THE WORLD OF ANGELS

The Nature of Angels

The name "angel" is an abbreviation of the Greek "angelos", meaning "one who is sent" or "a messenger". The term is sometimes used in Scripture to describe people who are sent on a special mission, as St. John the Baptist.

Holy Scripture tells us nothing of the nature of the angels except that they are spirits. In mentions them in connection with the mission they carry out in the world as messengers. They appear unexpectedly. They disappear without telling us anything about their mode of thought, or their love, or their activities. This must be because such knowledge is not necessary for our salvation.

An angel is a purely spiritual created substance, who exists as an individual person with mnd and will, but unlike human beings, has no bodily parts that can be perceived by the senses. An angel is a spiritual creature naturally superior to human beings and often commissioned by God for certain duties on earth.

A pure spirit is not confined to space, for a spirits has no parts. An angel is not confined by time or its changes, for time is the measure of bodily movement.

God alone is eternal. Since angels live by acts of intelligence and love, their duration is made up of instants which are quite distinct, like flashes of light.

A pure spirit knows itself perfectly and derives its knowledge from the Infinite God. By a glance, angels have knowledge of reality richer than ours.

An angel loves, wills and is supremely free and incorruptible.

Angels are the highest of creatures. Only the secrets belonging to God alone are withheld from their knowledge. What depends on the will of God and free human choice is beyond any created wisdom, for God alone is present to that which to us is future.

Countless number of Angels

Scripture says that pure spirits exist in countless numbers. "Again I looked, and I heard angels, thousands and millions of them!" (Rv 5:11)

Jesus himself speaks of armies of angels. "Don't you know that i could call on my Father for help, and at once He would send me more than twelve armies of angels?" (Mt 26:53)

St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the glory of God is the reason for the existence and nature of angels. The perfection they have to reflect is inexhaustible, and hence they must be many in number. Just as they surpass the visible creation in beauty, so must they surpass it in multitude.

In conformity with the generosity of our God, his creatures increase in number as they rise in sublimity and beauty. The multitude of the lesser angels is past counting, for among them are the angel guardians of every person who has existed, exists, or will exist.

St. Thomas teaches that one pure spirit, in its fullness of being, is as distinct from another as one universe from another. Our words and thoughts cannot express the brightness of God's external glory.

The test of the Angels

When God made the angels, he made each with a will that was supremely free. We know that the price of heaven is love for God. It is by making and act of love for God that a spirit, whether an angel or a human soul, fits itself for heaven. The love must be proved in the only way in which love for God can be proved - by a free and voluntary submission of the created will to God, which we commonly call an "act of obedience" or an "act of loyalty".

God made the angels with free will so that they might be capable of making their act of love, their choice of God. Only after they had done so would they see God face to face; only then would they enter into that everlasting union with God which we call "heaven".

God has not made known to us the nature of the test to which the angels were put. Many theologians think that God gave the angels a preview of Jesus Christ, the Redeemer of the human race and commanded his humiliations, a child in the manger, a condemned man on a cross. Acording to the theory, some of the angels rebelled at the prospect that they would have to adore God in the guise of a man. Conscious of their own spiritual magnificence, their beauty and their dignity, they could not bring themselves to the act of submission that adoration of Jesus Christ would demand of them. Under the leadership of one of the most gifted of all the angels, Lucifer ("Lightbearer"), the sin of pride turned many of the angels away from God, and there ran through heaven the awful cry, "We will not serve!"

And thus hell began, because hell is essentially the eternal separation of a spirit from Almighty God. Later on, when the human race would sin in the representative figure of Adam, God would give the human race a second chance. But there was no second chance for the shining angels. Because of the perfect clarity of their angelic minds and the unhampered freedom of their angelic wills, even the infinite mercy of God could find no excuse for the sin of the angels. They understood (to a degree that Adam never did) what the full consequence of their sin would be. With them there was no "temptation". By their deliberate and fully aware rejection of God, their wills were fixed against God, fixed forever. There burns in them an everlasting hatred for God and all his works.

It seems more probable that the great majority of the heavenly host remained faithful to God, made their act of submission to God, and are with God in heaven.