“Beatitude, as has been said, signifies the perfect good of the intellectual nature; as everything desires its perfection, the intellectual [substance] desires to be beata. That which is most perfect in every intellectual nature, is the intellectual operation wherein, in a measure, it grasps all things. Wherefore the beatitude of any created intellectual nature consists in knowing (in intelligendo).”[598]
IV
Thomas regards the creation as a processio, a going out of all creatures from God. Every being (ens) that in any manner (quocumque modo) is, is from God.
“God is the prima causa exemplaris of all things.... For the production of anything, there is needed a prototype (exemplar), in order that the effect may follow a determined form.... The determination of forms must be sought in the divine wisdom. Hence one ought to say that in the divine wisdom are the rationes of all things: these we have called ideas, to wit, prototypal forms existing in the divine mind. Although such may be multiplied in respect to things, yet really they are not other than the divine essence, according as its similitude can be participated in by divers things in divers ways. Thus God Himself is the first exemplar of all. There may also be said to be in created things certain exemplaria of other things, when they are made in the likeness of such others, or according to the same species or after the analogy of some resemblance.”[599]
God not only is the efficient and exemplary cause, but also the final cause of all things (Divina bonitas est finis omnium rerum). “The emanation (emanatio) of all being from the universal cause, which is God, we call creation.”[600] God alone may be said to create. The function pertains not to any Person, but to the whole Trinity in common. And there is found some image of the Trinity in rational creatures in whom is intelligence and will; and in all creatures may be found some vestiges of the creator.
Thomas, after a while, takes up the distinction between spiritual and corporeal creatures, and considers first the purely spiritual, called Angels. We enter with him upon the contemplation of these conceptions, which scholasticism did not indeed create, but elaborated with marvellous logic, and refined to a consistent intellectual beauty. None had larger share in perfecting the logical conception of the angelic nature, as immaterial and essentially intellectual, than our Angelic Doctor. A volume might well be devoted to tracing the growth of these beings of the mind, from their not unmilitant career in the Old Testament and the Jewish Apocrypha, their brief but classically beautiful mention in the Gospels, and their storm-red action in the Apocalypse; then through their treatment by the Fathers, to their hierarchic ordering by the great Pseudo-Areopagite; and so on and on, through the earlier Scholastics, the Lombard’s Sentences, and Hugo of St. Victor’s appreciative presentation; up to the gathering of all the angelic matter by Albertus Magnus, its further encyclopaedizing by Vincent of Beauvais, and finally its perfect intellectual disembodiment by Thomas;—while all the time the people’s mythopoeic love went on endowing these guardian spirits with heart and soul, and fashioning responsive stories of their doings. For men loved and feared them, and looked to them as God’s peculiar messengers. Thus they flash past us in the Divina Commedia; and their forms become lovely in Christian art.
As we enter upon the contemplation of the angelic nature, let us not as of course regard angels simply as imaginative conceptions of Scripture and of the patristic and mediaeval mind. Thomas will show his reasons for their necessary existence, which may not convince us. Yet we may believe in angels, inasmuch as any real conception of the world’s governance by God requires the fulfilling of His thoughts through media that bring them down to move and live and realize themselves with each of us. Who, in striving to express, can do more than symbolize, the ways of God? What symbols truer than angels have been devised?
“It is necessary,” opens Thomas,[601] “to affirm (ponere) that there are incorporeal creatures. For in created things God chiefly intends the good, which consists in assimilation to Him. Perfect assimilation of the effect to the cause is seen when the effect resembles the cause in that through which the cause produces the effect. God produces the creature through intelligence and will. Consequently the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures. To know cannot be the act (actus) of the body or of any corporeal faculty (virtus); because all body is limited to here and now. Therefore it is necessary, in order that the universe may be perfect, that there should be incorporeal creatures.”[602]
Thomas then argues that the intellectual substance is entirely immaterial. “Angelic substances are above our understanding. So our understanding cannot attain to apprehending them as they are in themselves; but only in its own fashion as it apprehends composite things.” These immaterial substances exist in exceeding great number, and each is a species, because there cannot be several immaterial beings of one species, any more than there could be separate whitenesses or many humanities. Angels in their nature are imperishable. For nothing is corrupted save as its form is separated from its matter. But these immaterial substances are not composed of matter and form, being themselves subsisting forms and indestructible. Brass may have and lose a circular shape; but the circular shape cannot be separated from the circle, which it is.
Thomas next shows (Pars prima, Qu. li.) that angels have no bodies by nature joined to them. Body is not of the ratio of intellectual substances. These (when perfect and not like the human soul) have no need to acquire knowledge through sensation. But though angels are intellectual substances, separate (separatae) from bodies, they sometimes assume bodies. In these they can perform those actions of life which have something in common with other kinds of acts; as speech, a living act, has something in common with inanimate sounds. Thus far only can physical acts be performed by angels, and not when such acts essentially belong to living bodies. Angels may appear as living men, but are not; neither are they sentient through the organs of their assumed bodies; they do not eat and digest food; they move only per accidens, incidentally to the inanimate motion of their assumed bodies; they do not beget, nor do they really speak; “but it is something like speech, when these bodies make sounds in the air like human voices.”