Faith & Reason: St. Albert the Great

Teaching St. Albert the Great

Fr. James-Peter Trares, OP

When I was teaching undergraduate theology classes, there were often students who came to the first lecture looking skeptical or guarded, assuming I was going to proselytize them or bore them with Bible stories they heard 100 times in Sunday school. I would start off the course by diving into the relationship between faith and reason, and suddenly those same students would perk up and say, “Hey, we’re actually going to think in this class?! Awesome!” They were amazed that a believer could be open to engaging religious topics logically and in dialogue with knowledge derived from other fields.

St. Albert the Great (1200-80) is an excellent model of such an open approach to faith and reason. As a professor of philosophy and theology, a formator for young Dominicans, a priest, and later a bishop renowned for his holiness, he took his faith seriously and practiced it devoutly.

But he did not let his religious interests cut him off from zealously exploring other areas of knowledge, including biology, chemistry, astronomy, and law. He could engage in abstract philosophical debate, and also deal practically with the Church’s present-day problems.

Following Christ does not mean we have to turn off our brains, ignore the world around us, and blindly follow nonsensical doctrines. Rather, by using our God-given reason to pursue truth wherever it may be found, we can be confident that this will lead us ultimately to the Creator and source of all Truth.