What
do the angelic forces of the Heavenly Host have to do with orgasms?
The answer, according to the 12th-century philosopher and theologian
Maimonides, was simple. Some invisible forces that caused movement
could be explained by God working through angels. Quoting a famous
rabbi who talked about ‘the angel put in charge of lust’,
Maimonides commented that ‘he means to say: the force of orgasm …
Thus this force too is called … an angel.’
Before
the discovery of gravity, energy or magnetism, it was unclear why the
cosmos behaved in the way it did, and angels were one way of
accounting for the movement of physical entities. Maimonides argued
that the planets, for example, are angelic intelligences because they
move in their celestial orbits.
While
most physicists would now baulk at angelic forces as an explanation
of any natural phenomena, without the medieval belief in angels,
physics today might look very different. Even when belief in angels
later dissipated, modern physicists continued to posit incorporeal
intelligences to help explain the inexplicable. Malevolent angelic
forces (ie, demons) have appeared in compelling thought experiments
across the history of physics. These well-known ‘demons of
physics’ served as
useful placeholders, helping physicists find scientific explanations
for only vaguely imagined solutions. You can still find them in
textbooks today.
But
that’s not the most important legacy of medieval angelology. 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.
Angels
have been around at least since Biblical times, and are described in
various, and sometimes odd, ways. In the Book of Ezekiel, for
example, the Cherubim have intersecting wheels sparkling like topaz
that move them in all four directions without turning, and their
‘entire bodies, including their backs, their hands and their wings,
were completely full of eyes, as were their four wheels’. However,
aside from these googly-eyed angels, angels were also, as we can see
from Maimonides, a way of explaining movement in the world. They were
spiritual substances that could take on the appearance of corporeal
beings, but also acted as invisible, intelligent, immaterial forces.
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.
The
key to understanding the angelic debates of the scholastic period is
to understand what conceptual tools the physics of the day provided.
For all intents and purposes, this physics was Aristotle. How the
Greek philosopher conceived of place, motion and bodies profoundly
shaped the medieval worldview. And some of the most prominent
theologians of the day, such as Aquinas, used Aristotle to think
about the nature of angelic location.
For
Aristotle, physics was simply about things that move and, on his
account, bodies don’t move because of gravity or kinetic energy or
the warping of spacetime but because of their natures. The nature of
fire, for example, is to move up, the nature of earth is to move
down. That’s why fire licks the air and a rock falls.
Similarly,
there was no concept of absolute space, but rather a concept of
‘place’, which, unlike Newtonian absolute space or Albert
Einstein’s spacetime, does not exist entirely independent of the
bodies that inhabit it. As the philosopher Tiziana Suárez-Nani
points out in Angels,
Space and Place (2008),
‘space … as an undifferentiated and homogenous receptacle, was
alien to the medieval mind.’ For
Aristotle, bodies could not exist without place, which served as a
kind of container. Likewise,
there had to be bodies for there to be place. In other words, a
vacuum is not possible in Aristotle’s view.
In
turn, this Aristotelian notion of bodies and place influenced how
medieval scholars understood movement. The view was that bodies have
a nature that makes them move. This nature makes them move in a
certain direction, so
place too must be inherently directional. We
now understand that direction within space is relative only to a
starting reference point; the Universe as we know it has no absolute
‘up’ or ‘down’. But in the Aristotelian worldview, the
outermost rim of the celestial spheres provided the absolute
reference for ‘up’, with Earth as a stable point at the centre.
So, the notion of place had the concepts of either ‘up’, ‘down’,
‘left’ or ‘right’ inbuilt to it. Place was not neutral, but
directionally laden, exerting power on bodies because bodies respond
to the call of place according to their natures. Fire can travel to
an ‘up’ place but not a ‘down’ place etc.
In
sum, Aristotle’s physics linked bodies, place and movement, and
each depended upon the other.
So,
what has that got to do with angels? If you recall, theological
concerns at the time required angels to have a specific location –
to be limited and bodiless – in order to avoid angels with
limitless power, rendering them omnipotent as well as omnipresent.
Since Aristotle’s physics was the reigning physics of the day,
medieval scholars worked to explain these location problems within
his framework.
Normally,
the material body of something locates it, so how can immaterial
angels be located? Aquinas and others solved this problem creatively,
locating angels not by their physical dimensionality but by their
operations. Aquinas proposed that an angel has a different type of
location than a bodily being. An angel is in a place by virtue of
applying its power to the physical objects in a given place. This
limited both an angel’s operations and their location, locating
them by
their operations,
rather than by a body.
