The Thomist 68 (2004): 205-58

THE SEMIOSIS OF ANGELS

John Deely

University of St. Thomas

Houston, Texas

I. Stating the Question

Semiosis is the action of signs whereby, through the unification of three elements under a single relation, that one of the three which stands in the foreground as representing brings about the effect distinctive of signs, namely, renvoi, which is for one thing so to stand for another that that other is made manifest to or for yet another still. The sign-vehicle, the foreground representative element or representamen, achieves this effect actually when the semiosis is completed, that is to say, when the semiosis achieves its "proper significate outcome" of including in the very single relation of sign-vehicle to object signified an interpretant here and now. The effect can, however, be achieved virtually when the semiosis but determines the specific possibility of bringing about a proper interpretant in future circumstances.

The interpretant, famously, "need not be mental"; that is to say, the interpretant need not be an interpreter. But in zoösemiosis and anthroposemiosis interpreters, that is to say, cognitive organ-isms acting as such, are normally involved. Indeed, in the case of anthroposemiosis, we find verified an intellectual component which precisely raises semiosis above the level of perceived objects as sensibly perceived. The perceived objects common to humans and other animals thus become intellectually perceived as well, but only by the human animals. It is this further dimension added to sense perception that constitutes the possibility of realizing the

fact that what signs strictly consist in are triadic relations which, as relations, can never be perceived, though they can be under-stood. At the foundation of this "intellectual semiosis" stands language, in its contrast to linguistic communication, as Thomas Sebeok best pointed out near the end of the last century.⁽¹⁾ But this intellectual semiosis proves in its turn to have a prelinguistic foundation precisely in the perceptual semiosis common to all animal organisms, which involves sensations and the interactions of brute secondness whence human understanding derives the materials from which it forms even its species-specifically dis-tinctive representation of objects as involving more than their relation to us within experience and perception. Language may be biologically undetermined, but the zoösemiosis upon which it depends for the very materials it forms in its own way and fashions intellectually⁽²⁾ is most definitely not biologically undetermined. Indeed, it is unthinkable apart from the world of bodies.

The question arises, could an intellectual semiosis be possible that did not arise out of and have constantly at its disposal a per-ceptual base of cognitive materials with which to work? Since discourse, commonly speaking, is precisely this interaction between sense and understanding, we are asking whether there even can be an intellectual semiosis which is not discursive. Or, to put it perhaps more plainly, can semiosis extend even beyond the world of matter and motion, to achieve its effect and proper work also in a realm of pure spirits bodiless from the start? Can we

even conceive of a cognitive being that has no body, and yet is capable of intellectual understanding perforce in the absence of sensations and perceptions alike? Would such an intellectual activity be semiosic? Can semiosis be verified, if only in thought, respecting the possible existence of angels?

Fortunately for us, the author of the first systematic treatise to demonstrate the unity of semiotic inquiry, John Poinsot,⁽³⁾ was also the author of one of the most extended and authoritative of the traditional theological treatises on the subject of angels.⁽⁴⁾ In what

follows, we will consider the understanding of semiosis among pure spirits or angels that is to be garnered from the writings of John Poinsot. We will follow his philosophical thought on this matter, passing through the world of bodies where the first signs of "spirituality" arise in the cognitive activity of animals, and then more completely in the intellectual cognition species-specifically human. It will then be both in contrast to and in continuity with human intellection that we will be able to give specificity to the type of existence required to establish a genus of purely spiritual intellect and intellectual activity, which, as we will see, is what the word "angel" properly signifies.⁽⁵⁾

II. What Is an Angel?

The world of matter, considered less in itself than as it has been thought and believed to be in the realm of human opinions, has a history strange indeed. Even by the time of Homer, we find records of belief in beings superior to human beings that are yet still bodily creatures, albeit of some material more ethereal than that of our bodies. Such were the gods, or "immortals," in the original version of Porphyry's Tree, which terminated with "Rational Animal"--not divided only into individual humans, but rather specifically divided into mortals (humans) and immortals (the gods).

By Aristotle's time we find something else again. Aristotle's Unmoved Mover or "Self-Thinking Thought" has no body, no materiality, no potentiality. But more interesting, for our purpose, we find the idea of the Separated Intelligences, bodiless spirits postulated as movers of the celestial spheres, pure immaterial substances, yet finite in nature. The celestial spheres were postulated to be (on the strength of the want of contrary evidence) susceptible only to change of place. Some ancient thinkers, indeed, dispensed with Aristotle's Separated Intelligences by postulating that the heavenly bodies were living bodies moved by their intrinsic principle of life, their souls, just as living beings in the sphere below the moon are moved by their souls in carrying out the activities of life. But it is Aristotle's idea of beings purely intellectual by nature and without bodies that moves us closer to our goal of understanding the idea of an angel; for the word "angel" in its biblical derivation is a synonym for "spirit" under-stood as an intellectual individual or "substance" which has in its nature nothing of matter as the principle whereby quantity (the having of parts outside of parts resulting in occupation of space) locates a body or--even less--whereby a body is rendered mortal, susceptible of that terminal "substantial change" wherein an individual ceases to be.

The picture is a little complicated at this point by an hypothesis of Aristotle that, over many centuries, hardened into a veritable dogma of philosophy, to wit, the hypothesis that the material universe admits of two kinds of matter: terrestrial, which under-goes substantial as well as quantitative, qualitative, and local change; and celestial, which undergoes only change of place, local motion--and only perfectly circular local motion at that. As Benedict Ashley has pointed out,⁽⁶⁾ this was an attempt to accommodate imagined facts that risked compromising Aristotle's basic theory of material substance, for even when the Greeks and Latins imagined that the heavenly bodies were incorruptible, it was understood that the Aristotelian idea of "matter" was, as a pure potentiality in the order of substance, able to compose with a substantial form by receiving, through the specification such a form provided, an actual individual existence.⁽⁷⁾ Thus, the dis-covery consequent upon Galileo's work that the entire material universe is of a uniform nature in its matter, consisting exclusively of temporal individuals which come into existence, maintain themselves, and eventually go out of existence wholly in and through process is actually more consonant with Aristotle's original doctrine of material substance as having an essence comprised of two principles: "prime matter," according to which the individual in nature (i.e., the material substance) is capable of having its body turn into some other kind of body or bodies entirely (and hence is constantly threatened by nonbeing);⁽⁸⁾ and "substantial form," according to which the individual at any given moment of its existence continues to be actually of this rather

than some other kind (even though potentially, as just noted, always of some other kind rather than this actual one here and now).⁽⁹⁾

So we are able to say that material substances as such involve bodies which occupy space. The question is: are there spiritual substances? That is to say, are there substances that have no material component as part of their intrinsic constitution?

A) "Spiritual Matter"?

But Aquinas and his followers, even though equivocating on the question of whether indeed terrestrial and celestial matter differed specifically, pointed out with deadly logic that the idea of "spiritual matter" is a flatus vocis, an empty nominalism, no more intelligible, though less obviously unintelligible, than a "square circle." To belong to the spiritual order, an order by definition transcendent to the material order, the matter in question has to possess a perfection exceeding the perfections of corporeal nature.

