Part II, Chapter III, Section 1, Article 2: Number and Hierarchy of the Angels

Pohle, God the Author of Nature and the Supernatural, Part II, Chapter III, §1, Article 2 (pp. 321–324)

1. Number of the Angels

Sacred Scripture and Tradition furnish us no clue by which we could determine the number of the Angels. It is certain that they are very numerous. Cfr. Dan. VII, 10: “Millia millium ministrabant ei et decies millies centena millia assistebant ei” — Thousands of thousands ministered to him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before him. Apoc. V, 11: “I heard the voice of many angels … and the number of them was thousands of thousands.”

Basing their calculations on the parable of the Good Shepherd, some of the Fathers have estimated the numerical proportion of Angels to men as 99:1. Thus St. Cyril of Jerusalem says: “Consider all the human beings that have lived from Adam to the present day; their number is very large, and yet it is small, for of Angels there are still more. They are the ninety-nine sheep, we are the one hundredth, since there is but one human race.”¹

Theologians differ as to whether or not the Angels are all of one species. St. Thomas holds that each constitutes a distinct species.² Suarez teaches that the members of each choir bear a specific relation to all the other members of the same choir.³ Cardinal Toletus assumes that, like men, all the Angels belong to one and the same species.⁴ The problem really defies the limited powers of human reason. Cardinal Toletus and those who hold with him must not, however, be understood as asserting that the specific unity of the Angels results from procreation, because the Church has formally condemned the proposition that “the human soul is propagated from parent to child just as body from body or one Angel from another.”⁵

2. The Nine Choirs and the Three Hierarchies of the Angels

The Angels are distributed into various Orders, some superior, others inferior. This is not an article of faith, but it may be set down as a certain truth. Sacred Scripture enumerates nine such Orders. Isaias saw the Seraphim,⁶ Moses mentions the Cherubim as guardians of Paradise,⁷ and St. Paul⁸ enumerates the Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers, to which, in another place,⁹ he adds the Virtues. Besides these the Bible frequently mentions Angels and Archangels.

The fact that Holy Scripture carefully discriminates between these different Orders is sufficient warrant that the names employed by the Bible are not merely synonymous terms.¹⁰ The precise number of the angelic choirs is not known to us. In how far they differ, and what are their mutual relations, is a matter of speculation rather than of faith.¹¹

Since the time of the Pseudo-Dionysius¹² it has been customary in the Schools to group the nine angelic choirs into three divisions, in imitation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, each division comprising three choirs (ordines, τάξεις), as follows: (1) The supreme hierarchy, comprising the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones; (2) The intermediate hierarchy, comprising the Dominations, Virtues, and Powers; (3) The lowest hierarchy, comprising the Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

This difference in rank is believed to be due to the fact that the members of the supreme hierarchy, who are, so to speak, assistants at the divine throne, receive their orders directly from God Himself, while those of the intermediate hierarchy hand the divine commands down to the lower Angels, who in turn communicate them to men. Revelation is silent on this point. According to Pseudo-Dionysius,¹³ whom the Scholastics, thinking him a pupil of the Apostles, blindly followed,¹⁴ the division of the Angels into hierarchies has still another signification. The higher Angels, he says, are charged with the mission of “illuminating” and “purifying” those of the lower Orders. By illumination (illuminatio) the Schoolmen mean the communication of knowledge by an Angel of a higher to an Angel of a lower Order. In so far as the inferior Angel is thereby cleansed of defects incident to his imperfect mode of cognition, the process is also called “purgation” (purgatio). We need scarcely remind our readers that this teaching does not exceed the value of a more or less well-founded opinion.¹⁵

Notes

Note on this transcription: this short article was textually clean apart from routine page-break footnote splits. One Greek word (τάξεις, “orders/ranks”) was reconstructed from garbled OCR.

This completes Section 1 (Existence, Nature, Number, and Hierarchy of the Angels). Section 2, on the supernatural endowment and probation of the Angels, follows next.