Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Questions on Truth. Question 11, Articles 3 and 4 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation. London: Penguin, 1998.
Why raise the question of whether angels can teach? Augustine never mentions them in his dialogue on teaching. Why does Aquinas do so?
Unlike Augustine, Aquinas aspires to produce not only a comprehensive account of the creator-God and His creation, insofar as that is humanly possible, but a systematic account. Augustine is capable of writing a treatise (as André Malraux remarked, his Confessions end with a treatise on metaphysics), but he is no systematizer. Augustine is a ‘personalist’ avant la lettre. Aquinas seldom writes about himself or other particular human persons; his Disputations are disputes between arguments alone, impersonal, centered on logic with no concern for portraying human beings in dialogue with one another. When a commentator writes, “the objector argues….” he exercises poetic license.
But Aquinas is nonetheless supremely interested in the nature, the ‘species characteristics,’ of persons—the nature of human beings as such, the ‘nature’ of God as the Person sui generis, and the nature of angels, persons whose nature rests in between human nature and God. Further, angelic nature has a characteristic that is of considerable interest for teaching, discovery, and learning: angels are incorporeal by nature, purely intellectual creatures, with no knowledge that is derived from the senses—that is, both free of all physical characteristics and created, not creators. They can “assume” bodies, when that assists human beings, but they do not have them by nature. As incorporeal beings, they have no sensual knowledge of things; “they first and principally understand immaterial things.” They understand those things actually, not as we do, potentially. “The intellectual power of the angels extends to understanding all things: because the object of the intellectual is universal being or universal truth.” Unlike human beings, who must ‘get at’ universal being through sense perceptions of material things, ‘abstracting’ the universals from those particulars, laboriously reasoning toward noetic perception, angels receive knowledge of the species, forms, ideas directly from God, knowledge of events from God’s revelation. Thus, they are not gods; their intellects know because God endowed them with knowledge of the forms when He created them. God, by contrast, doesn’t receive knowledge from anyone or anything. He already knows all, by His “essence,” not having been created, caused by some prior being or beings.
Angels have self-knowledge and they know God. They know material things because they know the forms, the ideas of those things. But “the difference between heavenly and earthly bodies is this, that earthly bodies obtain their last perfection by change and movement: while heavenly bodies have their last perfection at once from their very nature.” Human beings discover and learn things they do not know; angels already know. Accordingly, in the Summa Theologica Aquinas devotes the first 49 questions to God, with the subsequent fifteen questions, devoted to angels. Although free of corporeal limitations, their intellects perfect, needing no teaching, they cannot fully comprehend the essence of God because they are still created intellects. “Nature does not transcend its limits”—an aphorism that expresses both the Aristotelianism and the Christianity of Aquinas.
In the Summa‘s “Treatise on Angels,” Aquinas goes on to say that “all cognition takes place through an assimilation of the knower to the known” via the form, the idea, of the thing known. “Man knows things which he has not made only by means of forms received from things. The case is different with angels, however, because they have the forms of things given them from the moment of their creation.” Angels have “Morning Knowledge”—knowledge of the primordial being of things as spoken by the Word of God “in the Beginning.” They also have “Evening Knowledge”—knowledge of the being of the things created, as created being and the beings within it stand in their own nature, their forms or ideas, knowledge of all God created by the end of His sixth “day” of creation. They do not, however, know the future, nor do they know the will of man, which is free. God, being eternal, comprehends all the events of time at once, essentially.
So, although angels don’t know as much as God knows, they know a lot, more than we do. But can they teach any of that to us? This is the question Aquinas raises in the third Article of the Disputatio “On the Teacher.” What, if any, educational worth have angels? They are the second most important beings, the most important created beings, and the Bible shows them in their proper role as messengers between God and men, but can they teach us ‘in their own right’?
Aquinas lists seventeen objections to any such claim. First, as he has stated in the first two Articles of Question 11, human beings can be taught “either inwardly or outwardly.” God alone teaches inwardly; human beings teach outwardly. If angels could teach us, the objector now argues, they would need to use “sensible signs” to do so, as human teachers do. But angels are not material beings, so if they did use “such signs,” they would need to perform a miracle, to appear before our senses, “which is outside the common course” of events—a miracle, “as it were.” In response to this, Aquinas locates angels midway between God and man, saying that they do teach us invisibly and inwardly “by comparison to man’s teaching,” but not as God does, by “infusing light” into the mind. Angelic teaching is therefore “reputed” to be outward. This less-than-illuminating reply might mean that angels teach by means of the imagination, a mode that does indeed lie between intellection and sense perception. But Aquinas has a more complex explanation, involving but not limited to the imagination, as he will show in subsequent answers.