But perfection follows upon actuality in beings, not upon potentiality. Therefore, spiritual matter, to be spiritual, necessarily would possess an actuality greater than even material forms, that is, the actuality of substances subject to "corruption" (the technical Latin term taken over from Aristotle's Greek for "ceasing to be"). But in that case, the spiritual matter could not enter into the very make-up of an angel insofar as the angel is a substance, that is, an actual individual; for existence comes to an individual only via its form, that is, only insofar as it is a substance of some kind, whereas the putative spiritual matter already would have to have a substantial actuality of its own as spiritual in order to belong to an order superior to the material order.⁽¹²⁾

The material order can be conceived as a hierarchy, to be sure, beginning with substances (individuals) different in kind among themselves but having in common the fact of not being alive. "Being alive," in Aristotle's framework, is one of those relatively few instances in nature of an "either/or," like pregnancy in a female. For us as students of nature, it is often hard to tell whether or not we are confronted with a living individual, or whether a given living individual continues here and now to be living, or had died ("corrupted," in Aristotle's technical sense). But considered ontologically on the part of the intrinsic constitution of the part of nature we are observing, our difficulties are apart from the fact that the substantial form giving actuality to the individual we are observing either is or is not a "soul."

The term "soul" here should not mislead us. The study of the soul, for Aristotle and for the mainstream thinkers of the Latin Age, was what we have come to call "biology." If any given individual either is or is not alive (regardless of how far from "genera-tion"--Aristotle's technical term for the moment a substance begins to be, similar to the modern term "conception"--or how close to "corruption"), and if the actuality that makes an indivi-

dual be the kind of individual it is we call "substantial form," then we need a term to distinguish when the substantial form in question belongs to an individual that is not alive and when it belongs rather to a living thing. Aristotle's term for substantial form in the latter case is simply "soul." So "soul" names, in this vocabulary, the principle whereby a body exists as an actually living body, nothing more nor less. When an inorganic substance undergoes transformation into some other kind of substance, the original substantial form recedes into the potentiality of matter even as a new substantial form or forms are educed or drawn out of that same potentiality by the circumstances and conditions of the matter subjected to change. Whether this new substantial form will be organic or inorganic, that is, a soul or not, depends exactly on the same thing: the circumstances and conditions so modifying the material body in question that it is no longer capable of sustaining the actuality of its original substantial form.

Here an interesting ambiguity arises, for a "reception of form by matter" is one thing, a "reception of form by form" quite an-other, as we will see. On the one hand, "spiritual" is opposed to "material" as an either/or, such that a substance is either a material substance or a spiritual substance, in which latter case it will have no composition of form with matter but only of form with existence. On the other hand, certain substances, undoubtedly material at the level of substantial existence, exhibit at the level of activity an operation that borders on or partakes of the spiritual level. What makes the composition of matter and form at the level of substance a material composition is nothing less than the fact that the form "educed from" or "received within" matter comes to be in a restrictive or subjective manner, such that the individual in question comes to be, dependently upon its environment (to be sure) but nonetheless as existing within that environment as a thing in its own right, a subject of existence distinct from, even if related to, the other subjectivities that surround it. But if the

substance so constituted subjectively is not only a living substance but also a cognitive organism, then it crosses another either/or divide in its capabilities: it is capable not only of being acted upon by its surroundings but (also) of partially becoming aware of those surroundings, that is, of objectifying them, in and through the interactions. Such a substance Aristotle calls a "sensible substance" or an animal.

The distinguishing feature of an animal is that it has a soul that, even though educed from the potentiality of matter (as also are plant forms), is further capable of receiving in its own actuality the very actuality specified from outside itself by an agent acting upon it. This peculiar receptivity the Latins called "the reception of form by form," where the receiving form is the cognitive power subjective to the individual becoming aware, while the received form is called a "species," that is to say, a specification or specifying form causing the subject acted upon to enter into a relation not simply of "action and passion" (cause and effect), like one rock striking another, but into a relation of subject and object, that is, of one knowing to another than itself known.⁽¹³⁾ This initial florescence of spirituality in the material world is, in Aristotle's terms, an accidental rather than a substantial spirituality. It pertains to and occurs only in the activities of organisms over and above their substantial constitution, which remains determinately material. What is "spiritual," then, in the case of these cognitive organisms, is no part of their essential being whence they derive existence,⁽¹⁴⁾ but something consequent rather upon the level of "second act," the level of the operations whereby substantial existence maintains itself as determinately of

a certain kind of being. This is the case of an animal in contrast with the case of a plant (whose operations are wholly subjective and transitive, transforming things outside itself not into objects immanently cognized but into its substantial self as nourishment or offspring); and in contrast a fortiori with the case of an inorganic substance interacting subjectively with its surroundings (as Yves Simon so nicely showed for the Scholastic context).⁽¹⁵⁾

Human beings are a species or type of animal. As such they too are capable of the spiritual activity of partially objectifying their surroundings. But this objectification moves to a different level, so to speak. With the other animals, the horizon of objectification is limited to what their senses are able to respond to. With the human animal, objectification begins with the senses, but then goes on to distinguish what is objectified from what exists or might exist apart from the objectification, and makes that the horizon of objectification. Since what exists or might exist is not limited to what can be directly sensed, the horizon of cognition becomes now in principle unlimited. The human animal, aware initially of objects like any other animal, comes to see in those objects beings that transcend sensation,⁽¹⁶⁾ and develops a com-munication system based in principle on this larger horizon of being rather than simply on the horizon of objects. The cognitive power or ability to visualize the difference between objects and beings the Greeks called nou", the Latins "intellect." The communication system consequent upon it they called discourse or rational discourse, which continues to this day to be the heart of species-specifically linguistic communication.

Linguistic communication, and, more fundamentally, intellection, depends in general on sensory modalities, but it does not depend specifically on any one sensory modality. Linguistic

communication must be sensed to be understood, but it does not matter whether its sensory vehicle, its "embodiment," be, for example, visual, auditory, or tactile. This indifference suggested to Aristotle and actually proved, as far as Aquinas was concerned,⁽¹⁷⁾ that the human intellect differs from the cognitive powers of sensation (external sense) and perception (internal sense) upon which it depends in this: that whereas all powers of sensory cognition are themselves composite of matter and form, dependent for their existence and exercise upon some bodily organ or part specifically adapted for the purpose (as the eye for seeing, the ear for hearing, the tongue for tasting, etc.), the intellect itself is not so composite, but springs from the form alone, the soul in which all the powers of the organism are rooted. Thus, just as the sensory soul gives rise to powers of sensation and perception, the intellectual soul gives rise in addition to the power of intellectual awareness, understanding; but this power, unlike those of sensation and perception, depends only indirectly, not directly, upon bodily organs. The embodied powers of sense, Aquinas will say, provide the intellect with its object, but in its proper activity the intellect does not act through a bodily organ.

