THERE IS A FASCINATION for us in thinking of the Angels, a fascination that springs from the fact that a healthy mind welcomes nourishing truth as enthusiastically as a healthy stomach welcomes a hearty meal; with the difference that there is no such thing as a stuffed mind. The more of truth we learn the hungrier we get, though the happier and more satisfied we are. These Angelic big brothers of ours have much for our learning: much of God, whose closest image they are; and much of ourselves, to deflate our pride and stimulate our humility as we learn from them how dim a light marks out our path and how wavering a heart Supports our love. But to learn any of the lessons there to be learned, we must remember that Angels are not God, neither are they men.

GOD KNOWS HIMSELF PERFECTLY, and knowing Himself knows all else. We never do know ourselves directly, we learn of ourselves, like any outsider, from the things we do; and our conclusions usually contain a good margin of flattering error. The. Angels, like God, do know themselves directly; like us, they know nothing else from knowing themselves for, like us, they are not the source of creatures but part of the family of creation. Divinity is the Creditor of the Angels as of us; from the infinite intellect which God is, they too borrow a limited intelligence and hold it on the terms of God. Though the amount of their loan is so very much greater, it is as true of Angels as of us that they have limited intellects, they are not intelligence itself. We walk through our days with the impact of the world beating on our senses like a pelting rain. From this downpour, properly filtered, we quench our mind's thirst though it is dangerous business; for the same flood furnishes us with all the risks of deception from the wandering phantasms that take over so completely in the dreamers or the insane. God and the Angels live their eternal lives in perpetually sunny weather, with never a drop of this rain falling into their world. As Gregory has it: "Man senses with the brutes, and understands with the Angels."

WE ARE VAGRANT PROSPECTORS searching the world for effortless strikes that will give nuggets of truth, but actually subsisting on the flakes and dust that make up our usual find. We spend our lives in laborious attempts at a piecemeal assembly of the pattern of truth from the shattered fragments that fill the world about us. Men search the earth for their knowledge, for we are close to the earth; for the source of the Angels' knowledge we must look not to earth but to God, for Angels are close to God. As creatures less than the Angels sprang from the mind of God into the physical world, from that same Divine source, they sprang into the knowledge of the Angels.

THE ANGELS' KNOWLEDGE, THEN, IS ALL that ours is not: accurate, complete, absolutely firsthand, coming to them directly from First Truth itself. All this, not byway of a special gift but by natural right; by the very fact of their purely spiritual nature, their proper way of knowing is by ideas infused into their minds by God. As the years roll by, We may become learned, or even wise; but our knowledge and wisdom are the products of the years and of our labors with many a weed harvested along with the good grain of truth. The Angel has all his knowledge in the first instant of his life; whenever, through all his ageless career, an Angel uses anyone of those infused ideas there is no laborious thinking involved. The thought of an Angel, swifter than light, deeper than a sword thrust to the heart, an intuitive plunging to the very depths of truth, leaves no room for doubts, for error, for indecision.

WE, WHO ACHIEVE OUR LITTLE WISDOM so painfully, are decidedly interested parties in any discussion of the mind of the Angels. They are our only intellectual relatives in the whole of creation, relatives who have millions to match our intellectual pennies, and there is no possible threat to their great wealth. Moreover, we do not stand afar off in poverty's frustration at the walls of snobbery or the great distances of social strata; these intellectual brothers of ours slip in and out of our days with an ease and intimacy unknown to the most loved members of our immediate family. We should know more about them; and, almost instinctively, we want to know more about them not only because they can do so much for or against us but also because they are all so very close to us and to our living.

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 in the day. It is good to know the powers 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 cannot disregard the information possessed by such an enemy.

WE MAY BE ONLY MILDLY INTERESTED in the fact that an Angel knows itself immediately and perfectly, that, seeing itself as the Divine image, it knows God, and that it has complete and intimate knowledge of other Angels; though by this we miss all the implications for our own humility, the substantiation of our dreams, and the inherent frustration of our love's desire to know all. But we must come up sharply alert at the Angels' knowledge of this physical world of ours. In that regard, they approach closest of all creation to the instant, omniscient comprehension of God. They know the details of the physical world, not through the often murky filter of sense and imagination but directly, without possibility of incompleteness or distortion. They know the world, all of it, not in the blurred fashion of a dilettante's surface expertness, nor in the vague general way of a mind that is just too tired to keep its hold on details, but sharply, concretely, with firm mastery. They know, in other words, more about all the things we have so laboriously studied through the centuries, and know them better than we ever will however more centuries are at the service of the labors of the minds of men.