The second objection hones in on the possibility that angels do teach by means of the imagination. “If it be said that the angels teach us in a certain way outwardly, insofar as they make an impression on our imagination,” this cannot be. “Species impressed on the imagination do not suffice for actual imagining, unless an intention be present,” but “an angel cannot induce an intention in us, since intention is an act of will, on which God alone can act.” In Thomistic vocabulary, an intention means a tendency toward something, some end. When we daydream, for example, we do so willingly. An angel cannot make us imagine. Aquinas concurs with the objector’s claim that intentions of the will cannot be forced, as human beings have free will, but “the intention of the sensitive part” of the soul can be forced, as when I feel the pain of a wound, which makes me tend toward tending to it. In this sense, an image presented to us by an angel impresses our senses and thereby impels us toward some end.
The third objection reinforces the claim that angels, although purely intellectual beings themselves, cannot communicate with us, and therefore cannot teach us, in an intellectual way. Only God can “give the natural light,” and only God can give us “the light of grace.” This reprises several objections in the first two Articles, which denied that human beings can teach because they cannot communicate with one another on a purely intellectual plane, with no sensible intermediaries, such as verbal or visual signs. And Aquinas answers similarly: While “the angel infuses neither the light of grace nor the light of nature,” he does “strengthen the light of nature which is divinely infused, as has been said.”
But to teach anything, the objector observes, “it is necessary that the learner see the concept of the teacher,” so that the student’s mind can move towards knowledge. “But a man cannot see the concept of an angel, for he neither sees [those concepts] in themselves, any more than he could those of another man,” if the teacher did not employ signs. Aquinas replies that human beings can be brought to understand the concepts angels have, but not in the same way angels understand them. “Man teaches man as a univocal agent, and in this way passes on to another the knowledge as he himself has it, namely by deducing from causes to the caused.” By “univocal” Aquinas mean a word that always means the same thing. If I say the sky is blue and the crab is blue, I mean the same thing (even if the sky and the crab are different shades of blue). This is why human teachers need to use signs, using words precisely, without equivocation. An equivocal word is a word that means different and indeed unrelated things. If I say ‘square’ in relation to a figure I’ve drawn on the blackboard I mean one thing; if (back in the 1950s) I called you a square, or (back in the 1940s) I praised a square deal, I would mean something entirely different in all three instances. Unlike a human teacher, an angel must teach “like an equivocal agent,” since he needs no reasoning to reach the truth, which is already implanted in him by God, naturally. To convey his knowledge to man, the angel needs to present it in a manner different from the manner in which the angel has it, not intuitively but via imagery or reasoning.
All right, but since “it is the prerogative of him who illumines every man coming in this world to teach” (as in Matthew 23:8) that there is only one Master, one Teacher, Christ, and angels are not Christ, angels are not Christ. This is at best a paradoxical argument, since it clearly states that beings other than Christ can teach. Aquinas addresses it simply by pointing out that Jesus was speaking of the mode of teaching God employs—direct, inward illumination of the intellect—not of teaching generally.
“But only God has causality over the truth, because truth is an intelligible light and a simple form,” produced only by creation.” “Angels are not creators,” and so “cannot teach.” Aquinas answers, easily, that teaching doesn’t cause truth; it “causes knowledge of the truth, in the learner.” And “truth does not depend on our knowledge, but on the existence of things,” which pre-exist our knowledge of them.
The objector accordingly shifts from the object known to the light by which it is known. “An unfailing illumination can only come from an unfailing light because, when the light is taken away, the subject is no longer illumined”; since “science is of the necessary which always is,” it requires “some unfailing light” to illumine it. Since angelic light lasts only so long as God preserves it, it isn’t in principle unfailing and angels cannot teach. Aquinas answers by distinguishing the light by which a thing is illumined from the thing illumined, saying that while science is indeed of the necessary which always is, knowledge of it can fail, and so may the light that illumines it. The teacher or the student may forget what he knew, but that doesn’t change the truth of what he knew.
Returning to the Bible, the objector cites John 1:38, which, according to Jerome’s Gloss, demonstrates that “the merit of faith” consists in “confess[ing] Christ to be a divine person.” Since Christ is the Teacher, only God can teach. Aquinas offers his own Gloss on this passage, not contradicting Jerome but pointing to the context. Initially, some of Christ’s disciples “venerated him as a wise man and teacher,” (rather as Thomas Jefferson did, centuries later), recognizing him as “God teaching” only later on. This means that one can learn from a person who does not seem to you to be God. Aquinas doesn’t the claim that only God can teach; he has already refuted this claim, repeatedly.