Only in this way, Aquinas thought, could the horizon of being be an unlimited horizon: that is, if the cognitive power which thinks being is not intrinsically limited by matter, by direct dependence upon a bodily organ.⁽¹⁸⁾ The role of matter is to subjectivize and individualize, as we have seen,⁽¹⁹⁾ whereas the role of cognition is to objectify, to make the individual cognizing aware of what is other than itself. In the case of sensation and perception, the organism's awareness is expanded to include something of the physical surroundings. In the case of intellection, with the grasp of being the human organism's awareness is expanded to include the

very otherness of what is not itself, to include the realization that things exist whether or not they are objectified--even whether or not they are material, when the question of God or angels arises.

In the case of sensation and perception, the body itself in its sense organs is adapted and proportioned to those other bodies or parts of the material environment that act upon the organism so as to create the cognitive stimuli that determine sensations and are organized into the perception of what to seek, what to avoid, and what safely to ignore. Hence, as Aquinas puts it, "things are of themselves sensible." In the case of intellection, it is the human mind itself that is required, in its species-specifically human cognitive activity, to elevate what was heretofore only sense-perceived to the level of an intelligible object. So, while things are of themselves perceptible, they must be rendered intelligible by the activity of the mind itself in that dimension or aspect of its activity which depends only indirectly on bodily organs and their products ("the human intellect depends upon sense to provide its object, but not its exercise respecting that object").⁽²⁰⁾ This process of rendering perceived things intelligible was one of the classical meanings of the term "abstraction," wherein the world of bodies, in itself material, is rendered immaterial as cognized, objectified, or known, first accidentally and relative to the cognizing organism in sense perception, then in itself as understood to involve being, that is, what is in principle independent of our awareness, beliefs, or desires.

The material, subjective existence of things in the universe, in itself, is both the starting point for and an impediment to species-specifically human intellectual awareness. To reach the awareness proper to and distinctive of the human mind or intellect ("language" in the semiotic root sense),⁽²¹⁾ the subjectivizing principle in bodily substances which we call matter must be transcended or overcome. This is precisely the business of "abstraction": of itself, intellectual awareness abstracts from the body to reach what is

"true of all or many," the 'universal' or nature considered in itself which individuals share (if it is a question of corporeal natures), or even the natures of things that have no intrinsic involvement in bodiliness (if it is a question of God or, as we shall shortly see, angels). As Poinsot summarizes:⁽²²⁾ "intellectuality of itself abstracts from body, nor does it depend upon but rather is impeded by the body."

C) Spirituality in Existence

Here the argument becomes remarkable. The intellectual soul, as a soul, is the substantial form of a body. As intellectual, it exhibits an activity that does not directly depend upon a bodily organ. But agere sequitur esse, "action follows upon being": the intellect as a power is rooted in the soul as the substantial form of the body, even though the intellect itself has no organ in which it itself is directly embodied. Therefore, when all organs fail, the intellect does not go back into the potency of matter, as do the powers of sense perception and, indeed, the sensible soul itself as a substantial form. What can act without a bodily organ can exist without a bodily organ: and so the human soul, which is the principle whence the intellectual power emanates, exists, and acts, must itself be capable of surviving the failure of all bodily organs. When the body of an animal with an intellectual soul dies, the soul lives on and continues in act as an intellect, continues to be as an intellectual form, preserving in itself at least the intellectual dimension of all that it experienced while complete as the form of a body. In this way the human soul, intellectual but incomplete (a part and not a whole) after the circumstances of life deprive it of its body, continues able to be aware of, dwell upon, perhaps even learn from the past--even though, now separated from the body, it has no means of deriving new experiences and phantasms from which to add to its objective world of things experienced and known.

All other souls, plant and animal, are drawn from and recede back into the potentiality we call matter. Forma dat esse: nothing can exist simply, but must exist as this or that, in this or that way. Yet the form is not the existence, but the specification of the existence as an existence of this or that kind. Moreover, if we look at existence in the perspective of the relationship of effect and cause, something remarkable appears. All other effects are produced by agents acting upon something else. But not existence. Existence is presupposed. A material structure can be acted upon, its dispositions changed, a new form educed, with the result that it will exist as something substantially different from what existed before the change in the dispositions. But to change the disposi-tions of a body presupposes that the body exists; and the changed dispositions that lead to the existence of a new substance likewise presuppose existence. Whence then does existence, precisely as such, come? What is the cause, not of the dispositions or change of dispositions in the material things that exist, but of the existence itself of the material things?

D) The Source of Existence

Here we come to the unique emphasis that distinguished the philosophical thought of Aquinas from that of Aristotle, his principal mentor, and that will become, we will see, the key to accounting for the semiosis of angels: the consideration of existence itself in the perspective of the relationship of effect and cause, leading Aquinas to enunciate his unique doctrine of creation as the one activity that presupposes nothing in its exercise. "Concerning existence, however," his last great Latin disciple summarized,⁽²³⁾ "we say that it does not result from the proper principles of a nature, but is given by God and received in a nature." The doctrine of creation unique to Aquinas was the doctrine that, contrary to the common understanding of the Book of Genesis as supposedly revealing that time had a beginning, in

fact the beginning of time is strictly irrelevant to the idea of creation, which concerns centrally and solely the dependence in being, dependentia in esse, of all beings that involve potentiality upon an Actuality with no potentiality, Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. This, as Aquinas put it in closing his commentary on the Physics, "all men understand to be God," the 'being' which, since existence is the actuality which gives reality to any substantial form along with all other actualities proper to that form, Aquinas preferred to call Ipsum Esse Subsistens, Actual Existence Itself Subsisting. Wherever there is actual existence, there is the creative activity of God, the unique 'causality' termed "creation," which is like efficient causality in that it makes something be this or that way, but which is unlike efficient causality in that it makes be whatever it makes be not out of something else, especially not out of a pre-existent matter or potentiality of any kind, but "out of nothing." Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing in the material universe but from the potentialities contained in that universe. But the universe itself, with all the potentialities in it, comes precisely from nothing by the creative action of God, creatio ex nihilo, which action alone sustains the material universe and everything in it. In this universe "nothing comes from nothing," but every event has a cause that presupposes existence, something to act upon, be it agent, material, form, or outcome.

E) The Intellectual Soul

We recall that the intellectual soul is still a soul, that is to say, the form of a body.⁽²⁴⁾ It is not just a substantial form correlate with matter as the potentiality for yet other substantial forms, but the substantial form correlate with a living body or, rather, the substantial form that makes a human body to be a living body (insofar as forma dat esse). It does not come from the potentiality of matter, as presumably do all other souls; yet neither does it come to be apart from matter, even though at bodily death it will

continue to be apart from the matter in correlation with which it begins to be.

As we have seen, the intellectual soul as such cannot be educed from the potentiality of matter, because it exhibits an actuality in intellection that does not reduce to the bodily organs by which life is corporeally maintained. The human soul must be immediately created by God. But, we have also seen, this means no more than that its existence depends directly only on God, which is true of all existence. As a soul, as the form of a living body, it will not receive existence until and unless the body of which it will be the form is brought about in the material universe by the standard play of efficient causes upon material by which any body is brought into being.⁽²⁵⁾ But once called into being by those material circumstances, this form, the intellectual soul, in contrast to every other substantial form of a body, inorganic or organic (such as vegetative and sensitive souls), will outlive the material circumstances of its creation. Forma dat esse: when the esse is more than the esse simply proportioned to that of a living body, the forma through which that esse comes will continue to hold and exercise its esse when the body to which it gave life can no longer sustain that life.

