligibile per se) according to virtue and its work, which is executed by the intellect perfected in the body through the intelligible “cum tempore et continuo”, is laid out by Albert in the commentary on De anima, Book III, Treatises 3, Chapters 6 and 11, and in Liber de natura et origine animae. Parallel to his theological–philosophical synthesis of the illumination theory developed in the Sententiae Commentary (I.5), following Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita and in line with the Peripatetic “intellectus agens” doctrine, he now adopts a theory of the soul’s enlightenment by separated intelligence and three kinds of intelligibles, which pave the way for the soul’s ascent to the highest intelligible and enable the perfection in contemplative bliss:

“We say that although the rational soul does not originate from intelligence, it nonetheless receives illuminations from intelligence. Since there are three kinds of intelligibles for the soul, namely the one related to time and space and that which is intelligible by its nature, the first is received together with sensory perception, the second with imagination, and the third through the simple intellect. And there is an order of intelligibles, in that through the intelligible associated with time, the soul reaches what is associated with space, and through what is associated with space, it reaches what is intelligible by itself.”35

Albert understands the perfection of the soul as a progressive process of acquiring knowledge, which is already grasped through the reception of intelligible light by study and scientific understanding during one’s lifetime. The individual is responsible for this perfection in that it pertains to the natural, temporal, spatial, and material realization of his ethical and dianoetical virtues. This realization of virtues during life and the acquisition of intelligible light through the intellect is presented by Albert as the condition for the possibility of postmortem intellectual perfection and human bliss. The path of acquiring intelligible light and perfection corresponds, according to him, to the nature of the human being as a human and is achieved through the study of natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics. He subsumes all other scientific disciplines, including moral philosophy (i.e., ethics and politics), under these three areas of theoretical study, which he summarizes with the term ‘philosophia realis’.36 He emphasizes the individual’s responsibility for their state of perfection and the resulting bliss. Neglecting intellectual perfection during one’s embodied state leaves the “anima separata” incapable of receiving the intelligible light without the mediation of the sensory organs, to which it no longer has access. It remains in eternal darkness:

“The opposite applies, however, to souls that neglect this perfection of the intellect. Just as the intelligible is moved towards the possible intellect by the light of the active intellect, so it is darkened and contracted by the mixture with matter, movement, and size, by the ‘here and now’, and the rational soul receives it only as it is ‘here and now’. It is therefore not free but shadowed and material, and thus the soul receiving it in this manner does not receive any light from it at all. Consequently, the soul has no access to the true intelligible, in which the soul perfectly shines, and thus such an intellect deprived of all light remains dark within itself and is unable to shine after death. As we have said previously, the possible intellect is only capable of receiving light that is truly the light of the intellect when it is strengthened by the lights received from sensory perception or with sensory perception and from imagination or with imagination. A return to sensory perception and imagination is, however, impossible after death; thus, such an intellect is incapable of illumination and remains in eternal darkness, which is deprivation and withdrawal of intellectual light.”37

Albert develops his philosophical theory of the perfection of the “anima separata” and its bliss in Liber de natura et origine animae and in the commentary on Metaphysics, in the work De intellectu et intelligibili, Book II, as well as in the second commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, without relating it to his theological conception of beatitudo and contemplatio, which he has outlined in the Sententiae Commentary, Book III Dist. 34 Art. 2 and Book IV Dist. 49 Art. 6, as well as in his first commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. In the Sententiae Commentary, Book IV, he discusses the difference between the theological, primarily inspired by Augustine and Boethius, view of “beatitudo secundum statum perfectionis viae and secundum statum perfectionis patriae” on the one hand, and the philosophical, as reflected by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics and elaborated by his Greek and Arabic commentators, theory of the twofold bliss, namely “felicitas moralis” and “felicitas intellectualis”. He did not make a sharp distinction between beatitudo and felicitas. Instead, he considered beatitudo as the overarching term compared to the concept of felicitas and acknowledged its multifaceted nature in philosophical and theological interpretations concerning the status viae and the status patriae.38 He excluded an equivocation between the theological and philosophical interpretations of bliss in favor of an analogous relationship between the two. By considering bliss in the proper sense as conforming with the philosophical view of human perfection according to moral and intellectual virtue in the sense of Aristotle,39 he seems to regard the difference between the philosophical and theological views of mental bliss as less pronounced than he later expresses, for example, in the first commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics:

