The Bodiless Powers

 

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"All my angels praised Me!"

"Uplifted Godwards, from their beginning it has been the angels' greatest joy to choose freely for God and to give him their undaunted flow of life in unending love and worship." ~ Mother Alexandra

On November 8, we commemorate The Synaxis of the Archangel Michael and the Other Bodiless Powers. This gives us the opportunity to explore the Church's well-developed angelology. Orthodox theology reveals to us the fulness of all created reality, beginning with the realm of the bodiless powers: "When the stars were made, all my angels praised me with a loud voice." (Job 38:7) When we remove the angelic orders from our account of reality, we diminish our sense of wonder and our sense of "mystery" in the best sense of that word. I recall once, speaking with one of our parish’s Church School teachers about the nature of angels and how we convey this to our children. One of our first tasks, I believe, is to overcome the caricature that has developed over the centuries concerning the appearance and role of angels. (Do adults also need to be liberated from this same caricature?).

That caricature imagines angels to be puffy and fluffy “cherubs” that are basically rosy-cheeked floating babies. Cupid-like, they carry bows and arrows that appear harmless enough. They are often naked, but at times they appear to be covered in what can only be described as a celestial diaper. How these Hallmark card fantasies, based on Renaissance and Baroque-era deviations from the sacred and profound iconography of the earlier centuries both West and East, can be associated with the “Lord of Sabaoth” and the celestial hierarchy of angels that surround the throne of God with their unceasing chant of “Holy, Holy, Holy!” is something of an unfortunate mystery. In the words of Lev Gillette, a Monk of the Eastern Church: "There is nothing rosy or weakly poetical in the Angels of the Bible: they are flashes of the light and strength of the Almighty Lord." And in her wonderful book The Holy Angels, Mother Alexandra writes: "In a certain sense, if it can be so expressed, they are the individualized selfness of God's own attributes."

The Scriptures and the Holy Fathers only describe powerful celestial beings that serve God and fulfill His will for the well-being of the human race and our salvation. Angels are not eternal or immortal by nature. They are creatures, coming forth from the creative Word of God perfected by His Spirit. It was Saint Basil the Great, based on Job 38:7, as quoted above, who taught that angels were created even before the cosmos. These genderless beings are described by Saint Gregory the Theologian as “a second light, an effusion or participation in God, in the primal light.” 

Whenever a human being is visited by an angel and receives this heavenly messenger’s revelation, his or her first impulse is to bow down and worship this celestial visitor as a divine being! Warm and fuzzy feelings with any impulse toward cuddling and kissing are hardly implied in the biblical texts. It is again, Mother Alexandra who reinforces this: "Angels are of a superiority all but incomprehensible to us, but they are a part of our lives. By God's boundless mercy, they are destined, in the great moments of history, to be the heralds of the Most High to man below; they are, as well, our guides, guardians, mentor, protectors, and comforters from birth to the grave." Actually, our use of the term “angel” – based on the Greek angelos or “messenger”—is a generic term used to describe all of the many kinds of heavenly hosts described and named in the Scriptures. In fact, this celestial hierarchy, according to Saint Dionysios the Areopagite, is comprised of a triad of ranks, three angelic orders in each rank. The names are scriptural, but the triads have been conceived of by Saint Dionysios: 

• First Rank:  Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones (Is. 6:2; Ezek. 10:1; Col. 1:16)
• Second Rank:  Authorities, Dominions, Powers (Col. 1:16; I Pet. 3:22; Eph. 3:10)
• Third Rank:  Principalities, Angels, Archangels (Col. 1:16; I Thes. 4:15)

This structuring of the celestial hierarchy has had an enormous influence on the angelology of the Church.

Actually, Saint John Chrysostom tells us that even these names and “classes” do not exhaust the heavenly ranks of angelic beings: “There are innumerable other kinds and an unimaginable multitude of classes, for which no words can be adequate to express.” he writes. “From this we see that there are certain names which will be known then, but are now unknown.”

With his great ability to summarize and synthesize the Church’s living Tradition, Saint John of Damascus (+749) gives us this description of what an angel actually is in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. “An angel, then, is a noetical essence, perpetually in motion, with a free will, incorporeal, subject to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature. The Creator alone knows the form and limitation of its essence.”

Admittedly, this is a very brief description of the true nature of the bodiless hosts of heaven, based on the Scriptures and the Fathers. Hopefully it will restore a genuine sense of awe and veneration before these incredible beings that only further amaze us with the creative power, energy and will of God.