It is not a question of a twofold act, one drawn from the potency of matter and a second attached to that first actuality as the captain of the ship. A soul abstractly is the form of a living body. But concretely, a soul is the form of this living body, this one and no other. No soul, therefore, pre-exists or could pre-exist the body of which it is the form. The soul comes into existence as the form of this body, and, if it be an intellectual soul, when that

body is destroyed or "corrupted" it continues to exist not simply in its own right independent of that body but incompletely as a part of what was once a whole, namely, the living organism of which it was the principle of life, and continues to be incom-pletely after having lost its body to yet other actualities which its corporeal potentiality contained as defining its mortality.⁽²⁶⁾ It was an intellectual animal, but still an animal, that is to say, a living body aware of something of its surroundings and capable of learn-ing from that awareness, growing cognitively up to the moment of death, "corruption," at which moment it lost not existence, like all other animals, but only the capacity further to learn. Depen-dent on the body for experience, dependent upon experience for developing ideas, the animal in question, the human animal, was not so much intellectual, capable of insight into being, as rational, dependent upon a sequence of experiences with other bodies to see what such insight contained, what the content of an initial insight implied.

F) Spiritual Substances Complete in Themselves

A truly and perfectly intellectual being, in fact, could not even be an animal. Which brings us at last to the angels:

 Spirituality properly speaking [that is, in the substantial order of first act, whence esse comes, and not merely in the operational order of second act, whence esse is sustained]  is   rightly  demonstrated on the basis of intellectuality. But that angelic beings are pure spirits in no way informing or forms of bodies is proved by this: the fact that angels are  perfect intellectual substances, and not imperfect as we are. Whence, since intellectuality of itself abstracts from body, and does not seek but is rather impeded by bodiliness, if there are     bodily intellectual

creatures bespeaking imperfection in the intellectual order, there must needs be yet other creatures perfect in that order of understanding, which means creatures lacking bodies and every intrinsic connection with bodies.⁽²⁷⁾

III. How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin?

This is the form of the question generally familiar to Americans, at least since the time of John Dewey (1859-1952). My

learned British friend Christopher Martin tells me convincingly that this form of the question is misstated, for the head of a pin already occupies space. The correct form of the question concerns the point of a pin, inasmuch as a point as such, ideally, is precisely distinguished by having no parts whatever outside of parts, that is to say, no quantification at all. "You might as well ask how many angels can dance in a football field as on the head of a pin," Martin insists.

The question remains, how do angels relate to what we call positions in space, since they have in their own substance no sub-jection whatever to quantification, having no body? Angels, being superior to bodies, can act on bodies, but they can have no body of their own. As a consequence, the contact of angels with bodies is possible through their activity, "virtue" or "power," only, not through their substance.⁽³⁰⁾ An angel is a finite being, not an infinite one, precisely because its power is limited to acting on and in creation, that is to say, to acting under the general dependency in existence of all finite being upon the creative activity of God. Not being the form of a body, the angel is not in some one place according to its form; yet, not being ubiquitous, being finite, it is where it acts upon bodies.⁽³¹⁾

A) Virtual and Dimensive Quantity

It is in this context that St. Thomas and his followers introduce the distinction so dear to Peter Redpath, of which he has made such remarkable extensions, namely, the distinction between the dimensive or dimensional quantity of bodies, whereby they have parts outside of parts and occupy space essentially according to what they are, and virtual quantity, or the extent of power and

control over bodies that a pure spirit can exercise through its actions.⁽³²⁾

Since, then, the presence to the world of bodies is something accidental to an angel and variable, "where" something is has a radically different meaning when applied to any bodily substance, including the human being, and when applied to a pure spirit. "Where a body is," in the categories of Aristotle, the Latins called ubi circumscriptivum, "circumscriptive location," the surroun-dings that locate a body and upon which the body depends in its existence. The human being, for example, depends on more or less fourteen pounds per square inch of pressure upon its body from without in order to continue in existence. Increase that pres-sure too much and the body will be crushed; decrease it too much and the body will explode. That is the nature of "circumscriptive ubi." Ubi angelicum is a wholly different matter. The angel relates to place not by depending upon surrounding bodies but by dominating bodies through its activity influencing whatever body or bodies it chooses to act upon within the limits of its finitude.⁽³³⁾

B) The "Location" and "Movement" of Angels in Space

An angel may "pass" from spatial location A to distant spatial location B without "passing through" any of the intervening loca-tions, or the angel may choose to "mark its passage" by exercising its power in some manner over the intervening locations, in which case it will appear to move locally, as it were, as a wind sweeping over the land. A body, by contrast, cannot pass from A to B except by traversing the space in between.⁽³⁴⁾

Angels, then, are "someplace" in the physical universe of bodies only when and to the extent that they take possession of some one place rather than another. This "taking possession" is familiar in the idea of "demons" particularly, or "evil spirits" taking over the control of some human being: "an angel and a soul can occupy the same body," Poinsot tells us,⁽³⁵⁾ citing Thomas Aquinas,⁽³⁶⁾ "because 'the two are not compared under the same relation of causality, since the soul occupies the body as its form while the demon occupies it quite otherwise'"--as an intruder overpowering the rightful occupant, as it were.

C) The Answer to the Immediate Question

This brings us back to our question: How many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or, indeed, the point of a pin, or, for that matter, in a football field? The answer is all of them or none of them, depending on whether they choose to exercise their power over bodies in respect of the given area, large or small, and with the caveat that a choice to occupy one and the same spatial location at one and the same time by each individual member of the angelic community has no probability of occurring. But, were they so to choose, all can be "present" there only insofar as they exercise their power each to achieve some different effect⁽³⁷⁾--for example, each one performing a wholly different dance; or different parts of the same dance, as in a ballet ("duo Angeli pluresve partialiter et inadaequate ad eumdem effectum con-

currant") or even a waltz with one leading, the other following ("unus sit in eodem loco per passionem et alius per opera-tionem"). Otherwise, respecting an identical respect, the more powerful angel will exclude the "presence" of the less powerful ("non [pos]sunt in eodem loco formali . . . absolute [et per se] loquendo").⁽³⁸⁾

However, all this is moot compared with the question of why angels would choose anything at all. In other words, the question of where and how angels might choose to perfect themselves by operations depends upon how angels see the world. For cognitive beings choose to act only according as they see things, that is to say, dependently upon their awareness.

IV. The Awareness of Angels

We are considering the being of a creature whose whole essential activity consists in awareness and the intellectual inclinations or desires consequent thereon, but that is nonetheless a creature, that is to say, a finite being, and therefore one whose awareness, however perfect intellectually,⁽³⁹⁾ is nonetheless a finite awareness, and requires specification from without in order to be aware of one thing rather than another. As intellectual, the angel, like the human mind, is able to consider being in the whole of its extent, actual and possible. But as being finite in intellect, this universal capacity needs to be specified to be aware actually, "here and now," as it were, of this object or range of objects rather than of that object or that other region in the range of objects possible to consider. The human being forms its actual awareness of clouds in the sky, or a breeze swaying the trees, or the night sky

sparkled with stars, in response to just such specifications from without.

