Angelic Motion

According to medieval scholarship, angels, despite being immaterial beings, possess certain abilities. Like the Aristotelian spirit, or the Kantian rational being, which does not have to be a human rational being, angels manifest a pure immaterial activity, which nevertheless is not an absolute activity, like that of God. On top of that, the angelic spirit seems to be capable of some type of agency and it can interact with the material world of human beings.

In some sense, angels are localizable in space and capable of motion. The key word here is ‘localizable’. Being localizable, they are not localized. Angelic beings, unlike material beings, do not possess the capacities of occupying a space, moving through or across space or acting causally upon things in space. To be more precise, these potentialities are not separate abilities or divisions of angelic agency. Instead, they collapse onto each other. An angel is localizable only through its action. Therefore, the three different capacities, potentialities or powers of material beings are brought into one within Angelic ontology. An angel, as an activity of a higher order than the human spirit, while still lower than that of God, is located within the confines of its action. While human beings are located within the confines of space even when we are relatively passive or motionless. An angel acquires spatial extension to the degree that it acts and intervenes in the human world. Action and material being are one and the same thing for an angel.

“It pertains to an angel to be in a place, but an angel and a body are said to be in a place in quite different senses. For a body is in a place by its being applied to a place through the contact of dimensive quantity. But there is no dimensive quantity in angels; rather, there is in them a quantity of power. Therefore, an angel is said to be in a corporeal place by application of the power of an angel to a place in some way.” Thomas Aquinas

“An angel, and any incorporeal substance, is in a body or a place only through an operation that causes some effect in it.” Thomas Aquinas

Based on angelic location, angelic motion is nothing but a series of successive interventions of an angel within a particular space-time continuum. An angel therefore “moves” as it continues to act on the material world consecutively.

Some medieval scholars interpret angelic agency as the being’s ability to occupy several spatial locations simultaneously, thus constituting its motion.