  Albert’s labors resulted in the formation of what might be called a Christian reception of Aristotle in the Western Europe. Albert himself had a strong bias in favor of Neo-Platonism,and his work on Aristotle shows him to have had a deep understanding of the Aristotelian program. Along with his student Thomas Aquinas he was of the opinion that Aristotle and the kind of natural philosophy that he represented was no obstacle to the development of a Christian philosophical vision of the natural order. In order to establish this point Albert carefully dissected the method that Aristotle employed in undertaking the task of expounding natural philosophy. This method, Albert decided, is experientially based and proceeds to draw conclusions by the use of both inductive and deductive logic. Christian theology, as Albert found it taught in Europe rested firmly upon the revelation of Sacred Scripture and the Church Fathers. Therefore, he reasoned, the two domains of human culture are distinct in their methodology and pose no threat to each other. Both can be pursued for their own sake. Philosophy was not to be valued only in terms of its ancillary relation to theology. As recent research has shown, Albert subordinated his use of Aristotle to his understanding of the Neoplatonic view of reality that he found in the writings of Pseudo Dionysius and the Liber de causis. He saw all of reality in terms of the Neoplatonic categories of exit and return, which he referred to in his writings with the terms exitus, perfectio, and reductio. This schema gave him a framework into which he could develop the scientific insights of Aristotle. But within this framework he insisted that natural science must investigate the causes that are operating in nature as based on empirical evidence.