A. The Opinions of Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent

489. Here the statement is made that an angel can move in an instant, not indeed of continuous time but of discrete time; for the proof see Thomas.ST la q.53 a.3 ad 3: “Now the time of motion of an angel can be non-continuous, and thus an angel can be in one place at one instant and in another place at another instant, without any time existing in between. But if the time of motion of angel is continuous, the angel goes through an infinity of places during the whole time preceding the ultimate ‘now’.” Ibid. in corp.: “And thus it is clear that to rest for a whole time in something, as in a whiteness, is to be in that something at any instant of the time; hence it is not possible for something to rest for the whole preceding time in one term and afterwards, in the last instant of the time, to be in another term... But in the local motion of an angel there is no term of any other continuous motion.; hence it is impossible to say that he is for the whole time in some place and is, in the ultimate ‘now’, in some other place, but one must assign an ultimate ‘now’ in which he was in the preceding place.” ³⁹

490. Another doctor speaks about this time; see Henry.Quodlibet 13 q.7: “And the time measuring these sudden changes of an angel is a discrete quantity., but its parts have no permanence but exist only in passing through, and the individual parts coexist with the individual instants of our time; nor do these parts have any continuity among themselves, because between any two instants and the aforesaid changes [of the angel] one must posit a stopping of the angel at the moment at which the preceding change ends, where the angel does not change but rests through some interval and part of our time.” ⁴⁰