Who Are The Angels (The Intelligence of The Angels)

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Later versions of software are usually able to do all the things that earlier versions of the same software could do. So also, the higher angels contain more universal and fewer species than the lower; these species contain in a simpler way everything that is contained in the species of subordinate orders, thus increasing the scope of comprehension and the parameters of influence of the higher orders. If I am presently working on a particular task, this is designated the "foreground" task, while the other operations are carried out in the "background.

In one simple act, they know all the variety of particular things, 14 although they can bring this or that object into the "foreground" by turning their attention to it. They are also continually combining the knowledge of things as they exist in God cognitio matutina with the knowledge of things according to their own proper existence cognitio vespertina. Individual computers or local network nodes often come into contact via modems with their counterparts through a process called "handshaking.

Signals are sent out and coordinated, and as a result commands can be processed, binary and text files can be transferred, etc. According to the Thomistic theory of separate substances, angels cannot receive new intellectual species from other angels, but they can receive an intensification of illumination of the species they already possess by coming into intuitive contact with other angels; an angel of a higher order merely wills to communicate something and it is instantaneously transmitted.

In networks, signals are sent from major servers and their "mirrors," sometimes through a chain of many intermediate servers as in Internet transmissions , until they reach an end "user. And so, communication always takes place from the naturally superior to the naturally inferior. What this means is that a superior angel can cause in an inferior a heightened perception of species the latter already possesses, or offer different insights or perspectives on the knowledge the latter possesses; or possibly put his own higher species into terms more comprehensible by the other angel, like a teacher explaining advanced concepts in simpler terms to a student.

Finally, one cannot help seeing an analogy between the various internal and external hardware caches and software caches, which help to increase computing speed by providing a route for signals to avoid getting slowed down in hard-disk swap files or other storage operations. The separate substance, on the other hand, completely avoids such problems; it simply has no matter to slow it down.

Thus, for all practical purposes, and from our corporeal vantage point, all angelic operations and comprehensions are instantaneous. It should be mentioned, however, that there was considerable disagreement among medieval and patristic authors concerning the "immateriality" of angels. Augustine and Origen had speculated about the possibility of angelic bodies being composed of matter, albeit a more "subtle" matter. Duns Scotus gave lip-service to the received doctrine of angelic incorporeality, but challenged his readers' imagination by theorizing that angels must have some kind of "incorporeal" matter; and, consistently with this theory, Duns Scotus thought that angels must reason discursively in some fashion.

Joseph's College, , Ch. Lombardi In II Sent. II, ad 1; Summa theologiae I, q. Notes 1 Summa theologiae Ia IIae, q. Paideia logo design by Janet L. That intellect is a faculty or potentiality; it must be fulfilled by some act, by some form. That other form, that other medium, can be no other than the intelligible species, the ideas, the mental similitudes, the intentional existence of created things. There is no other possibility: God could give supernatural knowledge proper to Himself, as He does in the vision of His essence, but this would still be a gift, not a natural knowledge for an angel; the angel itself is inadequate to represent the whole created world; every inferior creature is not only inadequate, it is physically incapable of affecting the angelic intellect.

The angels must know as we know, through ideas; where do these intelligible species come from? Certainly they cannot come from created things. We could as easily paint a mathematical point or wrap up the substantial form of a rose in cellophane as give an angel an idea of a flag by waving at the vault of heaven. Material things cannot act directly but only through a medium on spiritual things; in knowledge that medium is the phantasm of the imagination. There is, then, no way in which an angel can acquire ideas from created things, for it has no imagination.

Moreover, the thing is plain from the very manner in which the angel exists. We would be reasonably astonished to find a cabbage slinking up behind us with the grace of a leopard; cabbages move, but not precisely in that way, for movement follows the manner of existence. If that existence is a plant existence, then the movement is a plant movement; if the existence is animal, then the movement is animal.

So our thoughts do not come together with even so slight a jar as that felt by the teeth meeting well cooked asparagus. The mode of existence of the angels is quite independent of material; their action or movement of understanding, then, is a smoothly intellectual thing. Let us look at the whole picture. Man has an intellectual potentiality unfulfilled by nature; God has no potentiality but perfect intellectual fulfillment, perfect act; in the middle, the angels, half-way between God and man, possess an intellectual potentiality perfectly fulfilled from nature, and so, of course not from the material world outside their nature.