“It must be said that theological contemplation in some respects coincides with philosophical contemplation and in some respects differs from it; they are therefore not entirely identical. The similarity lies in the fact that in theological contemplation, there is also an unimpeded intellectual insight into the spiritual, despite the passions of the subject and doubts stemming from faith directed towards resting in God, which represents the highest bliss. However, it differs in terms of habitus, goal, and object: in terms of habitus, because theological contemplation occurs through the light infused by God; the philosopher, on the other hand, relies on the acquired habitus of wisdom. Regarding the goal, theological contemplation sets the ultimate goal in the contemplation of God in the patria, while the philosopher sets it in the vision through which he sees in via. Also, concerning the object—not insofar as it pertains to substance but in terms of mode—the philosopher contemplates God as a conclusion of a proof, whereas the theologian views Him as a being above understanding and intellect. Therefore, the mode of contemplation is different because the philosopher has the certainty of the proof upon which he relies, while the theologian relies on the first truth itself and not on a rational argument, even if he had one. This is why the theologian wonders, while the philosopher does not.”40

In his first commentary on the Ethics, Albert tended to highlight the differences between Aristotle’s positions and the theological, Platonic, and Neoplatonic interpretations of the same subjects, as seen in the question of the immortality of the human soul and the relationship of the “anima separata” to the here and now. In his theological commentaries, he sometimes adopted a critical stance towards philosophy, which can be understood as a subtle critique of Aristotle and a reference to the limits of philosophical knowledge. In such cases, he posited a theologically compatible solution by introducing the aforementioned notion of wonder. This can be seen as a counterpart to the admiratio mentioned by Aristotle at the beginning of the Metaphysics as the starting point of philosophy itself. Albert places this at the end of philosophical knowledge of God in terms of transcending and elevating the concluding reason to the divine:

“One must say that elevation (sursum agi) happens in two ways: either absolutely, as in what is concluded by proof, and in this way, the philosophers cannot be elevated to the divine; or through wonder, by proving something that reason cannot grasp, and in this way, they should be elevated to the divine. For although philosophy does not prove anything against the divine wisdom delivered by faith, it does not reach it; it has a limit up to which it can reach, and it still knows that it does not grasp the whole. Therefore, it should admire it, not oppose it, as it is philosophically proven that in God there are perfections of all kinds, that in Him is the highest simplicity, that He is His own act, and many other things of this sort that seem incompatible with the principles of reason, from which one progresses with other things. Hence, the philosopher says that the first cause surpasses language and reason.”41

Albert significantly expands the limits of philosophical knowledge in Liber de natura et origine animae and abandons his previously held Platonic view of postmortem knowledge through the forma ad res imprinted in the “anima rationalis” at creation. As has already been made clear, the concepts of soul and intellect are tightly connected in Albert’s work. Yet, Albert did not just see the doctrine of intellect as an integral part of Aristotle’s theory of soul and he went a step further by considering the doctrine of intellect as a separate scientia belonging to natural philosophy. In this regard, Albert seems to be quite innovative since he is the first medieval thinker who acknowledges the theory of intellect as an independent field and thus places the scientia de intellectu and intelligibili as a self-standing “scientia” within his natural philosophical system. Albert’s theory of intellect describes a meticulous and holistic path towards the perfection of man, while it also creates a cognitive nexus between this world and the afterlife, all of which result in justifying Albert’s famous dictum: “Man as man is the intellect alone” (homo inquantum homo solus est intellectus) [39,59].

Liber de natura et origine animae was written around 1258 which means that it discusses Albert’s mature philosophical views on the soul–intellect nexus. In this book, as we have already explained, Albert clearly argues that the cognitive capacity of the “anima separata” is tightly dependent on the intellectual perfection that one can attain during life. This “intellectual perfection” is achieved through our gradual understanding of contingent things of knowledge, a process which entails the notion of abstraction. Albert describes the attaining of knowledge through abstraction as follows:

“Another way is, according to the above statements, that the soul, now having an enlightened and strengthened intellect, can by itself reach the intellect of things. For we see that the intellect can understand things by abstracting from the phantasm while it is in the body, and when strengthened, it can reach the intellect of divine things. And in this way, we will say that just as it now is ordered towards things and therefore abstracts from the phantasms of things through its light, so, when separated, it can wholly apprehend things outside the soul, abstracting from them through its light and understanding them. And then every such intellect is determined through its comparison with the intelligible, just as now it is determined through the reflection of its intelligible upon the imagination and sense. And in this way, among separated intellects, Dionysius says there is knowledge of sensible things without sensation and immaterially. Nor is anything found that contradicts this position.”42

In order to understand the excerpt above one should take the following into consideration: for Albert, the notion of intellectual perfection is associated with the absorption of intelligible light, where the latter is augmented through our understanding of contingent things. This means that the more one understands contingent things and reality, the more intelligible light is absorbed. This act is crucial for human intellect since the process of “intellectual perfection” allows the possible intellect (intellectus possibilis) to develop into an intellectus adeptus and thus human intellect possesses the capacities of intellectuality and intelligibility. In our source, the intellectual abstraction that Albert refers to depends on achieving the state of intellectus adeptus. When achieved, the “anima separata” will be enabled to directly abstract the formal content of knowledge through perception of the worldly things.43 Yet, the separated soul possesses knowledge of things in a non-sensory and immaterial way, as Albert notes by evoking Pseudo-Dionysius. Thus, Albert underscores the importance of intellectus adeptus and it is due to intellectus adeptus that the separated soul has direct access to the sensory things, without having need of the intermediate step of sensory perception [62,63,64].

