Abstract

Human beings quite often choose bad actions because of cognitive deficits: they fail to understand what they ought to do. But what about angels? They are, by definition, perfect in their cognition. How can they choose bad actions or even commit sins? At first sight, this problem seems to be of mere theological significance, for it is only in the context of Christian theology that angels are supposed to exist. However, a closer look reveals that the problem runs deeper, as Tobias Hoffmann makes clear in his highly original study. Medieval authors used examples of angelic sinning as "test cases for the robustness of their theories of free will". They sought to explain the voluntary production of bad actions by...