The Angelic Life

Orthodox tradition calls the monastic life “the angelic life” (bios angelikos), and the monastic tonsure clothes the monk in “the angelic schema” (or “angelic habit”). This file sets out what that means — the monk as an imitator, not a duplicate, of the angels’ virginity, ceaseless prayer, and single-minded turning toward God — grounds it in the Lord’s word that the risen are “equal to the angels,” and describes the place the angels hold in the daily piety of Orthodox Christians beyond the monastery.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Angelic Life

From the beginnings of monasticism the Church has called the monastic life the angelic life — bios angelikos. The phrase does not mean that the monk becomes an angel, nor that he ceases to be human (a boundary set firmly at the outset: the angels are a distinct order of creation, and the human being remains human, destined for the resurrection of the body; see Creatures of the Invisible World). It means that the monk imitates the angels — takes the angelic mode of existence as the pattern of his own — in three respects above all: virginity (the celibate life, mirroring the bodiless purity of the angels), ceaseless prayer (the unbroken standing-before-God that is the angels’ very being; see The Bodiless Nature), and a single-minded turning toward God that lays aside the cares and possessions of the world (see Orthodox Monasticism).

The scriptural root of the phrase is the Lord’s own teaching on the resurrection. To the Sadducees who denied the resurrection with a riddle about marriage, Christ answers that in the age to come “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage: but are as the angels [Greek isangeloi, “equal to the angels”] which are in heaven” (Luke 20:35–36; cf. Matthew 22:30). The monastic life is understood as the anticipation, already in this age, of that angelic condition of the resurrection: the monk lives now, by grace and struggle, the deathless, marriage-free, God-absorbed life that all the redeemed will live in the Kingdom. The “angelic life” is thus an eschatological life — a foretaste of the resurrection — lived in the midst of the present world (the bios angelikos as the anticipation of the resurrection life is a commonplace of the monastic Fathers; see The Desert Fathers; Orthodox Monasticism).

The Angelic Schema

This understanding is written into the very rite of monastic profession. The monastic tonsure is called a “schema” (Greek schēma, “form,” “habit”), and the fuller degrees of the monastic life are named for the angels: the monk is clothed in the angelic habit, and the highest grade of Orthodox monasticism is the Great Schema — the “great angelic schema” (to mega angelikon schēma) — while the preceding grade is often called the “little angelic schema” (the terminology is standard in the Byzantine and Slavic monastic tradition; see Orthodox Monasticism). The tonsure rite itself frames the profession in angelic terms: the monk dies to the world and rises to the angelic manner of life, and the habit he receives is the outward sign of that inward assimilation to the bodiless powers. To be tonsured is, in the tradition’s language, to be “vouchsafed the angelic schema” — to take up, visibly, the angelic life.

The naming of monastics after the archangels — the many monks and nuns called Michael, Gabriel, Raphael — and the frequent dedication of monasteries to the Archangel or to “the Holy Archangels” (see The Bodiless Powers in the Calendar) carry the same devotion: the monastic community understands itself as living, in the flesh, the life the angels live in spirit, and takes the bodiless powers as its patrons and models.

The Angels in Daily Piety

Beyond the monastery, the angels hold a steady place in the daily piety of Orthodox Christians. The morning and evening prayers to the guardian angel (quoted in The Guardian Angel) frame the layperson’s day: one wakes and asks the angel’s guidance, and sleeps having asked its forgiveness and protection. The sign of the Cross, made against every fear and temptation, is understood in the tradition as the weapon before which the demons flee and the seal under which the angels guard (see The Demons and Spiritual Warfare). Every Monday the Church’s services turn to the Bodiless Powers, and the great feasts of 8 November and 6 September gather the faithful to honor the archangels. Icons of the guardian angel and of the Archangel Michael hang in Orthodox homes; children are taught that their angel goes with them; the dying are commended to the angels’ escort. The doctrine of the angels is not, in Orthodox life, an abstraction reserved for theologians but a lived companionship — the sense that the Christian walks always in the company of unseen servants of God, guarded, guided, and prayed for by a holy angel.

Sober Imitation, Not Fascination

The tradition’s angel-piety is marked, at its healthiest, by the same sobriety that governs its demonology. The “angelic life” is pursued not by seeking angelic experiences — visions, apparitions, communications — but by imitating angelic virtues: purity, obedience, humility, and ceaseless prayer. The Fathers who most revered the angels were also the most reticent about angelic visions, wary of the delusion (prelest) that counterfeits them (see The Jesus Prayer: Prelest and the Need for Guidance). To live with the angels, in the Orthodox sense, is not to court their appearances but to become, by grace, a little like them — attentive to God as the “hearing bands” of the icons declare the angels to be (see How Angels Are Depicted), and turned, as they are turned, wholly toward God. The monk in his cell and the layperson at the evening prayer are living the same angelic life in different measures: a life of standing before God in the company of His bodiless servants, awaiting the day when the redeemed shall be “equal to the angels” in the resurrection.

See Also

• Dogma and Pious Opinion — the capstone map of what the Church defines
• Orthodox Monasticism — the monastic life the “angelic life” names
• The Guardian Angel — the angel of daily piety and the received prayers
• The Bodiless Nature — the ceaseless prayer the monk imitates
• How Angels Are Depicted — the “hearing bands” and the angel as listener
• The Desert Fathers — the origins of the angelic life

References

• Scripture: Luke 20:35–36; Matthew 22:30 (the risen “equal to the angels”).
• The rite of monastic tonsure and the terminology of the “little” and “great angelic schema” — the received Orthodox monastic tradition; see Orthodox Monasticism.
• Daniélou, Jean. The Angels and Their Mission According to the Fathers of the Church. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1957. (The angelic life as the anticipation of the resurrection.)
• Orthodox Prayer Book: the daily prayers to the Guardian Angel (see The Guardian Angel).