This brings Aquinas’ reader to the ninth, central objection. “Whoever teaches must manifest the truth”—which, being “an intelligible light,” is more known to human beings, reasoners, than to angels, who simply intuit it. In this argument, the objector temporarily gives up his acknowledgement of the superiority of angelic knowledge by claiming we know better than they do, since we can not only know the truth but how to get to it when we don’t know it. But Aquinas sees that if angels can intuit the truth, they can intuit the truth about human beings and the way they discover and learn. Therefore, they can teach them in the way humans attain knowledge, either by reasoning with them or “by strengthening the light of intellect” in them. Human beings do not learn from angels in the sense that they somehow become conjoined to them, partaking of their nature. They remain inferior to them in the sense that they do not consist of pure intellect. They can nonetheless be taught by them.
The objector appeals to the authority of Augustine in On the Trinity, where he writes that the human mind is formed by God without any intermediary. Since angels are intermediary creatures, they cannot teach human beings. Aquinas clarifies Augustine’s meaning, which isn’t that human minds are formed by angels but that both human beings and angels know and find their happiness when “conjoined by God.” This does not preclude angelic teaching of their natural inferiors, men.
Recurring to a variation on the second objection, the objector contends that since God forms our will by the infusion of grace, with “no angel mediating,” so he forms our intellect. Aquinas answers in much the same way he did before: The will is not the intellect, and while human will is free, influenced only by divine grace, “both man and angel can, in a certain way, act on intellect, by representing objects by which the intellect is forced” to acknowledge, by logic.
“All teaching is through some species,” the objector remarks. That is, we learn when we know the form, the idea of a thing, as biologists do when they ‘classify’ animals and plants. There are two ways of doing this: either by “creating the species” (one knows what one creates) or by illuminating, ‘shedding light’ on an existing species which exists potentially in the human intellect in the form of a “phantasm”—an image acquired through the external senses, then lodged in the imagination, which is one of the internal senses. Angels don’t create anything, nor can their pure intellects shed light on phantasms for the benefit of the duller, plodding human intellect, which operates by the more ponderous process of reasoning about sense perceptions and phantasms. Aquinas of course agrees that angels are not creators and is willing to go so far as to say that angels cannot illuminate the “phantasms” or images they conceive directly within the human intellect. But they can establish a continuity between the light of their intellects and the light of human intellects by means of those phantasms, which the human mind then perceives through its imagination and can reason about, once they are perceived.
But “there is a greater difference between the intellect of the angel and man’s intellect than between man’s intellect and his imagination.” Since imagination gives us only particular forms, whereas intellect gives us general forms, ideas, there is little communication between the two. “Therefore, much less is the human intellect capable of what is in the angelic mind,” and angels can teach us nothing. On the contrary, Aquinas replies. True, human intellect and human imagination are similar in that they are both characteristics of the human soul, intellect as such, whether human or angelic, is univocal, different in operation but not so absolutely different as to make the knowledge of angels incommunicable to humans. The human mind “can grasp what is in the angelic intellect, in its own way.”
Isn’t the difference in kind between angels and men still too great? Any light by which a thing is illumined “must be proportioned to what is illumined, as bodily light to colors.” But any phantasm produced by an angelic intellect would be purely spiritual, “not proportioned to phantasms which are in a way corporeal,” in the sense that they can be “contained in a bodily organ,” such as the human eye. Aquinas disagrees, saying that “there is nothing to prevent the spiritual from being proportionate” to human sense perception, since in general “nothing prevents the inferior from being acted on by the superior.”
Yet, the difference is still too great, in another way. We know things “either through its essence or its likeness.” Angels cannot teach essences to human beings because that would require them to enter into the human mind, which is impossible for any created being. Aquinas concurs. But he dissents from the objector’s claim that angels cannot teach likenesses to human beings because the angel “causes the likenesses of things in the mind, either by moving the imagination or by strengthening the light of intellect,” as mentioned before.
The objector then observes that a farmer is no creator but a person who “incites nature to natural effects.” By analogy, then, “neither can angels be called teachers and masters.” Aquinas rejects the analogy, inasmuch as teaching isn’t creation but rather the natural ‘incitement’ to a natural effect, namely, the perfection of the intellect. Indeed, as he states later on, “inferior spirits, that is, the human, achieve the perfection of science by the causality of superior spirits, that is, the angels”—angelic intellects being “more actual than the human intellect.”
