The month of October, in addition to the Holy Rosary, is dedicated to the Angels. Angels and Demons, who are also Angels, but rebellious and fallen, exist. They are pure spirits, real and distinct persons, creatures with souls and not bodies. The Church has professed this from the beginning with the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and confirmed it in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), whose formulation is taken from the First Vatican Council which says: God ” created both creatures from nothing at the beginning of time, the spiritual and the corporeal, that is, the angelic and the earthly, and then created human nature as common to both, consisting of spirit and body .” That is, God created both realities from the beginning: the spiritual and the corporeal, the earthly world and the angelic.
The scene of the creation of the Angels was Heaven where, at their first opening to consciousness, they were called to adore God, his plans, his will. The Angels were the first rational and free creatures of the universe. As rational beings, they had the possibility of knowing in an immediate and intuitive way the Truth of God, their Cause and their supreme Good. As free beings, they had the possibility of rejecting the Will of God, his plan for the universe. Lucifer, the first of the angels, admired his own beauty, claimed to be equal to God, refused to serve him. A third part of the Angels followed him ( Rev. 12, 14), but all the other Angels, led by St. Michael, rose up with the cry “ Quis ut Deus? ”, “ Who is like God? ”.
Good and evil entered into the history of the universe. A battle took place in heaven ( Rev. 12,7-9): Michael and the good Angels cast Satan and the rebellious Angels into hell. However, it was not a battle between good and evil, but between good and bad: and this is because evil is not a substance, as St. Augustine says, because if it were a substance it would be good ( Confessions , III, 7, n. 12). If Satan were evil, there would exist an ontological dualism in the universe, as the Cathars believed, who contrasted the God of evil of the Old Testament with the good God of the New. The Angels, on the other hand, the Church teaches in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) against the Cathars, ” were created good by God but became evil by their own will .”
What divided the world of pure spirits into good and bad was therefore not an ontological division, nor a separation established by God, but a moral choice, fruit of the freedom inherent in the spiritual nature of the Angels. The good chose God as the supreme and definitive Good, turning to Him with all the inner strength of their freedom. The bad instead rejected and hated Him, rooting themselves irreversibly in their refusal.
At the root of Lucifer’s sin, as with every sin, there is a profound pride. At the root of the faithfulness of Saint Michael, his adversary, there is an even deeper humility. Pride and humility are the two axes of the history of the created world. Around these two attitudes of the spirit two cities have formed, the city of God and the city of Satan of which Saint Augustine speaks, destined to clash in history until the end of time. The choice of the Angels in fact continues to be repeated on earth every instant for men, until the moment of death.
The Apocalypse describes the final act of this battle that will conclude at the end of time, when the Lord will send his Angels to gather all the righteous from the four cardinal points. The Angels will imprint the seal of the living God on the elect who they will lead with confidence in the battle ( Rev. 7, 2). At the sound of the trumpets they will execute the punishments of God on earth, announcing the victory of Christ ( Rev. 8,2). At the end of the world, ” When the Son of man comes in glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of glory, and all the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them one from another ” ( Mt. 25, 31-32).
The battle of the Angels that occurred when God created the universe is not a mythical representation but a historical event because it occurred in time, an instant after the creation of time itself: it is an event that opens time, so to speak, and therefore has a paradigmatic value, a model of everything that would happen from then on in the course of history.
History, from its beginning to its end, is the uninterrupted repetition of this event: the radical choice for or against God and his Providential design on the universe. The protagonists, however, are no longer only the Angels and Demons, but above all the men who live, work and die in history.
Their choice is not of an instant, like that of the Angels, but lasts the time of a lifetime, it concludes at the moment of death, which is the hour of the final and definitive choice, from which there is no turning back. It is in the radicality and universality of this choice that the freedom of spiritual creatures, whether Angels or men, is expressed in its highest form.
