In the Catholic Church there are many reminders of the reality of angels: at the beginning of Mass we ask the angels to pray for us; we cry out with all the host of angels as we acclaim the Sanctus, and in the Bible, angels get a mention around 300 times. But in the month of September, we get one additional reminder: Michaelmas, the feast of the archangels Ss Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael.
However, in the natural sciences there are few, if any, reminders that angels exist, and it is likely that the vast majority of scientists would say that angels have no place in our understanding of physical reality. But this has not always been the case. According to Aristotle, the goal of science is to identify the principles and causes of knowable objects, and back in medieval times, there was much speculation about whether the angels mentioned in the Bible might be counted among the principles and causes of the knowable objects around us.
The word “angel” itself does not denote a kind of being, but rather it denotes an office, and according to their office, angels are servants and messengers of God. Nevertheless, angels also have a nature. St Augustine describes them as being spirits, Pseudo-Dionysius talks of them as being heavenly intelligences and the angelic doctor, St Thomas Aquinas, says that angels are immaterial substances.
Now intelligent immaterial substances figured significantly in Aristotelian natural science. According to Aristotle, these intelligences moved the celestial spheres and accounted for the wanderings of the planets across the night sky. But the role of immaterial intelligences wasn’t just limited to the movement of the heavenly bodies. They were also thought to play an important role in many of the phenomena we see around us in the sub-lunar realm. For example, it was thought intelligences were required to explain the ability of magnets to attract iron. If there were no such intelligences, magnets would only be attracted downwards towards the ground since this was how the element earth behaved which had a kind of virtual existence within the magnet. There therefore needed to be intelligences which could impart forms into the various mixtures of the four elements, (earth, air, fire, and water) to account for all the properties of natural bodies that the four elements lacked.
Given this Aristotelian picture of the natural world, an obvious question was whether any of the immaterial intelligences posited by the Aristotelian sciences could be identified with angels. St Albert the Great claimed that we shouldn’t make such an identification, since he thought the study concerned with angels belonged solely to theology and was guided by faith, whereas the study concerned with Aristotelian intelligences belonged to the speculative sciences and was guided by natural reason. Aquinas, on the other hand, did make a connection between angels and intelligences, though it wasn’t a point he was very keen to press – many of his writings on immaterial intelligences make no reference to angels. But in 1277, due to fears that Christian doctrine was being assimilated to pagan phil- osophy, the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, condemned the thesis that angels could be id- entified with intelligences. Although the 1277 condemnations were unable to suppress schol- arly interest in the Aristotelian sciences, they did have the effect of placing natural science on a trajectory in which angels and intelligences became increasingly irrelevant: their role was usurped by the principle of immediacy: anything that God could do through a secondary cause (such as an angel) could be done immediately (ie directly) by God Himself.
But to my mind, it is not obvious that immaterial beings, whether they be angels or intelligences, are irrelevant to science. One experiment that comes to mind is where a laser is directed towards calcium vapour which causes the calcium atoms to emit pairs of photons (ie particles of light) which travel in opposite directions. If you place two polaroid filters in the paths of these two photons, with the same orientation, either both photons will pass through the filters or both photons will be blocked by the filters. Somehow, each photon knows how the other photon will behave. Efforts to explain this behaviour by some kind of physical mechanism make statistical predictions that have been experimentally violated. One popular theory is that in such situations, the universe branches into two, where in one universe the photons are absorbed and in the other universe they aren’t absorbed. In comparison to such a crazy theory, the idea that the correlated behaviour of a photon pair is due to the impartation of a form by an immaterial substance seems eminently reasonable.
No doubt the office of Ss Michael, Gabriel and Raphael is rather more lofty than the governing of which photons are absorbed by pol-aroid filters and which pass through them. But I think Aquinas would have been fascinated by such physical phenomena that can’t be reduced to mechanistic principles, and he may well have seen such phenomena as further reminders of the reality of those immaterial intelligent beings that people call angels.
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