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(Also see “Christmas Star Mystery Continues.”)Celestial HierarchyNo sooner had believers begun to vaguely agree on what angels were than scholars began to debate how heavenly messengers organize themselves.The Bible sheds little light on angelic society, but writers have been happy to fill in the gaps, including the unknown author of the circa-A.D. 500 On the Celestial Hierarchy.Incorporating some earlier ideas, the tome ranks angelic beings into nine orders. From lowest to highest: angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim.”It was not an official church teaching,” said Michael Root, a theologian at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.Notre Dame’s Cavadini added, “I think it contributed to the beauty of the universe that all these different levels of beings were incredibly diverse but completely interdependent, and that all that multiplicity yielded a harmony instead of a dissidence.”Fallen Angels
God Knew I Needed An Angel So He Gave Me My Wife Shirt
Of course not all angels are angelic, according to some Christian traditions. Satan himself, it’s been said, was once an angel named Lucifer.The fact that angels can fall from grace is an important point, Catholic University’s Root said—it implies that they have free will.”You even had some theologians in the medieval and the early modern periods who thought that there was an adversarial angel, a fallen angel, assigned to each person as well as a guardian angel—though this was never an official thought,” Root said.As early as the second and third centuries, Christian scholars such as Origen of Alexandria saw important roles for fallen angels, Notre Dame’s Cavadini said.”For Origen and a lot of church fathers, angels participated in the governance of the universe at God’s will,” Cavadini said.”That also meant that the fallen angels were intended to participate in the betterment of the universe, and that you have to take them very seriously, because they still did participate—but in a negative way.”Angels in America
