Category Archives: Angels

Confronting the Mass Identity Crisis

Angels, Church and State, Creation, Culture, Devils, , , , , ,

When Our Lord and His Apostles came to the great rock of Caesarea Philippi, He asked a poignant question about His personality: “Who do you say that I am?”.  Only Simon, enlightened by Divine grace, saw Our Lord for Who He really was: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16).  Once Peter identified Our Lord, Our Lord in turn gave him his true identity as the Great Rock upon which the Church herself would be identified.  Peter was not alone in this regard.  Our Lord came to bestow our identity upon each one of us.  He identified with us in order that we might come to share in His identity as “sons in the Son.”  Modern man, perhaps more than any other ailment, suffers from a great identity crisis that makes this moment in Our Lord’s Life particularly important. 

The First Identity Crisis

Lucifer had the greatest natural endowment of all creatures.  In this way he was entirely unique and, created in a state of grace, he was the most like God.  This was his true identity. Rather than receive this identity as a gift, he instead chose to create his own.  Lucifer became Satan and lost his true identity forever.  He became, in the words of then-Cardinal Ratzinger an “Un-person”, corrupted beyond any personal recognition.  Out of envy, Scripture says, Satan then became an Identity Thief attempting to steal everyone else’s identity.  He began by coaxing a third of the angels to follow him in asserting their own identity.

Misery loves company and so Satan set his sights upon mankind.  Ultimately his temptation of Eve amounts to questioning her true identity as a beloved daughter of God.  He tells her that she will become like God.  The problem, of course, is that she already was like God.  God had gifted her with sanctifying grace which already made her “like God”.  Satan tempts her to see her identity as something she must grasp, rather than receive and so simultaneously attacks her femininity.  Likewise, with Adam, both his identity as being like God and being a man.  It was the man who was commanded to protect and till the Garden. 

Our identity crisis has its roots in the Fall then.  Original Sin removed sanctifying grace, which forms our true identity, our God-likeness if you will.  But it also wounded us in our sexual identity, the manner in which we individually image God.  Not only does the distinctly feminine power of childbirth become labor for the woman, but, because man will be tempted to lord over her, she will be tempted to seize masculinity.  Likewise, for man, the uniquely masculine way of working also becomes labor and he will be tempted to seize the feminine.  Not only was God-likeness lost, both forgot what it meant to image God in their masculinity and femininity.

The crisis would grow until the New Adam and his suitable helpmate, the New Eve came. Satan could not steal either of their identities.  He tried to steal Our Lord’s when He went into the desert.  The enmity between him and Our Lady made her immune to Satan’s wiles.  Our Lord and Our Lady then, each in their proper way, cooperated in restoring us not just as children of God, but sons and daughters. 

Our Identity Crisis

Satan may have lost the war, but he is still engaging in the Battle across the centuries, trying to keep us from our true identity.  He has had varying degrees of success but has been particularly successful in our own age.   His battle plan remains the same as always by destroying the image and suppressing our desire for the true likeness of God that lies at the root of our real identity.

Rather than accepting God-likeness as a free gift that comes only through Baptism, we chase immortality through technology.  The Covid crisis has been particularly eye-opening in this regard in that we are all expecting a technocratic Messiah to save us.  Technology can make us like gods.

The Church has not been immune to this attack either, putting bodily health before spiritual health.  One soul, dying in a state of grace, is far greater than 1000 people “safely” locked in their houses without any access to the gift of true God-likeness in the Sacraments.  Christ instituted the Church, so that, throughout all-time, His unique power to bestow our true identity might be made available to all.  When the Church forgets her true identity, then a mass identity crisis is sure to follow.    

While technology is the weapon of choice to suppress our desire for true God-likeness, intersectionality, rooted in identity politics, is the weapon of choice to suppress our identity as being made in the image of God.  Intersectionality attempts to root our identity in victimhood.  Christ became a victim so that we could overcome this temptation and clear the way for our real identity.  Sex, masquerading as gender, rather than being a way in which we individually image God, is simply a social construct made malleable (through technology) according to personal whims.  This Great Lie destroys our identity rather than restoring it.  It sits at the heart of today’s mass identity crisis and is nothing more than a ploy of the Evil One. 

Genesis tells us that the Serpent, in attacking Adam and Eve’s identity was the most subtle of all the wild animals (Gn 3:1).  What makes our age unique is that he has thrown subtlety out the window and has chosen to unmask himself.  That is why we must be prepared to fight the identity crisis by refusing to be a party to any of the lies that have enabled the crisis to become so deep.  Too often we simply go along to get along.  The Devil has been hard at work stealing people’s identities, we need to be equally hard at work helping them find their true one.

On the Necessity of Government

American Founding, Angels, Anthropology, Church and State, Culture, Moralilty, Natural Law, , , , ,

Our country was founded upon a rather strange amalgamation of principles.  A perusal of the writings of the Founders will uncover both references to Catholic Natural Law and principles of the Enlightenments. One can imagine that there are some pretty stark contradictions.  One such contradiction is found in the question of why we need government at all.  In the midst of defending the need for a government that includes checks and balances in  Federalist Paper no. 51, James Madison makes what seems like at first to be a very Catholic statement saying that government is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature.”  Rather than remaining on that train of thought, Madison diverts to another track claiming that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  Understanding both of his statements will help us go a long way in understanding why our country seems to be plagued by moral decay.

If Men Were Angels…

Obviously one of the important questions that the Founders sought to address was how authority was to be exercised by the State.  Trying to emerge from the shadow of Divine Right Theory, the Founders thought authority came from the individual.  Men would form a society like the State by bartering freedom for security.  The individuals would bestow authority upon a Governor in order to ensure that his rights would be secured against encroachments from other men who had all entered the society via a social contract.

When Madison says that government is the “greatest reflection upon human nature”, he has this view of human nature in mind—man as the individual who enters society via the social contract.  This principle of the Enlightenment treats government then as a necessary evil that must be tolerated because man is fallen.  In his own words, “anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.”  If men were not fallen, like the angels, then government would not be necessary.  So commonplace is this idea today, that hardly anyone questions whether Madison has greatly misunderstood human nature.

