Trinity College Theological School Research Seminar

Angels and Corporations

Scott Kirkland, Stockdale Senior Lecturer in Ethics, Trinity College Theological School

Corporations dominate our forms of collective life. From the Crown to Apple, we are surrounded by a series of bodies, persons, who endure our deaths, who have attained to legal immortality. Where does this idea come from? This paper will explore the 13th century Christian entanglement with Averroist notions of time and the development of the category of the aevum. While Averroist doctrine was eventually condemned, scholastic theologians beginning with Thomas Aquinas develop the notion of the aevum in response to the Averroist doctrine of the eternity of the world. The time of the aevum is a stimulus for the development of medieval angelology, and, crucially, for jurists, of the possibility of thinking a body that endures sempiternally. Between the transitoriness of creaturely life and the eternity of the divine life emerges a mode of thinking about endurance without death that provisions jurists with the possibility of thinking the corporation. So we will ask: are we, after all, surrounded by a great chorus of secular angels? And, following Dante, is this in fact hell?

Event details

• Date: Wednesday, 2 April
• Time: 2:00 pm–3:00 pm AEDT
• Attendance: in-person and online
• Venue: Trinity College Theological School

RSVP

RSVP to Scott Kirkland at theologyevents@trinity.edu.au