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

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

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?

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 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.

and that the verse “and they have set up a kinship between Him and the jinn” is a pointer to the saying of Quraysh that the angels are the daughters of God.

Were any thing to abide and to be granted long life — that would be Sulaymān, held safe from time My God fashioned him and chose him out of His servants — and gave him dominion from Thurayyā to Miṣr and He made subject to him nine of the jinn of the angels — standing before him, labouring without wage

and so too the angels — the guardians, the bearers and the Cherubim (2) — must have their classes;

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.

And He, exalted be He, said, "On the day when the spirit and the angels stand in rank" — and this is of the description of bodies.

Then the souls of the angels — and I do not know whether they differ in their realities, or are a single species having individuals within it, like the soul of man.

after every angel an intellect, with one more in addition that has no angel with it.

and angel, and the rest of created things besides, so that even the species serves its own members one to another;

but believe that you were created disposed to be an angel in human form, and that none excels you but a man whose character has been nurtured and whose conscience is pure, who is a key to good and a lock to evil.

if happiness were to be found only in eating, drinking and intercourse, the donkey would be happier in its state than the angels brought near — and no one says that but a donkey.

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;

all the people of the Church agree that when the soul comes to be transferred out of the body, the angels and the devils (*abālisah*) make for it, and to whichever side it has deserved they thrust it (4), until the universal resurrection, when it returns to the body from which it was separated, either for lasting torment or for abiding bliss.

the intellect bears witness that the rejoicing of the angels in intelligible matters is greater than that of the beasts in base and despicable foods.

« The angels carried him over to Ibrāhīm » (5).

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;

All the degrees prior to this world are those we name the angels and the enclosing veils (*sarādiqāt*);

the universal souls that nurture the world of the human realm, appearing in it in the manner its degree in the descent requires, are four souls.

And the most excellent of creation absolutely is our Prophet, God bless him and grant him peace, and his excellence is established even over our master Jibrīl and the rest of the angels brought near, and over others a fortiori — contrary to the Muʻtazilah, who claim the superiority of our master Jibrīl over the Prophet, God bless him and grant him peace.

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

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.

But the heavens they reckon to be intellectual, and sometimes they make them angels, as also the Demiurge himself, as also Paradise the fourth Archangel—since they fix this too above the third heaven, from whose power Adam took, sojourning there among little clouds and little shrubs.

What, then, was permitted to God's lower angels, when changed into human bodily form, so that they nonetheless remained angels — this you would take away from the more powerful God, as though Christ, having truly put on a man, could not have continued to be God?

" 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.

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.

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.

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

Neither vouchsafed to the sphere, nor attained by the angel — that which lies in the secret of the black core of the heart of the sons of Adam, and is from Him.

For Christians who have departed this world there is no promise of any restoration of marriage on the day of resurrection, since they will have been translated into the condition and holiness of angels.

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?

and they are nothing but the practitioners of a craft, like the blacksmiths and the carpenters and others, and our ignorance of their craft does not support their claim — such as their pretence that they are in league with the Knower of all hidden things, and that it is He who inspires them with this knowledge by means of the angels or the devils, according to the compact between them and Him.

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 …

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:

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

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.

Angels too even Plato did not deny.

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

All which things conferred upon the soul at its birth, the same one who envied at the first origin now too overshadows and depraves, so that they may not either be voluntarily provided for or administered as they ought.

But we believe the divine offices to be angels.

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 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?

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

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.