Have you ever wondered how the angels could possibly have fallen?
They had it all.
There were so close to God.
Why then the tragic catastrophe?
Perhaps you've heard that they envied the Incarnation.
Perhaps you've heard that they rebelled against the exaltation of man.
Theologians had been free to speculate on the issue for centuries, and St. Thomas weighed
in on the matter with his characteristic verve.
In this video, we'll build on what has gone before by considering angelic knowledge
and then angelic destiny.
So first, a word about angelic knowing.
Let's distinguish angelic knowledge from divine knowledge.
God is His intellect, His act of knowing, and the object of His knowledge.
For angels, the intellect is a faculty of their spiritual nature.
So whereas God is simple, angels are composed.
Whereas God is His intellect and His knowing, angels know through their intellects.
Consider then how angelic knowledge compares to human knowledge.
Humans learn as we progress from blank slate to wisdom.
For angels, there is no intrinsic potency to further knowledge.
Okay, that's kind of complicated, but that is to say there's nothing in angels that disposes
them to acquire more knowledge.
So whereas humans acquire knowledge through their senses over the course of their life,
angels are furnished with all of their ideas at their creation.
And they rely on God entirely for what they know.
There are ranks of knowing among the angelic choirs. The nearer an angel is
to God, the more perfectly he shares in the simplicity and comprehensiveness of God's
knowledge.
Higher angels know more, with fewer concepts, and to a greater degree of intimacy.
By contrast, the nearer and angel is to man, the more complex is their knowing and the
less embracing.
The final thing to mention on the matter of knowledge is that angels don't think
discursively.
Whereas we reason from one point to the next, angels see in an intuitive burst.
Angels don't syllogize.
They just perceive principles and conclusions simultaneously.
Angelic knowledge gives us the backdrop for angelic choice and angelic destiny.
Angels were created in grace and created for the loving vision of God, what we call the
beatific vision.
Some angels chose for God and some chose against the former.
The former, we call angels, the latter we call demons.
Many have speculated on why the demons chose as they did.
Here's what St. Thomas thought on the matter.
"Angels," says St. Thomas, "are the kind of thing that achieve their end by one movement."
Angels are situated in between God and man.
On the one hand, there is God who doesn't achieve His end by any movement since He is
his end.
On the other hand, there is man who comes to his end by many movements.
So an angel who chooses for God is beatified upon performing one charitable act.
And a demon who chooses against God is damned upon committing one sinful act.
But given what we've said about knowledge, how can angels even sin?
"Well," says St. Thomas, "all rational creatures can sin because only God is His
own end by nature.
The created will by contrast is not its own end."
For that reason, the action of a created will cannot be self-justifying.
Creatures work according to a nature and in a world that they have received and not made.
So they are beholden to a higher standard.
St. Thomas uses as an example taken from craftsmanship.
He says, picture a craftsman's hand, the rule of which is the very virtue of the agent.
Let's break this down.
Okay, you have a craftsman who is engraving.
Let's say that the craftsman hand is the very rule itself of the engraving.
In this instance, the craftsman could not engrave the wood otherwise than well.
He can never fall short or miss the mark.
The hand just does what the hand does.
So if someone were to ask, "Why did you engrave thus, and not otherwise?",
he could simply respond, "My hand engraved."
That'd be the end of it.
But if the excellence of the engraving were judged by another rule, like the image of
the engraving in his mind or the universal standard of excellent engraving, then the
engraving may fall short or miss the mark.
So basically, if there's no higher standard of right or wrong, like in the case of God,
the agent can't do but well.
But if there is, like in the case of angels and man, then there's the possibility of sin.
Now, among angels, there are fewer sources of sin than among men.
Angels can't err through ignorance or error or through the interference of passion or
bad habit.
Instead, it must be that the angel chooses something good, but not according to the proper
measure or rule.
It seems that the angel simply failed to consider what ought to have been considered.
Now, it's also the case that the sin must have been spiritual, so St. Thomas
rules out the sins which are necessarily embodied.
That leaves him with pride and envy as the likeliest candidates.
By pride, one tends to great things inordinately.
By envy, one sees another's good as a hindrance to his own.
St. Thomas settles on a couple of concrete options.
"Perhaps," he speculates, "the fallen angels chose to love God by their own power and not
the power of God.
Or perhaps they chose to love themselves rather than God, so that they didn't need to appeal
for assistance beyond their nature."
In the latter case, they would have refused to aspire to what they could only have as
a gift, preferring to rest in that joy, which their natural powers could supply.
In either case though, the angelic sin amounts to a rejection of the dispensation
of grace.
We call it pride.
The angels, it seems, were the first Pelagians.
And so, in the first moment of their existence, the angels knew themselves as created to the
image of God, and they cleaved to God by the force of their nature.
In the second moment of their existence, they had the opportunity to ratify that situation.
Choosing the situation would mean preferring God to themselves, affirming that they are
of God in the way that God willed.
Some made this choice.
Others didn't.
"Why?" you might ask.
This is a great mystery, but keep pondering. There's wisdom to be had here.
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