With angels, there is a problem to be considered from the outset. Lacking a body of any kind and in any way, they also lack organs whereby they might receive from outside themselves any kind of specifying stimulus in response to which their mind or intellect might form a concept relating them cognitively to the surroundings external to their proper subjectivity. Whence then is to come the stimulus for the angelic intellect to look beyond its own activity in the consideration of beings which are other than itself, which it itself is not?

A) The Stimulus for Cognitive Response in Angels

The answer to this question, according to Thomas Aquinas and those who follow his thought on the matter, is that the pure awareness of angels, being spiritual, is attuned to an environment that is likewise purely spiritual, and the stimuli "from without" that prod the angelic consciousness to form and to be able to form concepts that will serve as sign-vehicles (representamens, as we have become accustomed to say after Peirce) manifesting objects other than themselves are nothing else than the "climate changes" of the spiritual order in which the angel dwells, namely, the changes in existence all throughout the universe that come about always and only from the source of the whole of finite being, in which changes the creative activity of God consists.

We are aware only of bodies living and dying, particular material substances beginning, developing, and ceasing to be. The reason for this is that bodies are all that we can directly and im-mediately know. Pure spirits are aware directly and immediately of their surroundings, just as we are. But, unmediated by senses, what this angelic awareness directly takes rise from is the creative activity which is manifested directly whenever and wherever and however existence occurs. For the climate in and of which purely intellectual or utterly bodiless spirits--angels, in a word--are perforce directly immersed and aware is the receiving of

existence, the actuality presupposed in every other actuality, as from the purely spiritual source of the universe of finite spiritual and material beings indifferently. This creative influx is, as it were, the very air they breathe, the one aspect of being that comes from God alone and manifests the divine activity wherever and for whatever duration ("whenever") it is found: "Concerning existence, we note that it results not from the subjective principles of any [finite] nature," material or spiritual, "but is imparted by God and received in a nature."⁽⁴⁰⁾ (The expression "received in" requires to be quite carefully and singularly understood, inasmuch as, prior to existence, there is no nature in which existence can be received. So the "reception" in this case signifies rather the manner or specification according to which the creative power of God is being exercised respecting things⁽⁴¹⁾ and manifested respecting intelligibility, that is, as making it possible for purely spiritual intelligences actually to attend to the surrounding universe of spiritual and material substances or "things" interacting also among themselves in various ways.)

This divine activity, of course, is internal or "immanent" to each angel insofar as it is a substance, a "subjectivity" or thing among the rest of things; but it is external or transitive to each angel insofar as the angel is an intellect capable of being aware of the whole of being, not of itself only but of all beings insofar as they are intelligible. And all beings are intelligible, ultimately and supremely, precisely as they issue forth from the creative activity of God whence and whereby they derive their existence both as real and as acting and interacting in the universe of things. It is in

just this way that the imparting and sustaining of existence--in which "creation" (the creative activity of God) consists--impacts upon and enables the intelligence of angels to become aware from within of the universe without as a whole, including angels themselves as parts:

the specifications providing the ground for the awareness of angels derive from the divine ideas according to which God is creating as outward expressions thereof, representing the creative rationales more or less universal in God's causing of existence, and in accordance with which the things themselves derive their existence following the modality of causes more or less universal.⁽⁴²⁾

It is important to remember that we are talking of finite, albeit purely spiritual or bodiless, beings: they can only be living things capable of purely intellectual awareness and the desires and actions consequent thereon. They are not and cannot be omniscient. They cannot pay attention to everything possible for them to know at once, nor is it possible for them to know everything at once. The former is the case because they must themselves respond to the stimuli of changing existences everywhere around them, in which activity they are subject to some freedom both of choice and even of distraction. Thus, just as we may be in a room with music in the background while being so absorbed in thought or conversation as not to notice it, or just as we may ignore the fact that it is raining in India, so can it happen with angels.⁽⁴³⁾ The latter is the case because things do not exist everywhere all at once but only successively, one after another, and dependently upon

causal series some aspects of which are necessary and other aspects contingent, so that, even seeing all things in their causes and as receiving whatever they have of existence from God, the future holds even for angels surprises beyond what they can see and conjecture. The past too can hold blind spots for angels. For if a thing comes into existence while a particular angel attends elsewhere, and then passes away without leaving signs traceable to its proper singularity, the angel in question--unless enlightened by another who was paying attention at the time--will have no way whatever of coming to know what it missed.⁽⁴⁴⁾

B) How Concepts Work Differently for Angels

Because the actual ideas (the "concepts") of angels are formed in response to the determinations impressed upon the angels from within by the activity of God communicating existence to finite singulars and sustaining that existence in and through their interactions, the angelic manner of knowing contrasts sharply with intellectual knowledge in human beings. In our intellectual knowledge, the universal is at one extreme, the singular at another. The universal gives rise to abstract knowledge. The sin-gular, if present to, active upon, and proportioned to our senses, gives rise to intuitive knowledge in the immediately cognized coincidence or partial identity of object and thing--that is to say, to the awareness of a physical thing as physically existing indepen-dently of awareness, here and now existing also in awareness as object thereof. Or again, our knowledge is said to be universal when we have managed to arrive at an understanding of what is necessary to a particular nature, as when we know that wherever there are molecules of water there are combinations of two hydrogen atoms with one atom of oxygen.

In neither of these senses of "universal" can the knowledge of angels be called universal; nor can the knowledge of angels be

opposed or contrasted to their awareness of singulars.⁽⁴⁵⁾ Whatever an angel is aware of it is aware of on the basis of the divine activity of creation, whether it be the continuance of things in existence or the divine concurrence in their operations and interactions through which that existence is maintained, dimin-ished, increased, or lost.⁽⁴⁶⁾ Consequently, in utter contrast to any sense in which human knowledge can be said to be either "universal" or "of the universal," angelic knowledge is called "universal" because it forms itself directly from the specifying stimuli of the universal activity of God's imparting of existence ("creation") and because angelic awareness reaches directly to the singular existent, intuitively whenever it considers an existing singular, and abstractively when it considers a past or a future singular. In this last case (the contemplation of a future contingent), moreover, the "universal knowledge" of the angel is liable to error as "virtual falsity."⁽⁴⁷⁾

"Virtual falsity" as yet excluding actual falsity is a particularly interesting notion. When an angel "here and now" conjectures the future on the basis of what it presently knows of existing things and their interaction, it makes a guess--"performs an abduction," as we say in semiotics. If the guess will turn out to be right, it can be said to be "virtually true"; but if the future will turn out otherwise than the angel now conjectures, the guess is "virtually false." But when the future on which the guess bears becomes present, the angel attending thereto will know of everything that exists that it does exist, and so in that present moment it no longer has room for conjecture and it is unable to think that its former conjecture might still be correct. Hence actual falsity is precluded from angelic awareness inasmuch as, at any given moment, though an angel can be deceived about what will be in

some particulars, it cannot be deceived about what here and now actually, as opposed to virtually, exercises existence in the universe of finite being.

