Angels are kept alive by God, Angels: Day 031

Angels are kept alive by God

A particularly poetic passage from Dionysius  the Areopagite tells us that the angels, and all other living beings, are alive only because they share in the self- existing Life of God. When we say that angels are immortal, we don’t mean that they are immortal by nature; we mean that God keeps them alive forever.

Now let us sing the eternal life, from which comes the self-existing Life, and every life; and from which, to every single thing that shares in life, is distributed the power to live appropriately to each.

Certainly the life and the immortality of the immortal angels, and the very indestructibility of the angelic perpetual motion, exist because of the eternal life, and is sustained from it and because of it. For that reason they are also called ever- living and immortal—not immortal because they have immortality and eternal life by their own nature, but because they have it from the life-giving Cause that forms and sustains all life. As I said before, God only is self-existing Being; and again I say here that the divine life, which is above life, is life-giving and sustaining even to the self-existing Life. Every life and life-giving movement comes from that Life that is above every life and every source of life.

From God even the souls have their indestructible nature. All living crea- tures, and plants in their most remote echo of life, have their power to live from God. And, as Scripture says, when that Life above all life is taken away, all life fails. But even things that have failed through their inability to share in that life, if they return, become living creatures again. –Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names, 6.1

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Have I thanked God today for his gift of life—not only to me, but to everything from angels down to the bacteria I couldn’t live without?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, I thank you continually. I adore and glorify you, O Lord of all, without whom I would not exist, and not even the angels would have life.

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