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The saints

St. Albert the Great

The Dominican scientist who studied everything, and taught Thomas Aquinas.

Feast: 15 November · 1206 to 1280 · The Middle Ages · Swabia, Cologne and Paris

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Painting of St. Albert the Great in a bishop’s miter and Dominican habit, writing in a book.

Tommaso da Modena, 1352. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

Home / The saints / St. Albert the Great

Cologne, Germany, the 1240s

Albert was a German Dominican who wrote on astronomy, botany, chemistry, animals and theology.1

He believed faith and reason could not contradict each other, because the same God made both.1

One of his students was a big, quiet friar the others called the dumb ox: Thomas Aquinas.

Patron of scientists1; philosophers1; teachers1

01St. Albert the Great

The teacher

Albert defended Thomas’s work even after Thomas died.1

He was briefly a bishop, and he walked everywhere, refusing to ride.1

Live it this week

Wonder at creation scientifically

Albert studied nature to know its Maker. Spend an hour outside this week really observing (a tree, birds, the night sky) and look up how one thing works.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Albert the Great”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.