Angel

Plato does not speak of angels in the Judaeo-Christian sense, but he provides the tradition the conceptual space that angels will later occupy. In the Symposium, Diotima teaches Socrates that between the divine and the mortal there is a whole order of beings, daimones, who span the chasm between the two realms. They are neither gods nor men but intermediate powers, "many and diverse," through whom the communion between heaven and earth is maintained. It is by means of such beings that the gods communicate their commands and men offer their prayers; the two orders could not otherwise touch.

These intermediate spirits are necessary because being is hierarchical. The Forms are purely intelligible and eternal; sensible bodies are mutable and perishable; between the two there must be natures that share in both. In the Timaeus and Laws X, Plato treats the celestial bodies as ensouled, moved by rational souls that carry out the ordering work of the divine craftsman. On this account the heavens provide visible evidence of invisible intelligences, and the cosmos is populated at its extremes and throughout its intermediate ranges.

Plato's account of daemons connects, on the one side, to his treatment of the intelligible realm as set out under the ideas of FORM and SOUL, and on the other, to his cosmology in the Timaeus. Both the intermediate beings of the Symposium and the world-soul of the Timaeus serve to explain how the rational order that belongs to the Forms is present in the sensible world. Whether these celestial souls are to be identified with the daemons of the Symposium is a question Plato does not settle; but in either case the principle holds that no gap in the universe is absolute.

What Christianity will call angels, Plato calls daemons; what the medievals will call the hierarchy, Plato calls the chain of intermediaries. Plotinus develops the concept of purely intelligible beings into a systematic account of emanation; Augustine adapts that framework for Christian angelology; Aquinas inherits from both the argument that between God and the sensible world there must be intermediate degrees of being.

Aristotle's contribution to angelology is the doctrine of separate substances. In Metaphysics XII he argues that the eternal circular motion of the heavens cannot be self-explaining: there must be an unmoved mover, pure actuality, thinking its own thinking. But the heavens contain more than the outermost sphere; they contain many concentric motions, those of the planets, each of which is also eternal and each of which must have its own unmovable cause. Thus alongside the prime mover stand other movers, "of the same number as the movements of the stars."

These secondary movers are substances, not mere principles, yet they are utterly immaterial. They are "without magnitude," exempt from change, unmixed with matter. Their activity is thought, and their causality over the spheres is that of a final cause: the heavens move because they are drawn toward, because they imitate in their way, these separate intelligences. Aristotle thus establishes a graded order of purely intelligible beings between God and the sensible world, defined not by mythic narrative but by the requirements of his account of eternal motion.

It may be asked whether Aristotle's separate substances are purely knowers or whether they also govern the spheres in a more direct sense. Plotinus will hold that they are both knowers and knowables but deny them any active role beyond contemplation; the Islamic commentators and later Aquinas assign them a more direct governing function. In any case, the vocabulary Aristotle supplies proves indispensable to all subsequent philosophical angelology: "separate substance," "intelligence," "form without matter," and "immaterial mover" are the terms within which the discussion is conducted, whether in the Neoplatonic tradition or in the scholastic treatises of the Middle Ages.

Aristotle turns the chain of being into a demonstrable hierarchy. The Islamic philosophers, notably Avicenna and Averroes, work within his framework; and Aquinas, while correcting his account by reference to Christian revelation, takes the separate substances of the Metaphysics as his philosophical starting point. Every later treatise on angels, from Avicenna to Aquinas to Dante, begins from his separate substances and asks how the God of scripture and the intelligences of the Metaphysics are to be reconciled.

Plotinus takes Plato's intermediate spirits and Aristotle's separate substances and situates them within a metaphysical architecture of emanation. From the One proceeds Nous, the Intellectual-Principle; and Nous is not a single mind but a whole realm of intelligences, each of which is both a being and a thinker, each contemplating the One and contemplating itself. Being and knowing are identical at this level: to be intelligible is to be an intelligence. The hypostasis of Nous is, in this sense, populated.

This answers a question Aristotle had left open. Are the separate substances merely knowers, or are they also knowables? Plotinus answers: both, inseparably. The intelligible realm is a community of pure minds whose knowing constitutes their being. Unlike Aristotle's movers, however, Plotinus' intelligences do not govern the spheres through any direct causality of motion; their work is contemplation. Each reflects the divine light according to its rank. The hierarchy descends from the One to Nous to Soul to matter, and at each level being is less fully actualized than at the level above.