The only source of these angelic ideas is God Himself giving them to the angels by directly infusing them into the minds of the angels. No higher angel will do for this first knowledge, as will be apparent from a later chapter on the speech of the angels. Here it is enough, by way of explanation of the incapacity of the higher angels, to point out that the angelic intellect and will, like the human intellect and will, are intrinsic accidents of the angelic nature; they are utterly inviolable, theirs is the sacred territory from which everyone, everything is barred violent entry.

This is the garden where only God and the individual possessor of that intellect and will can walk freely. The angel, then, has intelligible species from God; about how many? No, the question is not nearly so absurd as it sounds; in fact its answer is decidedly illuminating.

In our own case we do not base our judgment of intellectual acumen on the number of species, the amount of knowledge a man has acquired, but rather on how much a man can see in this or that particular species; it is not quantitative knowledge but penetrating wisdom that is the mark of excellence. Thus, a workman, who knows that he can get a brick off a roof by throwing it and sees nothing of the possibilities of its hitting someone on the head, is stupid.

Thomas, in a comparatively few theological principles, could see the whole field of theology; a mathematician, in a few principles, can see the unfolding of the whole complicated area of mathematics; while a student, sitting under either Thomas or the mathematician. Our judgment in this case is entirely reasonable.

The closer a creature is to God in the natural order, the more it participates the divine perfections, the more perfectly it images God.

Intelligence Angels

Those nearer God in the intellectual order will, then, participate more closely the divine mode of knowledge; and God understands everything in the one species which is His divine essence. The angels as a class, have fewer and more universal species than men, being so far superior to them; the superior angels will have fewer and more universal species than the lower angels, precisely because of their superiority. How does it use these ideas?

What is this intuition which is the normal manner of knowing for the angels? Certainly the angel has no period of cooing and gurgling infancy while it awaits the age when ideas are possible to it; it undergoes no tortuous school days in which ideas are gathered one by one. The angel is in no way in potency as to the acquiring of its ideas; these ideas are had from the beginning. Nevertheless, the angels, like ourselves, cannot consider more than one species at a time.

These species are forms actuating the intellect; to have the mind consider two of them there at the same time would be like having a man run in different directions at the same time, and with much the same results. In scholastic language, the angels are always in act as regards the possession of these species: In other words their knowledge, like the knowledge of God, is always actually possessed; but, like the knowledge of man, it has its potential element, it is only successively used.

For a man, no matter how much affection he may have for the multiplication table, does not spend all his time thinking of it. Though an angel cannot consider more than one of these species at one time, yet it can know many things at one time according as many things are contained in this or that particular species, much as a man, looking into one mirror, can see all the many things reflected in that mirror.

In one species the angel sees all that it contains in just the one penetrating glance, as the eye of a camera in an airplane catches the detail of the city of New York as it paces restlessly between its confining rivers far below. An angel can do this because the angel is a step higher in the intellectual order than men.

THE ANGELS’ MIND

The precise imperfection of the human intellect is its nearsightedness. It can see only one corner of the picture at a time; the world is a map too huge to be seen all at once by a human mind which must, instead, go slowly over the whole surface inch by inch, because of the weakness of our minds, we must come down from principles to conclusions like an old man cautiously feeling his way down a flight of steps; only when we reach the bottom, the conclusion, do we have a clear notion of all that might have been seen from the top by a stronger eye.

Like children with a Christmas package, we must open things up, tear them apart and put them together again before we know what is in them. The one who made up the package or who has information from that original source, knows the whole story by merely identifying the package. The angels do not reason their way down from principle to conclusion, not because they cannot, but because they do not have to. Their position between God and man demands the absence of the essential imperfection of the human intellect, the imperfection which makes reasoning, piece by piece judgment, necessary.

