“The whole life of the Church benefits from the mysterious and powerful help of angels.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 334). So, “we would be removing an important part of the Gospel were we to leave out these beings sent by God, who announce and are a sign of his presence among us. Let us invoke them frequently, so that they may sustain us in our commitment to follow Jesus to the point of identifying with him.” (Benedict XVI)
It is important to understand who the angels are and the role they play in our life. Fortunately, there are some excellent books that present and explain the Church’s teaching about angels and demons. Here is a selection of five.
Five Books for Catholics may receive a commission from qualifyng purchases made using the affliate links in this post.
On 29 September, Catholics of the Latin Rite celebrate the feast of the Archangels St. Michael, St. Gabriel, and St. Raphael. On 2 October, they celebrate the memorial of the guardian angels. On these occasions, we venerate all the angels; we celebrate their role in salvation history; and we invoke their assistance.
With these two feasts, the Church makes us aware of how important the angels are in the Church and our own life. Nor are these festivities the only two moments in which the Church teaches us about their important mission. She does so at various moments of the liturgical rites. During the Mass, we unite ourselves to the heavenly hosts in their worship of the Lord (Revelation 5). In the Gloria, we make our own the hymn of praise that the heavenly host sang at Bethlehem when Jesus was born (Luke 2:13-14). At the end of the preface of the Eucharistic Prayer, the priest unites our worship to that of the heavenly hosts right before the whole assembly takes up the hymn of the seraphim in the Sanctus (Isaiah 6:2-3). At quite a few parishes, after the Mass has ended, the assembly still follows the practice prescribed by Leo XIII, though no longer in force, and recite the Prayer to St. Michael and invoke his protection.
As these examples show, the Church’s belief in angels is deeply biblical, as are its rites and their expression of the unity between the earthly and the heavenly liturgy. Moreover, the liturgy’s repeated evocations of the heavenly hosts stresses that angels are neither symbolic nor superfluous, but real and relevant.
In our day, however, there is much scepticism about the existence of angels or esoteric fascination with them. Even quite a few Christians are swept along by the one tendency or the other. On the one hand, there is the odd priest who preaches that Satan does not exist but is a biblical symbolization of evil. On the other hand, there are pockets of devout Catholics who claim to know the name of their guardian angel and contact him with prayers and rituals that have no place in the Church’s Tradition.
Neither phenomenon is new. They are as old as Christianity. St. Paul had to admonish those who tended toward “the worship of angels” (Colossians 2:18). On the other extreme, there were the Sadducees. They gave more priority to Hellenism rather than the Torah whenever the two came into conflict and so denied the existence of angels (Acts 23:8).
"The angels are spirits and insofar as they are spirits they are not angels. The become angels when they are sent: 'angel' is the name for their office, not their nature." St. Augustine
Modern rationalism about angels has a somewhat different cast. It too is shot through with philosophical naturalism. However, it bolsters it with appeals to the natural and human sciences. It argues that thanks to those sciences we know better than the ancient peoples, who only believed in angels out of ignorance and superstition.
According to the naturalist, that is also true of the authors of the Bible. The Old Testament authors, they argue, introduced stories about angels, not because they are describing divinely revealed truths under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, but simply because they were influenced by the religious beliefs and myths of the surrounding peoples, such as Assyria or Babylonia. However, drawing on elements from the surrounding culture and writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit are not mutually exclusive. The Holy Spirit can still reveal truths through the culturally conditioned literary idiom of the divinely inspired human authors. And when it comes to angels and demons, the Bible teaches unequivocally that they exist. St. Paul is quite explicit that “all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities” (1 Colossians 1:16). For this reason, we Christians use these words of St. Paul to assert our belief in the existence of angels. We do so when we profess the first article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed: “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.”
Consequently, the Christian vision of the universe is radically different from that of the naturalist. For the naturalist, only the visible exists. Ultimately, it is just matter that is continuously reconfigured by the blind, uncaring laws of physics. Christians, on the other hand, know that the cosmos has been created out of nothing by the Triune God, is under his provident care, and comprises both the material domain and the spiritual. Moreover, angels and demons are major actors within the cosmos and its sacred history.
These truths were defined as dogmas by the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Lateran IV taught: that God has created angels; that they are pure spirits and so, unlike us, do not partake of the earthly, corporeal order (see 1Kings 22:21, Matthew 8:16, Luke 6:18, Hebrews 1:14; Ephesians 6:12); that demons, though created good, became bad by their own decision; and that the first man sinned at the instigation of the devil.
Furthermore, Sacred Scripture repeatedly states that are very many: “a thousand thousands” or “ten thousand times ten thousand” (Daniel 7:10), “myriads of myriads,” (Revelation 5:11). Had Jesus wished to, he could have summoned “more that twelve legions of angels.” (Matthew 26:53). Similarly, there are many fallen angels. The legion of devils that possesses the Gerasene demoniac attests as much (Mark 5:9, Luke 8:30).
Of course, belief in angels and demons is hardly the most fundamental truth of the faith. It is not nearly as important as our belief that there are seven sacraments or that Mary was conceived without original sin, is ever virgin, the Mother of God, and has been assumed body and soul into heaven. Indeed, the Church’s doctrine on the angels falls fairly low within the hierarchy of truths. That does not mean that it is unimportant.