This is perhaps the deepest contrast between anthroposemiosis and the putative semiosis of angels. We conceive "the universal" not only often erroneously, but always in a static way, such that, even when circumstances make the universal in question determinately false, the state of our knowledge as discursive (in contrast to the comprehensive awareness of angelic knowledge, as we will see shortly)⁽⁴⁸⁾ leaves it possible for us to remain ignorant of the relevant facts and consider the entertained universal as true. The "universal" knowledge of an angel can entertain no such illusion because it has nothing of the static about it; it is more like watching a landscape under rapidly shifting conditions of light and weather:

The concepts angels form in their awareness of things can be called "universals" only by reason of the medium on the basis of which they represent the things themselves right down to their unique differences. And this medium is the more universal according as it the more perfectly and intimately represents the things that are grasped within it: just as a cause is more universal the more forcefully it brings about its effect, and the more intimately and profoundly it achieves that effect: and so the universality of angelic knowledge is a universality of activity, which applies to many rationales of existence.⁽⁴⁹⁾

More than an activity, the "universal knowledge" of an angel is a constant unfolding into clear and distinct awareness of what exists which, as has been said, contains constant surprises for the angel comprehending what unfolds, for the actual awareness of the angel forms itself from determinations "which receive the force of representing the individuals existing successively, just as they are

caused in the universe from the creative ideations of God, not otherwise and not before."⁽⁵⁰⁾

Note that it is not abstractly that the creative activity of God impacts upon and specifies the concept-formation, or actual awareness, of the angel. It is not concepts that are "infused" into the angel's consciousness, full-blown.⁽⁵¹⁾ The climate in which the angelic mind is bombarded with infused specifications or stimuli arising from the universal maintenance of existence by God is not a Platonic realm of pure Ideas, even Divine Ideas, abstractly and eternally exemplifying universal natures. Quite to the contrary, what is at issue is the dynamic activity whereby the universe is maintained in existence insofar as it dynamically and in finite ways exemplifies the infinity of divine perfection as finitely imitable in various, varying, specific ways:

specifications in response to which the angel attends to the universe around it are similitudes derivative from the divine ideas [through the creative activity according to which things receive existence], and represent things in the angelic intellect in the way in which those things are derived from God as one following upon the other in a temporal order.⁽⁵²⁾

It is not any static exemplar in the divine mind or "individual essence" in some created substance itself that provides the representative rationale in response to which the angel forms its awareness of the universe. It is rather the rationale of the emergence and development in time of creatures ("ut descendens

a Deo," as Poinsot puts it)⁽⁵³⁾ that stimulates the angels to form their concepts representing the many creatures perfectly and distinctly. The unity of the conceptual representation is taken not from the creatures conceptually known but from the constancy and manner of the creative activity of God which brings these creatures about and in response to which as to a stimulus the angel forms its awareness.⁽⁵⁴⁾

C) Universal Knowledge of Singulars:

The Key to the Knowledge Distinctive of Angels

When it is said that intellectual knowledge of universals contrasts with sense knowledge of particulars, then, the expres-sion "knowledge of universals" is almost equivocal as between human beings and angels, embodied spirits and spirits with no internal dependency upon bodies in their cognitive activity:⁽⁵⁵⁾

Angelic conceptions are not universal [in the way that human intellectual ideas are] from the fact that they represent directly and essentially some nature in a universal state or some generic grade . . . but from the fact that the conceptions represent several things . . . insofar as they come from God . . . according to diverse relative conditions.⁽⁵⁶⁾

and now of a person while shaking hands and exchanging greetings, but with none of the limitations of distance and circumstance that intuitive awareness dependent upon sense (i.e., human intuitive awareness) entails and including the awareness of causality at work in every aspect of the being standing before one insofar as that being exercises a unique existence. The "universality" in question is a concrete, not an abstract, universality:

The climate from which angelic concept-formation receives its specifying determinations is one representative of things according as they are derived from divine ideas, whence perforce the specifications in question represent whatever individuals they do represent successively, and not simultaneously: because it is successively that individuals exemplify the creative action of God in the physical universe. So it is that the concepts angels form in actually achieving awareness in response to these determinations represent the things of the universe, not by taking anything from the very things themselves,⁽⁵⁷⁾ but rather by taking determination according to the way in which the things themselves depend upon the divine exemplars; whence from the efficacy of their representation and from the efficacy of their participation in the divine or creative ideas, angelic conceptions perforce are assimilated to the individuals when they come to be and participate existence from the divine ideas, and not in any other way. Nor is this representation or application to the knowing of the individual determinately drawn from the individual things themselves, except insofar as they are the final terms (the terminus) of such representation.⁽⁵⁸⁾

Poinsot sums all this up in a terse formula: "id habent in repraesentando, quod ideae in causando,"⁽⁵⁹⁾ a formula which he expands over the next several pages of his treatise and recapitulates

in saying that "the specifying determinations on the basis of which angels form concepts possess in representing the very content which the divine ideas impart in the causing of actual existence."⁽⁶⁰⁾ This is the key to the knowledge distinctive of angels.

D) The Semiotic Triangle

We see in all this clearly verified the triadic structure of signs which is the foundation of semiosis, no less in the "sphere below the moon" than in the empyrean home of the angels: the "in-fused" determinations from the creative activity of God, whereby the angel is enabled to form an actual awareness of whatever it chooses to pay attention to in the universe, serve as the basis for angels to fashion sign-vehicles (concepts) which represent to them the universe of things other than (and also including) themselves. So we have the famous triad: first, the representamen or sign-vehicle, to wit, the concept itself; second, the object signified, which in this case (as in our immeasurably more limited partial identification case of sense perception) is an object identical with a physically existing thing; and third, the one--namely, the pure spirit or angel--to or for which the existing here and now thing is represented in the manifestation making of that thing also an object. The nature of this triad may be expressed in a formula--the semiotic formula, let us call it--which, as Poinsot points out,⁽⁶¹⁾ admits of no exception in the order of finite being: any two things related to a common third are in that same way related to one another.

As with us, the awareness of a given object for an angel can pass from abstract to intuitive or back, but on entirely different grounds. With us, an object need only pass out of the range of sensation to become "abstract," whether or not it continues to exist. Not so with the angels. Near or far, as long as a thing exists, an angel adverting to it and so making it an object of awareness will apprehend it intuitively, unless for reasons of its own it chooses to use less than the full comprehension of the impressed specification at the basis of this particular consciousness. Other-wise, whatever exists in nature, when an angel attends to it, that angel knows intuitively, that is, knows the physical thing in its very physical reality objectified, and comprehensively as well.