The final objection in effect responds to Aquinas’ immediately preceding refutation. Angels are superior to man and therefore their teaching “must excel human teaching.” But if angels are only teaching man about “definite causes in nature,” then they aren’t doing anything more excellent than what human teachers do. The problem with this argument is that although angels do indeed teach the same kind of knowledge man can teach man, they know more. And they teach “in a more noble manner,” as well.
Aquinas takes this last point from the Christian Platonist Dionysius the Areopagite in his book On Celestial Hierarchy. Dionysius writes, “I see that the divine mystery of Christ’s humanity was first taught to the angels and then through the grace of knowledge descends to us.” As our superiors in intellect, angels “can do more and more nobly” than we can do, when it comes to teaching; their knowledge is broader and higher than ours, and so is their ability to teach. Aquinas adds Augustine’s observation in On the Good of Perseverance, that there is not only a hierarchy in divine teaching but a certain diversity, inasmuch as (as Aquinas summarizes) “some receive the teaching of salvation immediately from God, some from an angel, some from men.” That is, genuine Christian teaching emanates from God, but God may choose any of those three pathways to convey it. Additionally, while the light of God’s truth enters the human intellect by God’s intention alone, angels and men “can remove an impediment to perceiving the light,” refute errors—an important task teachers perform.
More generally, “an angel can act on man in two ways”: in the human manner, appearing to our senses visually or auditorily, just as human beings act upon one another; and in the angelic manner, invisibly. How do angels teach men in the angelic manner?
As mentioned in Augustine’s answer to the twelfth objection in Article 1, intellect differs from bodily sight in that “sense is not a collating power.” The mind’s eye sees self-evident truths the way the eye sees an object, but it also compares, contrasts, thinks logically in order to arrive at truths that are not self-evident, which the intellect sees “only through others already seen,” whether self-evident or rational “habits” established previously by reasoning from the self-evident. Now, “God is the cause of man’s knowledge in the most excellent manner, because he both seals the soul itself with intellectual light and impresses on it knowledge of first principles which are as it were the seeds of the sciences, just as he impresses on natural things the seminal reasons for producing all their effects.” Human beings don’t teach that way, because they can’t; they cannot create their own intellect or implant self-evident truths in it. But they can teach one another “by bringing into actuality what is implicitly and in a certain manner potentially contained in the principles through certain sensible signs shown to exterior sense,” as Augustine and Aquinas agree.
Located in the natural order between God and man, the angel, whose “intellectual light” is “more perfect than man’s,” can cause human beings to know in both ways, although he cannot do so as well as God can do it. He “cannot infuse intellectual light as God does,” as he is not a creator, but “he can strengthen the infused light for more perfect seeing” better than a human teacher can do, precisely because his intellect is purer, unimpeded by passions. Moreover, “the angel can also teach man, not indeed by conferring on him knowledge of these principles, as God does, nor by the deduction of conclusions from the principles by proposing sensible signs, as a man does, but by fashioning certain forms in the imagination which can be formed by the movement of the bodily organ.” “What the angels know is shown as conjoined with such images,” as Augustine teaches in his commentary on the Book of Genesis. There, Augustine suggests that the account of the six “days” of Creation is an accommodation to the human intellect, which thinks in temporal sequence. The paradox, famously, is that the Genesis account says that God separated light from darkness before creating the sun and stars that emit light. He explains this by arguing that God in fact created light and dark and the heavenly bodies all at once; the angels understand this as one act of God, not as a series of events in time. Their intellects have the power of “conjoining” what human intellects understand in segments.
In his fourth and final Article, Aquinas asks, “Is teaching an act of the active or contemplative life?”—politics or philosophy? The question is roughly analogous to the contrast between human beings and angels, inasmuch as angels, as persons of pure intellect, are better adapted to contemplation than humans are, and they do indeed teach. The question itself is a major theme of Plato’s dialogues. In Christianity, the matter is complicated by the fact that neither God nor the angels (who hold a similar place to that of the guardian daemon Socrates claims to have) take action as well as think. The Biblical God is not pure thought thinking itself and, indeed, is not an ‘it’ at all, but a three-Personed Person).
