FOURTH ARTICLE: THE ANGELS ARE PURE SPIRITS WITHOUT A BODY QUESTION 50, A. 1

The Scriptures never speak of the body of an angel, and frequently call the angels spirits. When spirit is predicated of intellectual creatures, it is used in opposition to body.[1196]

The Fourth Lateran Council declared: "At the same time in the beginning God established from nothing both creatures, the spiritual and corporeal, that is, the angelic and the mundane, and finally the human creature as a common creature constituted from spirit and body."[1197]

In this definition is clearly defined: 1. the existence of the angels; 2. their real distinction from corporeal creatures and from man, who is both spiritual and corporeal. This is equivalent to stating that the angels are incorporeal. This, however, is not properly defined but merely declared; what the Council was expressly defining was the unity of the first principle against the Manichaeans.

After the Fourth Lateran Council it was considered temerarious to attribute to the angels a body however subtle, and after the twelfth century theologians commonly taught that the angels were absolutely incorporeal.

St. Thomas shows that the perfection of the universe requires intellectual creatures, who are able to know God. "Since intellection is not an act of the body nor of any corporeal power, the union of a body is not part of the nature of the intellectual substance as such; it is an addition,....because it is imperfect, inasmuch as the object (of the corporeal being) is the lowest intelligible of sensible things. In any genus where something imperfect is found, it is fitting that the corresponding perfection in that genus pre-exist."[1198] Otherwise creation would be truncated and, as it were, mutilated.

As Cajetan points out, a more perfect creature can always be produced, but it is reasonable to infer that the perfection of the universe requires a purely intellectual creature as one genus of being.