Madison’s anthropological error comes into relief if we challenge his theological assertion that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”  Angels do, in fact, live within a hierarchy, a hierarchical structure that includes authority.  Scripture provides us with an example in Chapter 10 of the Book of Daniel.  Daniel calls upon the help of Gabriel, but the angel does not immediately respond because the Guardian Angel of the Kingdom of Persia would not allow him to act.  After Michael intervenes, the lower angel is allowed to help Daniel (Dn 10:11-21).  What this reveals is that angels, even unfallen ones, do have a government, one that is based upon a clear authoritative structure.

The Greatest of All Reflections on Human Nature

So, if men were angels then government might be necessary rather than being a necessary evil.  Contra Locke, Rousseau and their intellectual progeny, including the Founders, man is not a solitary being, but is naturally a social creature.  In order to fulfill his nature, man has need of other men.  This is not just a matter of convenience but part of his natural instinct.  There are two natural societies in which man’s needs are supplied, the Family and the State.

Because men naturally form these two societies, they must have an authoritative structure.  As Pope Leo XIII put it, “no society can hold together unless some one be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the common good, every body politic must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its Author. Hence, it follows that all public power must proceed from God. For God alone is the true and supreme Lord of the world. Everything, without exception, must be subject to Him, and must serve him, so that whosoever holds the right to govern holds it from one sole and single source, namely, God, the sovereign Ruler of all. ‘There is no power but from God.’” (Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 3).

St. Thomas says that the act of authority would be applied in four ways.  First, the ruler must direct the members of society towards what they should do to contribute to and achieve the common good.  Second, the ruler should supply for difficulties such as protection against an enemy.  Third, the ruler should correct morals via punishment and (four) he should coerce the members to virtuous acts.

Now it becomes obvious that the first two would apply whether or not men were fallen or not.  Virtuous men might agree about some common good, but because it is possible to achieve a good in multiple ways, they disagree as to means.  Without a ruler, that is one without authority, there would be no one to make the final decision.  Because men, even in a state of innocence would not be equal with respect to virtue, it is the most virtuous who would govern.

St. Thomas describes this virtuous ruler in the Summa:

“But a man is the master of a free subject, by directing him either towards his proper welfare, or to the common good. Such a kind of mastership would have existed in the state of innocence between man and man, for two reasons.  First, because man is naturally a social being, and so in the state of innocence he would have led a social life. Now a social life cannot exist among a number of people unless under the presidency of one to look after the common good; for many, as such, seek many things, whereas one attends only to one…Secondly, if one man surpassed another in knowledge and virtue, this would not have been fitting unless these gifts conduced to the benefit of others…Wherefore Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xix, 14): ‘Just men command not by the love of domineering, but by the service of counsel”: and (De Civ. Dei xix, 15): ‘The natural order of things requires this; and thus did God make man.’”

(ST I q.96, a.4)

Madison, because he thinks government a necessary evil, would have us tolerate evil in our rulers.  But when we see the State as something natural, we begin to identify its purpose of making men better.  It is necessary for men to fulfill their nature by becoming more virtuous.  The virtuous ruler will create virtuous subjects.  St. Thomas thinks we can, and must, do better.  The transition may be rocky, but if our society is to turn around and become morally sound, we must not settle for moral degenerates in our leaders.  With Primary Season upon us, especially with a total lack of emphasis on the character of our leaders, this is an important message. 

Angels and the Sexes

Angels, Anthropology, Apologetics, beauty, , , , , , ,

There is perhaps no topic that St. Thomas Aquinas is more closely associated with than angels.  Dubbed The Angelic Doctor, both because of his angelic purity, and because of his thorough compilation of the Church’s teachings on the angels, he is a reliable teacher on the topic.  We can turn to him and find the necessary principles that will enable us to answer any question we might have, including the question as to why angels always appear as men in Scripture. 

One of the things that St. Thomas does is to help us see beyond on modern prejudices because he appeals to universal principles.  There is a modern tendency, especially in an age of exaggerated gender equality, to attribute it to patriarchal repression.  But there is more to it than that and it begins by turning to Aquinas’ negative definition of an angel as that which is “understood to be incorporeal” (ST, q.51, art.1).  Lacking bodies, are neither male nor female by nature.  Nevertheless, because matter makes the invisible visible, the angels use a body to reveal themselves. 

Where the Body Comes From

To say that they “use” a body leads us to a necessary digression.  The angels do not rob a grave nor perform something like a good possession, but instead draw together the matter necessary to create the physical appearance of a human body.  “Appearance” because it is not truly a human body because its proper form of the human soul.  Although they do not have a body by nature, they do, by nature have the power to move matter in accord with their will (assuming Divine approval of course).  Making a body then would be perfectly within their natural powers.

This “body” serves solely the purpose of revealing the angel and allowing him to communicate with humans on their level.  In this way, the angels are in the image of God, given the power to use the material to make the non-material intelligible to us.  This is why we can never look upon their choice of body as an accident of social convention or a concession to patriarchy.  Instead it is chosen for a purpose, namely to reveal the angel, in both his nature and personality, to men.  This purpose helps set the tone for an explanation as to why the bodies are always male. 

Angels, because they lack materiality, also lack, philosophically speaking, potency.  The angel is pure intellect, always being in act of knowing a loving.  If they cease to think and love, they cease to exist.  Likewise, being immaterial, they “live” outside of visible creation.  This means that angels are always the initiators in their interaction with mankind.  Men cannot beckon them (this is why the angel will not tell Jacob his name) nor conjure them up.  They must always come on their own accord.  In “coming” they enter into the physical world from the outside.  They must come from outside of visible creation and enter into the physical world.  Finally, angels are by their mission, the militant protectors of mankind.  They are warriors assigned to battle the evil spirits in their assault upon mankind.

