Who Are The Angels (The Intelligence of The Angels)
Intelligence Angels
There is no good reason for thinking that the angels have forever present to their minds everything that falls within the range of their knowledge, nor do they represent to themselves an object as existent, until it actually exists. There is another great difference between the images which complete the intellectual faculty of the angels and dispose it for the act of natural knowledge, and those whereby the human mind is rendered similarly apt.
The angels approach much nearer than we to the simplicity and spirituality of the divine being, and hence as God knows all things and comprehends all things through His own essence, as through a perfect, all-embracing mirror, so the angelic mind is endowed with images — species the schoolmen call them — of far greater range than our, and ever broader in their scope and more universal, as angel rises above angel in glory, and draws nearer and nearer to the source of all being, and the fountain-head from which all knowledge flows.
The universla ideas of the blessed spirits are not, like ours, mere shadowy outlines of their objects, more and more bereft of content as they become more and more universal, but on the contrary, the more universal ideas are richer in content, and belong in consequence to the loftier intelligences. Note — universal ideas in the strict sense are those which represent indifferently any one of a multitude of individuals.
Intelligence Angels
Through the abstractive power of the mind, the object represented has been stripped of its individuating characteristics, and thus the mental image may serve equally well as a representation of any similar object. But the universal ideas of the angels are of a totally different kind. They are universal not through lack, but through abundance of content. Such a universal idea would be, for instance, the concept of this or that earthly kingdom, of which some particular angel might be the appointed guardian.
Not only would the angel have full knowledge of the kingdom as a whole, but every detail affecting its physical characteristics as well as its people would be clearly manifest to him. The nearer the angels approach the unspeakable perfection of their Maker, whose divine essence is like a boundless mirror reflecting at once all existing as well as all possible being, the more they recede from a multiplicity of ideas, and the more they resemble Him in the unity and simplicity of their knowledge.
Next — The Angelic Will. An Invisible World Existence of the Angels What the Angels Are The Angelic Mind The Angelic Will The Trial of the Angels The Speech of Angels Presence in Space - Activity The Flight of Angels The Angels and Time The Occupations of the Angels The Angelic Hierarchy Are All the Angels of One Species The Nine Choirs 18a.
But here is where the "middle term" enters: Thus the angel knows itself, its own essence, completely; 1 and since will is proportioned to intellect, the angel's volition and "movement" is characterized by completely spontaneous self-determination on the basis of its knowledge. The chip storing the Read-Only Memory in a computer contains the immutable routines controlling input and output for the computer.
It determines the basic functions of a computer, and cannot be modified in its essential functions by programs running in the computer. In a sense, it is the innate, predetermined program for the computer as a whole. The Random-Access Memory of a computer opens up the possibility of receiving an influx of data and images from programs and input devices; thus the maximum capacities of a computer can to a great extent be utilized only if maximal megabytes of RAM, proportional to hardware and operating-system capabilities, have been installed in that computer.
THE ANGELS’ MIND
Angels, according to Aquinas, possess a negative or privative potency which is inversely proportional to their perfection. The higher angels have maximum act and minimum potentiality, while the inferior angels have proportionally "less act, more potency.
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The inferior angels, because of the greater relative deprivation of actuality in their form, need to be continually equalized with their superiors through the proportionally greater number of infused species they receive from their comrades and God Himself. Hard Drives and Intellectual Memory: A distinction is made in contemporary computers between "main memory" or storage capacity, and the volatile memory in RAM. When "memory" is spoken of without further qualification with reference to computers, RAM is usually meant.
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When the "memory" of intellectual beings is referred to without further qualification, something like "storage capacity" is usually meant. Among intellectual beings, humans have both sense memory and intellectual memory.
Whatever the merits of this analogy, angels, according to Aquinas, being purely spiritual creatures, have only intellectual memory, not sense memory. A comparison with Leibniz's monads, which mirror all things in an intrinsic fashion, is probably in order here. In other words, images of all things, including sense objects, are stored in an angel's intellectual memory; and these images can be accessed and applied whenever needed. The Operating System and the Reception of Information: Granted that RAM gives a computer the capacity to receive information, how does the data actually come to be accessed?
The answer to this question in the case of computers is obviously the operating system; a computer must have an operating system such as DOS or OS2 or Unix or Windows NT to begin receiving data and commands.
The Angelic Nature and its Operation
Human beings, because of their corporeality and discursive type of rationality, must process information sequentially with what Aristotle called the "possible intellect. Like a computer shipped with an operating system fully installed, angels are fully equipped at their creation with innate and habitual intelligible species. Software and Habitually Acquired Species: In a computer, information, techniques and procedures not contained in ROM and not included with the operating system, are supplied by supplementary software.
According to Aquinas, angels continually and unendingly receive habitual impressed species directly from God as a supplement to the connatural knowledge which they have through their own essence. There are some limitations to their knowledge of other intellective beings, however. Something like a "right to privacy" is operative amid the angelic hierarchies, since angels cannot have access to the thoughts of other angels, unless the other angels explicitly will that they have such access.
These restrictions apply also to angelic interrelationships with human beings: Later versions of software are usually able to do all the things that earlier versions of the same software could do. So also, the higher angels contain more universal and fewer species than the lower; these species contain in a simpler way everything that is contained in the species of subordinate orders, thus increasing the scope of comprehension and the parameters of influence of the higher orders.
If I am presently working on a particular task, this is designated the "foreground" task, while the other operations are carried out in the "background. In one simple act, they know all the variety of particular things, 14 although they can bring this or that object into the "foreground" by turning their attention to it. They are also continually combining the knowledge of things as they exist in God cognitio matutina with the knowledge of things according to their own proper existence cognitio vespertina. Individual computers or local network nodes often come into contact via modems with their counterparts through a process called "handshaking.