Editor’s note: with the upcoming feasts of the Archangels and Guardian Angels, we would like to present Dr. Peter’s Kreeft’s thoughts on angels in the modern era. This article is adapted from the book Ask Peter Kreeft, available from Sophia Institute Press.
Why don’t we hear anything about angels anymore?
Because we don’t want to.
They
don’t pop into and out of existence depending on whether we believe in them,
but, on the other hand, they don’t do much for us until they are asked and
believed in.
Angels are not
gods.
Nor are they
human beings.
They are superior
to us and inferior to God.
Almost all premodern cultures believed in something like
angels, something between us and the Supreme Being. Sometimes these were
mistakenly called gods. That was a mistake, but it was not a mistake to see
human life as a kind of Jacob’s Ladder, a stairway to Heaven; to believe in
doors in the pitiless walls of the world, or better, doors in the sky, doors
that sometimes opened. Today, for most of us “enlightened” people in Western
civilization, those doors are locked.
Why are they
locked?
Because Science
can’t discover them.
And the spectacular success of Science has convinced us that if Science can’t detect it, it isn’t real. (If you accepted the capital letter “S” in the word “science” in that sentence, you probably bought into that superstition, because what we create is not usually capitalized but what we believe creates us is.)
Science also can’t detect beauty, love, or the self that
knows all the things that Science knows. In other words, Science can’t detect
the scientist. The one thing that can’t be one of the images on the screen of
our consciousness is the thing that’s projecting all the images. The subject of
consciousness can’t be simply one of the many objects of consciousness.
If science can’t even detect our own spirit, mind, or
consciousness, only its bodily instruments and effects, we can’t expect it to
detect angels, which are pure spirits without bodies.
Angels are persons without bodies; humans are persons
with bodies. Angels are no more mythic than human persons are. Materialists say
there are no such things as persons, souls, selves, egos, or spiritual
substances, either human or angelic, because Science cannot detect them. They
are at least consistent. If spirits outside bodies (angels) don’t exist, then,
for the same reasons, spirits inside bodies (human persons, selves, “I”s, egos,
minds, or souls) don’t exist either.
In fact, in a sense, spirits inside bodies,
spirits that are the souls of bodies, are harder to believe in than spirits
outside bodies. It’s very strange that spirits should be joined to bodies.
Whose weird idea was that? Probably the same One who designed the duck-billed
platypus.
If
angels are myths, then human persons are myths too. But if persons are myths,
who invented them? If the answer is that we invented them, how can a myth be
invented by another myth?
If
there are no persons, but just bodies, then the attempt to find yourself is a
bad knock-knock joke: Knock, knock. Who’s there? Nobody. Nobody who? Nobody
you.
Probably, there is no irrefutable logical proof for the existence of angels outside of religious authorities, but there are all sorts of things that angels explain. Why did you suddenly, intuitively, jump back from stepping off the curb just as that car that you didn’t see passed? And all those great ideas that seemed to pop into your mind without your planning them or willing them — where did they come from? And why is it that in every culture, many sane, wise, and reliable people (as well as many liars and kooks) claimed to have seen and interacted with angels? Why has every other culture except ours believed in something like angels? Were they just silly, like Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, playing with an invisible rabbit friend even as an adult? In that case, let’s all be atheists, because God is only the biggest invisible rabbit of all.
What difference do angels make?
For one thing, angels expand our mind. For another thing,
they expand our lives. If there were no angels who interacted with us, no
guardian angels who fought for us and protected us from temptations by evil
spirits, we would be decimated by our true enemies, which are not flesh and
blood but “principalities and powers of wickedness in high places.” They are
far more numerous, more intelligent, and more powerful than we are. Without
help from superior friends, no one could survive that battle against superior
enemies.
If you don’t think there are superior enemies, do you
honestly think that the evil you see in the souls of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot,
and the Marquis de Sade is only human?
Your guardian angel protects you at every moment, even
when you forget him completely. He does not need your remembering, your faith,
your trust, your hope, or your love. But you do.
How long do acts of memory, faith, trust, hope, and love take? A
few seconds. The old guardian angel prayer is a good one because it’s short and
simple and childlike:
Angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom His love commits me here, Ever this day be at my side,
To light and lead, to guard and guide.
Have you ever seen an angel?
No.
But I have talked to people who have. And I have talked to Joan Webster
Anderson, who strikes me as very sane and sober and reliable. She researched
and wrote up a couple of books about people who saw angels, and unlike most
such books, they seem to me quite reliable.
I’m not talking about the popular pictures of angels,
e.g., with wings. Angels don’t have wings because they don’t have physical
bodies. They are pure spirits. What do they look like? Like nothing. Or like
whatever appearances they generate, either in matter or in our minds. They
usually disguise themselves as human beings. They are much better at
pretending to be humans than we are at pretending to be angels.
I have the impression that ghosts are more
commonly seen than angels. I don’t know why. Probably because angels are enablers,
like Gandalf in The
Lord of the Rings. They do most of their work invisibly. Like
God, they appeal to faith more than to sight. They could use their great
supernatural powers, as the Angel of Death did to the Egyptians in the Exodus,
and to Sodom and Gomorrah, but that’s not how God usually works, by sheer
power. He gives us free choice. He doesn’t bypass His creatures but works
through them, both angels and humans.
When we get to Heaven, I think we will see our guardian angels,
and God will show us all the millions of times they were guarding and guiding
us, and inspiring us, and we will say, “Oh, so that was you all the time! Thank
you.”
If
you cut out all the references to angels in the Bible, your scissors would wear
out before you finished.
If
angels do not exist, all the saints, all the bishops of the Church, and all
orthodox Christians for two thousand years have been deceived, including Jesus
Christ. In that case, Christianity is not a divine revelation at all. Angels
are not the center of Christianity, but they are part of the “package deal.”
The most practical thing in the Bible about angels for all of us is: “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares” (Heb. 13:2).
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This article is adapted from Dr. Peter Kreeft’s Ask Peter Kreeft: The 100 Most Interesting Questions He’s Ever Been Asked. It is available from Sophia Institute Press and your local bookstore.
Photo by Cosmin Gurau on Unsplash
