Part III, Chapter XXXIV, 2

Concerning the creation of angels, Scripture tells us nothing. That they are spirits is often repeated. But in Scripture and in common speech among both Jews and Gentiles, spirit sometimes means thin bodies—the air, the wind, the vital and animal spirits of living creatures—and sometimes the images that arise in the imagination in dreams and visions. These images are not real substances but accidents of the brain; yet when God raises them supernaturally to signify his will, they are not improperly called God's messengers, that is, his angels.

And just as the Gentiles commonly took the images of the brain for things that really existed outside themselves, independently of the imagination, and from these images formed their notions of good and evil daemons—which, because they seemed really to exist, they called substances, and because they could not feel them with their hands, incorporeal—so the Jews, on the same grounds and without anything in the Old Testament compelling them to do so, generally believed (except for the sect of the Sadduces) that these apparitions, which God sometimes chose to produce in men's imaginations for his own purposes and which were therefore called his angels, were substances: permanent creatures of God, independent of the imagination. Those they thought would benefit them they regarded as God's angels; those they thought would harm them they called evil angels or evil spirits, such as the Spirit of Python and the spirits of madmen, lunatics, and epileptics. For they regarded people afflicted with such diseases as possessed by daemons.

But if we examine the passages of the Old Testament where angels are mentioned, we shall find that in most of them angel can mean nothing other than an image raised supernaturally in the imagination to signify God's presence as he performs some supernatural work. Therefore, in the remaining passages, where their nature is not specified, the word can be understood in the same way.

For we read in Gen. 16. that the same apparition is called not only an angel but God. The one called the angel of the Lord in verse 7. says to Agar in the tenth verse, “I will multiply your offspring exceedingly”; that is, he speaks in the person of God. Nor was this apparition an imagined figure, but a voice. Thus it is clear that angel there means nothing but God himself, who caused Agar supernaturally to hear a supernatural voice testifying to God's special presence there. Why, then, might the angels who appeared to Lot, called men in Gen. 19.13., and to whom Lot, though they were two, speaks (ver. 18.) as to one, and that one as God (for the words are “Lot said to them, Oh, not so, my Lord”), not be understood as images of men supernaturally formed in the imagination, just as angel previously meant an imagined voice? When the angel called from heaven to Abraham to stay his hand (Gen. 22.11.) from killing Isaac, there was no apparition but a voice. Yet it was properly enough called a messenger or angel of God, because it declared God's will supernaturally, without the need to suppose the existence of permanent ghosts. The angels Jacob saw on the ladder to heaven (Gen. 28.12.) were a vision in his sleep, hence only an image of the imagination and a dream. Yet because they were supernatural and signs of God's special presence, these apparitions are not improperly called angels. The same is to be understood in Gen.31.11., where Jacob says, “The Angel of the Lord appeared to me in my sleep.” For an apparition to someone asleep is what everyone calls a dream, whether that dream is natural or supernatural. And what Jacob calls an angel there was God himself, for the same angel says (verse 13.), “I am the God of Bethel.”

Also (Exod.14.9.) the angel that went before the Army of Israel toward the Red Sea and then moved behind it is (verse 19.) the Lord himself. He appeared not as a beautiful man, but (by day) as a pillar of cloud and (by night) as a pillar of fire. Yet this pillar was the whole apparition, and the angel promised to Moses (Exod. 14.9.) as the Army's guide. For this pillar of cloud is said to have descended, stood at the door of the Tabernacle, and spoken with Moses.

Here you see motion and speech, commonly attributed to angels, attributed to a cloud, because the cloud served as a sign of God's presence. It was no less an angel than if it had taken the form of a man or a child of surpassing beauty, or had wings, as angels are commonly painted to the misinstruction of ordinary people. For it is not their shape but their purpose that makes them angels. Their purpose is to signify God's presence in supernatural acts. Thus when Moses (Exod. 33.14.) asked God to accompany the camp (as he had always done before the making of the Golden Calf), God did not answer, “I will go,” nor “I will send an angel in my place,” but “My presence shall go with you.”