The Body Reveals the Personality

If the angel, in forming a body, wants to convey both his nature and his personality, then how should he present himself?  To convey personality, he must choose one of the sexes and not just an amorphous blob or non-personal type matter.  To convey his nature, he must choose one or the other.  To see which one, another slight digression is in order.

The sexes, male and female, are meant to reveal masculinity and femininity.  The masculine principle is always the initiator, always the one who comes from the outside.  The feminine principle is always passive and receptive.  The masculine is, viewed philosophically, acts as the efficient cause in reducing the feminine from potency to act.  Likewise, the masculine is always the protector and warrior of the feminine. 

Angels, by choosing to appear with men, are revealing that they have initiated the conversation with men, and that they have come from outside of visible creation.  The Heavenly Host is an army arrayed in battle to protect us.  This militancy is best portrayed by being a man.  It is for these three reasons that angels always appear as men in Scripture and why we always speak of the angels that we don’t see as “he”.

In the book of Zechariah, there is a story of how the prophet was visited by an angel.  In that regard, it is no different than many other cases in Scripture of similar visitation.  It is unique however because at first glance it appears that a female angel (actually two) makes an appearance.  There is reason to think however that these angels are actually demons.

The prophet is visited by an angel who points out to him a basket that contains a woman whom he identifies as “wickedness”.  He closes the basket and then the angel raises Zechariah’s “eyes and saw two women coming forth with wind under their wings—they had wings like the wings of a stork—and they lifted the basket into the air.  I said to the angel who spoke with me, ‘Where are they taking the basket?’  He replied, ‘To build a temple for it in the land of Shinar. When the temple is constructed, they will set it there on its base.’” (Zech 5:9-11).  These “two women”, some posit, are angels.  But the destination, Shinar, which is where the tower of Babel was built (Gen 11), later referred to as Babylon, tells us something different.  Throughout Scripture, Babylon is always presented as the city of the devil and thus they are carrying wickedness back to its biblical home. 

Devotion to the Angels and Angel Statues

All of that being said, why does it matter if they appear as both men and women or only as men?  It matters because angels are not just hypothetical beings but real people who play an active role in the world of mankind.  It becomes then a matter of discernment, giving us a principle by which to distinguish between an angel of light and an angel of darkness.  Given all that we have said, it is not surprising that exorcists and demonologists find that only demons appear as women and that they caution us to avoid a feminine spirit.  This is not to suggest that women are evil, (for the demons also appear as men) only that femininity does not properly convey the nature of the angel.  The demons operate on deception and seduction and thus we should not be surprised that these is one of the means they use. 

It isn’t just discernment that matters, but also devotion.  Devotional art ought to portray the object of devotion as it truly is.  It may abstract away certain pieces (like the excess blood of Christ on the Cross) but it must remain true to the object itself.  In other words, devotional art ought to imitate nature because it helps to foster a deeper devotion.  This is why we should be cautious in accepting the modern tendency to depict angels as female in art.  The angels themselves are artists and they have chosen the male body to portray themselves.  Masculine angel art helps to foster true devotion to the angels because it depicts their true characteristics more than a female art would.  In this way, that is because it has claritas, the masculine angel is always more beautiful than the feminine. 

If it is really true that only demons appear as women, then these aesthetic objects may in fact be idols, fostering devotion to devils instead.  Devotion is always directed from the heart to the object.  In this way it has a power of forming our hearts to love the object of our devotion.  A poor depiction of angels, or even one that is really demonic, can eventually do harm to our spiritual life.  This is why it is always better to foster devotion based on what we do know, namely that angels always take on masculine form, then to speculate, and risk offering devotion to something far more insidious. 

How Do You Talk to an Angel?

Angels, Devils, , , , , , ,

When the Son of God came down from heaven and became the Son of Mary, He did not come alone.  He brought many of His friends, the angels, with Him.  Throughout His earthly sojourn we find the angels playing a pivotal role.  Whether it be in glorifying God at His birth, ministering to Him in the desert, strengthening Him in the Garden or joyfully announcing His resurrection, the angels were His constant companions.  He did this not because He “needed” their help, but because we do.  He wanted to reveal to us just how vital angels are to our eternal well-being.  It seems fitting then that we take an opportunity to reflect on our relationship with them.

In a very real sense we were made for friendship with the angels.  Any time that Our Lord mentions the eternal reward He is promising, He always mentions the angels in the same breath (c.f. Luke 12:8-9, Mt 25:31-46).  But this friendship begins now; the angels are “all ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14).  But this community with the angels can remain entirely abstract unless we have a means to communicate with them.

Talking with the Angels

Our side of the communication is rather straightforward.  We can invoke the angels and speak to them directly, knowing that they hear us.  How we invoke them however is also important.  We should never invoke an angel by name.  The Church has cautioned the Faithful about this and in recent times the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has spoken against the habit of asking your Guardian Angel his name:

“The practice of assigning names to the Holy Angels should be discouraged, except in the cases of Gabriel, Raphael and Michael whose names are contained in Holy Scripture.” Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, 216

This can be a dangerous spiritual practice as you have no assurance that the name you have discerned is not, rather than your Guardian Angel, a demon.  Once you repeat the demon’s name, you are inviting him and giving him a certain power over you.  In fact, because the Church, whose authority binds even those in heaven, has spoken definitively you can be sure that the name you “hear” is either the result of an over-active imagination (hopefully) or the name of a demon.  It is most assuredly not the name of your obedient Guardian Angel.  Better simply to address him as “Guardian Angel.”  The only exception to this rule are the names of the angels revealed in Scripture—Michael, Gabriel and Raphael.

Of equal greater interest to us is how the angels communicate with us.  To answer this question we must first look at how it is that man receives any communication.  When words are spoken to us or read by us, the words themselves are merely symbols that are meant to invoke concepts.  We hear or see the words and then we form images (or phantasms as St. Thomas calls them) in our imagination, supplement those images with other images from our memory, and abstract the concepts from the images with our intellect.