The extent of Plotinus' influence on later angelology may be judged from the character of the Dionysian hierarchies, which shape all subsequent medieval thinking on the subject. The nine orders of Dionysius the Areopagite are arranged by their nearness to the divine source and by the degree to which they participate in divine light, precisely as Plotinus arranges his intelligences within Nous. Augustine, who read the Enneads before his conversion, finds in this framework a philosophical vocabulary for beings that cleave to God and know all things in the divine Word. The Plotinian conception provides, in short, the structural pattern that Christian angelology will fill with scriptural content.

Plotinus gives later Platonists, pagan and Christian alike, a vision of a heavenly society whose characteristic activity is pure contemplation. Augustine adapts this vision for Christian theology; the Dionysian hierarchies transmit it to the Latin West; and Aquinas, while differing from Plotinus on many points, inherits from him the picture of an intelligible order in which each degree of being is defined by its relation to the One above it.

Augustine gives Christian angelology its first mature philosophical expression. In Confessions XII he meditates on the opening words of Genesis and identifies the "heaven of heavens" with a purely intellectual creature, created in the beginning, without preceding time, cleaving to God in ceaseless contemplation. The angels are not eternal like God, for they are created; yet neither are they temporal in the ordinary sense. They are aeviternal: their duration is beyond flux but below eternity.

In City of God Augustine works out the dualism of the two cities in angelic terms. The good angels form the heavenly city, bound to God by love and truth; the fallen angels form the earthly city's invisible head, bound by pride. He engages Platonist daemonology directly, especially Apuleius, and rejects the middle-gods of paganism. The true mediator between God and man is not a daemon but Christ; the true intermediaries are angels, who differ from pagan demi-gods in being creatures, not inferior deities. Knowledge, for the angels, is not discursive. They see all things in the Word itself: a "morning knowledge" of things in their divine source, and an "evening knowledge" of things in their own natures.

Augustine's treatment is notable both for what it takes from Platonist philosophy and for what it declines to accept. The distinction between aeviternity and eternity, the account of angelic knowledge in the Word, and the analysis of the angelic fall through pride all become standard starting-points for medieval discussion. At the same time, Augustine insists on a point that separates Christian doctrine from Neoplatonic teaching: the angels, however exalted, are creatures. Their mediation between God and man does not diminish but presupposes the absolute sovereignty of the Creator. On this point his disagreement with the daemonology of Apuleius and with the intermediate gods of the Platonist tradition is thoroughgoing.

Augustine bequeaths to the West the idea that angels are the first and highest creatures, mirrors of divine light and the pattern after which the redeemed soul is to be ordered. Aquinas inherits his distinction between aeviternity and eternity and his account of angelic knowledge in the Word; Dante inherits his two cities and makes them the architecture of the afterlife itself.

Aquinas writes the most systematic treatise on angels in the Western tradition. In Summa Theologica I, Questions 50 through 64, he works through their nature, their knowledge, their will, their speech, their place, their creation, and their fall with a precision no earlier thinker had attempted. He treats the angels not as pious ornament but as the clearest instance available for studying the nature of immaterial substance, so that what he says about them also illuminates what he says about the soul, about God, and about being.

The distinctions are carefully drawn. An angel is a subsisting form: pure actuality of its kind, without matter. Because matter is the principle of numerical multiplication within a species, every angel must be its own species; there can be no angelic equivalent of the human race. They are aeviternal: neither eternal like God nor temporal like embodied creatures. They know not by abstraction from sense but by intelligible species infused at their creation, grasping principles and all their consequences in a single intuitive act rather than by discursive reasoning. They move from place to place by the application of their power, without traversing intervening space. Two angels cannot occupy one place, because where an angel acts, and two complete causes cannot be the immediate cause of one and the same thing.

The metaphysical precision of this account has consequences that extend beyond angelology proper. By demonstrating that substance, knowledge, will, and action can be coherently attributed to beings entirely without bodies, Aquinas provides the philosophical basis for a coherent account of the separated soul, treated more fully under the idea of SOUL, and, by analogy, contributes to the account of divine knowledge and action as well. The graded hierarchy of nine orders, received from Dionysius the Areopagite, is not for Aquinas a mere convention but an expression of the principle that incorporeal substances must differ in species and therefore in degree of participation in divine perfection.

