The works of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita played an important role in constructing early christian theology. During the 13th century CE, the texts of Aristotle and their arabic commentaries and paraphrases, e. g. by Averroes or Avicenna, are translated into Latin, becoming available to christian scholars such as Albertus Magnus. In Albert’s works, the commentaries on the corpus dionysicum are especially interesting due to their nature of blending theology and (gentile) philosophy. In his commentaries, Albert combines the neoplatonic Dionysius with his understanding of aristotelic philosophy and it’s arabic interpretations to form a wholistic philosophical-theological system.

The dissertation aims to show the negative theology Albert constructs in those commentaries. As one of the first latin scholars, Albert has one of the few similarly extreme negative theologies at hand: Maimonides’ Moreh Nevokhim has been fully translated as the Dux Neutrorum and – especially in the commentary on De divinis nominibus – Albert makes extensive use of it, thus showing his willingness to use sources mostly indifferent to their origin to develop a coherent reading of philosophical works. This dissertation thus will discuss how Albert actually constructs an autonomous system of attributes.

With commentaries as the starting point, multiple levels of heteronomy can be shown:
Qua commentary, the main works used are per definitionem heteronomous texts. Dionysius, on the other hand, can (and has been) read, at least partially, as paraphrases of Proklos’ Elements of Theology, which occur as the pretext for another important work for Albert, the Liber de Causis.