A song, sung by Susie Burke, one of New Hampshire’s own folksingers, contains the words, “How many angels dance on the head of a pin?” This morning I woke up thinking about this idea and mumbled something, apparently incoherent, about it to Jim over breakfast. He said that he’d heard of that as a medieval idea, and that perhaps I should “Google” the words.

Dutifully, I went to the computer and looked at the first couple of pages of entries under that category. Surprisingly, there are some 118,000 files. I was amused by all that I read. One person said that it is very apparent that only one angel can dance on the head of a pin due to the fact that only one angel has taken dancing lessons.

Another person with a sense of humor stated the he was sure that four angels can fit on the end of a pin. This he attributes to current OSHA regulations and their concern for the structural support of the pin.

Yet another upended the discussion by saying that what we should be discussing is the needle’s tip, not the head. Still another said that being non-corporeal bodies, an infinitesimal number of angels can fit on the head of a pin.

So where did the discussion get started? Did medievalist theologians really sit around talking about these kinds of questions to which there are no ready answers? Saint Thomas Aquinas is the person most often blamed for bending his mind in this direction. Unless we want to hold a seance, we’ll probably never know to whom we should give credit for the thought.

These days, the words, “How many angels dance on the head of a pin?” are said in jest, as a way to spoof the unknowable or perhaps professors with a pet theory. Personally, being a fancier of “thought,” I enjoy considering the notion. Furthermore, I really appreciate Susie Burke’s song and its other equally unanswerable questions.

Thank goodness for those who can envision worlds that we cannot see. Without them, we would have no space explorers, no microbiologists, and no Norad tracking for Santa. We would be stuck in readily known and understood phenomena and it would be a much more boring world.

Patricia Cummings

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 1:53 pm and is filed under , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.