It would take too long to mention every place in the Old Testament where the name angel occurs. To encompass them all at once, then, I say that no text in the part of the Old Testament that the Church of England holds canonical allows us to conclude that any permanent thing called a spirit or angel has been, or is, created without quantity, or that it cannot be divided by the understanding—that is, considered in parts, so that one part can be in one place and the next part in the next place beside it—or, in short, that it is not corporeal, taking body to mean something that exists somewhere. In every passage, angel can bear the meaning messenger, just as John Baptist is called an angel and Christ the Angel of the Covenant; by the same analogy, the Dove and the Fiery Tongues, as signs of God's special presence, might also be called angels. Though we find two angels named in Daniel, Gabriel and Michael, the text itself makes clear (Dan. 12.1) that Michael means Christ, not as an angel but as a Prince; and Gabriel (like similar apparitions to other holy men in their sleep) was nothing but a supernatural phantom, by which Daniel seemed to see in his dream two Saints talking, one saying to the other, “Gabriel, let us make this man understand his vision.” For God has no need to distinguish his celestial servants by names, which are useful only to the short memories of mortals. Nor is there any passage in the New Testament from which it can be proved that angels—except where the word denotes men whom God has made messengers and ministers of his word or works—are both permanent and incorporeal. That they are permanent may be gathered from our Savior's own words (Mat. 25.41.), where he says that on the last day the wicked shall be told, “Go, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.” This passage plainly supports the permanence of evil angels (unless we might understand the Devil and his angels to mean the Church's adversaries and their ministers). But it then conflicts with their immateriality, because everlasting fire is no punishment to things incapable of suffering, as all incorporeal things are. This passage therefore does not prove angels incorporeal. Likewise, St. Paul says (1 Cor. 6.3.), “Do you not know that we shall judge the angels?” And (2 Pet. 2.4.), “For if God did not spare the angels that sinned, but cast them down into Hell.” And (Jude 1,6.), “And the angels who did not keep their first estate, but left their own habitation, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness until the judgment of the last day.” Though these passages prove that angelic nature is permanent, they also confirm its materiality. And (Mat. 22.30.), “In the resurrection men neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.” Yet in the resurrection men will be permanent, not incorporeal; therefore so are angels.

Various other passages allow the same conclusion. To those who understand the meaning of substance and incorporeal, taking incorporeal not to mean a subtle body but no body, the words are contradictory: to say that an angel or spirit is an incorporeal substance in that sense is, in effect, to say that no angel or spirit exists at all. Considering, therefore, the meaning of angel in the Old Testament, and the nature of dreams and visions that occur to men in the ordinary course of nature, I was inclined to believe that angels were nothing but supernatural apparitions of the imagination, raised by God's special and extraordinary operation to make his presence and commandments known to mankind, chiefly to his own people. But the many passages of the New Testament, and our Savior's own words, in texts where there is no reason to suspect corruption of Scripture, have compelled my feeble reason to acknowledge and believe that substantial, permanent angels also exist. Yet Scripture cannot prove that they exist in no place—that is, nowhere, and hence are nothing—as those who insist they are incorporeal say, though indirectly.

The meaning of INSPIRATION depends on that of spirit. Inspiration must either be taken literally, in which case it is nothing but the blowing of thin, subtle air or wind into a man, as a man fills a bladder with his breath; or, if spirits are not corporeal but exist only in the imagination, it means the blowing in of a phantom. This is both an improper expression and an impossibility, for phantoms do not exist as things, but only seem to. Thus the word is used in Scripture only metaphorically. When (Gen. 2.7.) it says that God inspired into man the breath of life, it means no more than that God gave him living motion. We must not think that God first made a living breath and then blew it into Adam once he had been made, whether that breath was real or apparent, but only, as it says (Acts 17.25.), “that he gave him life and breath”: that is, made him a living creature. And when it says (2 Tim. 3.16.) “all Scripture is given by inspiration from God,” speaking of the Scripture of the Old Testament, this is an easy metaphor, meaning that God inclined the spirits or minds of its writers to write what would be useful in teaching, reproving, correcting, and instructing men in righteous living. But when St. Peter (2 Pet. 1.21.) says that “Prophecy did not come in old times by the will of man, but the holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit,” the Holy Spirit means the voice of God in a supernatural dream or vision, which is not inspiration. Nor, when our Savior breathed on his Disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” was that breath the Spirit: it was a sign of the spiritual graces he gave them. And though many people, including our Savior himself, are said to be full of the Holy Spirit, this fullness means not an infusion of God's substance but an abundance of his gifts, such as holiness of life, tongues, and the like, whether attained supernaturally or through study and effort; in all cases they are God's gifts. Likewise, when God says (Joel 2.28.), “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions,” we must not understand it literally, as though his Spirit were like water, capable of being poured out or poured in, but as God's promise to give them prophetic dreams and visions. To use infused literally of God's graces is an abuse of the word: those graces are virtues, not bodies that can be carried from place to place and poured into men as into barrels.