A similar thing would obviously happen if an angel was to audibly speak to us (either by gathering matter together to make a body) or by simply moving air to make sound waves that form the spoken words or even writing us a message.  But this would not be the normal way in which they would communicate with us.  The angels’ normal mode of communication, that is when one angel communicates with another, is to simply place the idea they want to convey in the mind of the other angel.  They do this because of the manner in which angels naturally come to know things—the infusion of ideas directly into their minds.

There is a principle of with Scholastic philosophy that “whatever is received, is received according to the mode of the receiver.”  What this means is that when angels communicate with us, they use not their mode of receiving communication, but ours.  They do not infuse ideas directly into our minds, but instead they move our imagination and memory with certain images that will set off a chain of thought.  The angels, especially our own personal guardian angel, know us well enough to know what images it will take to move our intellects in a certain direction.

A Hidden Corollary

This is, by the way, is why we have difficulty knowing that the angels have communicated with us.  We would tend, because it is so “natural” for our imaginations to actively provide images that come out of nowhere, to think it was just the result of our own thinking.  But there is an important corollary to this as well.  The fallen angels retained this power to move the material faculties of the imagination and memory and thus they too can set us off on a train of thought of their design.  Again, this is why we do not always know whether a particular temptation comes from us or from a demon.

In the information age, we spend a lot of time and resources making sure our personal data is secure.  We would not want hackers to get access to highly sensitive material.  The demons are like hackers.  They can easily hack into our memory and imagination and pull up particular memories or images to tempt us with.  This means we must constantly guard against putting any images there ourselves that could be used against us.  Many men report being able to remember a single pornographic image from 20 years ago and this is part of the reason why.

But we are not left unprotected.  Our Guardian Angel, whose main role is to protect us from the demonic invaders can guard our imagination and memory.  We should regularly seek their help so that the moment one of these images arises, we turn it over to them.  As this habit grows, we will reflexively turn them over and the demonic will seek another means of attacking us.

In a sermon he wrote for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, Blessed John Henry Newman articulated one of the dangers of an “educated age” such as our is that we take little account of the angels.  When all thoughts are explained as simply the result of the firing of various synapses we can ignore that our friends the angels are still there and desiring to communicate with us.  Let us not fall into this sin of the educated age and rely ever greater on our heavenly ministers.

How the Angels Fell

Angels, Devils, Heaven,

As Dante journeys to the center of Hell, he learns why it is so cold.  The devil is trapped in the pits of hell in a pool of ice that is constantly cooled by the flapping of his wings.  In other words, he would be free to rise to God if only he would stop trying to raise himself.  Dante is smuggling theology into his literary masterpiece in order to tell us how some of the angels fell and why they will always remain that way.

First of all, how can we possibly know what happened before the creation of mankind (i.e. no human witnesses) and about which there is no explicit divine revelation?  We know that they were tested prior to the creation of mankind (Gn 1:4), some angels fell, but the majority of them of them remained faithful (Rev 12:4), that after they failed their testing they were thrown down to the earth (Rev 12:9) and that their ultimate destination is hell (Mt 25:41).  There are also few Magisterial pronouncements (see CCC 391-395) on the fallen angels, none of which speak of how they fell only that, as the Fourth Lateran Council declared, “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.”  With only these few theological data points in hand, what can we say?

Why Specualtive Theology Matters

As a preliminary aside, many people will simply throw up their hands and say we cannot know anything more.  To speculate, in their minds, in theology is dangerous.  But when we allow revelation and the Church to set the boundaries, speculative theology can be an extremely fruitful exercise.  In fact I would say contemplating such questions (which is really all that speculation is) actually serves the purpose of moving what might seem to be abstract theological truths into the practical realm.  It helps us to see more fully the implications of our beliefs and show us how they actually relate to our Christian lives here and now.  It also helps strengthen our faith because it reveals the inner connectedness of all that we believe and how, even though many beliefs could not be known by reason, once they are known, just how reasonable they are.  As Clement of Alexandria once said, those who have “received these things [revelation] fortified by reason, can never lose them.”satan-wings-of-fury

With that said, let us begin with the declaration of the Fourth Lateran Council given above, namely that angels were created by God and insofar as they are created by God and reflect His beauty and wisdom are good.  Yet through a free decision of their own, they became morally wicked.  Reflecting on this, we see the first practical question emerge regarding the nature of reality.  In order to avoid falling into a dualistic understanding of reality—one in which good is equally pitted against evil—we must be able to explain angelic sin.

How Angels were Created

Like any artist, God created in order to reveal something of Himself.  In His plan, all of creation exists in a natural hierarchy.  The higher up the ladder of being, the more the creature naturally images God.  At the top of the ladder, sit the angels and man.  Angels are pure spirits incapable of making errors in the natural order.  All of their knowledge is given to them by God directly at their creation (we call this infused knowledge) and thus they are a rule unto themselves in the natural realm.  They exist in a natural hierarchy of power.  The highest of these angels has been always understood to be Lucifer, who was after his fall to become Satan or the devil.

We encounter here what might be an objection—the impeccability of the angels.  If the angels are incapable of making an error, then how could 1/3 them make such a grievous error of turning away from God?  I was careful to add a key modifier that many people overlook.  The angels are impeccable in the natural realm.  Like man, because angels are intellectual creatures, they have the natural capacity to live a supernatural life.  Like man prior to his fall, they were created in a state of grace that “activates” this natural capacity.   In other words, to truly be like God, they must receive the life of God directly from Him.  Otherwise they will merely remain His image.

What this means practically speaking is that they didn’t fall from “heaven” in the sense we might think.  We tend to think of Heaven as the place where the Blessed see God face to face.  Prior to their test, the angels were not in Heaven, but instead in some place of testing.  Properly speaking we might say they fell from the heavens in that their fall brought them from outside the material realm into it.

The angels in the supernatural realm are no longer a rule unto themselves.  They must now submit to the higher rule of God.  It is only in this supernatural state that they are vulnerable to error.  Thus we find that they are tested and not in some superficial way.