The term "comprehensively" here does not mean that, for each and every angel, there is nothing left to know or be known about the object. The term means rather that the angel in knowing, when attending fully to the particular stimulus or species impressa⁽⁶²⁾ in proportion with which it forms its species expressae or concepts,⁽⁶³⁾ knows to the full capacity of its specifically individual apprehensive power the substantial being and necessary properties and causes involved therein. But this same angel knows only conjecturally the contingencies that bear on the future of the being in question. And, if the object of the apprehension is a being

itself capable of immanent activity, the angel does not know at all those immanent acts ("secrets of the heart")⁽⁶⁴⁾ save insofar as they outwardly manifest themselves in some bodily state or behavior of the cognized organism. In other words, at any given moment, unlike our intellectual knowledge, which always contains an element of confusion or potential for greater clarity overall in the here and now (and is said in this sense to be "discursive"), the purely intellectual awareness of the angel, which is all the angel has, it also has wholly actually respecting the here and now--not in the sense that there is nothing in the here and now being of which the angel is unaware,⁽⁶⁵⁾ but in the sense that there is nothing further in the here and now which is potential respecting the individual angel's here and now awareness. A given angel always knows, if not all that there is to know, at least all that it can by itself know under the actual circumstances here and now. It is in this sense that the angel is said to know "comprehensively" rather than "discursively";⁽⁶⁶⁾ but, since the next moment in time may, and the whole of future time certainly will, unfold differently than the individual angel is led to conjecture from what it does know here and now, the angel, turning its attention here or there, is constantly liable to surprises further revealing the limited or finite nature of its intellectual power, for all its "compre-hensiveness" at any given moment. Yet the angel cannot from this experience learn, for example, a habit of humility, because the

angelic nature has no place for the taking of habits.⁽⁶⁷⁾ So too in its comprehensiveness from the first moment is the awareness that contingent causes found only conjectural as opposed to certain knowledge: part of the comprehension is that it does not know everything and cannot infallibly predict the future on the basis of the certainties it does have.

F) Learning by Successive Discourse

Since the angelic knowledge always takes its rise from the stimulus of the divine creative activity which gives existence to natural beings, and since it is in time that this creative activity gives rise to the succession of individuals and events in nature from which the angel attending to the unfolding constantly learns new things comprehensively, the successive character of this comprehension gives a successive sense in which the angel can be said to learn. If the notion of discursive knowledge is extended to include the capacity to learn new things without any transition from potentiality to actuality respecting the known at any given moment, angels may be said to have a successive discourse, that is, a discourse in which the previous awareness is not at all the cause of the later awareness (as when we see a new consequence of something we already knew) but merely its predecessor, which did not actually have all that is contained in the new awareness simply because contingent causes in nature that are now actual were not then actual. In other words, the angel has nothing to learn by inference in reflecting on its present knowledge, yet it can and will learn by contrast in the successive awareness it maintains of exis-tence and holds in intellectual memory. Whatever it will learn will come, not from a present awareness that is potential respecting a

future awareness, but always and only and wholly from the future state of the objects themselves, known intuitively by the angels (i.e., known as actually existing at the time they are considered by the angel).⁽⁶⁸⁾ "And so it is," Poinsot notes wryly, "that God moves [i.e., instructs the understanding--or, rather, comprehension-- of]⁽⁶⁹⁾ a spiritual creature by means of time."⁽⁷⁰⁾ Motion, the passage from potency to act, is essential to discourse, both in the successive discourse of angels and in the illative discourse of humans; but the motion in question is internal to the discourse by which we come to see new things in the realizing of consequences, while it is only external to the "discourse" by which new things enter angelic apprehension through the causal unfolding of the universe in its contingent as well as its necessary causes.

We have also seen that the angels, in forming concepts, form sign-vehicles or representamens that achieve the distinctive effect of semiosis, in the end, exactly in the manner that human concepts (in contradistinction, now, to percepts) do, although without the dependency upon zoösemiosis and the actions of sensible bodies upon organs of sense: to wit, by relating the angels to the universe of things other than themselves objectified through

the concepts which represent those things as cognized by the angels forming the concepts. This concept formation on the part of angels is what constitutes them as actually aware, and this awareness takes its excitation or stimulus from the purely spiritual activity of God, impressed on the angelic intellects from within concomitantly with their own creation, in creating the universe of interacting things by imparting to the events and things of the universe, not all at once but successively, an actual existence beyond nothingness and outside of the efficient causes of coming to be in the case of individuals, "substances."

G) The Distinctiveness of Angelic Semiosis

If we consider now what is distinctive of this angelic semiosis, in contrast with the semiosis of animals, linguistic or not linguistic, we find that it concerns mainly the situation of intuitive awareness, that is to say, the awareness wherein the very object signified is identified with a thing physically existing here and now. In the semiosis of animals, intuitive awareness is limited by the range of the senses. Not only are past or future imagined objects known abstractively, but even objects that have a here and now physical existence are known to us intuitively only when they are present and active upon our bodily senses. If we look at a picture of someone who is alive but in some distant place, we are intuitively aware of the picture, but the person in the picture we are aware of only abstractively.⁽⁷¹⁾

Not so with the angels.⁽⁷²⁾ Concepts formed on the basis of the objective stimulus of the divine creative activity cannot be de-

ceived as to what actually exists and what does not, for everything that an angel considers that actually exists physically is represented and known so to exist. Only things considered by an angel wholly alert to its stimulus that either no longer exist or that do not yet exist are known abstractively, and, in the latter case, are known mainly conjecturally as well (and so under threat of "virtual falsity").

How do we explain the necessarily intuitive character of angel awareness respecting the universe of physically existing things? My guess would be that the explanation lies in the ability of a purely intellectual consciousness directly to apprehend categorial relations among physical objects. Categorial relations⁽⁷³⁾ are all and only those relations that exist in the world of nature without any dependence upon the cognitive activity of organisms. They differ from mind-dependent relations in that they necessarily involve the actual existence of two (at least) related things: A can be similar to B, categorially speaking, if and only if both A and B exist. The shape, let us say, on the basis of which the two are "similar"--or whatever other "accident" (whatever subjective characteristic, let us say) on the basis of which the two are related--can and does exist in each of the two independently of the other. But the characteristic in question as foundation or basis of a relation cannot exist equally independently (which, of course, is the proof that every relation as such exists not independently of but irreducibly respecting its subjective basis or "ground").⁽⁷⁴⁾

In our semiosis, categorial relations and mind-dependent relations are functionally equivalent precisely because we cognize things on the basis of models⁽⁷⁵⁾ representing "how things actually are." In most cases, it is only by experimentally reducing these models--our conceptions--to sensibly verifiable alternatives that we are able to determine whether or how far there is a "correspondence" to an actual physical state of affairs blithely indifferent to what or whether we think about it, whether or how we try to "model" it for the purposes of our own understanding.

