Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 289 - A Wing and a Prayer - Angels in Medieval Philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, A Wing and a Prayer, Angels in Medieval Philosophy. Of all the lyrics in the Elvis Presley songbook, among the most puzzling is the one that begins his 1963 single, Devil in Disguise, in which an affronted Elvis complains that his sweetheart is not nearly as sweet as she first seemed to be. He sings, You look like an angel, walk like an angel, talk like an angel, But I got wise, you're the devil in disguise. You see the problem, right? Surely angels are immaterial beings, so they don't look like anything. Even if they did have bodies, they would have wings, so they wouldn't need to walk anywhere. Finally, these are purely intellectual beings, so it seems hard to believe that they talk either. But perhaps I am only puzzled because I've been reading medieval philosophy, something Elvis never got around to, having died so young. The Scholastics love to think about angels with pretty much every figure we've covered having something to say on the subject. It can be hard to relate to this feature of medieval thought. Like the spectacular caped suits of Elvis's Vegas period, the intricate Scholastic discussions of angels have not dated well, with exquisite ornament and filigree detail being lavished upon something that was arguably a pretty bad idea to begin with. Hence, Scholastic philosophy has famously been mocked as dealing with questions like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. In this episode though, I'd like to persuade you that medieval angelology was more like the leather outfit Elvis wore for the 68 comeback special, possessing a relevance as timeless as angels themselves. You don't have to believe in angels yourself to see their philosophical appeal. The medievals found them fascinating for theological and doctrinal reasons, no doubt, but also for the way that angels can be used to address an astonishingly wide range of philosophical topics. If they really lack bodies, then how is it possible for an individual substance to be immaterial? If angels can walk and talk after all, or at least engage in motion and communication, what does this mean for physics and the philosophy of language? Are angels really timeless, and if so, what does timeless existence even mean? And what does the hierarchical society of angels tell us about ideal political structures? What might reflection on their exalted minds reveal about our lesser mental lives? In grappling with such questions, the medievals drew on conflicting sources of ideas about angels themselves. Obviously, angels feature throughout the Bible, often bearing messages from God. This is actually the meaning of the word angel, angelos means messenger in Greek. This is still probably the first thing to come to mind when you think about angels, winged messengers announcing the coming of Christ to astonished shepherds, or Gabriel informing Mary she is with child. The messages could go the other way too. Though it was considered inappropriate to worship an angel, since that should be reserved for God, one could ask them to pray on one's own behalf or to bear one's prayers up to God. Particularly important angels were known by name, Gabriel, Michael, and so on, and celebrated on feast days. Medievals also believed that they were protected by guardian angels and subject to temptation or other malign influence from fallen or rebel angels who took over the place occupied by demons in pagan imagination. As noted by Elvis, a seeming angel may be a devil in disguise. The Bible speaks of Satan himself posing as an angel of light. This tradition of thought then makes both good and evil angels into intermediary beings whose influence is pervasive in everyday life. They serve as conduits between the spiritual and material realms. Your average believer would presumably have imagined them as having bodies, and certainly had no trouble accepting that they could leave traces of themselves in the physical world. One medieval church had a piece of marble in which one could see the footprint of the angel Gabriel. Against this, though, stood another tradition of thought stemming from ancient philosophy and the Islamic world. The Quran too mentions angels. Indeed, Muhammad's prophecy begins when an angel appears to him and commands recite. While we're in an etymological mood, this is where the title Quran comes from. It means recitation. Philosophers of the Islamic world, like Al-Farabi and Avicenna, identified the angels of the Abrahamic tradition with the celestial movers of the Aristotelian tradition. According to Aristotle, there are dozens of pure intellects that explain the different motions of heavenly bodies, with God simply the highest such intellect. On this conception, angels are definitely incorporeal. The whole point of the philosophical account is that only a purely immaterial, intellective being can be an unmoved mover, as demanded by Aristotelian cosmology. The topic of angels thus turns out to be a beautiful illustration of the way that the recovery of Aristotle and influence from the Islamic world shaped philosophy in Latin Christendom. Up until the 12th century, even schoolmen tended to think of angels as having bodies, but this became a minority view in the 13th century. Some thinkers embraced the identification of angels with intellectual movers, a leading example being Thomas Aquinas. His teacher, Albert the Great, was more cautious. For Albert, there are two ways of thinking about angels, the philosophical one found in figures like Avicenna, and the theological one we know through Revelation. A more aggressive tone was taken by Peter Olivey, who complained that the pagans and Muslims spoke of angels as if they were minor gods rather than created beings and refused to identify them with pure intellects. Other thinkers of the late 13th century were not so ready to abandon the old Neoplatonic idea that there are pure intellectual beings who mediate between God and physical creation, yet they shared Olivey's misgivings about just identifying the angels of the Bible with such intelligences. One solution was simply to accept the existence of both intellectual movers and angels while refusing to identify the two. This is what we find in Dietrich of Freiberg. For Dietrich, angels are more like humans than divinities, though he does try to justify the fact that pagan authorities called them gods. Angels are not the intelligences spoken of by these pagans. Rather, while angels do have intellects, they are