At issue with Aquinas's systemization isn't that passages such as the one quoted above don't make sense, but rather that they make too much sense. Serpentine though the reasoning may be, Aquinas's logic is unassailable and, based on the axioms he assumes, conceives of an angelology as rigorous as Euclidian geometry. What's unclear is whether any of it corresponds to an actual reality. With the rise of Scholasticism toward the end of the Middle Ages, what we see in evidence isn't an overabundance of faith but rather a crisis of it. What's clear in reading Aquinas-especially once it's remembered that he abandoned his own philosophy after a mystical experience that was supposedly infinite in its beauty-is that the Summa Theologica is a project of trying to convince yourself of something. Neoplatonists had the benefit of admitting that their systems were forever deferred, always falling short of whatever ultimate things flit unseen beyond the veil of human senses. When it comes to approaching angels, science is deficient in a manner that poetry simply isn't. A powerful tool, poetry — as long as it isn't mistaken for the referent-one that dominated until the High Middle Ages, only to return with the Renaissance humanists, occultists, and Neoplatonists. The Areopagite was among the most subtle of thinkers in this regard, in avoiding intellectual idolatry that confuses the painting of a winged being with intangible celestial forces themselves—a feature of the aforementioned apophatic tradition of which he is an exemplar, a wisdom that understands that the spoken god is never the real God. This is the "being beyond being" as he calls it in Divine Names, something that "is cause of all; / but itself: nothing." What Dionysius's angelology offered was a system of symbol, metaphor, simile, and cipher in which to express the experience of the inexpressible, to hear that which is silent, to see that which is invisible. A language to speak of those without tongues, a hand to write among those lacking limbs, a mind to envision for the thought that is greater than all experience. For Dionysius, angels were both agents of inspiration and a metaphor for meaning; returning celestial beings to their most crucial function, his was a theory of the message. - ED SIMON Elysium page 64
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