Saint Albert the Great whose Feast Day is tomorrow, November 15, studied the natural world and wrote extensively about his findings. He said,

“In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power: we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass…”

Translated, Saint Albert is saying that God can certainly do miracles. But when we study the natural world, that is irrelevant. We are not looking for miraculous intervention, we are trying to see what is already present in Nature, what things will happen because they are built into the nature of Nature, as you might say. God created the world and built into it incredible depth and beauty and intricacy, governed by rules that we can discover.

New Advent Encyclopedia has a really good article on Saint Albert the Great (https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01264a.htm) but it is difficult to read. I am paraphrasing and quoting from it.

Saint Albert was born in Swabia in 1205 or 1206 or 1193. He was educated somewhere, somehow, and was sent to the University of Padua at some moment. In 1223 he joined the new Order of Saint Dominic. New Advent does not suggest that he heard Saint Dominic himself preaching, rather he was attracted by the preaching of Blessed Jordan of Saxony, who was the second Master of the Dominicans. Saint Dominic died in 1221.

Saint Albert completed his studies somewhere and then taught theology in five or six places, including Ratisbon, and Cologne. He was sent to the University of Paris in 1245 to complete his studies and teach theology. It seems that Saint Thomas Aquinas became a student of his in Cologne, and then went to Paris with him. Saint Albert defended mendicant orders generally (like the Franciscans and Dominicans) in 1256. He was ordained Bishop of Ratisbon in 1260 and served briefly before resigning and returning to full-time scholarship. He died in 1280.

Apart from his extensive travels, his teaching, his defense of the Dominicans, and his brief stint as a bishop Saint Albert wrote an encyclopedia including everything known to his contemporaries about the natural world. He conducted experiments and wrote about the things he did. He laid down the principles that should govern the experimenter. It is for this that I really love him.

Logic, according to Albert, was a preparation for philosophy, teaching how we should use reason in order to pass from the known to the unknown.

He says:

“The aim of natural science is not simply to accept the statements [narrata] of others, but to investigate the causes that are at work in nature…”
In his treatise on plants he lays down the principle: Experimentum solum certificat in talibus (Experiment is the only safe guide in such investigations).
“He was an experimenter and applied himself energetically to the experimental sciences with such remarkable success that he has been accused of neglecting the sacred sciences.”
He resolved to purify the works of Aristotle from Rationalism, Averroism, Pantheism, and other errors, and thus compel pagan philosophy to do service in the cause of revealed truth. In this he followed the canon laid down by St. Augustine (II De Doct. Christ., xl), who declared that truths found in the writings of pagan philosophers were to be adopted by the defenders of the true faith, while their erroneous opinions were to be abandoned, or explained in a Christian sense.

Header picture from the National Gallery of Art. public domain.