Sir, - In his examination of angelology I think Giles Foden (December 21st) has followed a long queue of the misled into a small pit. It is still commonly and scurrulously alleged that medieval scholars discussed how many angels could balance on the head of a pin. They didn't that would have been a singularly pointless exercise. They wondered how many angelic beings could fit on to the POINT of a pin, which was a much more useful debate.
The subject was not a spiritual one, but one that wash currently a mathematical paradox: an angel, having no physical body, had zero cross sectional area. The point (not head) of a perfect pin also has zero area. The number of angels is therefore zero divided by zero, which is what...? The definitive answer to that had to await the calculus of Newton or of Leibnitz, a subject whose success in defining dy/dx revolutionised mathematical science.
Without the recognition of that cloisteral paradox, we might well be debating foolish things like angels dancing on pin heads. - Yours, etc,
De Vesci Court, Monkstown,
Co Dublin.