THE INDIVIDUATION OF ANGELS FROM BONAVENTURE TO DUNS SCOTUS Giorgio Pini The individuation of angels constitutes a good example of how an appar- ently obscure question concerning a specific aspect of Christian theology provided later medieval thinkers with the opportunity to explore some fundamental issues in metaphysics. As it happens, some of the best and most influential treatments of individuation were developed in the later Middle Ages in order to establish what accounts for an angel’s individu- ality and whether there can be several angels in the same species. This is admittedly surprising, for the individuality of the objects of our every- day experience seems to be a more pressing metaphysical problem than the individuality of beings that, as medieval thinkers readily admitted, lie beyond the limits of what we can currently experience. There may be two explanations for the prominence of treatments of angelic individuation. First, a medieval theologian would have encountered his first clear oppor- tunity to discuss the problem of individuation when commenting on the treatise on angels in Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Book II, distinction 3), which had become the standard theology textbook since the first half of the thirteenth century.1 Second, angels provided medieval thinkers with a difficult test case for their theories of individuation. The debate over the individuation of angels entered its most dramatic phase with Thomas Aquinas. It is not an exaggeration to say that later medieval discussions on this topic were largely debates over Aquinas’s position. In the course of those discussions, some fundamental notions of This paper was written during my stay at the De Wulf-Mansion Center of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2008/2009, which was made possible by a Faculty Fellowship granted by Fordham University and a Visiting Fellowship of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. I am grateful to my colleagues at both institutions, and in particular to Russell Friedman for his help and generous support of my research. I also wish to thank Tobias Hoffmann for his many suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to David Schwartzberg and espe- cially to Thérèse Cory for her linguistic revision and for calling my attention to several obscurities and problems contained in a previous version of this paper. 1 Peter Lombard, Sententiae in IV libris distinctae 2.3.1 (Grottaferrata, Rome: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae Ad Claras Aquas, 1971–1981), 1:341–42. 80 giorgio pini Western metaphysics (including the notions of form, essence, and poten- tiality/possibility) were closely scrutinized. Since a key question in that debate was whether God could create several angels in the same species, the issue of God’s freedom and omnipotence with respect to His creatures was also being considered from a new perspective in the background. In this paper, I focus on the main positions on the individuation of angels developed between ca. 1250 and 1300. In those years, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Richard of Middleton, Henry of Ghent, Giles of Rome, and John Duns Scotus put forward the main theories that would be dis- cussed in the later Middle Ages and afterwards. 1. The Common Framework and Bonaventure’s Position Medieval discussions on the individuation of angels focused on the issue of synchronic individuation, i.e., what accounts for a certain thing’s being an individual distinct from other individuals, as opposed to diachronic individuation, i.e., what accounts for a certain thing’s remaining the same individual over time. Since at least the middle of the thirteenth century, there was some consensus about the terms of the debate.2 The authors we will consider agreed on three important points. First, they agreed that created things belong to natural kinds (i.e., spe- cies) and that, more controversially, several things belong to the same natural kind because they share a common essence.3 Second, they agreed on the general definition of what it is to be an individual: to be an individual is to be “undivided in itself.”4 In order to understand this formula, we should distinguish between two kinds of divi- sion and, correspondingly, two kinds of parts. First, something may be divided into “integral parts,” i.e., parts that do not exemplify the whole of which they are parts. For example, Socrates can be divided into his soul and his body, and in turn his body can be divided into a head, two 2 On the problem of individuation in the Middle Ages in general, see Peter King, “The Problem of Individuation in the Middle Ages,” Theoria 66 (2000): 159–84. See also the articles collected in the volume Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation 1150–1650, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 3 An exception we shall consider is Richard of Middleton. On this point in general, see Robert Pasnau and Christopher Shields, The Philosophy of Aquinas (Boulder, Colo.: West- view Press, 2004), 53–54. 4 See, for example, John Duns Scotus, Lectura 2.3.1.2 n. 42, Editio Vaticana 18:241; Ordi- natio 2.3.1.1 n. 48, Editio Vaticana 7:413. See also the texts cited below at note 6..