Question Four of Chapter One of the Second Decade
Concerning the beginning of the angels
It is asked: when were the angels created?
To this it is answered that Gregory Nazianzen, a Greek whose authority is so great in Christian teaching that no one has ever presumed to bring a calumny against his statements—as Damascene testifies—acknowledges that before the corporeal creature God, whose conceiving is producing, produced or created the angels.
For he said that movers ought to precede movable things. But angels move the heavens and corporeal things. Therefore, they preceded the heavens and every corporeal creature.
Jerome was of this opinion. In his commentary upon the Epistle to Titus he says: “Six thousand years of our time have not yet been completed; and how many times and how many origins of ages must we think there were in which the angels, thrones, dominations, and the other orders of angels served God?”
Augustine, however, whom Bede and the other Latins follow, says in The City of God and upon Genesis: “God, who in his work has no need of a succession of times, produced the corporeal and spiritual creature simultaneously.”
The corporeal creature, namely, not according to individuals, which are generated through a succession of times, but according to nature and species.
For since angels are a certain nobler part of the universe, and a part separated from the whole cannot be perfect, the angels were therefore produced by God simultaneously with the corporeal creature.
But if anyone should think it unworthy that the doctors of the Church—namely Jerome and Augustine—held contrary opinions concerning the time of the creation of the angels, let him hear Thomas in the disputed questions On Power, question 9, article 5, saying:
“The Catholic doctors, agreeing in that which belongs to the faith—that is, that nothing except God exists from eternity—are found to have said varying things, at least with respect to the surface of their words, in matters which are not of the necessity of faith and concerning which it was lawful for them, as it is for us, to hold different opinions supported by reasons. Nevertheless, one must adhere to one opinion in such a way that we do not judge the other erroneous.”
And to the point that Gregory the Greek, or the Theologian, together with Jerome, said that movers precede movable things, Augustine and the others answer that movers do not precede movable things in duration, but in dignity, as is evident concerning the soul and in Thomas at the place cited above and in Book II of the Sentences, distinction 2.
Addition
See Epiphanius of Samosata and Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, in the book On Various Questions.
And although you may find a difference between the Greek and Latin doctors, you can nevertheless hold with the Latins that Lord Jerome spoke according to the Greek opinion—which is tolerable—and thus that the angels were created first in dignity or nature.
And according to the Greeks, say that God created all things simultaneously by eternal preordination or in the power of prime matter.