LENTEN MEDITATION - Day XXIX — Desert Wisdom and Baptism

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

Abba Moses of Petra was terribly embattled by porneia. No longer strong enough to remain in his cell he went and reported to Abba Isidore. The elder begged him to return to his cell but he would not accept that, saying: “Abba, I haven’t the strength.” So he took him and brought him up onto the housetop with him and said to him: “Look to the west.” He looked up and saw an innumerable host of demons; they were milling around together and shouting, ready for battle. Then Abba Isidore also said to him: “Look to the east.” He looked and saw innumerable hosts of glorious holy angels. Then Abba Isidore also said: “Here, these are they who are sent by the Lord to help the holy ones; those who are in the west are they who are fighting against them. These who are on our side are more numerous.” When he had given thanks to God for this, Abba Moses took courage and returned to his own cell.

—From Give Me a Word: The Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers

______

I believe that Abba Isodore was assuring Abba Moses that essentially God is far stronger than the Evil One. No matter the temptation - in this case "porneia" means basically sexual lust - the Christian, armed with the sign of the Cross, which is the outward manifestation of faith in Christ, has the necessary weapons to engage in this  "spiritual warfare" and emerge victorious. 

 It is essential, however, that we do not fight  these battles depending upon our own strength and resources, but always humbly seek the Lord's grace and presence. The angels in the "east" are more numerous, then the fallen angels in the "west." That takes up back to our Baptism, when turned toward the west we (or our sponsor) renounced and even spit on Satan. We then turned back to the east and confessed our faith in the victorious Christ.

 

The Angelic World

 

 

 Dear Parish Faithful,

The passage below is taken from a homily by the late Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon. The title is the "Synaxis of the Holy Angels," and it was delivered on November 8, 2005, the date on which we commemorate the Archangels Michael and Gabriel and and all of the bodiless powers. We celebrated this feast just this week with Great Vespers and the Liturgy. And we also chanted an Akathist Hymn to Archangel Michael the day after the feast. The feast is already past, but this is a timely excerpt from the end of this fine homily that I wanted to share with the parish. And since the Liturgy on the Lord's Day is approaching, an "event" in which the angels are together with us and serving with us, this passage is a good reminder as to where we need to turn our gaze and "attention" so as not to become indifferent to the invisible world:
_____

My beloved brothers and sisters, we live in a materialistic world, in a world, in a culture - a so-called culture, at any rate - which deals with nothing but matter. How will we satisfy our material needs, how will we increase our bodily enjoyment, how will we increase our pleasure. Our world today is nothing but a struggle to increase our standard of living, our wealth, a struggle without end, a struggle which subjects us to mental and physical fatigue and makes us lose our faith in a world which is not material. So the angels today, my beloved brothers and sisters, are calling us to leave the earth, to think that our destiny is to be together with the angels close to God, because that is where our happiness lies and not in the material goods of this world. And that is precisely why today's feast is an opportunity that our Church uses to send a message that there is an intangible world, that matter is not everything, that our destiny is to unite with this intangible world and to be close to the glory of God.

...Our ancestors lived with this faith in the angelic world. They believed that angels accompany them in their journeys and that at the end of their lives, angels receive their souls and take them to the throne of God. Let us acquire this simple faith again, my dear brothers and sisters, in this materialistic world in which we live. Let us be a light, a witness, a true witness to the glory of God. Amen!

From Receive One Another - 101 Sermons by Metropolitan John of Pergamon.

'All My angels praised Me!'

 

Dear Parish Faithful,

"Uplifted Godwards, from their beginning it has been the angels' greatest joy to choose freely for God and to give him their undaunted flow of life in unending love and worship."  ~ Mother Alexandra

On November 8, just yesterday at the Liturgy this year, we commemorated The Synaxis of the Archangel Michael and the Other Bodiless Powers. This gives us the opportunity to explore the Church's well-developed angelology. 

 

Orthodox theology reveals to us the fulness of all created reality, beginning with the realm of the bodiless powers: "When the stars were made, all my angels praised me with a loud voice." (Job 38:7) When we remove the angelic orders from our account of reality, we diminish our sense of wonder and our sense of "mystery" in the best sense of that word. I recall once, speaking with one of our parish’s Church School teachers about the nature of angels and how we convey this to our children.  One of our first tasks, I believe, is to overcome the caricature that has developed over the centuries concerning  the appearance and role of angels.  (Do adults also need to be liberated from this same caricature?).

