In Girly Air Force, all that stand between humanity and certain destruction are a group of young women who are the only people capable of handling the special aircraft used to fight the sinister Xi. It’s a typical twist on a common anime trope, but there’s one thing that stood out to me as unusual.

Some necessary background: Each girl and the aircraft she pilots are artificially created together, and are a single being despite having two bodies (one human, one a plane). The human part is called an Anima, the plane part a Daughter. And each is modeled on a particular model of fighter plane, e.g. the F-15.

In the latest episode, someone asks, “Why not make, say, a whole fleet of special F-15’s, instead of having each Daughter be a different kind of warplane?” The answer, surprisingly, is that it simply can’t be done. For reasons that are left largely unstated, once a particular kind of Daughter exists, no more of that kind can be made.

Now, just within the story itself, I found this pretty unsatisfying, though perhaps it will be explained more later. What was cool, on the other hand, is that this actually echoes one of the traditional Catholic ideas about angels. Specifically, theologians have argued at least since the Middle Ages that each angel is its own species. You can think of it this way: Three angels are likely to be as different from each other not as three humans (let’s say Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura) but as three kinds of creatures (like Snake, Slug, and Frog).

Why on Earth would anyone think this?

To understand why, let’s have a quick refresher on classical metaphysics. Everything, according to Aristotle, has both Form (“what it is”) and Matter (“what it’s made of”). All of us bloggers are human, for example, but we are not the same human. What is the reason that we are different humans? My man Aristotle says it’s because we’re each made of different matter.

To summarize centuries of nuanced philosophical discussion in a single phrase, it became common in the Middle Ages to equate Aristotle’s Form with the soul, and his Matter with the body.

But what about angels, which don’t have bodies?

Without bodies, they don’t have Matter in the Aristotelian sense. So how are they differentiated? What makes this angel different from that one?

The answer is that Matter only differentiates individuals who belong to the same species. Beings that belong to different species are different because, well, they belong to different species!

Thus, if each angel were its own species, the problem is solved.

Of course, the medievals were smart and realized that there were other ways to solve the problem. While this approach found favor with the Thomist philosophers (who built on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas), others were perfectly happy to say that Form and Matter were not the same as body and soul. Voila! But in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, the Thomist school became dominant in the Catholic intellectual tradition in the early modern period, right into the beginning of the 20th Century.

And, I suspect, there’s something captivating in imagining a cosmos filled with powerful, beautiful beings, each of which is its own kind of creature. Maybe that’s why this idea has held on even now when Thomism has fallen from its formerly-privileged seat.

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