Chapter 055 - The Medium of the Angelic Understanding

The essence of the angels being determined to genus and species, which implies a limited perfection, does not comprehend all within itself. This, indeed, belongs to the Divine Essence alone, which, being absolutely infinite, contains all in Itself; hence God alone knows all by His Essence. The intellect of the angels must, therefore, be completed by some species enabling them to understand things. But these species are not received from the things themselves; they form part of their own nature. For there is a distinction between corporeal and celestial substances, according to which the former are in potentia to their perfections, and acquire them successively; while the latter have these perfections created along with them. Thus in the inferior intellectual substances, i.e. in human souls, the faculties are not complete from the beginning, but developed successively, inasmuch as souls receive their intelligible species by means of external things; while the intellectual faculties of the angels are completed by intelligible species belonging to their nature, by means of which they understand whatever they naturally know. This is likewise evident from their mode of being. For human souls have their natural mode of existence in the body and by the body in which their intellectual perfection is developed; while the angels, subsisting in intelligible being and wholly incorporeal, receive their intellectual perfection by innate species, directly from the Author of Nature.

The higher these angels are in grade, by so much the more universal species do they understand, thus resembling God in intellectual perfection in proportion as they approach that mode by which He understands all by means of One, that is, His own Essence - an intellectual plenitude which is found in intelligent creatures after an inferior and less simple mode. For what God knows by one the inferior intellect knows by several; and multiplied in proportion as the intellect is lower. This is evident likewise among ourselves: for some persons from weakness of intellect cannot seize truth unless it be explained by many particulars; while others of stronger intellect understand many things by means of few.