By Fr. Dale Allder,
Cathedral of the Risen Christ, Lincoln
In my last column about angels (Sept. 29), I mentioned that we had only scratched the surface on the topic. I wasn’t kidding. While I suggest reading that article if you haven’t, it’s not necessary for this one.
Like last time, I want to lead you to a deeper love and friendship with your guardian angel and all the angels. However, this time we’ll be focusing more on angelic nature as it is in itself and less on how we relate to them. The temptation might be to ask, “What’s the point if it doesn’t directly relate to me?” Well, we can only love someone (or something) if we know them in some way.
As we come to know more about someone, loving them can become easier since we know more things to love about them. Since love unites the lover to the beloved, every new thing we learn can be an opportunity for a deeper union. That’s one reason why it’s important to keep learning about God and our Faith, since there will always be more to know, and therefore always more to love. There is plenty to learn about angels, so there are many things we can love about them.
One of the fundamental experiences of human life is learning. As many of us can probably testify from our time in school, sometimes it can be a long and difficult process to grasp even one fact. We engage the world around us, or ideas are presented to us, and from those things we extract truths about physical or spiritual realities. But besides certain fundamental principles instilled in us by God, our minds start with very little. We even have difficulty understanding ourselves!
Angelic knowledge is far superior. They do not have the same challenges we do. Whereas we start with almost nothing in our intellect and must build it up, the angel’s knowledge is already “complete” from the beginning of his creation—he already knows truths about physical and spiritual natures in a far more comprehensive way than we could hope for. What is particularly amazing about this is that each angel knows the nature of things through the very act of knowing himself. To explain it in another way, we have to “take in” the world around us if we hope to learn about it, but an angel, by seeing and knowing his own angelic nature with perfect clarity, already knows the natures of things without having to directly engage them. We call this an angel’s “natural” knowledge, and higher angels have a more perfect and universal natural knowledge than lower angels.
Furthermore, angels do not use discursive reasoning, like humans do. If all triangles have three sides, there are specific mathematical conclusions which we can deduce from that fact. However, we need to work out those conclusions step-by-step. An angel would not need to go through that process—he would already know all those mathematical conclusions in the very act of knowing that all triangles have three sides. He would not need to work out proofs or follow chains of logic from one step to the next. There is no work to be done. The results would already be immediately evident to him.
As wonderful as this is, an angel does not have perfect, infinite knowledge of everything. Angels are not God. Angels (and demons) cannot know the future with perfect certitude as God knows it, although their natural knowledge may give them a great probability in their guess. They cannot know the inner thoughts of our heart and mind, though their knowledge of human nature and our own individual habits may give them similarly probable guesses. They also cannot know the mysteries of grace and salvation without God revealing it in some way. This doesn’t even touch on how angels communicate and enlighten one another, but that may be for another time.
As humans, we are equal and unequal in different ways. We have the same fundamental human nature. We are one “species,” and in that way we are equal with each other. We differ from cats or pine trees because they have different natures. The reason we differ from each other, and the reason one cat differs from another cat, or one pine tree differs from another pine tree, is that each nature is “actualized” in different physical matter. John is just as much of a human as Larry, but one may be taller, or have a different skin tone, and so on. It is physical matter which allows for many individuals of one nature or species to exist.
For those of you who read my first article, you may recall that angels do not have physical bodies. They’re not made of matter. But if that’s the case, then how is one angel distinguished from another? If they don’t differ in matter, then they must differ in nature.
That means that each angel is truly one-of-a-kind. Each angel has a nature that is different from all other angels. No two angels are equal. Each angel is its own “species.” It is less like the difference between Fido, Spot, and Lassie, and more like the difference between a lion, a bear, and an eagle. In fact, I would argue that the difference between one angel and the one most similar to him is far greater than the difference between an eagle and a bear, because spiritual realities are far greater and more numerous than physical ones.
And if you consider other points in my previous article, that over 100 billion angels are in the lowest choir, and each successive choir has many more angels than the one below it, the sheer beauty and variety of the angelic host is truly beyond comprehension. Truly, no two of those innumerable angels are the same.
Although the ideas this time around are a little harder to work through, I hope it gives you something to think and pray about! If you learned something, don’t let that knowledge sit idle! Use it for that deeper love and relationship. Bring it to your guardian angel. Bring it to God, who made the Heavenly hosts. May our Heavenly friends continue to enlighten, guard, and guide us in the ways of holiness so that we can share eternal life with them!