On the contrary, it is deeply important. The angels are part of God’s salvific dispensation. Not only do they help God accomplish it. Through their existence and works they help manifest the Trinity and its salvific plan.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church discretely underlines their importance when it teaches that, “The existence of the spiritual, non-corporeal beings that Sacred Scripture usually calls ‘angels’ is a truth of faith” (328). With the theological term of art “a truth of faith” (de fide), it indicates that this is a divinely revealed truth, contained in both Sacred Scripture and Tradition, which has been solemnly defined as such. It is, therefore, a truth that is necessary for our salvation and which we are obliged to believe.
Precisely because both angels and demons exert such a major influence on our life, we should be interested in learning about who they are and how they affect us.
Not only are there several excellent, accessible books on the subject. Over the last few years there has been a growing interest in angels among Catholic theologians and several excellent studies have been published. Some are suitable for a general audience. Some are more detailed, though still accessible to the general reader. Others, such as Elizabeth Klein’s Augustine's Theology of Angels, are academic monographs for specialists but not unduly challenging and well worth reading.
Here then is a selection of five books on angels.
They have not been listed in any recommended reading order.
The most accessible one is Rosa Giorgi’s survey of angels and demons in art. However, perhaps Card. Danielou’s book is the best place to start. Not only is it an accessible presentation of what the Church Fathers teach about the angels. It also ties those teachings in with the spiritual life and the concerns of every Christian. Moreover, by surveying the angelology of the Church Fathers, it is also a good introduction to the first book on the list, Denys the Areopagite’s Celestial Hierarchy. This work from the patristic era is important but often difficult to understand for modern readers.
Of course, the Church Fathers do not always agree with each other on every point of doctrine. Not everything that each Father of the Church teaches is dogma. So, you may want to familiarise yourself first with what Scripture and Tradition, interpreted authoritatively by the magisterium, really teach about the angels. In that case, the book by Fr. Saward or that of Fr. Bonino is a good place to start.
"Everyone is influenced by two angels, one of justice and other of iniquity. If there are good thoughts in our heart, there is no doubt that the angel of the Lord is speaking to us. But if evil things come into our heart, the angel of the evil one is speaking to us." Origen of Alexandria
1.
We should start with the Church Fathers. Arguably, the first systematic treatise on the angels from the patristic era is: the Celestial Hierarchy (De coelesti hierarchia) of Pseudo-Dionysius.
This author wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. However, modern scholarship has renamed him Pseudo-Dionysius to underline that he was not the actual Denys the Areopagite but writing under this pseudonym.
He was not the convert mentioned in Acts of the Apostles (17:34) and who, according to Eusebius of Caesarea, was the first bishop of Athens. Rather, he was active during the late fifth or early sixth century. He uses phrases from the fifth-century Neo-Platonist philosopher, Proclus, whereas his works are already mentioned by the 620s. However, he was not trying to deceive his readers with his clever pseudonym. Rather, he was using a standard rhetorical device of the period to situate his writings within an authoritative theological tradition.
The Celestial Hierarchy is arguably the first systematic treatise on the angels. However, that would not be reason enough to include it. It makes the list because it sums up much of the patristic teaching on the angels and greatly influenced later doctors of the Church. St. Gregory the Great was one of the first to be stimulated by it. St. Albert wrote a commentary on it when St. Thomas Aquinas was his student at Cologne. St. Thomas subsequently drew on it when writing about the angels in his Summa theologiae. The Celestial Hierarchy, therefore, was a major influence on medieval theological reflection on angels, especially in the West.
That said, it may strike modern readers as strange and even forced because it is shot through with Christian Platonism. For that reason, it is important to appreciate what Denys is doing. Essentially, he is using Neo-Platonic philosophy to explain how through creation God both manifests himself to us and draws us towards union with him.
Celestial Hierarchy is a work of biblical exegesis. On the one hand, Denys is looking for a rationale behind the various kinds of angel that Sacred Scripture mentions. By his reading, there are nine such kinds. Earlier Church Fathers—such as St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. John Chrysostom, and St. Gregory of Nyssa—had distinguished the same nine kinds of angels but listed them in slightly different orders. On the other hand, Denys seeks to explain why Scripture applies the names of certain visible realities, such as fire, to describe the angels. What makes those names and things suitable for manifesting the invisible angels?
For Denys, however, it is not enough to identify the nine kinds of angels that Scripture lists, just as several Church Fathers had already done. It is also important to understand why God created these nine orders and only nine. St. Gregory of Nyssa had already claimed that they are ordered by rank. Denys believes that Neo-Platonism’s concept of intermediary beings and the triadic structure of reality provides a key to understanding why there are these nine orders of angel. He argues that they are not only hierarchically ordered—indeed, he coins the term ‘hierarchy’—but also form three hierarchically ordered triads. First, there is the triad of the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones. Under it is the triad of the Dominions, Powers, and Authorities. Under both is that of the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. Moreover, in each triad the first angelic order accomplishes the operation of union, the second that of illumination, and the third that of purification.
While this theory may sound strange and forced, Denys is arguing that God manifests himself to us through the hierarchies that he establishes within creation: indeed, that those hierarchies play an active role in revealing him and uniting us to him.
One such hierarchy is that of the angels. In the companion work, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, Denys describes another, that of the sacraments and the Church. The angelic hierarchy and the ecclesiastical hierarchy work together. By bringing these hierarchies to light, Denys is explaining that creation is a liturgical cosmos through which the Triune God manifests himself and leads us to union with him. ç
2.
This post is for paying subscribers only
Sign up now and upgrade your account to read the post and get access to the full library of posts for paying subscribers only.
