The creatures most like God, the angels, show forth best the goodness, the majesty, the glory of God; these are His most perfect images, and so the ones to be multiplied with divine extravagance. Heaven and earth are indeed full of His glory. Because the angels are bodiless creatures, pure spirits, it is too often concluded that they are supernatural beings; they are not, God is the only supernatural being. The angels are natural beings. They belong in, and, indeed, dominate our world. They are creatures as natural as oaks, or sunsets, or birds, or men. To call them supernatural because they are not like ourselves is part of that provincial pride by which a man puts human nature at the peak of the universe, primarily because he himself is a man.
Once created, the angels live forever, depending as we do, on the steady support of the hand of God but on nothing else. All the things that pertain to us because we have bodies have no place in the angelic world: growth, nourishment, sickness, pain, the decline of old age, and ultimately death. They are so much more like God than we are that their whole being reflects something of the divine eternity, immortality, independence. Angels are neither old or young, sick or healthy, men or women, infants or ancients, tall or short, fat or thin, they are the bright flames of life, unflickering, unfading, indestructible flames that are fed by nothing but God.
The princely dignity of Gabriel standing before Our Lady, the easy competence of Raphael protecting the young Tobias, the majesty of Michael with his flaming sword guarding the gates of a lost paradise gives us some little vision of the nobility of the angels. We are in danger of blinding ourselves to that vision if we forget that these angels were stooping to our limitations, bowing to our penchant for thinking in pictures; thoughtful angels who delight us as a mother delights her infant by imitating it’s gurgling and chuckling. This is not a mother’s normal speech; nor is this the angel’s normal appearance.
Angels were not made to give life to bodies as were our human souls. The bodies in which they have appeared from time to time among us were the appearances of bodies taken for our comfort; not real, but apparent that we might the more easily accept the angel, his message, his companionship. None of the things that are proper to living bodies could be accomplished by these apparent bodies of angels: they could not digest a meal, beget children, become tired, or wake refreshed from sleep. For us to lose our bodies is a tragic thing called death; the body belongs to our integrity, without it we are not men and women but disembodies souls, we are only half ourselves. It is hard for us not to feel a little sorry for the angel’s lack of bodies, forgetting that if the impossible thing had happened and an angel had a real body, it would not be benefited but debased by that fact. It’s completely spiritual nature in it’s independence and power has no need of a body. It can get far more done than any strong man, indeed than any material force. It is free from the barriers that the physical inevitably imposes on our knowledge and our love: free from the sluggishness, fatigue and distraction that makes our lifetime harvest of truth so skimpy; free from the frustration inherent in all our loving gestures of union, of all the feeble faith that supports our love, of all the helplessness that is our love’s bitterest fruit.
Not even a child is puzzled about how an angel gets it’s clothes on over such huge wings; for it is clear to everyone that the wings we give to angels are a symbol and nothing more. The swift flight of a bird contrasted with the trudging step of a man is a fitting symbol of smooth, untrammeled, rapid movement, and so the centuries-old expression of the celerity of angelic passage. In our own times, we might appeal to the soundless swoop of a diving jet plane to help our stumbling minds to follow the flight of an angel; we would come closer to reality by following with a flick of an eye the almost instantaneous thrust of lightning. We have the most accurate measurement of that angelic progress in the same time it takes our own minds to jump from city to city, across oceans, over five, ten, or fifty years; for it is thus that an angel moves.
In our thinking about the angels, we must draw much more on our knowledge of God than our knowledge of men, for the angels are finite pure spirits modeled on the infinite Pure Spirit. We do not locate God by surrounding Him, He is not contained within the easily discerned outlines of a body, a town, a country; He is where He works, and so is everywhere, for nothing can continue to be unless it is supported by His omnipotence. Nor can we locate an angel by surrounding it; it, too, is a pure spirit. To ask where an angel is means to ask where it is working; only thus is an angel in place. Obviously no place can be too small for an angel, no place too big, no place too distant; for with the angels, it is not a question of squeezing a body into uncomfortable quarters, of spreading it’s arms wide to cover more territory, or of easing it out of a town quietly. No angel is everywhere, for no angel is God, no angel is omnipotent; but neither is an angel human, to be circumscribed by the length of it’s arms or the horizons of it’s eyes. It is pure spirit, to be limited in place only by the degree of the power and perfection proper to the nature given it by God.
About ourselves, the angels know all there is to be known from the post of an observer who needs no relief, misses nothing, forgets nothing. Beyond that, the angels, all of them, easily penetrate into the regions of our imagination and memory, areas about which the human observer can only guess; which means that our daydreams are not purely private affairs, they are shared by the whole of the angelic world, our sentimental journeys into the dear days of long ago are never solitary trips. We are not nearly so much alone as we imagine, whatever the hour or the place. In relation to the friendly angels, this is to our infinite comfort, and often enough to our acute embarrassment; while it brings home clearly our weak defenses against the hostile horde of devils, the help we unwittingly and constantly give to our bitter enemies, and our own desperate need for help from powers on a par with these enemies who so completely outmatch us.
The angels can introduce pictures into our imagination, they can reach into the storehouse of memory and parade the past before our mind’s eye; but there the great natural powers of the angelic world grind to a halt before the impregnable sovereignty of our intellect and our will. Not even the highest of the angels knows what a man is going to do next; the most gifted of angels cannot know what I am thinking at this moment. In this privacy of soul, we are equals of the angels; this territory is inviolable to all but almighty God Himself. Such is the stature of man’s dignity. We are spiritual as well as physical; we are free; our intellect and our will are not to be tampered with by any created force. So our thoughts, our deliberate desires, our loves are our own; for them we ourselves must take full credit or full blame. The angels can suggest through imagination and memory, they can coax, entice, threaten, or frighten through these avenues of our sense nature; but we are the ultimate masters in command of our lives.
Some of them are friendly with that staunch friendship that endures, even heightens, throughout our weaknesses, our failures, our pettiness, our positive malice; so friendly as to be on guard for us twenty-four hours a day. It is good to know the power of such friends, good for our courage, for our hopes, for our loneliness, for our self-respect. Other angels are relentlessly hostile, fired with a hate we did nothing to generate and which we can not dissipate by apology or appeasement. They will stop at nothing less than our total destruction, and even that will not satisfy but rather intensify their hate. In sheer self-defense, we can not disregard the information possessed by such an enemy.
That a mere man, the lowest of the intellectual creatures and so far beneath the devils in natural gifts, should, by the grace of God, go beyond the limits of nature to eternal life in the home of God is galling to the devil and a constant prod to his envy. That this particular soul should reach such heights triumphing over Satan’s diabolic genius is a bitter humiliation and added fuel to the fire of his hatred of God. Both that envy and hatred are fed by the devil’s disgust with the sins of men. True, he knows that he is guilty of all the sins he induces men to commit; but that guilt is a far cry from any affection for the things that so easily enslave a man. A man surrendering to the allure or violence of passion, immersing himself in the world of sense, playing the slave to things designed to serve him – all this is revolting to the devil’s purely spiritual nature even when he is playing the principal part in bringing about such a degradation of a man. His utter disgust with the depths to which man can sink is still more reason for his envy that such creatures can still aspire to heaven while Satan himself must grovel eternally in hell.
My Way of Life
- Confraternity of the Precious Blood
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