The end of September is always the time of the liturgical year when we reflect on the role of the angels in our lives. We celebrate the feast of the Archangels on September 29 and the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels on October 2. With so much emphasis placed on scientific knowledge today, it is a good time for us to reflect on the role of the angels within the laws of nature. 

            We are the children of the scientific revolution. We marvel at the advances in medicine, and in the handheld devices that each year perform an even greater transmission of information. Modern science has wonderfully revealed both the secrets in the heavens above and the hidden world of microbiology below. The discoveries of the laws of nature are useful and help secure needs for us in ways that were unimaginable to previous generations. Yet with the many advances in science, do we truly understand the causes behind the laws of nature? St. John Henry Newman dispels this illusion, asserting: “The world now vainly thinks it knows more than it did, and that it has found the real causes of the things it sees.”⁽¹⁾St. John Henry Newman, “The Powers of Nature” in Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 457.

            In this article, I will present some of the basic principles behind the divinely ordained role of angels in the laws of nature as explained by St. Thomas Aquinas (+1274) and St. John Henry Newman (+1890). While it is generally good to appreciate and support the advances in science, the “duties” carried out by the angels gives us an even greater delight at the marvels of God’s creative power. 

Instruments and Causes

            The good God is the primary cause of the created universe. In His infinite wisdom, He reaches “from end to end mightily, and orders all things sweetly” (Wisdom 8:1). Within this ordering of creation, God sets up His laws and movements in such a way that all of creation serves His purposes. St. Thomas teaches that God governs the created world through what is called the principle of instrumentality: “Since God is the primary agent…all things that come after Him are like instruments for Him.”⁽²⁾Summa Contra Gentiles, III.100.3. Cf. William A. Wagner, The Mission of the Holy Angels in the Economy of Salvation (Innsbruck, Austria: Confraternity of the Holy Angels, 1984), 285-289. God is the first mover of all things, so that all which comes after Him, i.e. creation, is moved by Him as His instrument. These instruments can be divided into three categories: intelligent instruments, animate instruments, and inanimate instruments.

            St. Thomas explains that the angels act as intelligent instruments, distinguished by their general offices, who have been charged with the duty of maintaining all natural laws within creation.⁽³⁾Aristotle was one of the early Greeks who, simply by studying the nature of the heavens, asserted that the stars were governed by spiritual substances (i.e. angelic beings). Cf. Metaphysics, XII.8. However, he never developed a notion that these separate substances would have a role in governing the inferior beings below the stars. Aristotle only briefly asserts that the sun has a role in the formation of a man without explaining what that means. Cf. Physics II.2.194b13-15. More specifically, the governing of the created world was entrusted to the middle hierarchy of angels. While the highest hierarchy (Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones) contemplates God Himself, and the lowest hierarchy (Principalities, Archangels, Angels) distributes grace to peoples and nations, the middle hierarchy (Dominations, Virtues, and Powers) governs creation. According to this mission, the Dominions appoint the things to be done by creation, the Virtues are given the power to carry it out, and the Powers give the ordering of how it is to be carried out by other things.⁽⁴⁾Cf. Summa Theologica., I.108.6. Describing this process, St. Thomas teaches: “Whenever an angel has to perform any work concerning a corporeal creature, the angel applies himself anew to that body by his power; and that way begins to be there afresh. Now all this takes place by Divine Command.”⁽⁵⁾Ibid., I.112.1.

            The animate instruments (humans, animals, plants) are beings inferior to the angels, yet they possess their own internal principles of growth and decay. They reproduce, process nutrients, and mature according to their own particular form. Quoting Origen, St. Thomas writes that these animate instruments are governed by the superior beings: “The world has need of angels who preside over beasts, and over the birth of animals, and trees, and plants, and over the increase of all other things.”⁽⁶⁾Ibid., I.110.1. Hence, the laws of every living creature are maintained by the hidden presence of these spiritual substances.

            Yet it should be noted that God is not directly causing every individual change of nature that happens within animals and plants. Although God continually sustains everything in existence, He organized the world in such a way that He respects the principles of causality present in natural things. 

