27 minute read
Angels and demons in spiritual warfare
by FR ANTHONY PILLARI
This talk was given at the Voice of the Family conference Created for heaven: the mission of Catholic young adults in today’s world, which was held in Rome on 2 October 2019.
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“Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.” (1 Pt. 5:8-9)
St Paul declares to us: “Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.” (Eph. 6:11) But St Peter gave us the very first piece of the armour in this passage where he declares that your enemy is prowling like a roaring lion: “Resist him, firm in your faith”.
The devil always wants to scare us and to stir up drama. He is terribly afraid of a soul firmly rooted in faith. Because he knows that the more we live by faith, the less power he has. The devil has no power whatsoever against the Lord and His plans. He knows that he can only harm us to the degree that we separate ourselves or draw back from Jesus Christ.
St John says in one of his letters: “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.” (1 John 3:8) He declares that this was the whole purpose of our Saviour’s mission on earth: to destroy the work of the devil. You see that all throughout His public ministry, our Lord performed exorcisms in different ways. And on the positive side, you see the presence of the holy angels throughout Scripture and in particular in the New Testament. Our Lord speaks of them, you see them in the Acts of the Apostles, for example, when an angel freed St Peter from prison. And each one of you, whether you know it or not, have two angels with you. Each one of you has a guardian angel who God has assigned to you to protect you and guide along the path to Heaven. But according to the Fathers of the Church, there is someone else who has assigned you a personal angel.1 Each one of you has been assigned a personal devil to tempt you throughout your life. In this talk, I will try to give you some idea of who angels are, of who devils are, and some understanding of their activity. It is a vast topic. But I am going to try to present you with some of the key points according to the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas, who is known as the Angelic Doctor because of his great development of the theology of the angels, in which he also presents to us the teaching of the Fathers of the Church. And I will be making use of a recent book by Fr Serge-Thomas Bonino, a good Dominican who teaches at the Angelicum in Rome. He is perhaps one of the foremost experts in the world today on the thought of St Thomas Aquinas on angels and demons, and his book would be a good follow up on this topic.2
CREATION OF THE ANGELS How were the angels created? Did God create “first angelic parents” who then had offspring among angels? No. In the New Testament, the Lord tells us that at the resurrection we will be “like the angels in Heaven”, who “neither marry nor are given in marriage”. (Mt. 22:30) God created every single angel directly.
How many angels did God create? In the instant of their creation, God made enough angels to provide a guardian angel for everyone who would ever live. That is already a vast multitude. But He did not create only guardian angels. He created many angels for other tasks, chief among them being adoring and praising Him in Heaven. In fact, since this latter purpose was
and is the most important purpose of an angel’s life, it is likely that there were many, many more angels created for the splendour and glory of Heaven than there were created to be guardian angels. We can easily forget that every angel, before having a mission to assist and protect us in our earthly pilgrimage, was created by God out of His infinitely generous love for them. What are angels? What are their powers and their abilities? A simple way to think about angels is that they are spiritual persons. Think about man, a person with both body and soul, but take away his body and any corporeal aspects of his actions. That will give you some idea of an angel as a spiritual person. Yet they are incredibly more intelligent than we are. This is one reason why you should never try to dialogue with the devil because he is much smarter than we are. However, just as we can feel love, hatred or jealousy, the angels can feel these things. True, the good angels don’t feel hatred or jealousy. The bad angels do feel jealousy and they have a very particular type of hatred towards us. But the good angels can rejoice. In Scripture, Our Lord says: “Angels rejoice over every sinner who converts.” (Lk. 15:10)
At the very beginning of time, the angels were created in sanctifying grace with the ability to make acts of faith, hope and love. From the very first instant of their creation, they were in the sanctifying grace, but they weren’t yet in the beatific vision. They weren’t yet in the glory of Heaven. Because if they had been, there would have been no possibility of sinning. Anyone seeing the full beauty and glory of God, could not possibly choose to turn away. So they had sanctifying grace but they had not yet chosen. They had to make a choice: to choose to trust God, to submit themselves to Him and to live by faith, hope and love. Any angel who chose that was instantly welcomed into the glory of Heaven, into the full splendour of God’s presence, and rejoiced with indescribable joy. And they then received a fullness of revelation.
