This week’s Jesus and the Catholic Church Podcast covered the Church’s teaching on the Angels. In the comment box, I received this question:
My question regarding angels is their depth of knowledge about us. I thought the angels are privy to every thought and memory we have from birth to death — except for the contents of our hearts (which is only known to God). Am I to understand then that the angels will only know what’s revealed to them by us?
Let me see if I can first put the question in context. During the podcast, I read from In Conversation with God by Fr. Fernandez, who says that in order for our guardian angels to know what we need, we need to turn our minds toward them and ask. If that’s the case (this person asks) then what should I make of my previous understanding, namely, that the angels are privy to every thought and memory we’ve had from birth to death?
To answer this question, let me cite a few paragraphs from My Way of Life, which is an excellent summary of the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas by Fr. Farrell and Fr. Healy. They write:
About ourselves, the angels know all there is to be known from the post of an observer who needs no relief, misses nothing, forgets nothing. Beyond that, the angels, all of them, easily penetrate into the regions of our imagination and memory, areas about which the human observer can only guess; which means that our daydreams are not purely private affairs, they are shared by the whole angelic world, our sentimental journeys into the dear days of long ago are never solitary trips. We are not nearly so much alone as we imagine whatever the hour or the place. In relation to the friendly angels, this is to our infinite comfort, and often enough to our acute embarrassment; while it brings home clearly our weak defenses against the hostile horde of devils, the help unwittingly and constantly give to our bitter enemies, and our own desperate need for help from powers on a par with these enemies who so completely outmatch us.
The angels can introduce pictures into our imagination, they can reach into the storehouse of memory and parade the past before our mind’s eye; but there the great natural powers of the angelic world grind to a halt before the impregnable sovereignty of our intellect and our will. Not even the highest of the angels knows what a man is going to do next; the most gifted of the angels cannot know what I am thinking about at this moment. In this privacy of soul, we are the equals of the angels; this territory is inviolable to all but almighty God Himself. Such is the stature of man’s dignity. We are spiritual as well as physical; we are free; our intellect and will are not to be tampered with by any created force. So our thoughts, our deliberate desires, our loves are our own; for them we ourselves must take full credit or full blame. The angels can suggest through imagination and memory, they can coax, entice, threaten, or frighten through these avenues of our sense nature; but we are the ultimate masters in command of our lives.
The key to understanding this passage is to know that our soul has two basic levels. First, the lower level of memory and imagination, and second, the higher level where the intellect and will reside.
The angels both know what is going on in our memory and imagination, and they are able to influence that lower level of our soul by putting images into our head and/or reminding us of past experiences.
The angels, however, cannot enter into the higher level of our soul. They do not know what we are thinking, nor do they know our desires. They can discern what is happening in the higher level of our soul by watching our actions, listening to our conversations, and studying what’s going on in our memories and imaginations. But they can’t know it unless we tell them.
With this in mind, let’s turn to what Fr. Fernandez says in Volume 3 of In Conversation with God (p. 508) about our guardian angels:
In spite of the perfection associated with spiritual nature, the angels do not have divine power or wisdom. They cannot read the inside of our consciences, because they do not have unlimited knowledge. This is why it is necessary for us to let them know what we need of them at every moment. We do not need to use words, but it is necessary to direct ourselves to them with our mind, because their intelligence has the capacity to know what we explicitly imagine or think. Hence the frequent recommendation to foster a deep friendship with our own Guardian Angel.
If we allow for a basic difference of terminology, it seems that Fr. Ferrell and Fr. Fernandez are saying the same thing — namely, that the angels are unable to penetrate into our innermost self, into our intellect and our wills. They cannot, in a manner of speaking, read our minds or know our desires. The only way they can know what we are thinking or what we want is if we tell them.
Therefore, a fundamental requirement for having a relationship with our Guardian Angel is to speak to him about our thoughts and desires. Once he knows, he can help us in innumerable ways.
In this fourth of five episodes on the Annunciation, we hone in on Luke 1.32-33, in which the angel Gabriel uses some highly charged Old Testament phrases to describe the mission of the Messiah. Our goal is to understand what is meant by the phrases “throne of David,” “house of Jacob,” and “everlasting kingdom.”
We then turn to the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. We see that whereas Jesus did not promise to restore the Kingdom to Israel, he did promise to send the Holy Spirit. This happens on the Feast of Pentecost. In attempting to understand Pentecost, we see we must return once again to Genesis: This time we go farther back in the history of salvation, all the way to the Tower of Babel — indeed, all the way back to the creation of the world.
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