The initial set of arguments, which Aquinas will refute, take the classical view of teaching, however, classifying it as an act of the contemplative life. First of all, since (to paraphrase Gregory the Great) “the active life fails when the body does” but “to teach does not fail with the body”—the teacher’s teachings may live on, in his students, after the teacher dies—and since angels teach but have no bodies, teaching goes with the contemplative life. Aquinas remarks that when Gregory writes of the active life, he means not politics but physical labor, “sweaty work,” whereas Dionysius refers to the “hierarchical action in the celestial spirit,” which is obviously “of a higher mode than the active life of which we are teaching.” Gregory also says that action in his sense precedes contemplation, whereas teaching follows contemplation, and therefore “to teach does not pertain to the active life.” But Gregory continues, Aquinas remarks, arguing that the soul can bring “what is drawn from” contemplation to activity, that “when the mind is kindled by the contemplative the active is more perfectly lived.” It all depends, Aquinas writes, on whether the action is indeed sweaty work, which might benefit from prudential reasoning but hardly from contemplation, or for an activity like teaching, which “must follow the contemplative.” In that case, theory precedes practice, but teaching is the practice.
The objector cites Gregory a third time, in remarking that the active life, preoccupied with sweaty work, “sees less” than a teacher does; at the same time, the teacher “sees more” than “one who simply contemplates.” Teaching therefore lies on the contemplative side. Against this, Aquinas concedes that “the vision of the teacher is the beginning of teaching,” and so contemplation precedes teaching, but “the teaching itself consists rather in the transmission of knowledge of the things seen than in the vision of them,” which makes it active.
Nonetheless, the objector rejoins, just as fire passes the same heat as it progresses, so too does the perfection of the teacher’s mind perfect the mind of the student. Since “to be perfect in himself in the consideration of divine things pertains to the contemplative life,” so does teaching, as does heat from fire. Aquinas regards this argument as proof that “the contemplative life is the principle of teaching,” even as “heat is not the heating but the principle of heating.” Yet while contemplation proposes, teaching disposes; contemplation directs the active, which then acts in accordance with the results of discoveries contemplation reveals.
For his last attempt, the objector rightly claims that “the active life turns on temporal things” whereas “teaching turns on the eternal, teaching about that which is more excellent and perfect.” But he draws the false conclusion that teaching does not “pertain” to the active life. But of course it does, Aquinas replies, even though one must contemplate before one teaches, just as one must more generally think (whether prudentially or theoretically) before one acts.
In his general remarks, Aquinas begins with a crucial point, quoting Gregory as saying that the active life gives bread to the hungry an teaches “the word of wisdom to those who do not know it,” that just as works of agapic love are works, are actions, so is teaching inasmuch as teaching is among the “spiritual alms.” For the philosophers of classical antiquity, discovery, learning, and teaching are the highest of erotic quests, a “passion of the head,” as Karl Marx (that scholar of things ‘ancient’) put it, albeit in mockery. It is highly unlikely that Plato (for example) expects the Ideas to be brought down to earth. Christian love is another sort of thing. Given the divine power behind divine wisdom, contemplation for Christians is animated by agape or caritas, charity—leading more directly and effectively to action than philosophic contemplation can (or should) do. It is the refusal of ancient philosophers to do that irritates Christians; it is the alleged failure of Christians to do effectively that irritates the moderns, beginning with Machiavelli.
Aquinas meets Plato and Aristotle partway. Temporal things, the things “on which human acts bear,” pertain to the active life; “the matter of the contemplative,” by contrast, “is the notions of knowable things on which the contemplator dwells.” The active life and the contemplative life differ in their ends, a point that teleological Aristotle would also endorse. But for Aquinas the contemplator dwells not on created things, including nature, so much as “uncreated truth,” the things of God, “to the degree possible for the one contemplating.” Admittedly, human beings at best see uncreated truth imperfectly in this life and must wait for “the future life” to see them “perfectly.” This is why, Aquinas remarks, “Gregory also says that the contemplative life begins here, that it might be perfected in the heavenly fatherland.” Meanwhile, “the end of the active life,” in this life, “is action,” aiming at “usefulness to neighbors.” That is, in Christian terms, God’s love for human beings is active, agapic, man’s love for God erotic, contemplative, man’s love for man agapic, active. God need not contemplate man, since He already knows him; man must contemplate God, because he knows Him imperfectly, regarding Him with philosophic eros, not only with fear but with wonder; man knows another man as he knows himself, and therefore need not so much contemplate him as act to help him. In teaching, this act of man helping man needs contemplation as its background, as the teacher needs to know what he’s talking about. But teaching itself is an interaction (as later writers would say) between teacher and student. Teaching has this “double object,” first of learning by the teacher, contemplation of the topic to be taught, then of transmitting knowledge to the student. “By reason of the first matter, the act of teaching pertains to the contemplative life, but by reason of the second to the active.” Teaching in itself belongs to the active life, “although in a certain way [it] pertains to the contemplative life.”
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