Why Can’t Angels See Our Future? Aquinas’s View of the Relation between Continuous and Discrete Time

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I think this is a very well-written and researched article. It is also very interesting. I look forward to it being published. Your notes seem to change font. Are there any notable objections to your position that you could reference? You have judicious citations of Aquinas, and while you do cite contemporary scholarship, you could perhaps interact with more of it (although I don't know how much modern scholarship there is on Thomistic angelology). A little long, but not unprecedented for online journals.

Author Response

Thank you! I appreciate the kind words. 

To the best of my knowledge there is, as you surmised, relatively little scholarship on Thomistic angelology in general, and almost none on the particular problem I'm addressing. That's why, as you noted, I don't interact much with the secondary literature in this essay. And as far as I know the position I'm defending is a new one, so I don't think there are yet any objections specifically against that position (though of course there are broader objections against the coherence of Aquinas's view of angelic discrete time more generally, which I tried to mention when relevant). I added a few phrases to try to make this clearer.

Thanks for pointing out the font issue! I think that may have been a typesetting problem.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a superior piece of research on a difficult topic. The author demonstrates complete familiarity with the source material and subsequent debates. I would raise to questions for further consideration without necessarily requiring any modification of the paper.

The author uses the dominant visual metaphor for angelic knowing: angels "see." Yet angels do not see, they understand and judge. Would the arguments, particularly for the exotic model, still hold if the language of understanding was used rather than seeing?

There is use in the paper of the terminology of simultaneity. How would this discussion stand up in a post-Einsteinian universe where suimultaneity is problematised? 

I would also like to see something similarly written on the experience of the blessed in heaven whose existence is analogous to the aeveternity of the angels, prior to the resurrection of the body. 

Final point, the author notes that angelic acts involve a movement from act to act, not potency to act. Such acts also form the basis on the psychological analogy for the trinitarian processions. Might this connection be fruitful?

Author Response

Thank you very much for your kind words, and your thoughtful questions!

• Regarding the metaphor of "seeing": you're certainly quite right that, for Aquinas, angels have no senses, and that they only perform simple intellectual acts that somehow fill the roles of both "understanding" and "judgment." I accordingly added a parenthetical sentence on p. 3 to clarify that when I attribute "seeing" to an angel, it's shorthand for the judgment by which they know an existing thing "in itself" precisely as existing. — I don't think, though, that my argument for the "exotic model" would be affected by eliminating this shorthand. To say, on the "exotic model," that an angel "sees" an extended physical time as a whole is simply to say that an extended physical time is (a) simultaneously present to the angel and (b) judged to exist by a single angelic act.
• I wish I were better versed in general relativity theory! I don't think relativity impacts my own argument, since what it problematizes is simultaneity between physical objects that allegedly share a "now," whereas I'm concerned with a broader sense of simultaneity between a physical continuous "now" and an angelic discrete "now." I did add a footnote, however, to flag the issue and to point to an article that confronts that question. 
• In Aquinas's view, the separated souls of the blessed do not have natural knowledge of physical contingent events at all. So the issue of synchronizing our continuous time with the discrete moments measuring their natural successive acts doesn't apply to them. (Aquinas grants that the separated souls might have supernatural knowledge of such things through the beatific vision, but he is uncertain even about that.) See ST I.89.8. — It's a great point to raise, though, and I added a footnote to this effect.
• In re movement "from act to act," I understand why that sounds like the theory of Trinitarian processions, but I think it's a different idea. In the Trinity, the point is that there's no passive potency to receive the eternal, successionless act. But in the angels, the point is rather that each successive angelic act is fully-complete, with no gradual actualization needed. So in the angelic case, "act to act" denotes temporal succession, which is absent in the Trinitarian case.

Thank you again! Those are all really interesting points, and I wish I could do them more justice.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The article presented for review is an example of top-quality scholarship. The research problem is concisely and precisely formulated in the title already, and the article itself, although based on Aquinas' works, offers an original solution to it. Furthermore, it should be strongly emphasised that both the research problem addressed in the paper and its solution are relevant to the study of scholastic thought from both philosophical and theological point of view. The research on the possibility of angelic prescience has therefore been carried out in an interdisciplinary context, which adds even greater value to the study itself. The text itself is heavily dense but has been well divided into paragraphs and sub-paragraphs, facilitating comprehension and assimilation of complex reasoning. Consequently, the paper constitutes simultaneously a compilation of critically selected quotations from Aquinas on the reference of angels to time and, at the same time, their possible pre-knowledge. It all adds to the value of this study. It is worth mentioning that the purely theoretical considerations are enriched by examples, which provide both applications of the theory and interesting thought experiments in themselves.

Admittedly, the article is almost completely devoid of a critique of Aquinas' approach itself, sets it rather loosely in the broader context of scholastic thought and almost completely ignores secondary literature. However, these shortcomings are fully justified because the study itself focuses on the solution of one very precise problem, which inevitably requires a certain narrowing of the field of research, which has been applied here in a very skilful and fully legitimate manner.

It is with great satisfaction that I conclude that this article definitely makes an important contribution to the development of scholarship and certainly is suitable for publication in its present form. Finally, I would like to compliment the Author on drafting an excellent paper.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your kind words!