But
Aristotle’s physics caused quite a few concerns for some
13th-century church leaders. If a body cannot exist without place,
this limits God’s power. If God wanted, some claimed, God could
create a rock that did not exist in a place, but Aristotle’s view
of place and bodies meant that this was not possible. So when the
nature of angels became a kind of playground for thinking about the
nature of the world, it was an especially fraught subject.
The
question of angels came to a surprisingly acute head when the bishop
of Paris Stephen Tempier published his Condemnations of 1277, a list
of 219 theses that Catholics were prohibited to hold or teach in the
university. This was part of a broader rejection of Aristotle and
other ‘pagan’ philosophers. These theses covered various
philosophical and theological positions, but an impressive 28 of the
219 had to do with angels also known as ‘separate substances’ or
‘intelligences’. Some of these had to do with the nature of angel
location and operation. Importantly, the Condemnations of 1277
forbade believing that angels are located by their operations rather
than by their substance, so Aquinas’ solution for angelic location
was now off the table. If an angel exists in a place solely by its
operations, as Aquinas claimed, then what happens when it’s not
operating? Angels had to be rethought. What was their
nature and essence such that they could be both immaterial and
located? This constraint would require even more creative manoeuvring
from scholars.
The
most notable manoeuvring would come from Duns Scotus. His
angelology would redefine the concept of place that was so central to
Aristotelian and medieval physics and, as Helen Lang notes
in Aristotle’s
Physics and its Medieval Varieties (1992),
this would shift the contours of physics forever.
As
we have seen, angels needed to be ‘located’ and operate in a
limited capacity, otherwise they would be omnipresent and omnipotent
like God. But the Condemnations of 1277 explicitly forbade Aquinas’
explanation: that angels are in a place according to
their operations. The challenge for medieval thinkers was to find a
way of locating an angel by its essence, without it being a bodily
substance, and to locate their operations, but without those
operations being the sole factor ‘locating’ the angels.
One
innovation that Scotus brought to escape this double constraint is
that he redefined ‘place’. He did this to solve the theological
problem of God being able to create a rock outside of place,
something theologians claimed God could do, but his solution applied
equally to angelic location. In doing so, his creative rethinking of
physics would lead to new concepts and reconceptualise old ones,
shaping modern physics in a quite radical way.
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.
Technically,
this meant that God could create a rock in no ‘place’, if place
referred to Aristotle’s definition of place, which was a location
within the outermost rim of the heavenly spheres. Whereas Aristotle
had defined place as a necessary defining
feature of physical bodies, Scotus did not. Instead, he created a
hybrid account in which something can exist
inside the outermost rim of the celestial sphere (occupying place in
the Aristotelian sense), but it doesn’t have to;
it could equally just occupy space by having dimension outside of
that sphere.
So here you have the creation of new concepts, a kind of precursor to
dimension and space, and the rejigging of old ones, separating ‘place’
from a necessary relation to bodies. For Scotus, Aristotle’s place could
exist, but it didn’t define bodies. If something did exist in
Aristotelian ‘place’, it was by God’s will, and because of what Scotus
calls a passive power, which simply means that it is able to exist in a
place without it going against the object’s nature.
This new physics left the door open for angels. Scotus argues that
angels too possess the passive power to exist in a place by God’s will,
because in this new physics, place and body are no longer mutually
defining. But unlike physical bodies, which must exist in a determined
way in a determined place, angels, because they have no dimensions, can
exist only in a determined place in an undetermined way. The image Lang
uses, citing Scotus, is of a surface that must have colour, but whose
colour can be anything. Angels can occupy a place however small or
large, just not infinitely so, and they must operate in a place, though
they themselves exist in the place indeterminately.
This radical rethinking of Aristotelian physics, catalysed by medieval
debates in angelology, allowed a new understanding of the relationship
between bodies, place and motion that helped reformulate our
understanding of the very fabric of the cosmos. For Aristotle, motion
was just inherent to bodies because bodies had natures that made them
seek their natural place. To posit angels as immaterial
external forces was indeed oddly closer to a classical physics that sees
an invisible force like gravity working on bodies externally. In fact,
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz accused Newton of having introduced occult
forces with his theory of gravity, because gravity seemed to be a
supernatural force acting on bodies at a distance.
Thought
experiments using angels and demons did not disappear in the modern
period, but they did shape-shift. Occult beings, often referred to
now as ‘demons’, continued to play a significant role in the
development of physics. (Theologically, there is very little
difference between demons and angels in terms of their metaphysical
make-up. Demons are a subset of angels; they are fallen angels.)
In the 1800s, Pierre-Simon Laplace’s demon (which he himself
calls merely an intelligence, a word often used to describe angelic
substances in the medieval period) was a being endowed with
supernatural abilities to know all of the forces in the Universe and
the placement of every atom. This being, in addition, has infinite
computational power, which it can apply to calculate the trajectory
of each atom. Laplace believed this would yield infinite predictive
power, and this superintelligence could therefore know the entire
history of the world and the ultimate future of the Universe. Such
determinism would later be called into question by quantum mechanics.
