Ulrich of Strasbourg

Abstract

The German Dominican Ulrich of Strasbourg (1220–1277) was a pupil of Albertus Magnus in Cologne, a lecturer in theology at the monastery of Strasbourg, and a prior of the German Dominican province. He wrote the De summo bono, a voluminous theological-philosophical summa composed between 1262 and 1272. Long considered to have been a fervent disciple of Albertus Magnus and the compiler of a work based largely on his teacher’s doctrine, Ulrich has instead been shown, through recent studies and the critical edition of his work, to have been an autonomous thinker who developed on his maestro’s ideas in a personal way, often subtly diverging from them. He placed Albertus Magnus’s doctrines, including the more strictly philosophical ones such as the theory of the divine intellect, into a theological framework, in keeping with his aim of highlighting possible concordism between philosophy and theology. The De summo bono was widely circulated, and its reception followed two distinct lines of thought: a speculative one, particularly with the fourteenth-century brothers of the Cologne studium (Dietrich of Freiberg, Berthold of Moosburg and perhaps Meister Eckhart) and the fifteenth-century “Albertists” of Cologne, and another moral-pastoral one that originated with John of Freiburg, a pupil of Ulrich’s, and spread through the German-Polish area until the fifteenth century.