Evil in Angels and Men: Thomas Aquinas and Melanie Klein

Extract

When I opened this series of Dominican conversations some months ago now, I suggested that angels were worth studying not only in their own right but for the light they throw on the human condition. I want now in this concluding paper to apply this suggestion to our final topic, evil in angels. This paper will, therefore, consist of two main parts: In the first part I want to indicate how St Thomas analyses evil in angels, while in the second part I want to show how this analysis clarifies the root of evil in ourselves.

Turning, then, to our first concern, I want to help you pick a way through the often dense wood of St Thomas’ thinking by as it were blazing those trees which serve as so many markers of the way through. These turn put on inspection and in reflection not to be as numerous as first appears. In fact St Thomas’ thinking on evil in the angels continues to be what we have already seen his thinking on other aspects of the angels to be: the sustained and rigorous pursuit of the implications of certain basic metaphysical principles or axioms. The sheer intellectual energy, brilliance and yet economy, therefore even the spare beauty of this argumentation is brought out by Fr Kenelm Foster’s summary in Appendix 2 on Satan, (in Volume 9 of the Gilby bi-lingual edition of the Summa). I cannot emulate that tour de force here, it would be out of place, and so I shall attempt to supply my own thread through the labyrinth.