This distinction between the natural and the supernatural state is very important.  Understanding this distinction puts the faith vs works controversy to rest.  No natural act can get us to heaven.  It is only supernatural acts, namely those good acts that we do animated by sanctifying grace, which activate our “heaven capacity.”  So many fail to make this distinction and spend time thinking it is either faith or good works that will get you to heaven.  But it is supernatural works that get us to heaven.

The First Sin

With this distinction in place we see that the supernatural state or the “order of grace” as it is called is a great equalizer.  It puts everyone on a level playing field regardless of their natural endowment.  Instead it depends upon God’s gracious dispensation.  We find that it is often those who have the greatest natural endowment of gifts that has the hardest time accepting this.  And now we are able to see the sin of Lucifer.  Because he was the one who had the highest natural endowment, he preferred to remain in his singular position as God’s greatest creature rather than associate with the “common folk” who were elevated (maybe even to a place higher to him) by God.

This is why the Church has insisted that the first sin was pride.   As Abbot Vonier, summarizing Aquinas’ teaching says, it is clearly a sin of pride in the sense that it is a love of one’s own proper excellency in opposition to another’s.  For the prideful to admit the other’s excellence would end the singularity of one’s own excellence.  In other words, Satan’s sin consisted in the steady refusal of Satan to enter into communion with other beings because he sees it as a loss of his own excellence.  It shows also why his will remains fixed on his decision.  He is not under the delusion that he will somehow become God, he already knows that.  Instead he really wants to be utterly unique like God.

Practical Matters

There are two practical implications that follow from what we have said.  First, that in the fall of the angels there is nothing like concupiscence. St. Thomas says the fallen spirits did not lose either their intellectual privileges or suffer a weakening of their will.  Their place in the universe remains unchanged and thus their natural capacities far exceed anything we can do.  These are our enemies, not so much because they hate us, but because they hate the grace of God and in jealousy (always the second sin) they seek to prevent man from possessing or keeping God’s grace.  We must never forget their innate power and realize the devil and his minions should not be treated lightly.  We must do all that we can to protect ourselves from their attacks, but ultimately our protection and power rests only in putting on “the full armor of God.”

Second, it helps us to more clearly see the motives behind our own sin.  We tend to look upon the fall of the angels with some disbelief.  How could a creature as smart as Lucifer make such a totally insane decision?  That question is quickly put away when we realize we are no different when we choose to sin.  We know it is insane and yet we do it anyway.  This is because sin is not a matter of knowledge but of the choice of the will.  We cannot know God as He is in this period of testing.  The only way to draw near to Him is through love.  The commandment is to love the Lord, not to learn about the Lord.  This is not to poo-poo learning the Faith, but to constantly be on guard that our knowledge is leading to more reasons to love God and not merely know more about Him.  The former leads to true love, the latter to pride.

Celebrating Angel Awareness Week

Angels

Did you know that it is Whole Grains Awareness month?  Were you aware that it is also National Yoga Awareness Month?  In fact according to the National Health Information Center, the month of September is marked by thirty-three distinct “Awareness” celebrations.  It seems all you need is a cause and you too can declare your own Awareness period.  What if the Church got in on this?  They could have something like Passion Awareness Week or maybe each week they could celebrate Resurrection Awareness Day or maybe even yearly celebrate Faithfully Departed Souls Awareness Day.  If they did, then maybe they could even declare the week between September 27th and October 3rd “Angel Awareness Week.”  They could even distribute little blue bracelets with wings and halos on them.  We would celebrate the week by getting to know the angels a little better and maybe even have special celebrations honoring two groups of them, Archangels and Guardian Angels.  Think of what raising angel awareness could do for the Church and for the world!

More than anything else, the discussion thus far probably reveals that I need a personal Liturgical Calendar Meaning Awareness Week.  Nevertheless, with the feasts of the Archangels (the 29th) and Guardian Angels (October 2nd) this is an excellent time to get to know the angels and develop a relationship with them.

Perhaps the best place to go to learn about the angels is to the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas.  In the Summa he summarizes the teachings of Sacred Scripture and the Fathers of the Church.  While knowledge of angels comes from divine revelation, St. Thomas argues from analogy to show why it is reasonable that angels exist.

If we examine creation we find two things.  First that it is clearly ordered and second that there is something like a hierarchy of being in which each thing that exists acts as a bridge between the thing beneath it and the thing above it.  Broadly speaking if we start with something like animals, we could see how they act as a bridge between plants and man.  They share in the plants’ vegetative powers in that they are alive but also share in man’s sensitive powers.  We could do this all throughout visible creation and find that there are no gaps.  Now when we come to man, we find that there is a great gap between man who shares materiality with the animals but the spiritual powers of knowing and willing with God.  In fact this gap is too large unless we posit that there is a creature who is pure spirit (like God).  We call this creature an angel.  This is why St. Thomas says it is “fitting” that angels exist and concludes that universe would be seriously lacking in order and completeness if angels are not part of it.

Turning to what Divine Revelation says about the angels we are immediately struck by what a vital role they play in God’s plan.  This is why belief in angels is a dogma of the faith.  They are mentioned in 31 of the 46 Old Testament books and 158 times in the New Testament.  In nearly every instant we see them as somehow acting for the benefit of mankind.  In essence they act as intermediaries between God and man.

St. Raphael

Unlike any other book of the New Testament, the Letter to the Hebrews instructs us as to what they do exactly.  Their role is to act as “ministering spirits sent to serve, for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Hebrews 1:14).  In fact they served as mediators of the Old Covenant and the author uses this fact to show the greatness of the Mediator of the New Covenant, Jesus Christ (see Hebrews 1-8).

Angels are intimately involved in the affairs of mankind.  In reading the first creation account in Genesis, there are two different Hebrew words that are used to describe the act of creation.  The author uses bara to describe the creation of the heavens and the earth, the sea creatures, and man.  This word literally translated would be “to create out of nothing.”  The rest of creation is described by the word Asah which translates as “brought forth.” It is the angels who do the brining forth.   In other words, the angels play a role in governing the physical universe.  This does not in any way make the physical laws superfluous but it acts as an admission that in the physical universe there is a tendency to decay and disorder.  The angels maintain the order of the universe.

