Legacy of the angels

Legacy of the Angels

Rebekah Wallace

... Angels also catalysed ferociously precise debates about the nature of place, bodies and motion, which would inspire something like a modern conceptual toolbox for physicists, honing concepts such as space and dimension. Angels, in short, underpin our understanding of the cosmos...

...This view of angels as immaterial ‘intelligences’ became pretty standard in medieval philosophy and theology. But the scholastic period saw an increasing desire to systematise, systematise, systematise. The precise nature or essence of angels became a serious cause for debate, and these debates were not mere thought experiments. Rather, because of the real belief in the existence of angels, theologians and philosophers could think through angels as a way of understanding the nature of the physical world and things like place, bodies and motion. This was motivated by significant theological concerns. One concern was that, if angels are immaterial intelligences, then what makes them different to God? For us, our bodies are what make us limited, able to exercise force only directly, such as when I throw a ball. Does this mean angels, having no body, could exist everywhere or act at a distance? This was dangerous territory for theologians, potentially challenging God’s omnipresence and omnipotence.

The view was that angels had to be located (ie, limited) but without a body. Angelic location was discussed by prominent theologians such as Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas, Peter John Olivi, Giles of Rome, Alexander of Hales, John Duns Scotus, St Bonaventure and many more. It was not a fringe topic, saved for pedants and scholars, but of serious importance in the debates that determined the limits and relations of physics, philosophy and theology. Angelology and its synthesis with the physics of its day would prime later thinkers to reflect on the nature of bodies, place and movement, but also, importantly, how they might relate to each other...

...Here’s what Scotus did: he made ‘place’ more mathematical, less tied to location and more similar to our notion of dimension. When thought about in terms of dimension, the ‘place’ occupied by an object stays the same as the object moves through locations. In this sense, its ‘place’, redefined as dimension, is the same, even though it changes location. In other words, Scotus, as aptly stated by Lang, ‘neutralises’ place radically. On the Aristotelian account, direction or location were part of the definition of ‘place’. When redefined more mathematically as a kind of dimension, direction is no longer a necessary feature of this new kind of ‘place’. You can have an idea much more like that of ‘space’, something that doesn’t inherently contain ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘left’ or ‘right’ in its definition...