Angels have no creative power, Angels: Day 100

God makes creation to operate by certain principles, says St. Augustine. If evil angels can make use of those principles to help magicians do apparent miracles, that doesn’t mean that anyone but God was the Creator.

The Apostle Paul distinguishes God’s creating and forming on the inside from the acts of the creature that are applied from without. Drawing a metaphor from agriculture, he says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor. 3:6).

In the spiritual life, no one but God can work righteousness in our minds. But people can preach the gospel as an outward means—the good can do it sincerely, but the evil can also do it in pretense.

In the same way, God works from within in the creation of visible things. What the good or the bad do—what angels or people do—even what animals do—all these things are done by the nature that God has given them, according to his own absolute power. He has given them their appetites for pleasant things, and their abilities to respond to those appetites. His creation is what agriculture is to the soil.

So I cannot call the evil angels, who are invoked by magic, the creators of the frogs or serpents (Exod. 7-8), any more than I can say that evil people were the creators of the grain crop when I see that it has sprung up through their labor. –St. Augustine, On the Trinity, 3.8

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Am I planting and watering the seeds God has given me to care for? Do I, like God’s good angels, use what God has given me for the good of his creatures?

CLOSING PRAYER

Holy Guardian Angel, you are devoted to my care: teach me to guard and keep God’s creation with the same devotion.

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