Question Three of Chapter Eight of the Second Decade
On the speech of angels among themselves
It is asked how one angel speaks with another.
To this it is answered as follows. Speech is nothing other than the manifestation of something lying hidden in the heart. Whence speech properly occurs by reason of the communication of hidden things.
It is evident, however, that an intelligible object exists in the intellect in three ways.
First, habitually, or in the hidden place of memory, as Augustine says.
Second, as actually considered or conceived.
Third, as referred to another outside oneself.
Now, through the command of the will, when the mind turns itself to consider actually what it possesses habitually, someone speaks to himself; and then he is said to form the word of the heart.
But when, through the command of the will, the concept of the mind is ordered toward another—for example, toward doing something or toward manifesting it to another—then he is said to form the word of the mouth.
In us, however, the interior concept of the mind is enclosed by a twofold obstacle.
First, by the will itself, which can retain the concept of the intellect enclosed within; and thus no one can see the mind of another except God alone.
Second, the mind of one human being is enclosed from another human being through the grossness of the body. Whence, even when the will orders the concept of the mind toward manifesting it to another, it is not immediately cognized by the other; rather, it must go out through the gate of the tongue and show outside what sort we are within.
An angel, however, does not have this second obstacle, because he is incorporeal.
Therefore, when the angelic mind, through the command of the will, turns itself to consider actually what it previously possessed habitually, it is then said to speak to itself.
But when it orders its concept toward manifesting it to another angel, it then speaks to him; and thus its power of ordering its concepts toward manifesting them to another is called its tongue.
Speech, however, differs from illumination in two ways.
First, because illumination is said properly in angels concerning those things which a superior angel apprehends in the light of the divine essence and which an inferior angel does not see from himself. Speech, however, concerns motions of free choice which one angel does not see in another.
Second, because illumination occurs through the fact that the light of the intellect of an inferior angel is strengthened more powerfully by the light of a superior angel for the cognition of certain things. But speech occurs through the fact that certain things previously hidden are set before him as things to be cognized, without a strengthening of the light.
These things are from Thomas and the theologians.