Angels on Pins

• from: http://www.wordwizard.com/ch_forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=3691&SearchTerms=aquinas

I wouldn’t let Saint Thomas Aquinas [Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: (“the Angelic Doctor”), 1225?-74, Italian scholastic philosopher: a major theologian of the Roman Catholic Church] off the hook so easily (as Marty suggests) because although he may not have argued that exact statement, “angels dancing on the head of a pin or how many angels can dance on the point of a needle,” he did argue something akin to that and several other equally esoteric angelic points.

Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica summary of theology, contains propositions on the nature of angels (in addition to tons of other stuff) which he attempted to work out by very tedious process of pure reason (a pretty futile task, but he attacked it with a vengeance of supposed logic as he did everything else in that treatise). The results are fairly painful to behold (at least to me) and some might even say a waste of time and energy. Thus, when some people want to express pointlessness argument, they sometimes say it is as useless as “arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin”.

Aquinas debated such questions as “is the angel in a place, can he be in several places at once, does an angel moving from A to B pass through the points in between, and he in fact he did inquire whether several angels could be in the same place at once, which of course is a relative of the “dancing on a pin question.”

The earliest reference I could find to that phrase was also the 17th century Cudworth as cited by Susumu above.

Response from Ken Greenwald (Fort Collins, CO - U.S.A.)

Updated 2009-10-12 (build:16) by Andrew Fountain