Category: Angels and Demons

Before the creation of the material universe God created the angels, billions of them. All at once they came into existence. One moment they were not, the next moment they were. Imagine that! Imagine being fully cognizant of yourself and your fellow celestial spirits all at once. Awesome, is it not? All of your knowledge of everything around you and your Almighty Creator, one God in Three Persons, was infused at your creation. You were a child of God from the start, gifted with the infused virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity; and all that you had to do to see God face to face forever was to love Him and obey Him.

The angels have no body; they are pure spirits, unmixed with matter. They have no need of a language for they communicate directly by one intellect engaging another, thought to thought, concept to concept. What tremendous minds they have! They see all the effects directly and immediately in their causes, all the conclusions in the premises. Therefore, they have no need to reason as we do. Philosophers call their intellectual activity “intuition.” They intuit, rather than think. They see the truth of things directly, so it is not possible for an angel to make an erroneous judgment. They do not know everything, of course. They can be ignorant. But they can never be wrong about what they do know.

Angels also have a will. It is their intellect and will, and sanctifying grace, that makes them the image and likeness of God. Because the angels have a free will, they could chose in their trial state to obey or disobey God. Did they receive a specific command from God, like Adam and Eve? Yes. They were commanded to adore God’s Son in a nature inferior to their own, the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ. Before it came about, God revealed to all the angels the creation of man and the Incarnation to come. And, the mother of this God-man would be their Queen.

The good angels joyfully obeyed and were taken in to the beatific vision of the Blessed Trinity, whom they had known before only by Faith. The tradition is that two-thirds of the angels obeyed God. The one third that refused, and chose to follow the rebellious Lucifer, were cast into hell. Some of these demons are allowed to take their hell with them and roam the earth where they can tempt men. So, too, the more powerful, good angels, take their heaven with them, and roam the earth doing good to men. A guardian angel is assigned by God to every man at birth.