THE FALL OF THE ANGELS What was the choice though of the fallen angels? How did they fall from grace? We know the effects of their choice from what St Peter tells us: “God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment.” (2 Pt. 2:4) And St Jude
declares: “The angels did not keep their own position, but left their proper dwelling and have been kept by [God] in eternal chains in the deepest darkness until the judgement of the great day.” (Jude 1:6) What was the great sin of the fallen angels that led them to be condemned for eternity to Hell? Because of the angels’ perfect knowledge when they made their choice they were never going to change their mind whether their choice was for or against God. The ones who chose for God for all eternity are with God, are the good angels, their will is oriented forever towards God. Those who turned away from Him, they made a choice that they will never change.
Angels were created with a certain fullness of knowledge about God’s goodness on a natural level, he also knew that to accept that happiness, that gift, he would have to accept God’s two conditions. First of all, this happiness could not be attained by any angels’ natural gifts, abilities or work. It would have to be received as a grace by abandoning himself to God in the obscurity of faith, by trusting in God. And secondly, he knew that this gift was being proposed to everyone – to all spiritual beings – even those far inferior to Satan in their natural abilities. The angels had different levels of natural abilities and degrees of intelligence. It seems that Satan was created as the highest of the angels in natural abilities. The acceptance of this gift would relativize the differences in the natural abilities, greatly diminishing the importance of Satan’s natural superiority to every other creature.
as their Creator. They knew how good God was, how loving, how gratuitously He created them and what incredible gifts He had given them. But God then wanted them to make a choice to truly love Him in charity, or not. They had the freedom to choose. And in that instant, Satan and the angels that followed him chose the sin of pride. That is a disordered love of his own excellence, a love of self to a point of contempt of God; an unwillingness to be dependent upon God out of an unbridled love for his own excellence and will.
Satan wanted to be like God. He was too smart to think that he could actually be God. He knew that God had created the world and he couldn’t do that. But he wanted to be like God insofar as he could. He wanted to be treated like God. He wanted to be treated as the most excellent, as the most important, as the one to whom everything else was ordered. He knew that God was offering him a happiness, a beatitude beyond anything he had yet experienced. But
Satan chose to reject these conditions. He chose to cling to the possession of his natural perfection. Because, first of all, it would distinguish him from others. If he clings to what is natural, in that domain he is the first and superior to others, which is what he desires above all else. Secondly, it belongs to him by natural right. In a certain sense, he is the master of his natural abilities. God has given them to him and he possesses them forever. He prefers to remain the first in the inferior order, the order of nature, rather than become one among others in a far superior order: the order of grace. He decides to determine for himself the goal of his life. He chooses as a goal one that he can attain by his natural resources: a full living out of his angelic powers and abilities, but without the help of grace, thereby showing contempt for the divine offer of supernatural happiness. He prefers to cling to what he controls rather than to be open to the divine call to “put out into the deep” – in other words, to let go of the control of his destiny, so as to
receive his destiny from another, to be dependent on another for the fulfilment of his life.
Satan clings to control, to choosing the goal of his life himself. And ever since he has tried to lead men to make the same choice.
Does any of that temptation or sin sound familiar? If you look around the world, you don’t have to look far at all. Our society cries out: “You can be whatever you want to be! Nothing is off-limits to you. If we work together, everything is possible for us. Don’t turn to God. Look to man and to this earth for the fulfilment of all that your heart desires. You can find it. Don’t surrender to God. Don’t accept to be dependent upon God. Don’t accept to be subservient to Him, to surrender to Him, to trust Him, to sacrifice yourself for Him.”
Even if we reject, with God’s grace, the full temptation the world offers, there is a subtle temptation that could be there even for devout Catholics. We really need to be docile to the general’s orders in the spiritual battle. And that means a constant dependence on God, which does not mean being unintelligent, or not using our minds – no, we need to do that very much, to be wise and prudent, but always being submissive and docile to the guidance of the Holy Ghost. That is why St Thomas Aquinas, when he asked about the most important element of the moral life, says that it is “the grace of the Holy Ghost in the hearts of the faithful”.3 This is the number one thing that we should be docile to. According to St Thomas, the whole purpose of the gifts of the Holy Ghost which are given to us, is to render our soul docile, in each moment, to the guidance of the Holy Ghost in our life. He says that is not just for great saints, but that it is essential for the salvation of every Christian – to try each moment to be docile to God’s own guidance.
At the heart of the terrible suffering of the fallen angels is that they want everything to be ordered according to what they have chosen. They wish they were not suffering, but they don’t regret their choice. They want to be the first in their order. They do not want to follow God’s direction. They reject God. But because they desperately want everything to be ordered according to what they have chosen, they hate the fact that the world is still ordered according to God’s divine providence. They don’t fully understand God’s designs, but they can see how God at the end of the day turns all things towards the good of His creatures and towards His greater glory. They hate that. The devils are allergic to reality. They want the whole world to be ordered the way they would like it to be and they detest the reality. They detest what they encounter in the world, because they realise, ultimately, even when they manage to crucify the Son of God, that this turns to their great demise. And everything else too God ultimately makes work for His glory and for the good of His creatures. And they hate the fact that God is constantly offering to us, sinful men, the grace that they rejected – a much greater order than that they have chosen to remain in. That is why they hate you so passionately. They are envious of the fact that you might enter into – or if you are living in grace you are already in – a higher order than what they have.
