The "how many angels?" question

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The question how many angels can dance on the point of a needle? has become proverbial for futile debates. It has also been at times used as a trite dismissal: of medieval angelology in particular, of scholasticism in general, and of particular figures such as Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas.^[1]

It is still a matter of discussion whether this precise topic has a historical foundation, in actual writing or disputation from the European Middle Ages. One theory is that it is an early modern fabrication^[2], used to discredit scholastic philosophy at a time when it still played a significant role in university education. James Franklin has raised the scholarly issue, and mentions that there is a seventeenth century reference in William Chillingworth.^[3] This is earlier than a reference in the 1678 The True Intellectual System Of The Universe by Ralph Cudworth. The modern currency in English (usually a needle, rather than a pin) may date back to Isaac D'Israeli.

Other possibilities are that it is a surviving parody or self-parody, or debating training topic. But George MacDonald Ross^[4] identifies a close parallel in a fourteenth century mystical text.

[edit] References

T. Koetsier and L. Bergmans (editors), Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, Ch.13 by Edith Sylla (review)
Philip Howard (1983), Words Fail Me, summary of correspondence in The Times on the matter

[edit] Notes

^ The Catholic Encyclopedia states [1]: St. Thomas does not discuss the question "How many angels can dance on the point of a needle?" He reminds us that we must not think of angels as if they were corporeal, and that, for an angel, it makes no difference whether the sphere of his activity be the point of a needle or a continent (Q. lii, a.2).
^ More precisely, in play in the seventeenth century, and discussed at various levels by the Cambridge Platonists Cudworth and Henry More, and Leibniz.
^ [2]
^ [3]