ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the relevance of angels to a neo-Aristotelian philosophy of nature. Aristotle himself was of course unaware of the Judeo-Christian conception of angelic beings. Patristic authors both east and west held to a variety of ontologies of the angelic, and at that time there were few sustained attempts to integrate Christian angelology with a specifically Aristotelian cosmology. That project began in earnest within Western theology during the thirteenth century, with the rediscovery in the west of Aristotle’s wider corpus. This integration process helped to spur important new reflections on such topics as the nature of bodies, physical agency, individuation, and the scope of hylomorphism. After reviewing some significant and partly divergent results of those reflections in the works of key Scholastics (including Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus), I consider what insights neo-Aristotelians today can still glean from engaging with these mediaeval angelologies (whether or not they accept the reality of angels).