In the same way, to take inspiration literally, or to say that good spirits entered men to make them prophesy, or evil spirits entered those who became frenzied, lunatic, or epileptic, is not to take the word in the sense Scripture gives it. There spirit means the power of God working through causes unknown to us. Likewise (Acts 2.2.) the wind said to fill the house where the Apostles had gathered on the day of Pentecost must not be understood as the Holy Spirit, which is the Deity itself, but as an outward sign of God's special work on their hearts, producing within them the graces and holy virtues he thought necessary for carrying out their apostleship.

CHAPTER XXXV. ON THE MEANING IN SCRIPTURE OF KINGDOM OF GOD, HOLY, SACRED, AND SACRAMENT

Scripture says nothing about the creation of angels. It often calls them spirits. But both in Scripture and in ordinary Jewish and Gentile speech, “spirit” sometimes means a thin body, like air, wind, or the vital and animal spirits of living things. At other times it means an image that arises in the imagination during dreams and visions. Such images are not real substances but events in the brain. Still, when God produces them supernaturally to make his will known, we can properly call them his messengers, or his angels.

Gentiles commonly mistook images made by the brain for things existing independently outside them. This led them to believe in good and evil daemons. Because these seemed to exist in reality, they called them substances; because they could not touch them, they called them incorporeal. For the same reason, and without anything in the Old Testament requiring it, Jews generally believed—apart from the Sadducees—that appearances God sometimes created in human imagination for his purposes, which they called his angels, were substances independent of imagination and lasting creatures of God. They thought those likely to help them were God's angels. Those likely to harm them they called evil angels or evil spirits, such as the spirit of Python and the spirits supposedly possessing mad people, lunatics, and people with epilepsy. They considered people with such illnesses possessed by daemons.

But if we look at Old Testament passages about angels, in most of them “angel” can only mean an image supernaturally produced in the imagination to show God's presence while he performs a supernatural act. So in other passages, where an angel's nature is not specified, we can understand the word the same way.

For example, in Genesis 16 the same appearance is called both an angel and God. The one called the angel of the Lord in verse 7 says to Agar in verse 10, “I will greatly multiply your descendants.” In other words, it speaks for God. And this appearance was not a shaped image but a voice. Clearly, then, “angel” here means nothing but God himself making Agar supernaturally hear a supernatural voice that testified to his special presence. Why could the angels who appeared to Lot also have been images of men formed supernaturally in his imagination? They are called men in Genesis 19.13; although there were two, Lot addresses them in verse 18 as one, and that one as God: “Lot said to them, ‘Oh, not so, my Lord.’” An angel earlier meant an imagined voice; these angels could be imagined figures. When an angel called from heaven to stop Abraham's hand from killing Isaac (Genesis 22.11), there was no visible appearance, just a voice. Yet the voice could rightly be called God's messenger or angel because it announced his will supernaturally. We need not assume any lasting ghosts. The angels Jacob saw on heaven's ladder (Genesis 28.12) appeared while he slept. They were therefore images in a dream. Still, because they were supernatural signs of God's special presence, they are rightly called angels. The same applies to Genesis 31.11, where Jacob says, “The angel of the Lord appeared to me in my sleep.” Everyone calls an appearance during sleep a dream, whether natural or supernatural. And the angel Jacob describes there was God himself, for that same angel says in verse 13, “I am the God of Bethel.”

Likewise, the angel who went ahead of Israel's army toward the Red Sea and then moved behind it (Exodus 14.9) is the Lord himself in verse 19. He did not appear as a beautiful man. He appeared as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Yet this pillar was the entire appearance and the angel promised to Moses as the army's guide (Exodus 14.9). The cloud pillar is said to have descended, stood at the tabernacle door, and spoken to Moses.

So movement and speech, commonly attributed to angels, are here attributed to a cloud. The cloud marked God's presence and was no less an angel than a figure shaped like a man or an exceptionally beautiful child, or a winged figure of the kind commonly painted, misleading ordinary people. Shape does not make something an angel; its function does. Angels serve as signs of God's presence in supernatural acts. When Moses asked God to go with the camp (Exodus 33.14), as he had done before the golden calf was made, God did not answer, “I will go,” or “I will send an angel instead.” He answered, “My presence will go with you.”

