Angels on Pinheads and Needles’ Points (original) (raw)

THAT scholastic philosophers engaged in speculations about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin has long been exposed as a myth invented in the seventeenth century. William Chillingworth is usually identified as the originator of this canard on account of his claim, in The Religion of Protestants (1638), that medieval Catholic theologians routinely occupied themselves with such trivial issues as ‘Whether a Million of Angels may not sit upon a needles point?’ 1 However, there is a hitherto unnoticed seventeenth-century reference to angels and points of needles that is significant not only because it is earlier than Chillingworth’s, but also because it adds a new dimension to this old chestnut, offering a key insight into why the specific image of the point of a needle became part of this popular way of caricaturing scholastic disputations.

Previous detective work on this question, much of it helpfully summarized by George MacDonald Ross and Edith Sylla, has failed to uncover a single medieval source that spoke about angels dancing on the head of a pin (or the point of a needle). 2 The closest discussion of this issue by a prominent scholastic comes in one of Aquinas’s articles on angels which enquires ‘Whether several angels can be in the same place at the same time?’ 3 The force of the question is to do with whether pure intelligences, which lack materiality, can be co-located in space. Subsequently, an anonymous fourteenth-century mystical work introduces not a pin, but a needle, and makes reference to the incorporeality of souls rather than angels: ‘a thousand souls in heaven sitting on the point of a needle’ ( tûzent sêlen sitzent in dem himel ûf einer nâdelspitze ). 4 The relative obscurity of this work, combined with the fact that it falls within the genre of mystical writing rather than scholastic disputation, make it an unlikely source for early modern English critics of scholasticism.

My suggestion is that the reason an English writer first introduced the ‘needle’s point’ into a critique of medieval angelology is that it makes for a clever pun on ‘needless point’. The pointlessness of medieval philosophy, along with its deviation from biblical doctrine, is what lies behind what I believe to be the first reference to angels and the points of needles, which appears in an expository work by the English divine, William Sclater (1575–1626). Commenting in 1619 on medieval papists’ predilection for ‘doting about curious questions’, he adduces the specific example of their enquiries about angels:

… they fell to Disputations about the time of their Creation; whether it were before, or with the visible World; whether on the first day, or when they were created. Touching their Orders, what, and how many they were, their number, whether more fell or stood: whether they did occupie a place; and so, whether many might be in one place at one time; and how many might sit on a Needles point; and six hundred such like needlesse points. 5

The examples cited by Sclater are all genuine topics of scholastic disputation except the last, which seems to have been introduced solely for its rhetorical value as a clever pun. Chillingworth, who shared Sclater’s contempt for the obscurity and vanity of scholastic philosophy, did not labour the pun in his subsequent 1638 reference. But he probably did not need to. Given that ‘needles’ appears in the Saxon genitive form (that is, without the now familiar possessive apostrophe) and that ‘needles’ was an acceptable seventeenth-century spelling of ‘needless’, astute readers would have been alert to the paragram. There were also subsequent authors who made the pun obvious. In a sermon on Christian charity, preached on 18 March 1649, Edward Willan observed: ‘When the question was asked, how many Angels might stand upon a needles point at once? The Answer was, that it was but a needlesse point to stand upon. Let not us stand upon such needlesse points of curiosity, to the breach of Christian Charity.’ 6 This suggests that in the first half of the seventeenth century, the punning potential of the ‘needle’s point’ was well established.

The image of sitting (or standing) on a needle’s point has its own uncomfortable mental associations. But the modern form of the myth has angels dancing , and this is also an innovation of the seventeenth century. The conceit of angels dancing on a needle’s point is usually attributed to Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, who in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) refers to those who hold that ‘ Thousands of these Incorporeal Substances, or Spirits, might Dance together at once upon a Needles Point. ’ 7 Again, though, Cudworth was not the first to have made the angels dance. Almost twenty years before, in 1659, another of the Cambridge Platonists, Henry More, had condemned ‘the ridiculous fancies of the Schools’ who deny extension to spirits, ‘and then dispute how many of them booted and spur’d may dance on a needles point at once.’ 8 Yet another associate of the Platonists, Joseph Glanvill, also used this allusion: ‘He that said, a thousand [angels] might dance on the point of a Needle , spake but grossly; and we may as well suppose them to have wings , as a proper Ubi .’ 9

It is worth noting that the Cambridge Platonists’ motivations in relation to this issue differ from those of Sclater, Chillingworth, and Willan. The latter were focused primarily on the pointlessness of scholastic disputation in general, and the specific example of angels standing on needle’s points was but one example of this. The Platonists, however, were directly engaged with the issues raised by the question. For them, it was not so much that this question about angels was pointless, but that the scholastic formulation was premised upon a mistaken view about the nature of spiritual beings. Unlike Aquinas (and Descartes, for that matter), they held that spiritual substance could be extended in space. Henry More thus insisted that substances must be present where they act, and that spirits must accord with locations in space. He also believed that space was an example of a non-material and infinite extended substance and, more radically, that God was an infinite being who was extended in space. These were not trivial or pointless issues, and form part of the background of Isaac Newton’s later controversies with Leibniz over the nature of space and the omnipresence of God. The Cambridge Platonists, in short, were disinclined to stress the play on words of the ‘needless point’ since they were committed to the view that the location of spiritual beings was, in fact, a philosophical issue of fundamental importance.

The direction in which the Platonists moved the discussion tended to mask the play on words of the original formulation, and subsequently the needle’s point became ‘the point of a needle’. Thus, when in the early nineteenth century Isaac D’Israeli made his well known reference to the saying in Curiosities of Literature he expressed it this way: ‘The reader desirous of being merry with Aquinas’s angels may find them in Martinus Scriblerus, in Ch. VII who inquires … How many angels can dance on the point of a very fine needle, without jostling one another?’ 10 The eighteenth century also saw the beginning of a substitution of ‘pin’ for ‘needle’. 11 This more common form of the claim, which has medieval theologians debating how many angels many dance on the head of a pin , has also served to diminish the force of the original pun, and further obscures one likely reason that this common mischaracterization of scholastic philosophy took the particular form that it did.

1 William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants (London, 1638), Sig. §§§3r.

2 George MacDonald Ross, ‘Angels’ Philosophy , lx (1985), 495–511. Edith Sylla, ‘Swester Katrei and Gregory of Rimini’, in Teun Koetsier and Luc Bergmans (eds), Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005), 249–71.

3 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 1a. 52, 3.

4 Franz Pfeiffer (ed.), Deutsche Mystiker (Aalen: Scientia, 1962), II, 474.

5 William Sclater, An exposition with notes vpon the first Epistle to the Thessalonians (London, 1619), 385.

6 Edward Willan, Six Sermons (London, 1651), 17.

7 Ralph Cudworth, True Intellectual System of the Universe (London, 1678), 776, cf. 778.

8 Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (London, 1659), 341.

9 Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing (London, 1661), 100.

10 Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature , 10th edn (London: Edward Moxon, 1838), 23. While Aquinas’s questions on angels can be found in Martinus Scriblerus, there is no reference to dancing on the point of a needle.

11 The earliest substitution of pin for needle that I have found comes in Bartholomew Williams, Congratulatio Roffensis (Dublin, 1701), 18.

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