The Bodiless Nature

What are the angels? The tradition calls them “bodiless powers,” but the Fathers are careful: an angel is bodiless and immaterial only relative to us, not absolutely — compared with God alone, who is truly immaterial, even the angel is found to be gross and material. This file sets out the classic dogmatic account of the angelic nature (following St. John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3): what it means for an angel to be incorporeal, circumscribed in place, in ceaseless motion, mutable by choice yet confirmed in grace, and finite in knowledge.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

“Bodiless” — But Relative to Whom?

The angels are named in the liturgical books the bodiless powers (Greek asōmatoi dynameis), and the Church confesses them as spirits. But the Fathers refused to leave the word “bodiless” unqualified, and the qualification is the heart of the Orthodox doctrine of the angelic nature. St. John of Damascus gives the classic statement in the third chapter of the second book of his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith:

“An angel, then, is an intelligent essence, in perpetual motion, with free-will, incorporeal, ministering to God, having obtained by grace an immortal nature… He is called incorporeal and immaterial in comparison with us; for compared with God, who alone is incomparable, everything proves to be gross and material — for in reality only the Deity is immaterial and incorporeal” (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3; trans. NPNF II/9).

This double qualification governs everything. The angel is incorporeal in comparison with us — it has no flesh, no material body, no place among the visible things. But it is not incorporeal absolutely, in the way God is: only the uncreated Deity is truly and simply immaterial; every creature, the angel included, is on the far side of that gulf, and so is, relative to God, a thing of some subtlety of “matter,” a determinate and circumscribed being (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3; Louth, St John Damascene, Oxford, 2002, on the qualified incorporeality). The angel is thus a created spirit: finer than any bodily thing we know, but not the boundless simplicity of God. The Damascene even ventures that God alone knows the angel’s real nature; to us it is “bodiless” chiefly by contrast with our own condition (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3).

The point is not a scholastic nicety. It keeps the angel a creature, and it keeps the creature/Creator line absolute where it belongs (see Creatures of the Invisible World). To say the angels are “pure spirits” in exactly the way God is spirit would be to make gods of them; the tradition’s careful “bodiless relative to us, not to God” forbids precisely that.

Circumscribed, Not Omnipresent

Because the angel is a finite creature, it is circumscribed — bounded, present in one place at a time, not everywhere at once. The Damascene is explicit: the angel, “when in the heaven, is not on the earth: and when sent by God down to the earth, does not remain in the heaven,” and it is “circumscribed” — not, indeed, in the coarse bodily way, “yet they are in place” and “are limited” (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3; trans. NPNF II/9). Only God is omnipresent, filling all things while contained by none. The angel is present where it acts; it moves from place to place, not by traversing space as a body does, but “intellectually,” being present where it works (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3). This finitude of presence is why the tradition can speak of sending an angel, of an angel coming and departing, of a guardian assigned to this person or that church (see The Guardian Angel) — a ministry that presupposes a creature who is here and not there.

In Perpetual Motion Toward God

The Damascene’s phrase “in perpetual motion” names the positive side of the angelic life. The angels are not static; they are ever in movement toward God, ceaselessly contemplating and praising Him, and it is this ceaseless God-ward motion — not sleep, not idleness — that is their rest (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3; on the ceaseless praise, see The Angelic Liturgy). The Dionysian tradition describes this motion as the receiving and handing-on of the divine light through the ranks, so that the angelic being is defined by its place in a living circulation of illumination (Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 3; trans. Luibheid–Rorem, 1987; see The Dionysian Hierarchy). The angel is, in a word, a doxological creature: to be an angel is to be forever turned toward God in adoration and service.

Mutable by Nature, Confirmed by Grace

A created will can turn. The angels were made good, but as creatures endowed with free will they were, by nature, capable of change — capable of turning toward God or away from Him. The Damascene teaches that the angel “is not susceptible of repentance because it is incorporeal,” meaning that the angelic choice, made with the whole clarity of a bodiless intelligence, is fixed as ours is not: the holy angels, having freely cleaved to God, are now confirmed in the good by grace and no longer able to fall, while the fallen angels, having freely turned away, are fixed in their apostasy (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3 and 4; trans. NPNF II/9; Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, 1957). This is why the fall of the angels is treated as a single, irrevocable turning rather than a career of repeated lapses (see The Fall of the Angels). The immortality and immutability the good angels now enjoy are, the Fathers insist, by grace and not by nature — a gift of God who alone is immortal and unchanging of Himself (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3).

The Limits of Angelic Knowledge

The angels know much, and swiftly; but their knowledge is a creature’s knowledge, and it has limits the tradition is careful to mark. They do not know the future as God knows it, for foreknowledge belongs to God alone; what the angels foretell, they foretell because God reveals it to them (John of Damascus, Exact Exposition II.3, that the angels “know the future” only so far as God reveals it and foretells it). They do not read the human heart directly, which is God’s prerogative, though they perceive much from what is expressed. And they are not omniscient: the Scripture that says the angels “desire to look into” the mysteries of salvation (1 Peter 1:12) implies that even the highest of them learn the depths of God’s economy as it unfolds, and are instructed — Paul says — through the Church, “to the intent that now unto the principalities and powers in heavenly places might be known by the church the manifold wisdom of God” (Ephesians 3:10; Daniélou, 1957, on the angels’ progressive learning of the economy). The angelic mind is vast but bounded; it grows in the knowledge of God and is not its own light.

This finitude of knowledge has a sharp pastoral edge in the treatment of the demons, who share the angelic limits without the angelic grace: because the fallen angels have no foreknowledge and cannot read the heart, their much-feared “predictions” and mind-tricks are guesswork and suggestion, not power — a point the ascetic tradition presses to disarm the fear of them (see The Demons and Spiritual Warfare).

A Nature Named by Its Work

It is worth ending where the tradition often does: the very word “angel” (Greek angelos, Hebrew mal’akh) means messenger, and names not the nature but the office. “They are called angels,” Augustine observed and the East echoed, “not because of what they are but because of what they do” — the name is the name of a ministry (Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 103.1.15; cf. Daniélou, 1957, on angelos as office). By nature they are bodiless intelligences; “angel” designates them as sent ones, and the ranks that are sent to us — the Angels and Archangels of the lowest triad — bear the name of the whole host precisely because they are the messengers nearest to human beings (Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy 9; see The Names and Their Scripture). To speak of the angelic nature is thus already to speak of a nature ordered to service — a bodiless creature made to stand before God and to be sent from His presence to ours.

See Also

References

  • John of Damascus. An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, II.3 (“Concerning angels”) and II.4 (“Concerning the devil and demons”). Trans. NPNF II/9. (The definition of an angel; incorporeal relative to us and material relative to God alone; circumscription and place; perpetual motion; immutability by grace, not nature; the limits of angelic foreknowledge.)
  • Pseudo-Dionysius. The Celestial Hierarchy 3 and 9, in The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. New York: Paulist Press, 1987. (The circulation of light; the Angels as the ministering rank nearest to us.)
  • Augustine. Enarrationes in Psalmos 103.1.15. (Angel as the name of an office, not a nature.)
  • Scripture: 1 Peter 1:12; Ephesians 3:10 (the angels’ progressive knowledge of the economy).
  • Daniélou, Jean. The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957. (The angelic knowledge and its growth; angelos as office.)
  • Louth, Andrew. St John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The qualified incorporeality of the angels in the Damascene.)