It would take too long to mention every Old Testament passage that uses the word “angel.” In brief, no passage in the part of the Old Testament the Church of England considers canonical proves that there is, or ever has been, a lasting thing called a spirit or angel that has no size and cannot be divided in thought into parts, with one part in one place and an adjacent part in the next. In short, nothing there proves an angel is not corporeal, if a body is understood as something that exists somewhere. In every passage, “angel” can mean messenger. John the Baptist is called an angel, and Christ the angel of the covenant. By the same reasoning, the dove and the fiery tongues could also be called angels, since they were signs of God's special presence. Daniel names two angels, Gabriel and Michael. But the text itself makes clear (Daniel 12.1) that Michael means Christ, not as an angel but as a prince. Gabriel was a supernatural image, like the appearances other holy men saw in their sleep. Daniel seemed to see two holy people talking in his dream, and one said to the other, “Gabriel, let us make this man understand his vision.” God does not need names to distinguish his heavenly servants. Names are useful only to mortals with limited memories. Nor does any New Testament passage prove that angels are both lasting and incorporeal, except when the word “angels” means the people God has appointed as messengers and servants of his word or deeds. Our Savior's own words may show that they last. In Matthew 25.41, he says that on the last day the wicked will be told, “Go, you cursed, into everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and his angels.” This clearly shows that evil angels last, unless “the Devil and his angels” means the Church's enemies and their servants. But everlasting fire is no punishment to things that cannot suffer, as all incorporeal things must be. So the passage does not prove that angels are incorporeal. Similarly, St. Paul says (1 Corinthians 6.3), “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” And 2 Peter 2.4 says, “For if God did not spare the angels who sinned, but cast them down into Hell.” And Jude 1,6 says, “The angels who did not keep their first position but left their own home, he has kept in everlasting chains under darkness until the judgment of the last day.” These passages show that angels last, but also support the conclusion that they are material. Matthew 22.30 says, “In the resurrection people neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.” People will last after resurrection but will not be incorporeal. So the same holds for angels.

Several other passages support the same conclusion. Anyone who understands “substance” and “incorporeal” knows that, if incorporeal means not a thin body but no body at all, “incorporeal substance” is a contradiction. In that sense, saying that an angel or spirit is an incorporeal substance amounts to saying no angel or spirit exists. From the meaning of “angel” in the Old Testament and the nature of ordinary dreams and visions, I was inclined to think angels were only supernatural appearances in the imagination. God would produce them by special, extraordinary action to make his presence and commands known to humanity, especially his own people. But many New Testament passages, including our Savior's own words in texts whose accuracy is not in doubt, have forced my weak reason to acknowledge and believe that some angels are also real, lasting substances. Scripture cannot prove that they exist in no place, or nowhere, and thus are nothing, as those who call them incorporeal imply, even if indirectly.

The meaning of “inspiration” depends on the meaning of “spirit.” If taken literally, inspiration is simply blowing thin air or wind into a person, as someone fills a bladder with breath. If spirits are not bodies but exist only in the imagination, it would mean blowing an imagined image into someone. That makes no sense and is impossible, since such images only seem to be things; they are not things themselves. So Scripture uses “inspiration” only figuratively. When Genesis 2.7 says God breathed the breath of life into man, it means only that God gave him living movement. We should not think God first made a living breath and then blew it into Adam after making him, whether that breath was real or imaginary. It means what Acts 17.25 says: “He gave him life and breath.” He made him a living creature. Similarly, 2 Timothy 3.16 says, “All Scripture is given by inspiration from God.” This refers to the Old Testament. The figure of speech means that God led its writers' minds to write what would help teach, correct, rebuke, and instruct people in righteous living. But when St. Peter says (2 Peter 1.21), “Prophecy did not come in former times by human will, but God's holy men spoke as the Holy Spirit moved them,” the Holy Spirit means God's voice in a supernatural dream or vision, not inspiration. And when our Savior breathed on his disciples and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” his breath was not the Spirit. It was a sign of the spiritual gifts he gave them. Many people, including our Savior, are said to be full of the Holy Spirit. That fullness is not an infusion of God's substance. It is an abundance of his gifts, such as holy conduct and the ability to speak languages, whether received supernaturally or acquired by study and hard work. They are all gifts from God. Similarly, when God says in Joel 2.28, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions,” we must not take the words literally, as if his Spirit could be poured out or poured in like water. God promises prophetic dreams and visions. Even to speak literally of God's gifts being “infused” misuses the word. Those gifts are virtues, not bodies that can be transported and poured into people like barrels.

In the same way, taking “inspiration” literally or saying that good spirits entered people and made them prophesy, while evil spirits entered people who became delirious, mentally disturbed, or epileptic, is not the Scriptural meaning. In Scripture, “spirit” means God's power working through causes unknown to us. Likewise, the wind said to fill the house where the apostles met on Pentecost (Acts 2.2) was not the Holy Spirit, who is God himself. It was an outward sign of God's special work in their hearts, producing the inner gifts and holy virtues he thought they needed for their work as apostles.

Chapter XXXV. What Kingdom of God, Holy, Sacred, and Sacrament Mean in Scripture