Every schoolboy knows that medieval theologians were isolated from the real world. They spent hours discussing how many angels could fit on the head of a pin.
Like most things that every schoolboy knows, this detail is not as straightforward as it seems. Benjamin D’Israeli, an English writer of the late eighteenth century, seems to have been the first to pin theologians to angels in this way.
But D’Israeli’s version of the tale was sharper. He had mediaeval theologians, notably Thomas Aquinas, ask how many angels could dance on the point of a needle. A man of the Enlightenment, he suggested that theologians had missed the point. They wove cloudy theories on topics that no-one could ever know anything about. Real thinkers focused on the real, substantial world before their eyes.
Earlier on, Renaissance schoolboys also knew that the theologians had missed the point. But they would have seen the theologians not as too ethereal, but as too earthbound. They pedantically burrowed into their books to pursue questions that had little contact with the central and powerful reality of the Gospel.
That two groups of people should agree that the theologians were detached from reality, but should differ on what reality they had missed, makes one pause. Perhaps the connections between speculation and the reality of our tangible world are more complex than we assume, and certainly much more complex than polemic allows.
The story of the angels suggests that important connections run through the imagination—the way we give stability and focus to the cloudy flux of our world. Thomas Aquinas never worried about needles, but he spelled out in great detail the differences between angels and human beings. This focus on the distinctive qualities of pure spirits did not necessarily blunt theologians’ perspective on the world or on the Gospel. It may have sharpened their intuition that the universe is more mysterious and rich than we can ever understand. It may also have encouraged them to treat the world with respect, and not simply with proprietorial interest.
That would represent a fairly straightforward connection between recondite speculation and reality. But ideas also feed the imagination in less organised ways. They are strings in a network of culture in which no part is ever totally disconnected. The attention paid to angels by medieval theologians certainly inspired Isaac D’Israeli to satirise it with the image of dancing angels. But D’Israeli also