            For example, there is an influential school of Islamic philosophy called occasionalism which argues that God directly intervenes in every event, or “occasion”, of nature.⁽⁷⁾Cf. Majid Fakhry, Islamic Occasionalism (New York: Routledge, 2008). The Asharite school, subscribing to occasionalism, historically became dominant in Islamic thought and remains so today. The school denies the nature of a thing, which means changes and causes occur solely from God’s immediate will, rather from the form of the substance. Each motion in the world is therefore an occasion for God’s particular act. For more on the influence of occasionalism in Islam today, see The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert R. Reilly. In this view, all natural causes are not real, but merely the direct agency of God. Contrary to this view, St. Thomas teaches that God’s wisdom included a twofold principle within animate nature: God has primary causality of all actions, and secondarily, the natural agent has an action proper to its form. In other words, God is the principle cause of every existing thing, but that animated instruments (humans, animals, plants) are also self moving, acting according to their own nature. They are said to possess a “secondary cause” of their own. Summarizing this marvel of semi-autonomous causality contained within creation, St. Thomas states: “It is part of the design of God’s providence to allow the operation of secondary causes, in order that the beauty of order may be preserved in the universe…and [in order that God] may communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.”⁽⁸⁾Summa Theologica, I.23.8.obj.2. However, God being God can by a kind of divine dispensation depart from the laws of nature and with immediacy perform a miracle without the help of angels. Cf. Ibid., I.112.2. Therefore, according to the Divine command, the angels maintain these causes at work in creation. 

            Thirdly, inanimate instruments (e.g. a chair, a hammer, wind, or water) do not have their own internal principle of growth or decay, and therefore must be moved by an outside agent. With a hammer, for example, it does not move without the arm of a man swinging it. With the inanimate instruments created by God, such as wind, fire, or water, they do not move without the agency of the angels. 

            There are numerous examples in the Scriptures where the angels are the ones who carry out God’s will over inanimate matter: The angels caused the thunder and lightning at Mount Sinai (Exodus 19:16-18; Galatians 3:19; Acts 7:53); an angel prevented the fire from burning the three young men (Daniel 3:26-27); the angels moved the waters of Bethesda and accomplished the subsequent healings (John 5:4); the angels restrain the four winds over the earth (Revelation 7:1). 

            Everyday, for example, we see the laws of nature at work without thinking of the reasons behind the movements. Do we ever consider, “What causes inanimate things to move and observe certain laws?” St. John Henry Newman asks: “But why do rivers flow? Why does rain fall? Why does the sun warm us? And the wind, why does it blow?”⁽⁹⁾Newman, 456. Answering his own question, Newman goes so far as to write: “Those events which we ascribe to chance as the weather, or to nature as the seasons, are duties done so that God ‘who maketh His Angels to be winds, and His Ministers a flame of fire’ (Psalm 104:3).”⁽¹⁰⁾Ibid., 456. The spiritual intelligences ordained by their Creator maintains the motions of the universe and the laws of inanimate creation as well. 

Blessings, Fear, and Delight

            The discoveries of science are a blessing. They give us much comfort and security. Yet the knowledge that science provides is not enough to fully explain the whole phenomena. St. John Henry Newman points out that the “sin of what is called an educated age, such as our own,” is “to ascribe to all we see around us, not to [the angels’] agency, but to certain laws of nature.”⁽¹¹⁾Ibid., 455.

            He proposes a scenario supposing that a scientist, “when examining a flower, or a herb, or a pebble, or a ray of light, which he treats as something beneath him in the scale of existence, suddenly discovered that he was in the presence of some powerful being who was hidden behind the visible things he was inspecting, who, though concealing his wise hand, was giving them their beauty, grace, and perfection, as being God’s instrument for the purpose…what would be his thoughts?”⁽¹²⁾Ibid., 458-459. As brilliant as he is, the astrophysicist suddenly witnessing an intelligent wind carrying a star through the galaxy, or the biochemist viewing a substantial spirit hovering over a particular molecular structure, would be awestruck and even fearful at such a sight, immediately recognizing that his seemingly vast scientific knowledge is infantile compared with mysterious workings of God’s ministers. In fact, there is far more delight in recognizing the hidden angelic order behind the laws of nature than merely the scientific knowledge itself. 

            Lastly, scientific knowledge is not enough for eternal salvation. It is only the Catholic faith which truly opens one’s eyes to the mysteries beyond nature and to the eternal destiny to which we are called. St. Bonaventure, who was more cautious when the scientific advances of his own age came with the introduction of Aristotle in natural philosophy, summarizes it well, writing: “Thus it is that, no matter how enlightened one may be by the light coming from nature and from acquired knowledge, he cannot enter into himself to delight in the Lord, except by the mediation of Christ who says, ‘I am the door. If anyone enters by Me he shall be safe’…But we do not come to this door unless we believe in Him, hope in Him, and love Him.”⁽¹³⁾St. Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, IV.2.