Aquinas so thoroughly integrates angels into Christian metaphysics that for centuries afterward to speak of pure intelligences was to speak within his framework. Dante takes his nine orders and makes them nine circles of flame revolving at speeds proportioned to love; Milton takes his angelic will and gives it a battlefield on which it can be won or lost; and even critics of the tradition, such as Hobbes, define their positions by opposition to the Thomistic account.

Dante renders the scholastic treatise on angels into vision. In Paradiso XXVIII he sees at the summit of the heavens a single Point of light of unbearable intensity, girt by nine concentric circles of fire spinning with varying velocity. Beatrice names them: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones; Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels, Angels. The circles nearest the Point move fastest because they love most; those furthest from the center move more slowly. The hierarchy that is abstract in Aquinas and Dionysius becomes in Dante a visible arrangement ordered by the measure of each order's contemplation.

The substance of the vision is a doctrine of love and sight. Each order's velocity expresses its degree of contemplation: love follows vision, and vision is proportioned to each angel's nearness to God. There is no equality in heaven; the hierarchy is not a ladder one ascends but a permanent order of graded joys, each creature fully satisfied in its own rank because its love matches its vision. In Canto XXIX Beatrice explains that the angels were created simultaneously with matter, that some fell in an instant through pride, and that the good retain their beatitude by the concurrence of grace and merit. The angelic society is the archetype of the Empyrean itself: a community ordered by love and requiring no external coercion.

What Dante adds to the scholastic account is a dimension that philosophical argument cannot provide: the nine orders become, in his poem, nine circles of love. By assigning each order a velocity proportioned to its vision, he gives visual and kinetic expression to the Thomistic principle that incorporeal substances differ in species and therefore in degree of participation in divine perfection. The hierarchy is not mere nomenclature but the visible form of the blessed life. The question of the angelic orders, their number and their nature, had been debated by Aquinas and Dionysius before him; what Dante shows is that these questions have a bearing on metaphysics and on the imagination of what happiness is.

Dante's picture of the angelic hierarchy becomes the canonical image of heaven for the late medieval and early modern world. Milton inherits his choirs and gives them a battlefield on which some may fall; later poets and theologians who wish to speak of a heavenly order must do so in relation to the image Dante fixed.

Kepler inherits a question that had remained settled since Aristotle: what moves the heavenly bodies? The traditional answer, adapted by Aquinas from Aristotle's unmoved movers and further elaborated in medieval cosmology, was that each sphere is moved by an intelligence, a separate immaterial substance whose proper activity is to know and to move. Kepler finds this answer unsatisfying not on theological grounds but on observational ones. Planetary orbits, he demonstrates, are not circles but ellipses, and the speed of a planet varies continuously depending on its distance from the sun. A uniform, unchanging intelligence driving a body around a perfect circle cannot explain motion that accelerates and decelerates according to a precise mathematical rule. The separate mover, whatever it is, has become idle machinery.

In the Epitome of Copernican Astronomy, Kepler replaces the angelic mover with what he calls the natural power of the bodies themselves, working in concert with an animating force whose origin is the sun. The rotating sun casts a kind of physical influence outward, and the planet, possessed of a native resistance and a directional soul, responds to that influence in ways governed by geometry. The question of celestial movers thus passes from theology into what would become physics. Kepler is careful to say that the alternative is not the angelic intelligence but "the natural power of the bodies, or else a work of the soul acting uniformly in accordance with those bodily powers" — a soul that is embodied, not a separate substance contemplating its own perfection from outside the system. The angelic intelligence is not refuted metaphysically so much as rendered superfluous by a better account.

The significance of this move for the idea of ANGEL is indirect but considerable. The tradition from Plato's Timaeus through Aristotle's Metaphysics and the entire medieval synthesis had assigned to beings between God and man a specific cosmological role: they govern the motions of the spheres, maintaining the regularity that makes astronomy possible and the orderliness that manifests divine reason in the physical world. Once Kepler shows that mathematical laws are sufficient to account for planetary motion without appeal to intermediate movers, one of the main arguments for the existence and activity of celestial intelligences is removed. The cosmos can appear fully orderly without requiring a hierarchy of spirits to maintain it. Kepler himself remained deeply pious, seeing in the mathematical harmony of the heavens an even more direct disclosure of divine mind than the medieval tradition had supposed; but the path toward a wholly disenchanted cosmology is open once the separate movers are set aside.