That caricature imagines angels to be puffy and fluffy “cherubs” that are basically rosy-cheeked floating babies.  Cupid-like, they carry bows and arrows that appear harmless enough.  They are often naked, but at times they appear to be covered in what can only be described as a celestial diaper.  How these Hallmark card fantasies, based on Renaissance and Baroque-era deviations from the sacred and profound iconography of the earlier centuries both West and East, can be associated with the “Lord of Sabaoth” and the celestial hierarchy of angels that surround the throne of God with their unceasing chant of “Holy, Holy, Holy!” is something of an unfortunate mystery. In the words of Lev Gillette, a Monk of the Eastern Church: "There is nothing rosy or weakly poetical in the Angels of the Bible: they are flashes of the light and strength of the Almighty Lord"  And in her wonderful book The Holy Angels, Mother Alexandra writes:  "In a certain sense, if it can be so expressed, they are the individualized  selfness of God's own attributes."

The Scriptures and the Holy Fathers only describe powerful celestial beings that serve God and fulfill His will for the well-being of the human race and our salvation.  Angels are not eternal or immortal by nature.  They are creatures, coming forth from the creative Word of God perfected by His Spirit.  It was Saint Basil the Great, based on Job 38:7, as quoted above, who taught that angels were created even before the cosmos. These genderless beings are described by Saint Gregory the Theologian as “a second light, an effusion or participation in God, in the primal light.”  And whenever a human being is visited by an angel and receives this heavenly messenger’s revelation, his or her first impulse is to bow down and worship this celestial visitor as a divine being!  Warm and fuzzy feelings with any impulse toward cuddling and kissing are hardly implied in the biblical texts. It is again, Mother Alexandra who reinforces this: "Angels are of a superiority all but incomprehensible to us, but they are a part of our lives. By God's boundless mercy, they are destined, in the great moments of history, to be the heralds of the Most High to man below; they are, as well, our guides, guardians, mentor, protectors, and comforters from birth to the grave." Actually, our use of the term “angel” – based on the Greek angelos or “messenger”—is a generic term used to describe all of the many kinds of heavenly hosts described and named in the Scriptures.  In fact, this celestial hierarchy, according to Saint Dionysios the Areopagite,  is comprised of a triad of ranks, three angelic orders in each rank.  The names are scriptural, but the triads have been conceived of by Saint Dionysios:

 

• First Rank:  Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones (Is. 6:2; Ezek. 10:1; Col. 1:16)
• Second Rank:  Authorities, Dominions, Powers (Col. 1:16; I Pet. 3:22; Eph. 3:10)
• Third Rank:  Principalities, Angels, Archangels (Col. 1:16; I Thes. 4:15)

 

This structuring of the celestial hierarchy has had an enormous influence on the angelology of the Church.

Actually, Saint John Chrysostom tells us that even these names and “classes” do not exhaust the heavenly ranks of angelic beings: “There are innumerable other kinds and an unimaginable multitude of classes, for which no words can be adequate to express.” he writes.  “From this we see that there are certain names which will be known then, but are now unknown.”

With his great ability to summarize and synthesize the Church’s living Tradition, Saint John of Damascus (+749) gives us this description of what an angel actually is in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith.  “An angel, then, is a noetical essence, perpetually in motion, with a free will, incorporeal, subject to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature.  The Creator alone knows the form and limitation of its essence.”

Admittedly, this is a very brief description of the true nature of the bodiless hosts of heaven, based on the Scriptures and the Fathers. Hopefully it will restore a genuine sense of awe and veneration before these incredible beings that only further amaze us with the creative power, energy and will of God. 

The Awesome God and the Holy Angels

Dear Parish Faithful,

I have been reading a very interesting book entitled Angels [and Demons] - What Do We Really Know About Them. The book is already about twenty-five years old. The author is Peter Kreeft who is a philosopher teaching at Boston College and King's College (I am not certain if he is still teaching, as he is now eighty-three years old). He is also a deeply committed Roman Catholic, and a very prolific writer who has written at least eighty books.

 

On the whole, most of his books can be called "popular," meaning written in a way that make them quite accessible to a wide-ranging audience. At times, he can certainly display his skills as a philosopher when necessary. He is clearly a Christian apologist, that is one who writes in defense of the truthfulness and reasonableness of the Christian Faith. For many he is seen as something of a late twentieth - early twenty-first century American version of C.S. Lewis, a writer that Peter Kreeft greatly admires. 

He is also very much a Thomist, a Roman Catholic who is deeply inspired by the medieval theologian, Thomas Aquinas. I have only read about two or three of his books, and I do find them very insightful and "thought-provoking," as we like to say. As Orthodox, we would disagree with certain things he claims, but the point is he offers a very compelling case for basic Christian Truth.

