B. Against the Conclusion of the Opinion

204. Argument against the conclusion of this opinion [n.198]:

First thus: that he who posits this conclusion contradicts himself, because in the question ‘whether God is everywhere’ [Aquinas SG 3.68] he proves that God is everywhere through the fact that, according to the Philosopher Physics 7.2.243a3-4, ‘the mover is together with the moved’, and God is the first efficient cause and therefore able to move every movable; and from this he concludes that God is in everything and present to everything. I ask what he means hereby to conclude. Either that God is present, that is, is ‘mover’, and then there is a begging of the question because the premises and the conclusion are the same [sc. ‘because God moves everything, therefore he is present by motion to everything’]; and is nothing to the purpose, because he intends there to infer the immensity of God from the presence of God to everything. Or he means to infer the presence that belongs to God insofar as he is immense, and in that case from God’s presence anywhere is inferred - according to him - the presence that pertains to the divine immensity (which belongs to God insofar as he is God), such that God will as he is immense naturally be present before he is as operating present; and this is inferred from the fact that he is present by operation, the way the prior is inferred from the posterior [sc. as cause is inferred from effect, or ‘God is somewhere by operation, therefore he is first there by essence’]. Therefore by likeness as to the issue at hand, an angel will naturally be present in some place by essence before he is present there by his operation [sc. contrary to the opinion in question here, which says an angel is only present in place by operation and not first by essence].

205. A confirmation of this reason [n.204] is that it seems less true of God that he must by his essence be present in the place where he operates than of an angel, because what is of unlimited power seems able to act on a thing however distant it is, but what is of determinate and limited power requires a determinate nearness to what it acts on so that it may act on it; for there is no agent of limited and determinate power whose action cannot be impeded by too much distance from what is acted on, and so it seems more necessary to posit that an angel is present so as to act [sc. than that God is].

206. Another confirmation is that if there is any action from an angel on a body, how is this action disposed to the power from which it proceeds? Mediately or immediately? If it is disposed immediately to the power from which it proceeds, then the angel is in such body or next to it immediately. If it is mediately disposed, then it is from the power through some medium, and there will be the same question about this medium.

And then one will have to stop at the fact that what is first from such power is immediate to such power (and consequently to him whose power it is), and thus that it will be present in that place.

207. Further and second, there follows [sc. from this opinion, n.198] that an angel may sometimes (nay frequently) be nowhere; for an angel does nothing in the empyrean heaven (because it is neither changeable nor movable, [Aquinas Sentences 2 d.2 q.2 a.2]), so he is never in the empyrean heaven. But he is there most of all.

208. Again, if an angel passes from heaven to earth, he can act on the extreme places while doing nothing in any of the intervening places - because there can be an angel who is not the mover of any intermediate sphere; so he is then [sc. in his passing] neither in heaven, nor on earth, nor in between.

209. Further: for an angel is not there first where he first operates. For the whole of something is first proportioned to the power of an angel, such that he moves the whole of it first (and proportioned such that, according to the Philosopher On the Heavens 2.12.293a9-10 [or rather in the Arabic version], if one star were added, the angel would move it painfully and laboriously), and yet he is not first in the whole heaven;     therefore etc     . [sc. an angel’s place is not just where he operates].

210. And if you say that he first moves some one part [Aquinas ST Ia q.52 a.2] and that part is where he is, and by the motion of that part he moves another part (as by pushing or pulling) - against this:

Although the Philosopher [Averroes On the Heavens 2 com.13] supposes the rustic he imagines to have his head and feet at the poles and his arms stretched or extended to East and West - yet in truth, if the first heaven is posited as movable and not resting, no point in the heaven is more East than another but each point is East successively. Also no point there is in truth more capable of motion than another - and so there is no right or left in the heaven from the nature of the thing as there is in an animal (for the right part in an animal is more capable of the virtue of the soul than the left part). So in no part of the heaven can an angel be placed first from the fact that he first moves that part.

211. There is also a confirmation of this, in that if in some part there were an angel resting as it were but moved per accidens (like a sailor in a ship), such that he was always being carried around by the motion, it would seem unacceptable to attribute such motion to the angel moving the sphere. Nor even can this angel be posited as per se resting and that next to him there is part after part of the heaven as it were flowing by, and that he is always moving first the part of it more present to him; for it is impossible to assign where the angel is resting, since he is continually moving the part present to him -and to exist in something insofar as it is moved is not to be resting in it, as it seems.

212. Further, that which for an angel is the reason for his existing or being in a place is in him formally - otherwise an angel would never be formally in a place; but a transitive operation on a body is not formally in him;     therefore etc     .

213. Further, the action is commensurately in a place, per accidens; therefore if the angel were by this in a place (and in no other way), he would be there commensurately.

214. Further, Damascene - on whom they most of all rely [n.199] - is not in their favor:

Both because all the authorities quoted from him commonly always combine operating with being - and this would be superfluous unless ‘an angel’s being in place’ were formally different from ‘an angel’s operating in a place’ (for Damascene says in the first authority that ‘he operates where he is’, in the second he says that an angel ‘is said to be in a place because of his being intelligibly there and operating there’, and in the third that angels ‘are intellectually present and operate where they are at least commanded to be’ [n.199]).

215. Likewise, the same Damascene says in ch.20 that “the heaven is the container of the forms of visible and invisible creatures, and below it are included the intellectual virtues of angels.” In this way then (according to him), the angels are now in the heaven, because they are included ‘below the heaven’. But they would not be thus included at the beginning of their creation, because Damascene himself in ch.17 seems to agree with Gregory the Theologian that they were made before the corporeal creature was; so they were not then in place as they are now, because now they are contained in place but then they were not; and yet then they were able to understand creatures in place, according to Augustine Literal Commentary on Genesis 4.32 n.39, because they had morning knowledge before they had evening knowledge, and they were able to understand the object ‘on the part of the object’ under the same idea under which they now understand it. Therefore Damascene does not posit that they are present to the object by intellection alone.