THE ACTION OF THE GOOD ANGELS You are not alone in the spiritual battle. You have a multitude of good angels and in a particular way, your guardian angel who is given to fight for you and to guide you in the spiritual battle.
How do the good angels act? In what way do the good angels intervene and act in your life? According to the Fathers of the Church, there are five categories:
1. Your guardian angel can ward off dangers to body and soul, either by intervening directly on the external reality or by acting on our psyche (for example, by giving you a presentiment of danger). The angels are not omniscient. They don’t know everything. They are aware of everything that happens externally. They perceive your facial expressions, your words and all such things. They are very smart, and so they can often have a good idea of what you are thinking or feeling internally, even if they cannot directly see it. Both good and bad angels have that knowledge and they can be very aware, to a degree, of what is going on inside of you, by analysing what is going on externally. But the good angels and your guardian angel have a very particular knowledge in addition to that. By God’s grace and particular revelation, He can show them a deeper level, what is going on inside you, or what may be coming up in the future; He can reveal to them His plans for you, and can give them special knowledge to guide you. The fallen angels do not have
that knowledge. Because they are highly intelligent they can predict with a certain degree of probability what might be coming up, but they are not aware – and that often frustrates them and leads them to fail in the battle – of what God’s plans are. Your good angel can intervene directly either on external realities, including your body, or on your psyche.
• How does an angel act directly on an external physical reality? In a similar way to how our soul can choose to do something and our body (normally) obeys by raising a hand or walking, or sitting, etc. – in a similar way an angel’s spirit can command not just one body but all sorts of physical objects. Angels have the power, according to God’s permission and plans, to make the physical reality move, simply by willing it. They can, if God permits it, move your body out of danger; and of course, the fallen angels can cause problems in your body. According to St Thomas and the
Fathers of the Church, the good angels have the ability even to form a body out of physical realities.
They can take material elements and in certain circumstances form and assume a body and use that to move about and intervene in the world.
So, angels can act in very concrete physical ways, when they have God’s permission and when that is part of the assignment God has given them in the world. To take two examples from Scripture: 1) when an angel appears to St Peter in prison, breaks his chains, opens the iron gates, and leads him out of the prison and into the city, and then disappears – this may well have been a case of an angel not assuming a body but simply acting on material objects through his will, and letting Peter see him in the form of a body. 2) On the other hand, when the angel Raphael comes to Tobias and accompanies him throughout his long journey – looking and acting in every way like a man and interacting with all sorts of physical objects – that extensive interaction with the physical world was the sort that likely meant he formed and assumed a body.
• In what ways can an angel act directly on our mind or will? Your guardian angel cannot directly make you will or think something. He cannot force your will. You are always free. Nor can he read your inner thoughts, unless God through a special revelation reveals them. (However, he may have a good sense of what you are thinking by his own intelligence and analysis on the basis of what he observes in your exterior appearance). Your guardian angel can influence your mind and will by suggesting or inspiring thoughts, which leads to the second major category of his action.
2. Your guardian angel can incite the soul to good and turn it away from evil, primarily by instructing it. The angel enlightens the soul not by infusing ideas into it directly but by presenting certain truths to it under sensible likenesses, thus inspiring good thoughts:
• As St Gregory says, “The good angel presents [your] spirit with the fruits of virtue, [with] everything that those who do good see in hope.”4 Your guardian angel is always trying to lead your soul to consider the blessings and treasures that God has prepared for those who accept to follow Him on this earth in suffering and sacrifice. • One of the earliest Christian writings, of the Shepherd of Hermas, speaking of the action of your guardian angel (using the term “spirit of justice” for your angel), declares, “…The spirit of justice is mild and reserved and meek and peaceful. When he enters into your heart, he speaks at once with you of justice and modesty and temperance and kindness and pardon and charity and paternal love.
As often as these thoughts arise in your heart, know that the spirit of justice is with you.”5 This is one way you are able to discern what kind of spirit may be inspiring you at that moment.