capable of imagination and of making mistakes, which would certainly help to explain how some angels could have made the tragic error of rejecting God's grace. But alongside this angelology, which draws more on Augustine than on pagan or Islamic sources, Dietrich echoes the Platonist doctrine that the heavens do have their own minds and souls which take up a place below God in the cosmological hierarchy. Dietrich also contributed to a heated debate concerning the individuation of angels, that is, the question how there are many angels, whereas there is only one God. The problem here is that, according to yet another teaching that can be traced to the Islamic world, and Avicenna in particular, individuation is caused by matter. There is only one human species, but many humans, who exist at different times and places, something made possible by the parcels of matter of which the humans are made. Imagine, if you are old enough to remember this technology, a factory pressing records with Elvis Presley's latest smash hit. The individual discs are distinguished not by their shape or the pattern of grooves cut into them, but by being made of different bits of vinyl. Clearly though, this explanation is not available in the case of angels once we accept that they have no bodies. As I mentioned when we looked at the condemnations issued at Paris in the year 1277, it was forbidden to say what Aquinas said on this issue, namely that each angel must just be unique in its species because not even God can make two immaterial things that are the same in species. That left other thinkers to sort out how angels are differentiated from one another without straying into forbidden territory. One solution, which had been adopted by Bonaventure, was simply to admit that angels are made of matter. He argued for this on the basis that all creatures must have a certain potential for non-existence, having been created from nothing by God. And that potential being is seeded in matter. As former podcast guest Giorgio Pini has pointed out, this means that Bonaventure has a unified account of individuation. All things, other than God himself, come to be singular entities by being made of matter. Unfortunately, as I also mentioned when we looked at the condemnations, the Parisian edict actually requires the university masters to admit that God can create two angels of the same species, even if they are utterly immaterial. Dietrich Freiberg's solution would fit this bill. In a version of the old idea that accidental features can individuate the substances to which they belong, he says that there is no need for matter in angels since the angels can be distinguished by the activities they perform. As metaphysics developed into the 14th century, other solutions became available. We saw in episode 263 that for Duns Scotus, common essences are contracted by being joined to individual natures. This explanation will work just as well for an immaterial angel as it will for a physical being, like a rose or a human. Which is to say that this explanation won't work at all, at least if you ask the nominalist critics of Scotus who come along in the 14th century. A nice example is provided by Durandus of Saint-Poissons, for whom the whole scandal over angelic individuation was the result of a simple misunderstanding. Aquinas was driven to suppose that angels are unique in their species because he thought that matter is needed to render each thing an individual, but this is a crass error in Durandus's view. Aquinas's problem is that he thinks essences are somehow universal by default, whereas actually it is only the process of mental abstraction that yields universality. To the nominalist way of thinking, things in themselves are always individuals. This is just a brute fact about them that needs no explanation. However we explain the multiplicity of angels, we might wonder how many there are. The classic Aristotelian view would have assigned an angel to each simple heavenly motion. There might be several angels whose combined efforts result in the complex path a certain planet seems to travel when viewed from the earth. Aristotle himself was unsure how many movers there need to be and advises us to go ask a mathematician, but it is somewhere around 60. As Roger Bacon noted, this is far short of what Christianity licenses us to believe. As he puts it, we know by the faith of the Church, by Scripture, and the saints, that there are tens of hundreds of thousands innumerable to us. For a better sense of the population and structure of the angelic realm, the medieval's turn to a work called the Celestial Hierarchy, written by the Pseudo-Dionysius. In this podcast series, Dionysius has mostly figured as a hero of negative theology, but his influence in the area of angelology was also profound. You might recall that in the Carolingian period, John Scodas Eriugena had brought the works of Dionysius into the Latin realm. In his wake, other early medieval thinkers enthusiastically repeated the details of the angelic ranks described by Dionysius and accepted the parallel he suggested between the hierarchy of angels and that of the Church. The parallel could be extended to the political realm. Just as the angels are ruled by God and the Church by the Pope, so the secular realm has as its head the king. I mean an actual monarch, not Elvis. An elaborate version of this is found in William of Auvergne, who explains that the orders of Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones correlate to royal advisors, lawmakers, and judges. The parallel goes both ways. It's been said that William portrays heaven as a throbbing court, busy with both the task of government and the settlement of legal disputes, with Christ advocating on behalf of the human race before the divine tribunal. Bonaventure follows suit, describing Christian society as an image of the angelic society with the highest rank of the Seraphim mirrored among humans by, you'll never guess, mendicant friars. You know, like St. Francis and Bonaventure himself. Our next question about angels is one that I'd imagine quite a few members of medieval society asked about mendicant friars. What do they do all day? Well, we can start with the question of whether they have days at all. Are angels subject to time, or do they live in a timeless eternity, like God? Yet again, views on this diverged. A common view was that they occupy a special temporal duration called the Avum, which is basically a middle ground between normal time and God's eternity. It means that duration does pass for the angels, but without their actually