After Kepler the mechanization of the heavens proceeds rapidly. Hobbes will deny that there is any coherent concept of an immaterial mover. Newton will describe the laws of gravitation with explicit agnosticism about whether God acts through intermediaries or directly. The celestial hierarchy that Dante and Aquinas described as nine orders of active intelligences, each moving its appropriate sphere, becomes, in the course of a century, a poetic image rather than a physical hypothesis. The idea of angel survives this transformation, but its cosmological function does not.

Hobbes challenges the whole medieval doctrine of angels at its metaphysical root. For Hobbes, "substance" and "body" are synonymous. To speak of "incorporeal substance" is not to name a higher kind of being but to join together words that cancel one another out. It is, he says, "insignificant speech." The scholastic apparatus of subsisting forms, separate intelligences, and aeviternal beings collapses the moment one insists on a consistent use of terms. On this view, the Thomistic account of angelic nature is built on grammar mistaken for metaphysics.

What then of the angels of scripture? Hobbes offers two possibilities. Sometimes, he suggests, the word "angel" in scripture signifies a real body, a thin and ethereal body that God creates and dissolves for the purpose of conveying a message. Sometimes it signifies nothing more than an image impressed by God on a prophet's mind, a vision without an external referent. Either way, angels are not permanent immaterial intelligences populating the heavens. The nine orders, the hierarchy of incorporeal beings, the great chain of purely spiritual natures are, for Hobbes, the imaginings of philosophers who confused their own concepts with realities.

The implications of this position reach from metaphysics into politics. If "incorporeal substance" is a contradiction in terms, then the scholastic church's claim to govern by reason of its access to a spiritual realm has no firmer foundation than a linguistic confusion. Part IV of Leviathan, devoted to "the Kingdom of Darkness," traces the political consequences of this error: the misuse of scripture to establish an authority over men through fear of invisible powers. The question whether substance must be corporeal, treated more fully under the idea of MATTER, is never, in Hobbes, merely a technical question.

After Hobbes, every defender of the traditional doctrine must first address the coherence of "incorporeal substance," and every writer in the materialist tradition has in his argument a ready instrument against the ontology on which the medieval cosmos rested. Locke, who follows Hobbes in many things, declines to follow him here.

Milton places the scholastic angel on an epic battlefield. In Paradise Lost, angels are not abstract separate substances but dramatic persons: Satan raging on the burning lake, Raphael descending to warn Adam, Michael leading the charge in the war in heaven, Abdiel standing alone against the rebel host. Milton retains the medieval hierarchy of Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, and Powers, but gives it action. The heavens are a society, and that society can divide.

On the metaphysics, Milton is a monist of a distinctive kind. His angels are corporeal in a refined sense: their bodies are ethereal, capable of wounds that heal, of eating Adam's fruit, of assuming any shape. Raphael explains to Adam that spirits and bodies differ not in kind but in degree of refinement along a single continuum: "one first matter all, / Indued with various forms, various degrees / Of substance." This position differs from Hobbes's materialism as much as from Aquinas's account of pure immateriality; it holds that all things share in one substance graded in its degrees of refinement. Free will extends through every rank. Lucifer falls not by necessity but by choice; Abdiel stands by choice; the war is genuinely contested because the combatants are genuinely free.

Milton's monism raises a question the scholastic tradition had generally set aside: whether the distinction between spirit and body is one of kind or of degree. Aquinas holds that angels are wholly without matter, subsisting forms in the strict sense; Milton holds that spirit and matter differ only in refinement. This places him closer, in some respects, to Leibniz's continuum of monads than to Thomistic dualism. By giving his angels bodies capable of passion and wound, Milton also gives them a kind of moral weight that the pure intelligences of the scholastic tradition, knowing all things intuitively and without the struggle of discursive reason, might seem to lack. The question of the relation between angelic freedom and angelic nature connects to the broader discussion of WILL and LIBERTY.