3. The guardian angel counteracts the malevolent activity of the demons. The devil often likes to act on aspects of man conditioned by corporeality; the guardian angel counters this by his action. Insofar as your angel protects you from the enemy’s assaults, the Fathers of the Church call him the “Angel of Peace”. Under this title, your guardian angel has the special role of protecting you – both physically and spiritually:
• St Hillary writes, “Our weakness is such that, if the guardian angels had not been given to us, we could not resist the many and powerful attacks of the evil spirits. To this end, we had need of a higher nature… [God has given the angels to us so that] this divine assistance might help us against
the powers of this world of darkness to attain the heritage of salvation.”6
• Your guardian angel can protect you from physical harms and evils. For example, the Archangel Raphael guided and protected Tobias from many evils on his journey and healed his father Tobit. There are many examples in the lives of the saints, and also in the lives of ordinary Catholics, of guardian angels protecting them from physical harm and guiding people to safety. He can also protect you from spiritual harm which is much worse than physical harm. For example, when our soul risks being overcome by agitation, despair, or irritation, the good angels can help restore interior peace in a soul. But for your guardian angel to assist you in these ways, he needs to find in your soul a living faith – that is a faith that is animated by hope and charity. As St Gregory of Nyssa declares, “…in all our perils, provided faith remains with us, we are defended by the aid of the spiritual powers.”7
4. The guardian angel presents our prayers to God – supporting them by his own fraternal intercession. For this activity, the Fathers of the Church call him the “Angel of Prayer”. Your guardian angel is given to you to teach and guide you in prayer. To help you when prayer is difficult, and to teach you to grow in prayer. For example, he wishes to guide your heart to pray out of love for the Most Holy Trinity, out of gratitude for all that He has done for you: out of love for Him who is your Heavenly Father, out of love for the Son who gave His life for you on the Cross, who died thinking of you, out of love for the Holy Ghost, the great “gift of God”, who lives in your soul.
5. The guardian angel corrects his ward. For this activity, the Fathers call him the “Angel of Penance”. Your guardian angel has a crucial role of chastising and correcting you. All of us are greatly in need of
TOBIAS AND THE ANGEL, 1470–1480, ANDREA DEL VERROCCHIO, THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON. conversion, greatly in need of penance. Your guardian angel, if you request his aid in this area, can help you see more clearly the reality of your sins, of your vices, of your lacks of virtue. But he is not a cruel friend who would show you these things and then refuse to help. Rather he wishes to guide and strengthen your soul along the path of penance. The path of penance is the path of conversion, the path of learning to sacrifice yourself out of a true love for God and out of a true love for your neighbour; it is the path of learning to turn away from selfish, sinful habits. The Fathers of the Church see in the parable of the Good Samaritan an image of your guardian angel. They indicate that in this parable the innkeeper represents your good angel. They say that the souls of sinners are confided in a particular way to the care of their guardian angel, who has a role of healing and nursing them back to spiritual health.
THE ACTION OF THE FALLEN ANGELS The natural powers of the fallen angels are the same as the natural powers given to the good angels, but
they don’t have the help of grace. Above all, they attack us through temptation – that is, by seeking to know more deeply men’s weaknesses and to use those weaknesses to more effectively lead them into sin. The fallen angels seek to deceive men in their judgments and to sully their imagination. They cannot act directly on man’s spiritual powers: on his intelligence or free will. They can only suggest things, especially through your imagination. Nor can they directly see what you are thinking or feeling, though – as mentioned for the good angels – they are extremely intelligent and can often tell what you are thinking or feeling by what they see externally. So, the enemy attacks man’s intelligence and free will by acting indirectly, by moving material realities – outside or inside of us. For example, by acting on the weak points in our bodies or minds, on the wounded “psychosomatic conditioning” of our earthly existence and spiritual activity; and also by acting on the society we live in, by striving to make everything you encounter a danger for your soul through different temptations.
Concretely, the enemy often presents morally bad objects to a man’s mind at an angle designed to make them appear as a certain good. He can act directly on the external objects presented to our senses, manipulating the things we encounter in everyday life, or act on the senses themselves (causing a sensation of pain or pleasure, etc.); or he can present to our senses objects that are ordinary in appearance but are artificially produced by him; he can even produce false miracles aimed at leading us into error. They are false because these works, extraordinary as they seem to us, do not really transcend the power of nature: they result from the intelligent use of nature’s hidden powers. In general, he strives to create structures of sin in society, to orchestrate the sins of others so that the culture tempts everyone to sin. He always presents evil under some aspect of the good.
