SOURCE: "Albertus Magnus and the Problem of Moral Virtue," in Vivarium, Vol. VII, 1969, pp. 81-119.

In the following essay, Cunningham examines Albert's treatise on ethics, Do bono, arguing that the work displays an innovative concern with "the purely natural and human elements of morality."

I. the Historical Setting

Within the intellectual upheaval that attended the appearance of Greek philosophical literature in the Latin West in the early thirteenth century, a special problem was put for Christian moralists when they were confronted by the theory of natural virtue contained in the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. Not surprisingly, Christian thinkers had been primarily concerned with supernaturally endowed perfections through which man could hope to achieve beatitude. In this preoccupation, however, they tended to ignore the question and indeed the very possibility of virtue naturally acquired. Albert the Great (1206-1280) appears to have been one of the first to respond enthusiastically...