The precise circumstances under which the via alherti came into existence and established itself are still obscure. In any case, the role of Johannes de Nova Domo, a master of arts, active at the University of Paris at the beginning of the fifteenth century, was crucial. He quoted Albert extensively in his works, calling him doctor meus, and compared Albert’s teachings with those of Thomas Aquinas. Most importantly, he considered Albert the most thorough and faithful interpreter of ancient Aristotelianism, that is, the philosophical movement represented according to him not only by Aristotle, but also by Boethius, Avicenna, and Averroes. In fifteenth-century sources, as in the works of Johannes de Nova Domo himself, this movement was also called the “peripatetic tradition’’ and as such carefully distinguished from other ancient schools, like those of the Platonists, Stoics, and Epicureans. According to Johannes de Nova Domo, the sententia peripateticorum is best found in the works ofAlbert, much more so than in those of Thomas Aquinas, who in several places had not considered decisive issues as carefully as had his teacher.
Also of crucial significance was the relationship of Albertism to the Christian Faith. As Johannes de Nova Domo makes clear at the outset of his De esse et essentia, the Aristotelian tradition as documented in the writings of Albert was especially well suited to explaining and corroborating matters of Faith, much more so than any other philosophical tradition, even the Platonist, all of which encountered serious conflicts with Revelation. Remarkably, it is in Johannes de Nova Domo that one finds the notion of the harmony between Aristotle and Faith most strongly expressed, a feature which later in the century became the hallmark of Thomism.
Johannes de Nova Domo taught in Paris. It was however through the activities of his pupil Heymericus de Campo at Cologne that Albertism developed into a school of thought with an institutional framework that secured its survival for many years to come. For Heymericus, as for Johannes de Nova Domo, Albert the Great was the best reader of Aristotle. In his Tractatus prohlematicus, written in 1423 in Cologne, Heymericus demonstrated that on many occasions the interpretations of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas were different and sometimes even radically opposed. However, before he entered into a discussion of the views of what he considered to be the main representatives ofphilosophical thought in his time principales huius temporis philosophiae defensores, namely, the Albertists and Thomists, he first critically examined and then rejected the views of the Nominalists in the opening parts of his Tractatus prohlematicus, which, for that reason, he entitled Contra Modernos.
World History
