Question Two of the Second Decade
What the spirits whom we call angels are
It is asked: what are the spirits whom we call angels?
To this Damascene replies in Book II of the Sentences, chapter 3, saying: “An angel is an intellectual substance, always movable, free in choice, incorporeal, ministering to God, receiving immortality by grace and not by nature, the species and limit of whose substance he alone who is its creator knows.”
It is called a substance, yet one composed not of matter and form but of being and essence.
It is called intellectual because, without discourse and ratiocination, it understands through species of things which are innate and not through comparison, as human beings do by reasoning and by acquiring species through the senses, phantasms, and images.
It is movable by nature, intelligence, and will.
By nature, because every created thing is capable of being turned into nothing.
By intelligence, because an angel in understanding has a succession of one thing after another.
By will, because it does not will this and that simultaneously, but one thing after another.
It is called always movable because, before confirmation and afterward, it possesses the aforesaid mobility.
Or it is called always movable because it is always actually understanding and is not sometimes in potency, as we are, as Thomas says in the First Part, question 50, article 1.
It is free in choice, not toward good and evil, but in the free election of that which it wills.
It is incorporeal in relation to us, because in relation to the simplicity of God an angel is, as it were, corporeal. Yet it is not so corporeal that it is circumscribed by place as bodies are; rather, it is contained definitively in its own place. God, however, is contained in no proper place either circumscriptively or definitively, but is everywhere and fills heaven and earth.
It is ministering to God, understood broadly, in whatever manner: whether by assisting, or by ministering or serving in some other way.
It is receiving immortality, and so forth, insofar as it is preserved in being by a gratuitous gift and not by nature. For it too, like all things, would tend into nothing unless the hand of the Omnipotent contained it and all things.
These things are from Albert the Great in the book On the Four Coevals, the fourth coeval.
Addition
It could have been described more briefly by saying: “An angel is an incorporeal intellectual creature.”
Nevertheless, since those clauses express and declare the final cause, operation, and duration of angels, they do not appear superfluous.
It is defined in another way by Dionysius in the book On the Divine Names, which Alexander of Hales observed in Part II, question 20, member 3, article 2.
But the clause substance must be noted. The author also marks it when he says “yet one composed not of matter and form,” in order to exclude the error of Plato and of his disciple Apuleius, who maintained that the intelligences—which Plato in the Timaeus calls cacodaemons and calodaemons—were bodies or possessed a body, as Lord Augustine explains more fully in Book VIII of The City of God.
For Plato said that those intelligences were aerial bodies, rational in mind, passive in soul, and eternal in duration. Blessed Augustine himself seems at one time to have held this opinion, as is evident in the little book On the Divination of Demons.
This, however, Lord Thomas denies in Book II of his writing upon the Sentences, distinction 3, question 1, where he says that angels possess no matter at all, and in the First Part, question 50, article 1.
Likewise Dionysius says in chapter 4 of The Divine Names: “The first creatures are understood to be immaterial just as they are incorporeal.”
For although the intellect receives, it nevertheless does not receive as matter does, but receives the forms of things according to spiritual and intelligible being.
Therefore, incorporeal substances do not possess spiritual matter, as Avicebron said in the book The Fount of Life, nor that matter which Augustine seems to have maintained in the book On the Wonders of Sacred Scripture upon the beginning of Genesis against the Manichaean.
Alexander of Hales also appears to have maintained it in the First Part of the Summa; Bonaventure in Book II, distinction 3, questions 1, 2, and 3; and Scotus in the same place.
Nevertheless, an angel is not altogether simple, but is composed of that which is and that by which it is, according to Boethius, because it possesses something after the manner of potency and something after the manner of act.
Essence is indeed, as it were, potency and that which is, insofar as it participates in being from God.
But being, which is the first act of essence, is that by which it is, so that a created intellectual substance will not be first act or unlimited.
Hence it does not know all things through its own essence but through superadded likenesses; nor does it understand through species received from things, but through species naturally connate with it, according to Thomas in the First Part, question 55, articles 1 and 2.