Be that as it may, in this book I am reading about angels, he makes a slight digression to examine and critique the philosophy of materialism, the belief that only material reality exists. This come under a section in which he is answering the questions: Can you prove spirits exist? Can you prove materialism is untrue? He begins with three short statements:

1. Nonmaterialists don't demand of materialists that they prove matter is real. Why does the materialist demand that we prove that spirit is real?

2. We appeal to common experience. Most people experience both their bodies and their souls, or spirits, or minds.

3. Materialism is insulting. if it is true, we are only sophisticated animals or machines.

It is his fourth point, picking up from and developing point 3, that I find a bit more compelling and worthy of sharing as a strong philosophical argument against materialism:

4.  If you are a machine, then you can't change or control what you do any more than the environment of the earth can help evaporating water. All acts of thinking and choosing are nothing but movements of atoms, or material energy., like gravity or electricity. How then can some of these atom movements be true and others false? You don't say that the evaporation that happens on the surface of another lake is false. They simply both happen. So if acts of thinking are just material events that happen, like evaporation, it makes no sense to call some true and others false. In that case, it makes no sense to call the thought of materialism true and of nonmaterialism false. The theory contradicts itself; it undercuts itself. If it is true, nothing is true, including it. Matter is not true; matter is neither true nor false; matter just is. If nothing but matter exists, then nothing is true, including the thought of materialism. (Angels [and Demons], p. 48-49)

(As Orthodox, we are less inclined to say that "matter just is." We think of matter as also filled with the divine energies - and for this reason, matter cannot be manipulated for the wrong purposes - but as used in his argument, his statement makes a point). Materialism, of course, is atheistic, and therefore actually nihilistic, no matter how "optimistic" one is about life in this world. It is a bankrupt philosophy that cannot ascribe real meaning to anything. But materialists do not act like the materialist that Peter Kreeft analyzes. They seek meaning in life, as well as they love and have "moral values." But none of this can be philosophically defended. Thus, there is a real disconnect between a materialist worldview and the desire to live moral and meaningful lives.

On a very different subject, now that I am dealing with this book, Peter Kreeft takes on the question: Are angels comforting? He writes simply:

"In the end, yes, but not always in the beginning. All the current angel books seem to assume that angels are comforting. Yet every time a real angel appears in the Bible, he has to say "Fear not!" And angels do not use superfluous words. Like Jesus and unlike popular spiritualists and occultists, they are laconic."

But he then continues this specific question by examining and defining what is meant by religious "fear" as that word is associated with God in the Bible. Not in anyway capitulating to our contemporary inclinations toward superficiality — even when discussing "religion" or "spirituality," —  Kreeft writes:

Religious fear, or awe, is an essential ingredient of all true religion, yet it has been systematically exiled from modern, "psychologically correct" religion. What irony! — the thing the Bible calls the "beginning of wisdom" is the experience modern religious educators and liturgists deliberately remove or try to remove from our souls: fear and trembling, adoration and worship, the bent knee and the prone heart. The modern God "is something I can feel comfortable with." The God of the Bible, in contrast, is "a consuming fire." (see Psalm 104:4 and Heb. 12:29).

Rabbi Abraham Heschel, when told by a student that it must be gratifying to spend his life amid the "comforts of religion," replied, "God is not an uncle. God is not nice. God is an earthquake." The same applies to God's angels.

And of course "fear" does not mean "craven fear" or "fear of an evil tyrant." It means awe. But this is much more than "respect," which is how the biblical term fear  is usually interpreted today. No. You don't just "respect" God. You "respect" the value of money, or the power of an internal combustion engine, or the conventions of politeness. You smile politely and take account of it. Only a fool does that to God. Refusal to fall flat on your face proves that the God you have met is simply not the real God.

Angels (as distinct from devils - fallen angels) always do us good. They warn, rescue, guide, and enlighten. So the end result is indeed comforting. But not at first. True religion never begins in comfort. It begins in repentance and humility and fear." (Angels [and Demons], p. 62-63)

This is very important for us to realize today, as "therapeutic religion" is becoming pervasive. In this approach, even if not articulated openly, it is God who is serving us, rather than we who are serving God. But it is more important to experience the reality that Peter Kreeft is defending.  And this always brings us to the beauty and power of the Liturgy. 

We do not come to the Liturgy - at least primarily - to be comforted by God; rather we come to worship God in all of God's majesty, power, glory and beauty: Holy God! Holy Mighty! Holy Immortal! Have mercy on us! And before every Vespers service: "Come, let us worship and fall down before Christ our King and our God!"   God is the "awesome God," but God is not a remote deity. God is simultaneously "Our Father." This balance - or paradox - is at the heart of the Orthodox understanding and experience of God.