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 lightest of the Angels knows what a man is going to do next; the most gifted of the Angels cannot know what I am thinking at this moment. In this privacy of the soul, we are the 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 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.

BOTH ANGELS AND MEN BOW DOWN in humble union in matters of faith. Here every truth is God's secret not to be discovered by anyone less than God, not to be known unless God Himself make the truth known. That Divine life can be and is shared, that Heaven's welcome waits for those who welcomed God, that Hell's misery confirms the sinner's choice, that the Son of Mary is also the Son of God, that the living Christ is present in the Eucharist, Calvary renewed in the Mass, that grace pours into the soul through the Sacraments-----all these the Angels know only as we do: by believing them on the word of God. Angels are a part of nature, as we are; their powers are natural powers. What they have of the supernatural, whether it be life, truth, action, or goal, is theirs only through the boundless generosity of the only supernatural Being, God Himself.

JUST AS IN US, the sweep of knowledge marks out the horizons of love, so in the Angels, to match that superb knowledge, second only to God's, there is a driving power of appetite that comes closer than anything else in creation to imaging the power, the intensity, the constancy and finality of the Divine will. Knowing a little we can love a little; loving a little, we insist on knowing more of that lovableness; knowing more, we love more and insist again on more knowledge that there might be more love. The heart never actually outruns the head, for we have to see to love and the heart has no eyes. To know something of the magnificent perfection of angelic knowledge is to prepare oneself for the breathless rush of Angelic love.

THE ANGELS ARE NOT DRIVEN to their activity by a knowledge outside themselves, directed by another intelligence, as are the plants; they are not caught up necessarily in the immediate appeal of this or that particular good, as are the animals. Rather, like us, they are free agents; their love is their own. They can take or leave any good that creation has to offer. The explanation of this is roughly paralleled in our capacity for vision. Our eyes can see brown, black, purple, blue, violet and all the rest precisely because they are not determined to anyone of these things but to color in general, any color, all colors; if they were made only for brown, they would see nothing else. Our wills, and those of the Angels, are not fixed to anyone good, but to good, any good, all goods, even the infinite good; and so our wills and theirs can reach out to any good, or they can reject any good save goodness itself seen nakedly in the vision of God.

BUT ANGELS ARE CREATURES, they are not God. Like ourselves, they cannot rest content within themselves without excluding happiness and making a home for misery. Like ourselves, they must reach outside themselves for the lovableness that will still the insistent demands of the will. Only God is totally sufficient unto Himself, for only God is infinite goodness, only God has no end to attain but only goodness to share. Only God is home for the love of the Angels, as He is for our love; they too must make their way home or remain forever exiles, wanderers in a world as empty and cold as a prison cell, for love's fire is the Divine flame or it gives no warmth.

To THE APPRECIATION OF OUR NOBILITY be it said that the Angels are no more free than the least of men. Liberty does not come in spoonfuls, it is not doled out in differing degrees; it is magnificently full or it is non-existent. We are, then, no less responsible than the highest Angels for the use we make of that liberty; and it is this awful splendor of responsibility that frightens men into an attempt to deny their humanity. The record of our use of it gives us grounds primarily for humility, since we are so often wavering, weak, timid both in our virtues and our sins. The Angels suffer no such imperfections: their virtues are gestures of sweeping grandeur, their sins plumb the depths of the malice of Hell. The movement of their wills, in other words, is a worthy complement to the instantaneous perfection of their knowledge.

IT IS AN AWESOME THING to be loved or hated by an Angel; one hardly less overpowering than the other. Nothing will arise to change that love or hate, there will be no belated discovery of goodness or evil, no error of judgment to be corrected, no rival to detract from the totality of love's embrace or hatred's spleen. The Angel loves or hates instantaneously, with all the intensity of its unimpeded nature, irrevocably, with utter generosity or malice, in a roaring flame of consummation of its desire. This is the way we think of our love in its springtime vigor, the way we dream of love in its perfection; but we know in the depths o our hearts that only God can make it come true in us and we are astounded that even God can work such a wonder within us. We are so easily afraid of utterly final surrender, so aghast at reckless gallantry, so cautious in giving, so demanding of gifts.

E-MAIL

HOME-----------------------ANGELS' DIRECTORY

www.catholictradition.org/Angels/angels50-3.htm