In the comprehensive awareness of angels, there would be neither need nor place for experimenting with cognitive models. The objective stimuli upon which angelic conceptions are formed, being not abstract representations of nature but rather, as we have seen, dynamic representations of natures realized in individuals when and as they receive actual existence through the creative activity of God (including its utilization of secondary causes in bringing about the material dispositions calling for this or that individual existence), would give rise to an immediate awareness of the arising of whatever categorial relations obtain here and now among interacting individuals of the physical universe:

So from the creative ideas according to which things exist, derive in the angelic mind objective stimuli representative of stones, or of herbs as possessing medicinal qualities, or as they pertain to the climate of this rather than that region; and likewise derive stimuli representative objectively of birds as belonging to a given region, or useful to a particular end, or even according as they are useful to humans: or stimuli representative of some embellishment of

an elemental state of earth or air respecting a higher and more universal end: or even as things upon earth depend upon events occurring in the heavens, and finally according to various other diverse modalities and outcomes which can affect the manner in which things derive existence from God.⁽⁷⁶⁾

The reverse, of course, happens when the object present within the angel's intuitive awareness physically ceases to be: the angel attending to the event immediately becomes aware that the sign relation whereby its concept makes present in awareness an existing thing ceases to include a categorial component within the representation and passes with the thing to an abstract, mind-dependent or purely objective status. The sign-relation, real to now, becomes instantly unreal, both in itself physically and objectively in the angelic awareness:

The objective determination on which the angel's awareness of the case is based derives from the issuing forth of the newly existent thing, which issuance is assimilated to the representation; therefore, from the force of that representation alone, the representation is applied and determined to the produced thing while it exists or is produced and assimilated to the representation. When the thing ceases to exist, accordingly, it is no longer assimilated to that representation, nor does the representation remain determinately applied as similar to a physical reality: because it is solely determined respecting that thing according as the thing itself receives existence or descends from God, and the representation is similarly determined not indeed to the thing as past, because as past it is already not receiving existence from God nor pertinent as an actual part of the universe . . . and so remains as but a memory [recognized as such].⁽⁷⁸⁾

have no immediate awareness of the change in the relational status. So, Poinsot points out:

When St. Thomas says that nonexisting things have not a nature through which they are assimilated to the objective stimuli for angelic conceptions, he is not speaking only of that relative similitude which is founded upon the co-existence of the foundation and terminus of the relation, but rather of the completive and determinative assimilation of the foundational representations to those individuals insofar as it provenates from the change of the individual existents according to which the representations in question are one time assimilated to those individuals as actual, another time not. . . . So that assimilation whereby things are assimilated to specificative representations in the mind of an angel is an assimilation obtaining not only on the side of the things [i.e., categorially], but one penetrating into the representations themselves through the new determination or application provenating from the creative divine ideas; whence, given the objects and the creative influx, the intentional assimilation applied to these individuals here and now results.⁽⁷⁹⁾

In the physical universe, the change that produces or destroys the categorial relations may be the substantial change whereby a given individual begins or ceases to be. But in the order of the representations upon which angelic conceptions are based in forming an actual comprehensive awareness of the individual in question there is no more than a modal explicitation (or suppression!) of an aspect of the actually possessed stimulus for the objectification.⁽⁸⁰⁾

V. Il Parlare Angelico:⁽⁸¹⁾ How Angels Converse

namely, the things of the physical universe, as including the angels.

To see how, through semiosis, the concepts of angels are no different from the concepts of animals in representing objects other than themselves to the ones forming the concepts, simply by bringing the three terms (concepts, objects signified, knowers) into the single relation of renvoi, is one thing. To see how one angel can manifest to another the very concepts that it has so formed, however, is quite another matter. Each concept is a wholly immanent action or response to some aspect of the divine stimulus of creation. Each concept of each angel as a quality formed in and by the intellect of the angel is as proprietary to each angel forming it as is the intellect itself of that same angel. If conversation is nothing other than the manifestation of what one is thinking to another, it is far from clear, from all that has been said, how is this to occur between angels.

A) Conversation without Sounds or Marks or Gestures

Among human beings, deliberate sounds serve to impact directly on another's senses, and from these sounds the listener is led to form his own concept of what, if anything, the sounds signify. Because we can come to understand both the sounds spoken, on the one hand, and the objects those sounds are intended to signify, on the other hand, we can get to a position where it is possible to agree or disagree with the speaker. How can such a process occur between two angels, where no sounds are available? Evidently, the angels, to converse, must directly manifest their very concepts, where we directly manifest only sounds!⁽⁸⁴⁾ How?

In one way the absence of intervening sounds makes the problem more mysterious; but in a way this absence also makes

the problem simpler. The key to the matter of communication, in both cases, is the difference between manifesting the object conceived and manifesting the thought itself of the object.⁽⁸⁵⁾ It is no less true of human conversation than of angelic conversation that the object conceived, when the communication succeeds (which is far from always), provides the common measure between speaker and listener.

Consider that each human speaker has his own concepts as defining elements of his subjectivity. Yet by a complex of conventions humans manage to coordinate and commingle conceptions of the mind with willful stipulations and conventions whereby the objects manifested to each of them through their respective concepts are brought into the tangle of conventions sufficiently completely to overlap the objects manifested to the listener, so that he or she can say, sometimes truly: "I see what you mean." That is to say, even in the case--on one glance simpler, but on another glance actually more complex--of human conversation, it is directly objects and only indirectly (in and through the objects cognized) the conceptions bound up with those objects that are communicated.

The sounds of speech, for example, are first of all objects apprehended by the sense of hearing. Only as understood, that is to say, as apprehended intellectually, do these same sounds as objects manifest insensible conventions that direct our attention not just to any objects but to this or these rather than that and those. The sounds, when understood, do not represent and direct our attention to the object(s) in any manner whatsoever, but in a very particular way--namely, as conceived.

The sounds of speech are elevated to the status of words, originally, by acts of stipulation. These stipulations, as such, come originally from the will rather than from the intellect of speakers. In the case of words, the stipulations involved rapidly sediment into habits; but here, again, the case of conversation of angels is simplified, for purely intellectual creatures have no need for

habits of inference, precisely because their manner of apprehending, as we have seen, is comprehensive rather than discursive (in an illative sense).

B) Conceptions Revealed through Objects

The will of the speaker introduces into the concept of the speaker an order, both to the object spoken about and also to the one to or with whom conversation is being attempted. And just as the human stipulation, through habit, enters into the con-eption of the object as conveyed by sounds, so in the place of habit the angelic stipulation enters into the stimulus incorporated into its conception so as to present that stimulus in a new way respecting the one with whom conversation is intended. So, quotes Poinsot from Aquinas: "to speak, for an angel, is nothing other than to order its own concept to the end of deliberately manifesting its conceived object to another angel."⁽⁸⁶⁾ The privacy

of the conceptions of the one can be overcome in favor of communication with the other:

The conceptions of one angel are not made manifest through the bare existence and physical production of the concept in the first angel's mind, because through this immanent action alone the conceptions do not pertain essentially to the parts of the physical universe as existing beyond the angel's own mind nor have a connection therewith, but only through this, that the conceptions are deliberately ordered to the other and thereby made pertinent to that other.⁽⁸⁷⁾

Once this "order to a hearer" (as it were) has been introduced and made part of the very object conceived, the problem solves itself:

Whensoever some object comes to be, an angel is . . . said to be stimulated by that object solely by virtue of the fact that the object in question exists as proportioned and appropriate to be understood by that angel, as being an object pertinent to the angel and contained within the domain of its knowability. . . . and the very fact of its newly coming into existence is what renders the object apt and proportioned to being cognized by the angel: and by this very fact the angel is excited by the object newly existent.⁽⁸⁸⁾

That is to say, the newly existent reality--a concept in one angel's thought ordered by that same angel's will to another angel's awareness or understanding--excites the angelic mind not itself directly, but by an objective determination or 'specification' contained in the creative divine ideas conveying the determination enabling the intended angel (if that angel attends to the new