Creatures of the Invisible World

The angels are creatures. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed confesses God as “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” — and the “invisible” is, in the Fathers’ reading, first of all the angelic world. This file sets out the createdness of the angels, the patristic discussion of when they were made (the tradition inclining, with Basil, to a creation before the visible cosmos), and the boundary that guards the doctrine: angels are a distinct order of creation, not deified human beings and not the souls of the departed.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

“Things Visible and Invisible”

The Creed of the First and Second Ecumenical Councils confesses one God, “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” (the Symbol of Nicaea-Constantinople, 325/381). The Fathers read the phrase “things invisible” as embracing, before all else, the angelic world — the spiritual creation that has no place in the visible cosmos and is not perceived by the senses (John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith II.3; trans. NPNF II/9). The confession is deliberately anti-dualist. Against every teaching that would make the spiritual powers eternal, or divine, or co-principles with God — the errors the Church confronted in Gnostic and Manichaean systems — the Creed places the angels firmly on the creature’s side of the one absolute divide: there is God, uncreated, and there is everything else, which He made from nothing. The angels, however exalted, stand with the world on the created side of that line (Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church, Newman, 1957, on the createdness of the angelic order; Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS Press, 1976, ch. 5).

This is the first and most important thing the tradition says about the angels, and everything else depends on it. Because they are creatures, they are finite; they can grow, and (as the fallen angels show) they could turn away; they worship and do not receive worship; they mediate God’s light but are not its source. The whole later architecture — the ranks, the missions, the guardianship — is the architecture of a created ministry (see The Nine Ranks; The Bodiless Nature).

When Were the Angels Created?

Scripture nowhere narrates the making of the angels. The Genesis account begins with the heavens and the earth and does not pause over the spiritual world; the angels appear already in existence, so that when God lays the foundations of the earth “the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (Job 38:7) — a verse the Fathers read as the angels already rejoicing at the creation of the visible world (Daniélou, 1957, on Job 38:7). The silence of Genesis left the Fathers to reason about the moment, and they reasoned variously.

The most influential Eastern answer is that of St. Basil the Great. In the first homily of his Hexaemeron, expounding “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” Basil argues that “In the beginning” points to a prior condition — that before this world, and before time, there existed “a condition harmonious with the powers beyond the world,” a spiritual and timeless creation in which the “supramundane” intelligences dwelt; the visible world, with its measured time, came afterward as a school for souls (Basil, Hexaemeron, Homily 1.5; trans. NPNF II/8). On this reading the angelic world is older than the material world — created, but created first, in a realm above the reach of the sun’s measured days. St. Gregory the Theologian and the mainstream of the Greek Fathers follow this general line: the intelligible creation precedes the sensible (Daniélou, 1957; on Basil’s cosmology, see St. Basil the Great).

Not every Father agreed, and the tradition never made the question dogma. [Disputed: the moment of the angels' creation is a patristic theologoumenon, not a conciliar definition. (a) The dominant Eastern view, following Basil (*Hexaemeron* 1.5) and Gregory the Theologian, places the creation of the angelic world *before* the visible cosmos. (b) A minority strand, wary of positing any interval before the six days, preferred to place the angels within the work of the first day (identified with the creation of "light" or of "heaven"); Augustine in the West characteristically reads the angels as made in the "light" of day one (*City of God* XI.9). (c) St. John of Damascus reports the question and inclines to the Basilian priority while acknowledging that "some say" the angels were made before the visible creation (*Exact Exposition* II.3). The Church has defined only *that* the angels are created, not *when*; this file reports the range and does not adjudicate it (Daniélou, 1957; Louth, *St John Damascene*, Oxford, 2002).]

The Damascene’s own summary is careful and representative: “He is Himself the Maker and Creator of the angels: for He brought them out of nothing into being and created them after His own image, an incorporeal race, a sort of spirit or immaterial fire… Some, indeed, hold that they were created before all creation… others that they were created after the first heaven was made” (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3; trans. NPNF II/9). The doctrine is the createdness; the timing is left open.

Number and Priority — What Is and Is Not Claimed

That the angels are very many, Scripture states plainly: Daniel sees the Ancient of Days served by “thousand thousands” and attended by “ten thousand times ten thousand” (Daniel 7:10), and the Apocalypse hears “the voice of many angels round about the throne… and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands” (Revelation 5:11). The Fathers took such numbers as figures of a multitude beyond counting rather than as a census; a favored image, drawn from the parable of the lost sheep, made the angelic host the ninety-nine and fallen humanity the one that strayed (Luke 15:4–7, read of the ninety-nine “in the wilderness” as the angels — a patristic commonplace reported in Daniélou, 1957). The precise number is not revealed and not claimed (see The Bodiless Nature on the finitude of angelic knowledge).

Angels Are Not Deified or Departed Humans

A boundary belongs to the doctrine and is worth stating flatly, because popular piety in every age blurs it: the angels are a distinct order of creation, not the souls of the dead. When a beloved person dies, the Christian does not “become an angel”; the human being remains human — a rational, embodied creature destined for the resurrection of the body — while the angel is a bodiless intelligence of another order altogether, created (on the dominant view) before the human race existed (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3, on the distinct natures; Daniélou, 1957). The angelic and the human are two different creaturely modes of the one rational creation, not two stages of a single one.

This matters in more than one direction. It guards against the sentimental error that reduces the angels to the ghosts of the departed; and it guards the dignity of the human person, who is not a lesser or unfinished angel but a creature of a unique kind — made in the image of God, called to a deification that (in the bold word of the Fathers) even the angels desire to look into (1 Peter 1:12; Daniélou, 1957, on the angels’ wonder at the economy of salvation in the flesh). When the monastic tradition praises the “angelic life” (see The Angelic Life), it means an imitation of angelic purity and ceaseless prayer, not a change of nature: the monk does not cease to be human, and will rise in the body. The angel and the saint stand side by side in the icons precisely as two distinct creaturely glories, not as one thing at two ages.

The same boundary lies behind the Church’s refusal to worship angels while honoring them: a creature, of whatever rank, is honored and not adored, and the honor rendered to the angels differs in kind from the worship due to God alone (Colossians 2:18; the Council of Laodicea, canon 35; treated in The Boundary of Veneration).

References

The Symbol of Faith (Nicaea 325 / Constantinople 381), “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”
John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II.3, “Concerning angels.” Trans. NPNF II/9. (Angels created from nothing; the incorporeal race; the reported views on the timing of their creation.)
Basil the Great. Hexaemeron, Homily 1.5. Trans. NPNF II/8. (The condition “beyond the world” and before time; the intelligible creation prior to the visible.)
Augustine. City of God XI.9. (The Western reading of the angels as made in the “light” of the first day.)
Scripture: Job 38:7; Daniel 7:10; Luke 15:4–7; Revelation 5:11; 1 Peter 1:12; Colossians 2:18.
Council of Laodicea (4th c.), canon 35. Trans. NPNF II/14. (Against the invocation and worship of angels.)
Daniélou, Jean. The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957. (The createdness and priority of the angels; Job 38:7; the ninety-nine; the angels and the economy.)
Lossky, Vladimir. The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976, ch. 5. (The angelic world in Orthodox dogmatics.)
Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The Damascene on the angels.)