The famous author Bernanos described the enemy’s activity by saying: “He deceives judgements, sullies the imagination, stirs up flesh and blood, makes use of our own failures and weaknesses with infinite skill, leads our joys astray, and deepens our sorrows. But ultimately, he cannot destroy anything without our consent.” If a soul perseveres in loving God, in believing and hoping in Him, in striving to serve Him, then the enemy’s attacks not only fail, but also become the occasion of even greater good – for the man himself, for the salvation of other souls, and for God’s greater glory.
There are other more extraordinary types of attacks, such as obsession where the enemy acts more openly in the physical realm through noises, movements, frightening apparitions or the violent attacks that the Curé of Ars and Padre Pio experienced; or possession, where the enemy seizes and uses the body and active sense faculties of a person to accomplish wicked works. But the vast majority of attacks are in the form of temptation, as briefly described above. The enemy loves drama. He always tries to “play a movie” in your mind’s eye: whatever difficulty you are dealing with now, it is going to be like that tomorrow and the day after it is going to get worse and in ten years’ it is going to be like this… He is doing that to scare you and to get you to pull back from faith and hope and charity. Whereas God very rarely reveals what is going to happen in the future. He says rather: “Trust me now. I am giving you sufficient grace for this day. If you co-operate today and the time comes for tomorrow or months and years from now, then I will give you the grace you are going to need at that time.”
HOW TO WIN IN THE SPIRITUAL BATTLE? One of the key strategies in the spiritual battle is the one that the Church gives every priest to recite every single evening in the prayer of Compline.
This is the passage I quoted in the beginning: “Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.” (1 Pt. 5:8-9)
That is the first and key strategy: faith. But St Peter goes on to speak of faith in the midst of great suffering that those he is addressing in his letter are going through. It is especially when living in obedience to the Faith in the midst of suffering that you allow God to conquer and crush the enemy in your life. St Paul tells us that Jesus Christ crucified is the power and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 18:23-24) In any area of your life when you are in need of the power and wisdom of God, you are not going to find it in any other way than in Jesus Christ crucified and in being united to Him, especially through faith.
At the heart of one of the classic works of Catholic spirituality called Abandonment to Divine Providence by Fr Jean Pierre de Caussade, is surrendering to the will of God, over and over again, in what is permitted in your life. It does not mean lying down in the face of the battle. A good and strong spirit of Christian militancy is so needed in the world and in the Church today. Rather, this abandonment actually makes you
stronger – to surrender to God’s will, to accept and embrace the Cross which the Lord has placed in your life at this day and this moment. Concretely this means that, for whatever sufferings and temptations are present in your life, a very helpful strategy is to turn to the Lord and make an act of surrender to His will. In the midst of other prayers or steps that you may be taking to deal with that temptation, say to God: “I surrender to Your will. Thy will be done. If it is Your will for me to have to endure this suffering or this temptation today or for whatever period of time – if that is Your will, I am willing to accept your will. I beg You take this away, I beg You to deal with this, but I surrender to Your will. I accept in faith whatever You are permitting, even if I cannot understand it, I surrender to Your will.” The moment you do that, you turn what the devil wants to be for your spiritual ruin into something which is helping you to grow in grace. Because by surrendering to God in this way you are making powerful acts of faith, hope and charity. The devil really loves drama, he loves for us to be afraid. God, on the other hand, calls us to a courageous faith, through which He can grant a peace beyond anything this world can give. The more we respond to this world’s trials and tribulations with faith in Jesus Christ crucified and with a willingness to unite ourselves to Him, the Lord will triumph. As St Paul tells us “God makes all things work for the good of those who love Him.” (Rom. 8:28)
Fr Anthony Pillari was born in Agana Guam (USA). He is currently the chaplain for the Usus Antiquior in the Diocese of Plymouth, UK. He holds degrees in Philosophy from University of Notre Dame, Indiana, Sacred Theology from L’Institut Catholique de Toulouse, France and in Canon Law from Saint Paul University, Ottawa, Canada.
ENDNOTES:
1. See, for example, St Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, PG 44, 337 D-340 A, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 90. 2. Angels and Demons:A Catholic Introduction, Catholic University of America Press, 2015. 3. Summa Theologiae, I-II, Q. 106, art. 1, corpus. 4. St Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses, PG 44, 337 D-340 A, cited in J. Daniélou, The
Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 90. 5. Mand., 6, 2, 2-5, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 88. 6. Tract. Ps. 134, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 82. 7. Tract. Ps. 137, cited in J. Daniélou, The Angels and Their Mission, Sophia Institute Press, 2009, p. 83. 1518, RAFFAELLO SANZIO, THE LOUVRE, PARIS. ST MICHAEL VANQUISHING SATAN,
