Chapter Nine - Angels, Sex, and the Body

CHAPTER NINE

Angels, Sex, and the Body

AT SOME POINT in every massive theological system, you have to deal with the weird stuff.

Thomas Aquinas didn’t avoid it. He ran straight at it.

He wasn’t just interested in proving God existed or mapping out the soul. He wanted to explain the entire metaphysical ecosystem, top to bottom. That meant dealing with creatures nobody could see, rules nobody could test, and questions that sounded like dorm-room stoner debates, but were taken completely seriously by the medieval Church.

What are angels made of?
Do resurrected bodies still have digestive systems?
Is sex always a problem?
What kind of poop, if any, happens in heaven?

Yes, really.

Aquinas didn’t treat angels like fairy tales or Christmas decorations. To him, they were real, structured, and wildly important.

And they weren’t cute.

They were pure intellect: no bodies, no senses, no gender. Each angel was its own kind of being. Not just a different personality. A different nature. They weren’t made of matter. They were made of will and knowledge. Basically, walking minds.

They didn’t move through space. They moved through hierarchy.

Angels didn’t learn gradually like we do. They got their full knowledge instantly at the moment of creation. They didn’t eat, sleep, or change. And they didn’t “appear” in the world unless they were assigned to intervene, which they could do by manipulating matter, never by inhabiting it.

Aquinas mapped out nine orders of them, ranked by closeness to God. Seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, and a whole metaphysical org chart. He took it seriously because he believed reality was layered, and if angels existed, they had to fit the system.

No chaos or fluff, just structure.

Aquinas didn’t hate the body, but he also didn’t trust it.

To him, the body was good, created by God, and designed for function, but also vulnerable. It could distract. It could tempt. It could override the soul’s judgment. And because of that, it had to be disciplined.

That’s why Aquinas viewed celibacy as a kind of superpower. Not because sex was evil, but because not having sex was proof that your soul was in charge.

He believed sex was only good within marriage, for procreation. Pleasure wasn’t the purpose. It was a natural side effect. Seeking it for its own sake twisted the act. That didn’t make sex bad. It made it dangerous.

But Thomas wasn’t a prude. He wasn’t scandalized by anatomy or desire. He just wanted a world where the higher powers ruled the lower ones. Reason over appetite. Will over instinct. Soul over body.

And that brings us to the big question.

Aquinas believed in bodily resurrection. Not just some ghostly afterlife. Actual bodies. Reunited with their actual souls. Glorified, perfected, and incorruptible.

But still functional.

He argued that resurrected bodies would have organs, not because they needed to eat or digest, but because God created humans as embodied beings. You don’t lose your humanity in heaven. You become the version of it you were always meant to be.

So yes, he thought resurrected bodies would technically still have intestines.

But no, they wouldn’t be used.

His exact argument was that digestion would happen perfectly and waste would be reabsorbed into the body with no need for elimination.

So, resurrected bodies still have butts. They just don’t need them.

Welcome to scholasticism.

This chapter isn’t just for laughs.

It shows how seriously Aquinas took the system. He didn’t handwave or skip anything. If the doctrine said something was real, then it had to make sense. It had to fit. Even if it meant mapping out angel species or explaining divine digestion.

To him, God didn’t create chaos.

So theology shouldn’t sound like it.