The Angelic Doctor’s Angelic Doctrine

Thomas Aquinas is often known as the Angelic Doctor. Explanations for this title are varied, with the most common being that the title was meant to convey something about the subtlety of his reasoning on theological matters. Others have said he simply wrote a lot about angels.

It is true that he wrote a lot about angels, but – then again – he wrote a lot about a lot of things: something like 8 million words on theology. Regarding angels in particular, he produced a score of questions in his Summa Theologiae, a treatise on spiritual creatures, another on separated substances, as well as numerous reflections in various disputations and quodlibets. Such work has made him among the most celebrated writers on angelology in the Middle Ages – the roughly 1000-year period between Augustine and Luther.

For Thomas, and for medieval theology generally, angelology was largely a bridge doctrine – a conceptual link between the pure and ineffable nature of God and the natures of lower, corporeal creatures like humans, squirrels, or rutabagas. It was also an opportunity to put certain metaphysical tools through the paces, since revealed truths about angels could reveal weaknesses in certain philosophical conceptions of substance, will, action, intellect and so-on. Hence, the metaphysical labor of Aquinas is simply an attempt to sketch out a plausible structure for dividing the traditional hierarchy of being in terms of the metaphysical resources of Aristotle, which had only recently entered the Christian West.

Yet, medieval teaching on the angels, and Thomas’ in particular, is often met with some suspicion as being fundamentally speculative, inconsequential, or navel-gazing. Some of this criticism is well-earned, after all: the medieval theologians did not know that Pseudo-Dionysius was Pseudo-Dionysius. Nevertheless, evangelicals tend to paint the period and the purpose of angelology in medieval dogmatics with too broad a brush. It is important that we understand before we judge.

While some of the questions that would have concerned Aquinas have very little interest for contemporary non-specialists, the basic picture that he paints of angels would be – in broad outline – what most evangelicals have heard in church. Angels are spirit creatures, who move about largely unseen to do God’s will. What a rehearsal of Aquinas’ views on this subject does for us, then, is provide an opportunity to see how he expresses something to which we ought to be strongly committed, namely, that angels aren’t human and that they aren’t God either. They are higher than we are in the hierarchy of being, yet they are still created and personal spirits – much like our souls would be if we weren’t human. In reflecting on his writing, we find that the philosophical resources to which he had access provide a rich and useful means of expositing Christian insights derived from Sacred Scripture. Along the way, such historical study allows us to see how our forebears critically assimilated such resources, which opens their projects both to celebration and critique.

How are angels different from us?

Very few definitive statements about the angelic nature have been made in ecclesiastical history, partly because there has not been tremendous controversy about the basic contours of their nature and partly because the biblical witness on angels is limited. This observation is especially important in the study of the history of angelology, which defined angels often in oblique and polemical contexts. On the one hand, theologians have wanted to preserve the transcendence of God. The rationale for this desire should be obvious. On the other hand, they have wanted to place the angelic nature above the human nature. This desire has been often driven by exegesis, such as the intra-testamental exegesis found in the book of Hebrews. Although these competing desires led to some discrepancies in their terminology (some of which pass on to deeper disagreements), there are some consistent themes among significant historical theologians about angels. Certainly, one of those themes has been the intuitive principle that humans and angels are different kinds of beings, and that this difference was discoverable in the incorporeality of the angelic nature. In other words, angels are different from us mostly because they don’t have bodies. Angels are different from us mostly because they don’t have bodies. Click To Tweet

This principle – derived from Scripture – is one area in which Thomas Aquinas’ reflection on the angels serves us well. Understanding the nature of his reflection requires that we begin with an insight about the Bible’s testimony. The scriptures do not tell us everything that we might want to know about angels. The biblical authors don’t even discuss angels, so much as they mention them with an assumed familiarity when it is appropriate to whatever topic they are being led by the Spirit to discuss. In fact, the lack of information is one reason that most modern books on angels are full of breathless anecdotes instead of exegesis or attention to Christian history. A notable example of the lack of information in the biblical witness is the fact that angels – although spirit creatures – at times appear indistinguishable from human beings. Historically, the question about how this was possible was discussed under the label of the “angelic assumption of the body.”

Despite the paucity of biblical data (indeed, perhaps because of it), Christian theological speculation about this doctrine has been a constituent feature of metaphysical questioning since the second century. In assessing what Thomas adds to the conversation, my goal is not to say that Thomas has found “the” answer – for beyond some key and necessary guardrails for Christian metaphysics – there are potentially other ways of explaining the assumption of the body. Instead, my goal is to show that his critically assimilated Aristotelian conception of substance and being provides a helpful regulative explanation. In fact, by embracing some details of this explanation, we find ourselves in a better position to defend the key distinction of the biblical worldview, which is the distinction between the Creator and creation. I explain this to my students as the notion that there is God and there is everything else.

The Scriptural criteria that must be satisfied on this question build from this first distinction to a second one, namely, that angels are not humans. Any successful metaphysical account of angels must at minimum be able to describe how a non-corporeal creature can appear bodily to such an extent that he is mistaken for an embodied creature. Aquinas’ angelology can help make sense of this problem. It will be clear, I trust, that this analysis is rooted in an attempt to explain a question raised by the discussion of angels in the Bible and not merely some perverse speculative urge.

This excerpt is from the new issue of Credo Magazine. Read the rest of the article here!