Angels-BODIES OF ANGELS

Medieval Christian theologians frequently pondered the question of
whether angels are purely spiritual or also have subtle, ethereal bodies.
This question in not immediately answered by Scripture. In some passages
(e.g., Heb. 1:14) angels are called “spirits,” suggesting the incorporeal
nature that the great thirteenth-century thinker Thomas
Aquinas later assigned to them; in other passages they seem to have
some kind of embodiment.
In Luke 20:36, however, Jesus is reported as saying that we, after
our resurrection, are to be “like the angels.” Because we are to have an
embodiment of some kind in the resurrected state, however transfigured
it may be, Jesus’ statement seems to imply that angels have an
embodiment. In his application of Ps. 82:6 in John 10:34–37, Jesus
suggests that the angels have a nature similar to ours and that it is different
from his only in the degree of perfection.
Origen (ca. 185–ca. 254), considered by many to be both the
greatest biblical scholar and the most original mind of the patristic
period, attributed to angels a subtle or ethereal body. This opinion was
also held by such later scholastic philosophers as Duns Scotus (ca.
1266–1308). The opposite point of view, however, was argued by Thomas Aquinas, who asserted that since intellect is above sense,
there must be some creatures who are incorporeal and therefore comprehensible
by the intellect alone. These incorporeal creatures are
angels; hence, angels are purely spiritual and do not have bodies,
although they can, when visiting the earthly realm, sometimes assume
bodies, as in the scriptural account of Abraham’s entertaining angels
(Gen. 18).