Angels-MIDDLE AGES

Medieval Christian thinking on angelology moved in two directions.
The first was characterized by fascination with the personalities of specific
angelic figures, both good and bad. Such writings as the Book of
Enoch, the Testament of Abraham, and the Apocalypse of Elijah
describe the functions of the angels Uriel, Raguel, Sariel, Jeremiel,
and others, who serve alongside Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael.
Christian noncanonical writings, especially the Nag Hammadi texts,
continue and elaborate upon this trend. The vivid angelic traditions
of the pseudepigrapha were popular in the medieval Christian world
and were preserved in Greek and Latin hagiographical manuscripts.
The second tradition of medieval angelology was primarily a
philosophical one in which speculation about the corporeality and
hierarchy of angels was fundamental. The notion of the incorporeality
of the angels, so prominent in later medieval scholasticism, was not
generally accepted until the sixth century. The idea that angels have a
spiritual, but not a fleshly, body is found in the writings of Origen and
Augustine and seems to have been widely held in the patristic period.
It was only with the early sixth-century writings of the mystical
theologian Dionysius the Areopagite, who flourished about the year
500, that Christian angelology took on its classical form. In the ninth
century Dionysius’s The Celestial Hierarchy was translated into Latin by
Hilduin of Saint-Denis and again by John Scotus Erigena. The latter
translation, corrected by Anastasius the Librarian in 875, became a
standard reference work in the High Middle Ages.
The Dionysian scheme bears a curious resemblance to the Gnostic
order of angels criticized by the second-century saint Irenaeus;
both systems may reflect Persian angelology passed on through the
biblical and rabbinic literature of postexilic Judaism. The Jewish
philosophical tradition from Philo to Maimonides included elaborate
theories about angels that influenced both Christian and Muslim
authors. In turn, the differing angelologies of the Muslim philosophers
Avicenna and Averroës left their marks on
medieval Jewish and Christian philosophies of
angels.
John Scotus Erigena (CA. 810–CA. 877),
who treated angels in the second tradition of
medieval angelology in his principal work, On
the Division of Nature, paved the way for development
of the notion of angels as incorporeal
beings and separate intelligences. In the twelfth
century Peter Lombard set forth a Dionysian
theory of the nature of angels that was commented
on by Scholastic theologians of the following
centuries, including Albertus Magnus,
Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and John
Duns Scotus. All of these authors agreed on a
basic definition of angels as spiritual beings, but
they showed some differences of opinion on the
question of their corporeality. These opinions
are most sharply opposed in the writings of
Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.
Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) devoted fourteen
books of the Summa Theologica to the
nature and powers of angels. He held that
angels have form but not matter and are therefore
eternal and incorruptible. Angels are able to assume bodies,
which take up space, so only one angel can be in a particular place at a
certain time. In contrast, Duns Scotus (ca. 1264–1308), the last of the
great medieval Scholastics, asserted that angels consist of both form
and a noncorporeal matter particular to them alone, which makes it
possible for more than one angel to occupy the same place at the same
time. The ensuing debates over these positions may have given rise to
the early modern legend that the Scholastics argued over such questions
as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.