HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Dates: c. 1274 Summary: Aquinas holds the Sethite reading he inherits from Augustine — the "sons of God" are the line of Seth, the "daughters of men" the line of Cain — and denies that the giants required non-human fathers. Yet he is notable for preserving, within that framework, the medieval incubus tradition: demons really do procure intercourse with women, but any offspring "is not the child of a demon, but of a man," because the demon merely transfers human seed. On 1 Peter 3:19 he reads the "spirits in prison" as human (not the imprisoned Watchers), preferring Augustine's "preached through Noah" reading to the Descensus. He thus sits firmly on the Sethite side, while supplying the most developed scholastic statement of how a quasi-demonic begetting could be conceived.
Treating whether angels can father children, Aquinas quotes Augustine approvingly and lands on the Sethite reading:
But God's holy angels could not fall in such fashion before the deluge. Hence by the sons of God are to be understood the sons of Seth, who were good; while by the daughters of men the Scripture designates those who sprang from the race of Cain. Nor is it to be wondered at that giants should be born of them; for they were not all giants, albeit there were many more before than after the deluge.
— Summa Theologiae I q.51 a.3 ad 6, newadvent.org (quoting Augustine, City of God XV). Aquinas places himself in the Augustinian line: the giants were real but ordinary men, and the "sons of God" are human.
What distinguishes Aquinas is that he does not simply dismiss demonic generation; he explains its mechanism — and in doing so anticipates, from the opposite interpretive camp, the kind of "two-father" logic De Young uses:
Many persons affirm that they have had the experience, or have heard from such as have experienced it, that the Satyrs and Fauns, whom the common folk call incubi, have often presented themselves before women, and have sought and procured intercourse with them.
Still if some are occasionally begotten from demons, it is not from the seed of such demons, nor from their assumed bodies, but from the seed of men taken for the purpose; as when the demon assumes first the form of a woman, and afterwards of a man… so that the person born is not the child of a demon, but of a man.
— Summa Theologiae I q.51 a.3 ad 6, newadvent.org. Both Aquinas and De Young reject literal demonic paternity, and both preserve the offspring's "supernatural" character by routing it through human seed plus demonic agency — Aquinas via the succubus/incubus seed-transfer, De Young via the sacral-kingship ritual of "two fathers." The frameworks differ (Aquinas keeps the Sethite reading of Genesis 6 and treats incubi as a separate, marginal phenomenon; De Young makes the ritual the meaning of Genesis 6), but the structural move is the same.
Aquinas lays out both readings of 1 Peter 3:19 and prefers Augustine's:
These words of Peter are referred by some to Christ's descent into hell… "Christ preached to them who formerly were unbelievers, and who were shut up in prison"—that is, in hell… not in order to convert unbelievers unto belief, but to put them to shame for their unbelief.
Augustine, however, furnishes a better exposition… that the preaching is not to be referred to Christ's descent into hell, but to the operation of His Godhead… to those (spirits) that were in prison—that is, living in the mortal body, which is, as it were, the soul's prison-house… He preached "which had been some time incredulous," i.e. not believing in the preaching of Noah.
— Summa Theologiae III q.52 a.2, newadvent.org. On either of Aquinas's options the "spirits" are human (the dead in hell, or Noah's living contemporaries) — not the fallen angels. He is thus a thirteenth-century witness to the same non-Watchers reception of 1 Peter 3:19 documented on the New Testament page.