Those Subtle Bodies

For there is customarily put in question among learned men, whether all the Angels, that is, the good and evil ones, are corporeal, that is, have bodies united to themselves. Wherefore some think, who supporting themselves on the words of St. Augustine [in On Genesis], seem to say, that all the Angels before their confirmation and/or lapse had bodies of air formed from a purer and superior part of the air, able to work, not to suffer; and that for the good Angels, who persisted in the Truth, such bodies were conserved, so that in them they may be able to work and not to suffer, which bodies are of so great a refinement, that they do not prevail to be seen by mortals unless they have been clothed over by some grosser form, with which assumed, they are seen, and with which laid down, they cease to be seen; but to the evil angels their bodies were changed in their downfall, into the worse quality of the thicker air.  For just they were cast down from a more worthy place into an inferior place, that is into the shadowy air, so those tenuous bodies of theirs were transformed into worse and thicker bodies, in which they would be able to suffer from a superior element, that is from fire.

    [St. Bonaventure, quoted in Peter Lombard’s The Second Book of Sentences, Distinction 8, Part I, Chapter I]

It is instructive to discover that very high-ranking learned men in the thirteenth century, and Doctors of the Church would seem to qualify here, spent a great deal of time pondering matters beyond the Borderzone. St. Bonaventure (1221-1274), a Franciscan, was one of these. The entire Second Book of Sentences is available on the Internet (link), in Latin and in English translation, from which I’m quoting a mere snippet above—having eliminated parentheses and the bracketed insertion of Latin words.

While this sort of thing puts me in right honorable company—in that a good deal of my time is spent on quite similar contemplations—I know just how such a text must strikes the modern mind; my own is modern enough to feel it viscerally. The present consensus on angels within Catholicism derives from the dominance of Thomas Aquinas, who held that angels do not have bodies. Other views were held or actively examined within the greater community of faith in earlier times, as the quote indicates. For Aquinas the definition of substance as the Aristotelian duality of matter and form ends with humans (in the hierarchy of beings); but others, among them St. Bonaventure, thought that hylomorphism (to use the Greek tag) extended to higher realms as well; the “matter” of those regions, however, was of a more airy or spiritual (call it subtle) kind.

Swedenborg would have agreed. For him it was a matter of experience. For the early thinkers of Catholicism, authority was rooted in scriptures and their interpretations by thinkers of some fame and gravitas. But when I read texts such as the one above, I am reminded of Theosophical conceptualizations drawn from a completely different spiritual tradition—and of the writings of David Bohm who proposed, based on the study of physics, that the world holds at least two Orders—the conditioned order (“matter”) and the unconditioned (“intelligence”); I think of these, myself, as matter and agency. But when I am reading Bohm, I always think of Aristotle. And then I think: “What goes around, comes around. Nothing new under the sun.”