Christ is the teacher, Angels: Day 095

Christ is the teacher, Angels: Day 095 October 24, 2016

angels_clement_of_alexandria_1One generation teaches another, but who taught the first humans? Not other humans, says St. Clement of Alexandria, since there were none. Not angels, because we cannot hear the way angels normally speak. No, our original teacher was the Word himself.

I lead you up to the first generation of human beings; and from that point I begin to investigate: who is their teacher? Not a human, for they had not yet learned. Not any of the angels, for humans do not hear the way angels, as an- gels, speak. We have ears, but they do not have a tongue to correspond; nor would any one attribute to the angels organs of speech—I mean lips and the parts con- nected to them, throat, and windpipe, and chest, breath and air to vibrate. And God certainly does not call aloud in his unapproachable sanctity, separated as he is from even the archangels.

And we also have already heard that angels learned the truth, and their rulers over them; for they had a beginning.

It remains, then, for us to keep going up to seek their teacher. And since there is one unoriginated Being, the Omnipotent God; the First-begotten is also one; “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made” ( John 1:3). This is the Teacher of all created beings.

–St. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, 6.7

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .
The angels themselves had to learn what they know from Christ. Is Christ’s teaching—in the Sermon on the Mount, for example—the starting point for everything else I know?

CLOSING PRAYER
Your angels, O God, would live in darkness without your Word. Confirm me in your divine knowledge, through your only-begotten Son, our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

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