Angels and the Physics of Place in the Early Fourteenth Century

Abstract

In 1638, the Protestant apologist William Chillingworth, responding to the accusation that the learning of Protestant divines amounted merely to rhetorical niceties, mocked those who found philosophical subtlety in the disputation of such questions as ‘whether a million of angels may not sit upon a needle’s point’, the first known appearance of what would become a common example of the follies of scholastic theology.¹ Chillingworth, imparting a touch of humor to his otherwise rather dour polemic, clearly intends this as satire, not a representative of a genuine debate among theologians such as his Jesuit antagonist. His accompanying, Latin example, utrum Chimaera bombinans in vacuo possit comedere secundas intentiones (‘whether a chimera, buzzing in a vacuum, is able to eat second intentions’) is a meaningless send-up of the language of scholastic disputation. Still, like all good satire, the question of how many angels could sit on the point of a needle contained more than a grain of truth. Behind it lay a serious discussion of angelic properties that had occupied theologians since the Middle Ages.