By adopting the model of intellectual abstraction, Albert simultaneously abandons the exegetical model of formae ad res which he used in his early works. At the end of Liber de natura et origine animae, Albert provides the reasons for rejecting the formae ad res model. According to him, these forms cannot provide ontologically and epistemologically valid knowledge of the objects of this world because the formae ad res do not have their origins rooted in the worldly things and thus these forms cannot become ontologically instantiated in these objects. Albert admits that some philosophers tried to overcome this difficulty by proposing universal forms of knowledge which Albert rejected as “absurd” since these universal forms could enable only a general and potential knowledge rather than a specific knowledge of things.44 On the contrary, the model of intellectual abstraction can render a human capable of “specific knowledge of things” and Albert explains its workings through an analogy:

“If someone were to ask what commonality the active intellect has with the object upon which it acts through abstraction, it must be said that the light of the active intellect shares a similarity with the forms of things, comparable to the relationship between physical light and colors. For certain embodied lights are colors, and in a similar way, certain embodied lights of the active intellect are the forms of things, as previously indicated, where it was shown that the active intellect is the first mover and actor in all of nature. This commonality suffices for abstraction; specifically, in the way that what is abstracted exists potentially, the abstracting intellect exists in actuality and is naturally alike to itself. And these principles suffice for such an activity as the abstraction of forms, which is nothing other than their removal from material existence and their reception in accordance with simple being.”45

In Albert’s view, the separated soul’s perfected state (intellectus adeptus) allows for a direct abstraction. This is possible because the intellectus agens relates to the forms in a similar way that colors relate to light. In this way, the perfected separated soul can transform all forms from their material into their intelligible mode which is in turn more suited to the separated soul’s nature. Consequently, Albert establishes an ontologically and epistemologically valid way of knowing things, while he also secures an unmediated way of knowing things.

5. Conclusions

Our short analysis on Albert’s theory of soul has primarily focused on some of his early works and Liber de natura et origine animae which contains the Dominican master’s mature views on the topic. Limited as the scope of this analysis might be, it manages to clearly present the multifaceted and dynamic character of Albert’s thought with respect to the topic of soul. Albert clearly attempted to account for a holistic theory of soul which would address the intricacies of soul from the moment we are born until the moment of soul’s separation through death and its perfected state in afterlife. In this regard, his scheme of exitus-perfectio-reductio served as a solid basis for addressing different aspects and problems of the theory of the soul. In De homine Albert argued about the origin of soul and explicated the role of God in its creation by following a creationist view. Additionally, Albert used the explanatory model of formae ad res in order to justify our knowledge of things and create a continuity of knowledge between our world and the afterlife. However, the dynamic character of Albert’s theory of soul is best portrayed in his Liber de natura et origine animae. In this book Albert delineates the stages of perfectio and reductio in a meticulous and thorough way as he argues for an “intellectual perfection” of soul in this life which affects, in turn, the cognitive state of soul in the afterlife too, only this perfection does not depend on the formae ad res model but on intellectual abstraction which renders the separated soul capable of directly accessing the forms of things.

This genuine shift in Albert’s approach to the theory of soul provides a unique insight into his system of thought. Albert was a seeker of knowledge and as such he consulted and assimilated many theological and philosophical authorities on the topic of soul. This became evident in both De homine and Liber de natura et origine animae where Albert exhibits knowledge of a great number of sources. Yet what should be mentioned is that Albert’s library was constantly changing and the books he was reading, interpreting and consulting over the years did not remain the same [65]. This gradual enrichment in terms of knowledge played a crucial role in Albert’s conception and realization of his own “intellectual perfection” which contributed to and resulted in a mature account on soul in Liber de natura et origine animae. Thus, Albert’s shift in opinion should not be seen as a surprise or an inconsistency of his work but rather as a practical reflection of the theoretical framework of soul he was working on throughout his life.

As a final remark, it is worth mentioning that Albert’s progression and evolution of theory of soul reflects his personal attitude towards the relation between theology and philosophy. In this regard, Albert conceived of the two fields not as conflicting with but rather as complementing each other. The way Albert treated the terms of beatitudo-felicitas and admiratio in reference to soul shows Albert’s tendency to “bridge” the two fields and demarcate their range of application. As a result, the emerging compatibility between theology and philosophy paved the way for Albert’s holistic theory of soul through the cognitive continuity between this world and the afterlife.