Milton provides the Western imagination with its most extensive poetic treatment of angelic warfare and angelic choice. Later poets and theologians who wish to speak of a fallen or a loyal angel must do so in relation to the figures he established, and his monist metaphysics continued to be discussed long after the poem's narrative had become canonical.

Locke defends the possibility of angels against Hobbes without embracing the full scholastic apparatus. His argument is that the idea of an immaterial spirit is no worse off, epistemically, than the idea of a material body. We arrive at both by combining simple ideas: willing, knowing, and the power of beginning motion are observed in ourselves, and from these we form "the complex idea of an immaterial spirit." If the idea of body is legitimate, so is the idea of spirit, for we have equal warrant for each. Hobbes's objection that "incorporeal substance" is insignificant speech does not, on Locke's analysis, succeed.

Locke then proceeds to argue from the order of nature that it is probable, though not certain, that species ascend from us toward God by gentle degrees, as they visibly descend from us downward through animals and plants. Nature, he observes, makes no leaps. If below us there are many ranks of living forms, differing from one another by small degrees, then above us there may likewise be many species of spirits, "much separated and diversified one from another by distinct properties whereof we have no ideas." The traditional hierarchy of angels is thus rendered plausible not by demonstration from first principles but by analogy with what observation discloses in the natural world.

Locke is careful, however, to mark the limits of this argument. We can form the general idea of an immaterial spirit, but the specific differences among spirits, if they exist, lie beyond our comprehension. On the question of angelic knowledge and its relation to human understanding, Locke has little to say beyond the bare possibility that beings above us may know in ways unavailable to us. The argument is one of probability, not proof. On this point his caution is more consistent than Leibniz's, who will draw out the implications of the chain of being with a confidence that Locke's own principles do not fully support.

Locke's defense of the possibility of angels passes the question on to the Enlightenment in a form suited to empiricist methods. Leibniz takes the argument from the continuity of nature and converts it into a strict metaphysical principle; Kant will later argue that neither the scholastic demonstrations nor the empiricist analogies provide genuine knowledge of what lies beyond the range of possible experience.

Leibniz converts the chain of being into a strict metaphysical principle. By his law of continuity, nature admits no gaps: between any two kinds of being there must be intermediate kinds, and the series of creatures rises by infinitesimal degrees from bare monads through animals and rational minds up toward, but never reaching, the infinite perfection of God. The angels take their place in this graduated series as spirits, monads endowed with clear self-consciousness, reflection, and the knowledge of necessary truths, who stand above human minds much as human minds stand above brute souls.

The Leibnizian angel is therefore not a separate substance of a foreign species but a further degree on a single continuous scale. Every monad mirrors the whole universe from its own point of view, and the higher the monad, the clearer and more distinct its perceptions. Spirits or angels are those monads whose mirroring approaches maximum clarity, whose knowledge is nearly intuitive in Aquinas's sense, and who, together with God, constitute the City of God: a moral society of minds governed by justice and love. Leibniz adapts Aquinas's language but holds that the difference between angel and man is one of degree rather than of kind. We too are spirits, however confused and limited in our perceptions.

The law of continuity underlying this account connects to the question of species and individuation treated more fully under the ideas of UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR and DEFINITION. If nature makes no leaps, and if between man and God there must be intermediate kinds, the question of what distinguishes one monad from another is inseparable from the question of what constitutes a distinct degree of perfection. Leibniz argues that no two monads can be perfectly alike: each is individuated by the particular degree of clarity with which it perceives the universe. On this account the difference between angel and man is not that between two categorically distinct natures, as Aquinas would hold, but that between two points on a continuous scale.

Leibniz represents, among the modern rationalists, the most sustained attempt to preserve the traditional cosmos of graded intelligences within a new metaphysical framework. Kant will argue that the argument from plenitude and continuity is a dialectical illusion: reason has no warrant to infer what fills the interval between man and God, since that interval lies permanently outside possible experience.

Kant draws a strict boundary around the kind of knowledge that theoretical reason can claim. The categories of the understanding, substance and causality among them, apply only to objects given in sensible intuition. A purely intelligible being, by definition, is not so given. However consistently we may conceive of immaterial spirits, we cannot claim theoretical knowledge of their existence. The arguments from the hierarchy of perfections, from the plenitude of nature, from the harmony of the universe, which carried weight for Aquinas and Leibniz alike, are for Kant dialectical illusions: reason extending itself beyond its legitimate domain.