In
a thought experiment to test the second law of thermodynamics in
1867, the Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell imagined a
hypothetical being (an ‘agent’) with the supernatural ability to
detect the location of the molecules. His contemporary William
Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) would label it a demon, and the name
stuck. ‘Maxwell’s demon’, still called so today, revealed deep
connections between information and entropy, evolving our empirical
understanding of the world.
Finally,
at the turn of the 19th century, the Filon-Pearson demon – proposed
by Louis Filon and Karl Pearson – became a so-called ‘colleague
of Maxwell’s demon’. It could travel at impossible speeds,
teleport, and act at a distance.
Reactions
against
such uses of supernatural explanation in physics, even as thought
experiments, also helped physics evolve. Einstein, for example, will
have read Pearson, and his antipathy towards using supernatural
explanations meant that he defined his work in a negative
relationship to occult forces. The astronomer Arthur Eddington
claimed that Einstein banished the demon of gravitation. And Einstein
himself claims to have banished the ‘ghosts’ of absolute time and
space with his theory of relativity.
But
could Einstein have achieved what he did without the precursory
belief in angels? Theology certainly motivated a search for
alternative accounts relating place, movement and bodies. But
although the nature of angels as a topic
of focus was the catalyst for discussions about the physics of place,
enquiring individuals also thought through
angels to understand the nature of the physical world and its
relationship to the broader cosmos. And this yielded more complex
notions of space, location and dimension, giving them new meaning.
The role angels played in such thought experiments was unique: angels
transcended the purely physical world but were still ‘creatures’
that abided by the rules and the logic governing the Universe.
In
fact, this mediatory role was part of the logic of positing angels in
the first place. Angels do feature in the Bible, but Aquinas believed
that a priori
arguments
could be made for angels precisely because the great chain of being
couldn’t miss any links. Any gaps mean that human beings could not
possibly make the jump to understanding God. We need some
intermediary knowledge that would bridge knowledge of God and
knowledge of the world. This is why angels, as early as
Pseudo-Dionysius in the 5-6th century CE, were equated with language.
Speech also mediates between the realm of ideas and the physical
world. Otherwise, all the work of angels could simply be explained by
God. However, angels, precisely because
of their intermediary status, allowed human beings to think about
dimensions of created
reality that yet transcended our direct human perceptions.
While
it is easy enough to ridicule the suggestion that movement is the
result of occult forces such as angels, we cannot, having ascended
the ladder of knowledge, so easily kick that ladder out from under
ourselves. Studies in embodied cognition are showing that our
knowledge is built upon our experience of the world. George Lakoff
and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors
We Live By (1980)
shows how our bodily experiences come together to create complex
metaphors, grounding abstract concepts. We equate ‘up’ with
‘more’ when we say ‘the stock market rises’ because when we
see, for example, rocks piled up, we learn to equate higher with
more. We say we ‘grasp’ an idea because we have experienced
reaching for a piece of fruit on a tree. In addition, we have a very
hard time imagining a nonphysical thing.
What we imagine, when we imagine a soul or an angel or a demon, is
some kind of insubstantial, but still ghostly, object.
Although
occult forces such as angels and demons may be ridiculed in modern
culture as ‘hand-wavey’ explanations of quite logical,
down-to-earth scientific phenomena, I would suggest the inverse. That
what is most down-to-earth might in fact be to think about the
invisible forces of nature as angels, agents, immaterial
intelligences with certain properties familiar to us, but amplified.
Properties like agency and intention. It is only in thinking through,
and with, these more familiar concepts that we can then discover a
less intuitive set of concepts, like spacetime, which require
grounding in concepts like dimension, body, place and movement. These
necessary grounding concepts were sharpened, historically, by
thinking through the relationship between the material and immaterial
world, and angelology played a significant role in their honing.
The
use of supernatural intelligences such as angels and demons to think
through physics stuck around long after the actual belief in the
existence of these beings had dissipated. It seems that this
imaginative framework resounds in the actual structure of how our
thought operates. By virtue of this, angelology lay the groundwork
for thinking through the nature of place, time and motion in quite
complex ways. Did angels and demons carve a conceptual space for the
invisible forces that physics would later come to discover? Though it
may seem that the scientific and the demonic are at polar ends of the
spectrum when it comes to explaining the natural world, angels and
demons have actually shaped modern scientific explanation as we know
it today.
Legacy
of the Angels. By Rebekah Wallace. Aeon, March 18, 2025.