Scripture also testifies that nations are entrusted to angels.  Not only is Israel (and subsequently the Church) entrusted to St. Michael but also Greece and Persia (see Dn 10:31-21) have angels guarding them as well.  In fact Deut 32:8 says that God “appointed the bounds of people according to the number of angels of God.”  In other words, each nation has its own protecting angel.  In this time of great turmoil in our own country we should be seeking the aid of the Angel of America.

All of this reveals a very important Scholastic Principle about God’s tendency to use secondary causes in everything that He does.  What St. Thomas says is that, “God never does directly Himself what may be achieved through created causality… For any result which does not require actually infinite power, God will sooner create a new spiritual being capable of producing that result than produce it Himself.”  This is because God is love and wants to bestow dignity upon His creatures by making them share in His goodness and love.

St. Thomas defines an angel as a “pure, created spirit, called angel because some angels are sent by God as messengers to humans. An angel is a pure spirit because he has no body and does not depend for his existence or activity on matter. ” To be a spirit means that they are a capable of knowing and willing.  To be a pure spirit means that they are always knowing and willing (as opposed to us who are a body/spirit composite that takes breaks from knowing and willing like when for example we sleep).

Three things follow from St. Thomas’ statement that “the angels have not bodies naturally united to them.”

First that each angel is its own species.   Each of us have a human nature—this is what is common to all of us.  Yet we do not all share one human nature because we have bodies.  Matter is what allows human nature to be multiplied and makes each of us individuals.  Angels on the other hand do not have bodies and so have no inherent individuating principle.  This means that each angel must have a unique nature (or species) in order to separate it from the other angelic creatures.  These natures exist in a hierarchy.

Second, angels come to know differently than we do because they do not have bodies. As human beings we rely on our senses to know things.  We encounter a particular thing and from that particular thing we are able to abstract to a universal idea.  For example, a man encounters a particular lion in the jungle.  He has never seen that particular lion and it is different from any other lion he has seen.  He is able to abstract the universal essence of “lion” from the individual lion using his intellect.  This is why Aristotle (and St. Thomas afterwards) said “that which is in the intellect was first in the senses.”

Angels on the other hand, because they do not have bodies, must have their knowledge infused in them by God at the moment of their creation.  Because it is directly infused, the angelic idea is at once universal and concrete. The angel’s infused idea of the lion, say, represents not only the nature of the lion, but all individual lions that either actually exist or have in the past been objects of the angel’s intellect. Angelic ideas are thus participations in God’s own creative ideas.

It is also important for us to understand that angels cannot know the future in itself—that belongs only to God—so like us they can only know it in its cause.  However because they are far more intelligent than us they can know the future more accurately.  Although God alone can know the secrets of our hearts, angels can deduce them because our movements often betray our thoughts (even things like our interior emotions and our heart racing).

Finally, without bodies angels move and will differently than us.  An angel is spiritually present at whatever place in physical space happens to be occupied by the body on which it acts—this presence is an occupation of the place.  As opposed to the fact that when a body occupies a physical place it is said to do so extensively by filling it with its bulk, an angel occupies a place intensively by surrounding it with its power.  Think of sunlight coming into a room through a window.  The sunlight is “in the room,” but if you were to cover the window, the light would not be trapped in the room but would cease to be present.  The sun is no longer acting upon the room by lighting up and so it is no longer present, just like an angel ceases to be present when he ceases to act on a physical space.  Practically speaking what this means is that two angels cannot occupy the same place at the same time.  To answer the age old question, only a single angel could dance on the head of a pin.

Why have I spent so much time talking about the angels when I emphasized at the beginning that we needed to develop a deeper relationship with them?  Because they are not visible most of the time, we can only see them through their effects.  Because we can only see them through their effects we have to know how and when they tend to act.

A word about why we should strive to enter a relationship with them.  One might argue that they are hidden and they are doing their work so why not leave them alone?  Of course the same thing could be said about any of the saints as well, but in the case of the angels it is easy to forget that they too are members of the Church.  Our belief in the Communion of Saints includes the belief that we share in the merits and in some respect the powers of all the saints. Angels as the first saints are no different.

We also owe them a debt of gratitude for all the ways in which they have acted in our lives.  Next to God Himself and the Blessed Mother, there is no one who loves us more than our guardian angels.  Your Guardian angel was assigned to you at the beginning of time and his test somehow had to do with whether he would serve you or not.  Think of the great love he has for you and how deeply he wills your good.  Now I am not saying he is tested somehow on whether he helps save us or not, but whether he wills to act as a servant in saving us.  At the very least we ought to strive for friendship with him and the rest of the angels who assist us directly or indirectly.

As to how we might do this, I would say the approach is no different than our exercises of devotion to any of the saints.  It is particularly striking when you compare the human response to angels in the Old Testament and the New Testament.  Angels are met with great awe and fear in the Old Testament while they are met with a spirit of friendship and equality in the New.  They truly desire friendship with us.  Speaking regularly to Our Guardian Angel and thanking him is certainly one way.  Even speaking to thanking the guardian angels of those closest to us as well is a good practice.  Many of the saints (Padre Pio and St. Gemma come to mind) had the habit of sending their guardian angels on missions to other guardian angels to help another person in difficulty.

Personally, I have found that the Chaplet of St. Michael is a great way to honor this powerful Archangel along with the other nine Choirs of Angels. Servant of God Antonia d’Astonac had a vision of St. Michael in which he told Antonia to honor him by nine salutations to the nine Choirs of Angels. In return St. Michael promised that whoever would practice this devotion in his honor would have, when approaching Holy Communion, an escort of nine angels chosen from each of the nine Choirs and he promised his continual assistance and that of all the holy angels during life.