It is, indeed, just this absence of the necessity for reasoning and judgment that males it impossible for an angel to make a mistake in natural knowledge. There is nothing peculiar about this; it is the way intuition works. As a matter of fact, we make no mistake in our first act of intellect, our intuition of tree, dog, man; our mistakes come in our judgments and reasonings, in our hooking the wrong things together.

Objectively, the steps down from principle to conclusion may be sharply cut and broad enough; but if we miss one of them, we tumble down to erroneous conclusions with a battered head. Its own brilliant, purely spiritual, utterly immaterial essence is immediately present to the angelic intellect and is, in itself, completely intelligible. Consequently, it is immediately known by the angel without the necessity of a medium such as we must have.

For it must be clear to every man that he knows his soul only through the revelatory character of his spiritual acts penetrating the material wrapping of his body. The intelligible species by which the angels know all other things come only from God; they are the first copy of the ideas of God, the first participation of that supreme truth, the blueprint formed directly from the mind of the divine Architect.

Augustine put this beautifully when he maintained that the things of the world poured forth from God in a double way: In this account, the angels are looking, from the wings at the drama played on the stage of the world.

08. The Angelic Mind

He who wrapped up this great package which is the physical world, has given His own first hand knowledge of it to the angels. The natural knowledge of the angels is a vast sea that touches the shore of every created thing — with one exception. There are no natural secrets hidden from the piercing intellectual eye of an angel — except one; spiritual and material, all are laid open and naked before their eyes — except one.

THE ANGELS’ MIND

On the spiritual side, they know themselves, immediately, by their own substance. All material things are known to the angels for exactly this same reason, that is, because these material things too are creatures of God, effects of the first cause; a detailed account of them exists in the divine mind and is communicated to the minds of the angels. The mysteries of grace are completely above the powers of the angels. What knowledge the angels have of these things is a free gift of God by a special revelation to each particular angel; or, in the case of the good angels, in the beatific vision, the sight of the essence of God.

There is one thing too sacred for the eye of any but God, one private room where man devil or angel cannot enter in; that is the realm of the thoughts and desires of intellectual beings, men and angels. Your servant thought, 'The word of my lord the king will set me at rest,' for my lord the king is like the angel of God, discerning good and evil. The fact that angels could discern good from evil was a proverbial expression in the nation Israel. Mighty Angels are greater than humans in power.

They are called Christ's mighty angels. Angels are able to do things that humans cannot do.

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However their power is dependent upon God. They are mighty beings, but they are not the Almighty. Their power is within fixed limits. Not Like God Thus they are neither all-powerful, all-knowing, or everywhere present, as is God. If there were another being in the universe who was all-powerful, then God would not be the only God. Not All-Powerful The fact that angels are not all-powerful can be seen in the episode of Michael, the archangel, and Satan. But when the archangel Michael contended with the Devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, "The LORD rebuke you!

Michael the archangel, the highest of all the angels, would not rebuke the Devil by himself. This is one example of how angels have limited power. Not Everywhere Present Unlike God, angels can be in only one place at a time. Since the Bible speaks of angels traveling from place to place this indicates they cannot be everywhere at once. Daniel records this testimony of an angel. He said to me, "Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words.

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But the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me twenty-one days. So Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia, and have come to help you understand what is to happen to your people at the end of days. For there is a further vision for those days" Daniel This passage shows the limitation of the power of angels as well as the fact that they are not everywhere present. Humble Though mighty, angels are also humble.

They do not seek their own glory but rather the glory of God. They go about their ministry unnoticed by humanity.

For example, when the seraphim worship the Lord, they cover their feet. This act, seemingly, is a sign of humility. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: Sinless The angels that did not rebel against Him are without sin. Though this is never directly stated, it is inferred from the various names given to them. They are called both "holy angels" Mark 8: Summary The character, or attributes, of angels are listed for us in Scripture. There is much for us to learn from them. Though powerful, they are humble.

Though intelligent, they have devoted their intelligence to the service of the Lord. Newsletters Facebook Twitter Donate Contact. Blue Letter Bible is a c 3 nonprofit organization. Cite this page MLA format. Share this page using one of these tools: Or email this page to a friend: You must be logged in to send email. Login to your account. That Email is already registered Error: Please provide a valid Email Error:

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