Once my seminarians in Kuching began asking questions about angels, it did not take long for the discussion to become considerably more personal. The first questions had concerned metaphysics. Where is an angel? Does an angel move? How does a purely spiritual creature relate to space and time?
But metaphysics has a way of refusing to remain safely abstract. If angels are real, and if they can truly act within the material order, then sooner or later another question presents itself: What can they do to us? Can a guardian angel put a thought into my mind? Can a demon read my thoughts? Can angels manipulate physical objects? Can the devil force someone to commit a sin? What exactly happens in temptation? And where does possession fit into all of this?
These questions are not trivial. Some people become almost fascinated by them. Others are embarrassed by them. The first group risks seeing demonic influence everywhere; the second may reduce the entire spiritual order to a relic of a pre-scientific imagination. The Catholic tradition does something much more demanding. It asks us to affirm at once the reality of the spiritual world, the integrity of created nature, the freedom of the human person, and the absolute sovereignty of God.
How do Angels Act Within the Material World?
Aquinas is especially helpful here because his treatment of angels never encourages sensationalism. The more carefully he defines angelic power, the more clearly its limits emerge. An angel can act upon matter. This may initially sound strange. If an angel has no body, how can he affect bodies? The answer is that causality does not require cause and effect to belong to exactly the same mode of being. Human thought itself produces bodily consequences every day: I decide to raise my hand, and my hand rises. The comparison is imperfect, but it reminds us that the material need not be causally closed to the spiritual.
Aquinas develops this point with considerable precision in Summa Theologiae I, q. 110. Angels can move bodies locally and can employ existing corporeal causes in order to produce further effects within the created order. What they cannot do is create, since creation in the strict sense means causing being from nothing and belongs to God alone. Nor does corporeal matter simply obey the will of an angel with respect to substantial form. As Thomas explains in ST I, q. 110, a. 2, an angel cannot simply will a material thing into a new substantial nature. Rather, angelic action takes place through the powers and causal structures already present within creation. Matter may be moved; existing natural causes may be employed; circumstances may be arranged. But the angel does not stand outside the order of nature as though he could rewrite it by fiat.
This distinction is important because it allows us to affirm genuine angelic causality without turning the angel into a secondary creator. The angel acts within an order he did not establish and upon created natures whose being and form he did not bestow. His power may far exceed ours, but it remains creaturely power. The same is true, at the level of natural capacity, of demons. A fallen angel has not ceased to possess an angelic nature; his intelligence and natural powers remain, but they are now exercised according to a will fixed against the divine order. We should therefore avoid two opposite errors: reducing demonic activity to a mere symbol of our darker impulses, and exaggerating it until the demon begins to resemble a minor deity. He is neither. He is a creature whose powers are real, but limited by the nature God has given him and by the Providence he cannot escape.
The same distinction helps us understand those scriptural scenes in which angels appear bodily. Angels do not naturally possess bodies. When they appear under visible forms, the body is assumed instrumentally for the sake of communication. The angel has not become human. This is why an angelic apparition can never be placed on the same level as the Incarnation. The Son of God does not merely appear as a man. He truly assumes a complete human nature. The angel, by contrast, uses an assumed visible form instrumentally, in a manner proportioned to human perception (ST I, q. 51, a. 2).
Do Angels Experience Time?
This question of how a spiritual creature acts within the material world leads naturally to another question that particularly interested my seminarians in Kuching: do angels experience time? Here again, we have to resist the temptation to imagine spiritual creatures according to the categories of bodily existence.
St. Thomas distinguishes three modes of duration: eternity, time, and what the tradition calls the aevum or aeviternity. God alone is eternal in the proper sense. Following Boethius, Thomas defines eternity as the “complete and perfect possession, all at once, of life without end”—interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio (ST I, q. 10, a. 1). The crucial words are tota simul, “all at once.” Eternity is not simply time stretched out indefinitely. An endless succession of moments would still be time, because one moment would continue to follow another. God does not move from yesterday into today and then await tomorrow. He possesses the fullness of His life in one indivisible act, and therefore knows the whole temporal order without Himself being subject to its succession.
Human beings exist quite differently. Our embodied life unfolds through change: we grow, age, remember, forget, learn, deliberate, and move from potency to act. Even our ordinary manner of knowing is discursive; we arrive at one judgment through another. Time measures precisely this succession according to before and after.
Angels, however, belong fully to neither mode. Their spiritual substance does not age, decay, or pass through the bodily changes that characterize human existence, yet they are creatures and therefore cannot possess the absolute immutability proper to God. Aquinas consequently says that their natural existence is measured by the aevum (ST I, q. 10, a. 5). Aeviternity contains no before and after in the angel’s substantial being, while succession can nevertheless accompany his operations. An angel can attend to one thing and then another, will one act and subsequently another, or exercise his power in one place and afterward in another. His being is stable, while his activity can enter into succession.
This distinction becomes especially important when angels act within our world. An angel is not himself immersed in bodily time as we are, yet his actions can have temporal effects. A guardian angel may assist someone at this moment rather than another; an angel may act upon a body here and subsequently elsewhere; a demon may introduce a temptation into a sequence of human thought. The spiritual cause does not become material or temporal simply because its effect occurs within material time.
Here again Aquinas allows us to preserve distinctions without separating realities that genuinely interact. God exists in eternity; angels possess their natural being according to the aevum; embodied creatures live within time. Yet Providence embraces all three without confusion.
This also prevents another common mistake. To say that angels are naturally incorruptible and can continue to exist without bodily decay does not make them infinite or eternal. An angel may have no natural principle of dissolution, but he remains a creature whose existence is received from God at every moment. His relative freedom from the succession that marks our bodily lives should therefore lead us not to exaggerate angelic greatness, but to perceive more clearly the immeasurable distance between every creature, however exalted, and the Creator. Angels may stand above us in the hierarchy of created intelligence, but they stand with us on the same fundamental side of the distinction that matters most: they too have received their being from God.
Angels and demons can act upon matter and within human history, yet they remain creatures dependent upon God. Understanding how they influence our interior lives will require further distinctions concerning thought, desire, and freedom—which are to come in Part 2 tomorrow.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