Kant does not hold that we may not think such beings. In the Critique of Judgement and in his ethical writings, he acknowledges that pure rational natures involve no contradiction, and he sometimes uses the angel as a limit-concept: a being whose will would follow the moral law automatically, without the struggle of duty against inclination. But precisely as a limit-concept, the angel marks what human beings are not. Our condition is to be finite rational beings whose knowledge requires sensible intuition, whose morality requires effort, and whose theoretical claims must answer to possible experience. Speculation about the population of higher worlds is, for Kant, not metaphysics but, at best, a matter of practical faith.

Kant's limit-concept of a purely rational will, used to define the nature of moral obligation by contrast, gives the idea of an angel a continued role in his philosophy, though a different one from the role it played in the tradition. Aquinas uses angels to illuminate the nature of immaterial substance and intuitive knowledge; Kant uses them to illuminate the nature of moral duty and the special character of a finite rational will. The question whether the moral law would bind a being entirely without inclination connects to the broader discussion of WILL and DUTY in Kant's ethics.

After Kant, the question of angels cannot be settled by demonstration from first principles. It is either a matter of revelation received on faith, or a regulative idea useful for moral self-understanding. The long discussion that began with Plato's daemons and continued through Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, Milton, Locke, and Leibniz reaches, with Kant, the limit that his critical philosophy assigns to all such speculation about what lies beyond possible experience.

Goethe opens Faust with a scene that recalls the wager in the Book of Job: God and Mephistopheles discuss a single human soul, and God grants the devil license to tempt it. The theological structure is traditional enough, but Goethe's Mephistopheles departs sharply from the fallen angels of Augustine and Aquinas. He is not a being whose nature was corrupted by pride, striving to be God's equal; he is something closer to a necessary function within the divine order, a spirit who serves by negating. His famous self-description — that he eternally wills evil and eternally works good — does not describe a creature struggling against God but one operating within a system whose outcomes God has arranged in advance. The fallen angel who rebellion made tragic has become, in Goethe's rendering, an instrument of divine pedagogy.

The philosophical consequence is a restatement of a question that runs from Augustine's treatment of the origin of evil through Aquinas's discussion of whether God permitted Satan's fall in order to draw greater good from it. Goethe's answer is embedded in the drama rather than argued in theological terms: the very force that attempts Faust's destruction becomes the engine of his striving. "The part of me that wills the evil," Mephistopheles might have said in a moment of self-knowledge, "perpetually creates the good." This is not quite the Manichean position that the powers of light and darkness are genuinely matched adversaries, which Augustine had taken pains to refute; it is closer to the tradition that makes Satan the unwilling servant of providence. But where Augustine and Aquinas draw that conclusion as a theological inference from God's omnipotence, Goethe enacts it as a dramatic irony: Mephistopheles knows he is in the service of a larger design and resents it even as he complies. His cynicism is the mask of a being who cannot ultimately frustrate what he exists to oppose. The connection to the broader questions of GOOD AND EVIL and WILL is unavoidable.

The closing scenes of Part II complete the reversal. Angels descend not to triumph over a defeated enemy in the manner of Milton's Paradise Lost but to outwit Mephistopheles by a stratagem: they scatter roses that inflame the demon's own desires, distracting him while Faust's soul escapes upward. The angels are not warriors or movers of spheres; they are agents of grace who work through the same erotic economy that Mephistopheles exploits. Good and evil operate by the same forces, distinguished only by direction. This is far from the strict hierarchy of Aquinas, in which the good and bad angels differ in nature as well as in will, occupying ontologically distinct ranks; for Goethe the difference is one of orientation within a single field of spiritual energy.

Goethe closes the long tradition of angelic poetry in the Western canon. Homer's gods, Dante's celestial hierarchies, Milton's warring hosts, and now Goethe's bureaucratic tempter-in-service-of-God represent successive reformulations of what beings between humanity and the divine are for. After Goethe, the literary treatment of the devil tends either to make him comic or to take him as a figure for forces within the human psyche rather than a metaphysical entity. The theological question whether evil is ultimately subordinate to divine goodness remains open to faith and argument; the literary question of how to dramatize it has received, in Faust, what many regard as its modern answer.