Dominions

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite gave the Dominions their lasting position in The Celestial Hierarchy (5th–6th century CE) (De Coelesti Hierarchia — CCEL; Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite — New Advent), ranking them fourth overall and first in the second triad, alongside the Virtues and Powers. In this scheme the second triad as a whole governs the cosmos, standing between the first triad's contemplative closeness to God and the third triad's direct engagement with human affairs. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologica (1265–1274) (Summa Theologica I, Q.108 — New Advent), elaborated on this by describing the Dominions as angels who are not themselves sent on missions to the world but who direct and authorize the orders below them that are, ensuring that the execution of divine commands proceeds in proper order down through the hierarchy — a supervisory rather than executive role.

Because scripture gives the Dominions no described form, their visual tradition in medieval and Byzantine art developed independently, drawing on the imagery of earthly kingship rather than any biblical vision. Painters and manuscript illuminators most often show them crowned and holding a scepter or an orb — sometimes a globe topped with a cross, in the same tradition as the regalia of medieval monarchs — with a sword occasionally substituted or added as a further mark of authority. Unlike the wheels of the Thrones or the four faces of the Cherubim, these attributes carry no scriptural warrant at all; they are a visual language borrowed wholesale from royal portraiture to represent a rank whose sole textual description is a single word in two Pauline epistles.