changing. Hence, Aquinas, for whom angels are pure intellects, thinks that these are minds created with all the knowledge they will ever have. If they experience duration, it is simply because they dwell on different things they know at different moments. Bonaventure makes a similar point by contrasting a river to a sunbeam. Angelic existence is not a part-by-part process, like that of a river, but occurs all at once, like a sunbeam. Scodas agrees, though for him, this suggests that the Avum is not really a temporal duration at all. Other scholastics are happy to suppose that angels are subject to time, and even that they can learn new things during their life, for instance as they see the choices made by free humans. Characteristically, William of Ockham falls into this camp, holding that angels increase in knowledge as they observe the course of the world, something modern-day scholar Martin Lentz has called angelic empiricism. If angels can learn, can they also tell one another what they've found out? This brings us back to our Elvis-inspired question of whether angels can walk and talk. Given the aforementioned role of angels as messengers, it would be pretty disappointing if it turned out that they cannot communicate. One way they might do this would be to assume a physical body, even if they are in themselves immaterial. Here it's worth mentioning Bonaventure again. He describes angels doing exactly this, though he hastens to add that an angel cannot actually unify to a body the way the human soul can. Indeed, the capacity to form a unity with the body is what distinguishes souls from angels. So, if we are to imagine Gabriel appearing to marry in the form of a luminous winged man, then we should also realize that Gabriel would be using that body in something like the way a puppeteer would use a doll. Presumably this isn't how angels communicate with each other though. Dionysius never mentioned in the celestial hierarchy that the Seraphim and Cherubim are getting together for costume parties. Instead, the Scholastics try to understand how purely mental beings could transmit knowledge to one another. For the most part, it was assumed that angels would not need to use signs to communicate the way that we do. Instead, Aquinas thinks that an angel can simply will to reveal its thoughts, opening the book of its mind to its celestial companions. Scodas thinks the angel needs to do something a bit more metaphysically aggressive, so to speak. It actually causes its thought to appear in another angelic mind, not so much a case of mind reading as mind writing. As so often, Occam reacts critically to this proposal of Scodas, pointing out that if an angel could do that, it would presumably be able to modify the will of another angel too, something he takes to be an absurd consequence. For Occam himself, the problem is easy to solve. After all, he has developed his theory of mental language, so that the angel's thoughts are already in just the right form to be communicated. That's talking. What about walking, or at least moving? Again, there was a heated debate over whether and how an angel can move around and occupy space. And again, you can see why this is an interesting philosophical issue, beyond the need to sort out angelology. Just as worrying about angelic communication was a chance to think about language and how it relates to thought, the puzzle about angelic location is really just a version of the more general question, how an immaterial thing can be present to any place at all. God is immaterial yet everywhere, and my soul is immaterial yet in my body and not in yours. How is this to be explained? In the case of angels, the task was yet again bedeviled by those problematic condemnations passed down in 1277. They ruled out of bounds the account offered by Aquinas, according to which the angel is present at a given location simply by exerting influence at that location, as when it causes heavenly motion. He compares this to the way the king is present throughout his kingdom by dint of exercising jurisdiction there. The committee who wrote the condemnations were unwilling to accept this, in part on the grounds that it would mean an inactive angel is nowhere. Henry of Ghent, who was actually on that committee, subsequently admitted that he was perplexed about just how angels are indeed present in a given place. We aren't allowed to say that it is by causal action, but neither does it seem that an immaterial angel has location by its very nature. Scotus rises to the challenge, suggesting that the angel must first of all have spatial location before it can act within that location, and furthermore proposing that the angel just overlaps, or interpenetrates, with whatever else is found at that same place. This is an interesting idea, since it implies that several things can share a single location, at least if all but one of the things in question are incorporeal. What conclusions can we draw from all these controversies and puzzles? It would be an exaggeration to say that you can tell the whole story of medieval philosophy just by talking about angels, but not much of an exaggeration. Not only have we seen problems about angels turning up in many areas of philosophy, as I promised at the top of the episode, we've also seen how the history of philosophy about angels is the history of scholastic philosophy itself, but in miniature. It shows us the effect of the Latin translation movement, as ideas from Aristotle and Avicenna were applied in Angelology. It shows how tensions between these new ideas and older conceptions led some to contrast a theological and a philosophical approach to the topic, and it shows too how debates change with the rise of nominalism, as some apparently insoluble problems became nearly trivial, as with Occam's solution to angelic communication. This is why I wanted to cover it before moving further outside the context of scholastic philosophy, as we'll be doing in episodes to come as we continue to examine vernacular literature and especially English authors, including Chaucer and Julian of Norwich. First though, we'll take a look at another issue that was discussed by numerous scholastics, but which we have barely touched on in the series so far, the emotions. What would someone like Aquinas say about the weeping and excitement of Elvis fans at the merest glimpse of their hero, or the outpouring of grief over his untimely passing? Next time, Martin Pekove will be returning to the podcast to explain what it in fact means to be all shook up, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.