Angels and Us

Angels

It seems that regardless of whether or not someone considers themselves a believer, there is a universal fascination with the angels.  This is even truer for those who profess belief in Christ because they know how important a role these spiritual creatures play in God’s plan for mankind.  Yet the average Christian knows very little about the angels.  The Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, perhaps more than any other man, has shaped the Church’s teachings on the angels.  In order to foster greater devotion to our heavenly ministers, we ought to familiarize ourselves with his teachings.

Nearly all of his teachings appear within a fifteen questions in the first part of the Summa Theologiae (ST I, qq. 50-64).  He puts them at the very beginning of his section on creation because they are the most perfect of God’s beings.  What makes his teachings so profound is that they really all naturally follow from one of the very first thing he says, namely that “the angels have not bodies naturally united to them” (ST I, q.51, a.1).  From this he traces all the implications of being a spiritual substance that is not united to a body.  For our purposes, there are three very important implications that pertain directly to our interaction with them.

402px-Saint_Thomas_Aquinas_Diego_Velázquez

First, each angel has a wholly unique nature and represents its own species.  What I mean by this will become clear when we look at what makes each of us unique.  Both author and reader have a human nature.  What is it that actually makes us different persons?  It is the matter that is “attached” to that human nature.  Philosophically speaking it is said that matter is the individuating principle.  All human beings have identical human natures, but what makes them separate is their material part.  Now if there is no matter, then there is no individuating principle.  So all the angels must have different natures.

That being said, how is it that angels sometimes appear with bodies?  St. Thomas says that angels can sometimes assume bodies for the purpose of ministering to mankind.  These bodies however are not true human bodies in that they do not have souls united to them, but are simply the material parts that make up a body.  While we do not know where the material that they use comes from or where it goes when they are done, it is still a material body and not something like a hologram.  The material itself is selected so as to make “the intelligible properties of the angel known” (ST I, q.50, a.2, ad. 2).  To see what he means specifically, let’s look at an example from Scripture.

In the Book of Tobit, Tobiah meets a young man (the angel Raphael in human form) who volunteers to accompany him to visit his kinsman in Medina.   After providing the means for both Sarah and Tobit to be healed, Raphael reveals himself to Tobit saying that “God sent me to heal you and your daughter-in-law Sarah” (Tobit 12:14). St. Thomas’ point is that Raphael reveals himself as a man in order to reveal his intelligible properties—namely that he is God’s healing angel (Raphael—“God heals”). As an aside this is why most of the Church Fathers think it is also St. Raphael stirs the waters in the Pool of Bethesda by which those entering it are healed (c.f. John 5:1-8).

It is important to mention a further aspect of this idea that the matter the angel takes on is meant to reveal something about the angel. Whenever an angel appears, it always appears as a man. Why is that? It is the same reason why we refer to God as “He”—it is the masculine that reveals the fact that the angels come from the outside of visible creation. This is also why exorcists warn about angelic visitations in which the angel presents itself as a woman.

The second implication has to do with the manner in which angels know. Because we are a composite substance, we come to know things in and through our senses. An object of knowledge first presents itself to us through our senses and our intellect abstracts the essence of the thing. Our knowledge grows through repeated contact with material things. Angels on the other hand must have all of their knowledge infused directly by God in their creation. This means their ideas are both universal and concrete. The angel’s infused idea of the lion, say, represents not only the nature of the lion, but all individual lions that either actually exist or have in the past been objects of the angel’s intellect. In other words, angelic ideas are direct participations in God’s own creative ideas.

This is why angelic knowledge is so superior to our own.  They comprehend the object of their knowledge fully.  But their knowledge is not unlimited.  Angels cannot know the future in itself.  So like us they can only know it by cause and effect.  Certainly their knowledge is greater and they can “guess” the future more accurately than us, in its cause but because they know more excellently they can know the future more acutely but knowledge of the future, which depends on the free will activity of human agents, belongs only to God.

Likewise they cannot know things in the order of grace, unless God reveals it to them.  The traditional interpretation of Psalm 24 (especially vv 7-10) shows that when the angels accompany Our Lord in His ascension and meet the angels of the gates of Heaven, the latter do not recognize Him until the guardian angels tell them.  The Son, in being made visible to man was made invisible to the angels who do not see His glory as one Church Father has said.

In an attempt to understand the third implication, the Scholastic theologians asked the question “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”  This was not meant to be an esoteric and speculative theological question, but meant to understand how angels act.  In particular, if an angel does not have a body, how do we say he is “present?”

An angel is spiritually present at whatever place in physical space happens to be occupied by the body on which it acts.  As opposed to the fact that when a body occupies a physical place it is said to do so by taking up space with its bulk, an angel occupies a place by surrounding it with its power.  An analogy might make this clear.

Suppose you are in a dark room and you open the shades on the window.  The room is now filled with light.  But this light cannot be trapped in the room by pulling the shade back down.  The light was merely operating in the room while the shade was open.  This is the same manner in which angels operate.  Where there power is in operation, they are said to be occupying that space.  This means that two angels cannot occupy the same place at the same time.  Therefore only a single angel could dance on the head of a pin.

How do they act specifically?  They can act on any material thing simply by willing it (assuming God permits it).  This is how our guardian angel can be both at our side and in heaven simultaneously.  It is not as if when we call upon them, they must leave heaven, but instead they will to be acting in both places.

There is a further aspect of this that has great implications for our spiritual life.  If an angel can act on any material thing simply by willing it then they can greatly aid us in our battle against the flesh.  When our imagination runs amok, our anger or lust is out of control, or our memory fails us (all of which are part of our “material” powers), we can invite our guardian angels to assist us in regaining proper use of these corporeal faculties.  Because only one angelic being can operate on a given material substance at a time, they can chase away any demonic powers that may be vying for control of those powers.  This is one of many reasons why we need to come to develop a deeper relationship with our guardian angels and regularly thank and praise God for the tremendous gift that they are to us.

Angel sent by God to guide me, be my light and walk beside me.  Be my guardian and protect me, on the path of life direct me.

