#of angels

“Angels in early times are male, and are generally (but not always) represented as winged. During the Middle Ages there was much discussion about whether they had bodies at all. If they did, of what were these bodies made? According to some, their bodies were formed of fire and ice. The apparent contradiction of these materials thus set angels apart as defying the laws of physics. We recently saw just such an admixture of fire and ice in clouds of volcanic ash, though without it appearing to generate any new clouds of angels! According to others, their bodies were of ‘subtle substance’, suggesting something other than normal matter, and, if this was the case, did they actually occupy space? If so, did they occupy a particular place singly, one at a time, or could many of them crowd together and, as the saying goes, ‘dance on the head of a very fine needle without jostling one another’? This question has often been considered as the quintessence of pointless discussion ascribed to scholastic theologians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In fact, it seems instead to have been thought up by the satirical writer François Rabelais in France (Pantagruel, 1532), picked up by the philosopher Ralph Cudworth in the seventeenth century, and then repeated by Isaac D’Israeli in his Curiosities of Literature, of 1791. Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), an original scholastic, asks much more reasonably, ‘Whether a multiplicity of angels can co-exist in the same place?’"

Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t think that there really are only 11 angels left alive.