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.