 

Knowing the Enemy

Angels, Devils, Redemption

One of the more glaring omissions of the Passion accounts in the Gospels is that no attempt to explore the motives behind Judas’ betrayal is made.  This has led to much speculation throughout the years imputing to him various motives such as greed, envy or even impatience that Our Lord was not acting quickly enough in claiming his Messianic throne.  The danger of trying to impute a motive is that we will actually miss the reason why the Evangelists only refer to him as the “betrayer” (Luke 22:3).  St. John captures the reason explicitly when he says that “After he took the morsel, Satan entered him” (John 13:27). The Sacred Writers want us to realize that it was not Judas nor the Sanhedrin nor even the Romans that ultimately hatched the plan to kill Jesus—it was Satan and his minions. Our Lord recognized this and pointed it out when He tells the Jews that they “belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires” (John 8:44). As the Church prepares to enter into Our Lord’s most intense battle against our Enemy we are reminded that in order to fight we must know about him and his tendencies. As Sun Tzu says in the Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Examining his history, we can better understand his motives.  Just how did Lucifer become the Satan?  For many it seems that the angels were created in “heaven” with God and therefore it would have been impossible for them to sin.  This is an example of how important it is that we properly define our terms, especially given the propensity in English to reduce the number of terms when they only refer to subtle differences (the word love is a classic example).  Properly speaking, the angels, although pure spirits, are not by nature heavenly creatures.  Instead we should refer to them as naturally “Celestial” creatures.  By making this distinction, we are able to reserve the word “heavenly” for those creatures who have the vision of God and see Him as He is (1 John 3:2) rather than in His reflections in creation.  No creature naturally has this vision, it can only be granted to those who have sanctifying grace.  Communion can only happen between two equals so that in order to have communion with God (i.e. heaven or as Augustine refers to it in the Confessions “The Heaven of heavens”), He must infuse His life in us.  Only angels and men (who are made in God’s image) have the capacity to receive this divine life, but they must receive it and freely persevere in it.

Like the first man and woman, the angels were also created endowed with sanctifying grace so that they might have the capacity to be saved.  And like Adam and Eve they also were required to undergo a period of probation to test whether they could persevere in that grace.  This period of probation included some test in which they could freely choose between good and evil.  Although they did not yet have the Beatific Vision, they lived in something like a celestial Garden of Eden.  This Garden included sanctifying grace (i.e. God walking in their Garden in the coolness of day) and an experience of being exposed to the danger of committing sin.  Those confirmed in grace were then granted the vision of God.  The rest, were cast out of the celestial Garden.

Three questions naturally arise from this.  First is what was it that actually caused “Satan to fall from heaven like lightning” (Lk 10:18)?  It was most certainly pride of some sort as the book of Isaiah testifies:

“How did you come to fall from the heavens, Daystar, son of Dawn? How did you come to be thrown to the ground, you who enslaved the nations? You who used to think to yourself, ‘I will climb up to the heavens; and higher than the stars of God I will set my throne. I will sit on the Mount of Assembly in the recesses of the north. I will climb to the top of the thunderclouds, I will rival the Most High.’ What! Now you have fallen to hell, to the very bottom of the abyss!” (Is 14:12-15).

As to the exact nature of the sin we are left only to the theological speculation of the Church Fathers.  Most say that it is directly related to the plan of the Incarnation and the angels’ service of mankind.  The Fathers apply the words which the rebellious Israel speaks to its God, “I will not serve” (Jeremiah 2:20) to the fallen angels.  Some Saints (like St. Louis de Montfort) have also speculated that their fall was related more specifically to the eventual role of Mary as Queen of Heaven.  This might also explain why Satan targets Eve, a type of Mary, directly.  So while his first sin was pride, the devil’s second sin was envy.  Once he realized he could not truly usurp God, he decided to turn his wrath on mankind so that he could gain pleasure in God’s loss.  Interestingly enough we see the same thing happen in man—Adam sins through pride and then Cain kills Abel through envy.  This is a familiar pattern in all of us—“pride comes before the fall” and then once truth sets in and we realize we are not God, we envy others for having what we do not have.

The second question is when the angels were created.  The book of Job tells us that they were created before the foundation of the world: “Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding…Into what were its pedestals sunk, and who laid its cornerstone, while the morning stars sang together and all angels shouted for joy?” (Job 38:4-7). This fits with St. Augustine’s explanation of the creation of light on the first day of as referring to the creation and testing of the angels. The light refers to the angels themselves and the separation of the light from the darkness (after judging that the light was good) refers to the casting out of the demons (Augustine’s commentary on Gn 1:4 in City of God, Bk. 11, Ch 19).  At the very least we know that the devil is already fallen when Adam and Eve encounter him in the Garden.

Garden Fall Sistine

If the devil had fallen, why did God allow him to enter the Garden to tempt Adam and Eve? Wasn’t he forever cast into hell? The Book of Hebrews gives us a clue to the answer when the Sacred Author refers to the role of angels. He says, “Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to serve, for the sake of those who are to obtain salvation?” (Hebrews 1:14).

The role of the angels in God’s eternal plan is to minister to mankind. God’s plan is never thwarted so that even the devil and his minions still serve to aid “those who are to obtain salvation.”  For those who are in Christ, it is temptation and suffering that leads to growth in merit through which they obtain their salvation. The evil spirits merely become means by which God brings this about. Remember that mankind’s fall in the Garden, although caused by the lies of the evil one, is ultimately the cause of the Incarnation which is the source of man’s salvation. The choice for the angels, fallen and blessed, is the same choice that we have as well—do God’s will or do God’s will.

St. Michael the Archangel, pray for us!

NOTE: A number of you have emailed me with questions and I would encourage you to continue to do that. In fact this entry is the result of two people asking the same exact question yesterday. I want to encourage you all to also use the Comment section on each post as well. My vision for this web site is that it is one where there is some engagement between the readers and the readers and me. Please don’t be shy about commenting!