Angels

"I charge you, before God and Christ Jesus and the elect angels, that you keep these things without prejudice, doing nothing out of partiality.

for neither, as the angels make known in so far as they are angels, do men hear;

for they, thinking that they alone know God, do not know him, serving angels and archangels, the month and the moon.

For what wonder is it if He confessed the Father greater than Himself, being the Word and having become flesh, when He was seen to be less than angels in glory and than men in form?

And by circumscribed I mean not only what is contained by place, but also what He who is about to bring it from non-being into being has comprehended in His foreknowledge, and what it is possible to comprehend by knowledge.

The holy disciples of our Saviour, having come beyond contemplation, as far as is possible for men, and having been purified by the Word, seek the end and long to know the ultimate blessedness, which our Lord declared that even His angels and He Himself are ignorant of;

and the breath of God is nobler than the material spirit of which the angels were composed.

blameless, indeed, in time past, from the day of his creation — created by God unto good, as by a good Creator of blameless creations, and adorned with all angelic glory, and set with God, as one good with the Good;

But also two angels appeared there.

This useless and trifling little body, which they do not even shrink from calling an evil — though it had been the work of angels (as Menander and Marcus would have it), though it were the construction of some fiery angel as well (as Apelles teaches) — would suffice, by the patronage of a second divinity, to establish the authority of the flesh.

where the demonic onsets with the Holy Spirit — the devil himself with his angels now plunged into the fires?

" If not by marrying, because not by dying — surely also by sinking under no like necessity of the bodily condition — since the angels too were sometime as men, eating and drinking and offering their feet to the washing;

these are the firstborn enrolled in heaven, who keep festival with so many myriads of angels.

the maidens make music, the angels glorify, the prophets speak, a sound of music is sent forth;

They will be distributed to the Angels, the satellites of Soter.

But, that they might also adorn so great a puppet on the outside, they bring forth as his satellites the angels, a kindred race—if among themselves, it can be so;

so that she indeed should give the image of the Father, invisible and unknown—unknown, that is, and invisible to the Demiurge—but should fashion that same Demiurge as the son of Nus, while the Archangels, the work of the Demiurge, should express the rest of the Aeons.

" And indeed they set it down that there is nothing to wonder at in a body without birth, since even among us it was permitted to angels to pass into flesh with no service of a womb.

Otherwise Christ would not be called a man without flesh, nor Son of man without some human parent, just as he is not God without the Spirit of God, nor Son of God without God the Father.

Beginning, indeed, from the birth itself, declaim away, come, against the impurities of the genital elements within the womb, the foul curdlings of fluid and blood, the flesh to be nourished out of that same filth through nine months.

for their angels do always behold the face of My Father who is in heaven.

For there is, He says, great and surpassing joy and festival in heaven to the Father and the angels over one sinner who turns and repents.

He who has commanded angels and principalities and powers to serve us at a great reward, because they too shall be set free from the vanity of the world at the revelation of the glory of the sons of God.

At the first trumpet of the angel they will leap forth unencumbered;

Thus they have laid hold of the Lord's eternal gift for themselves, and already on earth, by not marrying, are reckoned of the angelic household.

Whence shall we suffice to tell the felicity of that marriage which the church brings about, and the oblation confirms, and the blessing seals, the angels report, and the Father holds ratified?

But if, on the contrary, there will be an end of evil, when its president the devil shall have departed into the fire which God prepared for him and his angels — being first relegated to the pit of the abyss, when the revelation of the sons of God shall have redeemed the creation from evil (which, of course, was made subject to vanity), when, innocence and the integrity of the creation being resto …

Or was he perhaps speaking to angels, as the Jews interpret, because they too do not acknowledge the Son?

Therefore, if even the divine monarchy is administered through so many legions and armies of angels — as it is written, "Thousand thousands stood before him, and ten thousand times ten thousand appeared before him" — and yet has not ceased to be one man's so as to cease being a monarchy, because it is carried on through so many thousands of powers:

Angels too even Plato did not deny.

But how, out of certain angels corrupted of their own will, a yet more corrupt race of demons came forth, condemned by God along with the authors of the race and with him whom we have called their prince — the order of it is learned in the holy writings.

But we believe the divine offices to be angels.

for you have agreed to renounce both him and his pomp and his angels.

And he feigns himself indeed the supreme Father, but her his first conception, by which he had conceived to found angels and archangels;

If it ought not to be seen with bare head on account of the angels, much more with a crowned one would it then perhaps scandalize those crowned angels.

— he, around whom that circle of angels does not cease to say:

He says, of course, that they ought to be veiled on account of the angels, because the angels fell away from God on account of the daughters of men.

For if it is irreverent to sit down in the sight, and over against the sight, of one whom you most reverence and venerate, how much more, in the sight of the living God, while the angel of prayer is still standing by, is this deed most irreligious — unless we are reproaching God that prayer has wearied us?

Do you doubt that in that very moment in which the devil rages in the assembly, all the angels look down from heaven and mark each man—who has spoken blasphemy, who has heard it, who has lent his tongue, who his ears, to the devil against God?

look upon the courses of the world, count the gliding times, await the turning-posts of the consummation, defend the fellowships of the churches, start up at the signal of God, rouse yourself at the trumpet of the angel, glory in the palms of the martyrs.