The prefaces of the new translation of the Roman Missal now mention several choirs of angels which we join in singing God’s praises in the Sanctus. Several people have asked me about the origin of the ‘nine choirs of angels,’ so I will share a paper I wrote on the topic.
I have written an abstract which answers the question in a few paragraphs. If you’re still interested and brave, read the paper further below.
An anonymous sixth century monk who used the nom de plume Dionysius the Areopagite wrote a treatise named The Celestial Hierarchies where he systematically ordered the nine types of angels mentioned in Sacred Scripture into a hierarchy: seraphims, cherubims, thrones, dominions, power, authorities, principalities, archangels and angels.
Pseudo-Dionysius, as he is called today since we do not know his real name, was deeply embedded in Holy Scripture and the neo-Platonic thought of philosophers Plotinus and Proclus which taught creation was a series of hierarchical emanations from a single source called the One. Pseudo-Dionysius combines Scripture and neo-Platonic thought to provide a vision of angelic beings ordered in a hierarchy emanating from the One, who is God. Knowledge of God is passed down through this celestial hierarchy down to physical creation which itself is structured in a hierarchy which mirrors the celestial one. For Pseudo-Dionysius all knowledge of God acquired by human beings is mediated through angels, the lowest beings of the celestial hierarchy.
The specific order of angels in three hierarchies of three levels each may not be divinely revealed in Scripture, but Pseudo-Dionysius presents a coherent argument for the order. Since the Church has never articulated a hierarchy for heavenly creatures as an article of faith, Pseudo-Dionysius’ speculations do not go against that which has been revealed in Scripture as long as his celestial hierarchy is not enshrined as a definitive treatment on the mysterious realm of angelic beings.
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The Celestial Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius:
Where do the nine choirs of angels come from?
Knowledge about the essence and mission of angels has been articulated and disputed throughout the centuries within Christianity. The singular most influential figure in the Christian understanding of angels is Dionysius the Areopagite who in his treatise The Celestial Hierarchies set forth an arrangement for the heavenly creatures. Dionysius clearly analyzed the Scriptural mention of the different kinds of angels, yet his hierarchical organization of three distinct ranks of angels seems ungrounded in Scripture. Analyzing sources and ideas available to Dionysius, primarily Scripture and neo-Platonic thought, it is possible to conjecture the origin of the hierarchy and how he justified a particular order. After his death, Dionysius’ heavy, almost canonical, influence may be traced in Christian thought even though his celestial hierarchy is based on speculation and has never been adopted as an article of faith.
Dionysius the Areopagite is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles 17,34 as one of Paul’s converts in Athens. The authorship of TheCelestial Hierarchies and the rest of the Dionysian corpus was questioned as early as the 6th century by Hypatius of Ephesus, but only serious objections arose in the 16th century. It is now generally accepted that the author was not Dionysius whom Paul converted, but rather someone who wrote between AD 485 and 528. This man, Pseudo-Dionysius, was a Christian immersed into the neo-platonic thought of Plotinus (AD 204-270) and Proclus (AD 410-485), which is evident through his knowledge of common 5thcentury neo-platonic ideas and doctrinal formulas. Even his writing method of adopting an ancient figure was common at that time.[1] It is safe to presume therefore that the author of The Celestial Hierarchies did not write in the 1stcentury, but rather in the 5th century.
The scriptural knowledge of Pseudo-Dionysius is evident in the work in his examples and the names he gives the nine kinds of heavenly creatures in his hierarchy. In the highest hierarchy Pseudo-Dionysius places seraphims, cherubims and thrones. Seraphims appear explicitly in the book of Isaiah when “[Isaiah] saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up… Above him stood the seraphim; each had six wings (Is 6,1-2).”[2] In the tenth chapter of Ezekiel cherubims appear to the prophet and “each had four faces, and each four wings, and underneath their wings the semblance of human hands (Ez 10,21).” Genesis 3:24 mentions a cherubim guarding the entrance into Eden while 1 Kings 6:23-28 describes the cherubims of Solomon’s temple. In his letter to the Colossians, Paul includes thrones as one of God’s creations (Col 1:16).
The second hierarchy includes dominions, powers and authorities. Along with thrones, Paul mentions various kinds of angels in Colossians 1:16 when speaking about Jesus. “For in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities – all things were created through him and for him.” Paul also taught in Ephesians 3,10, “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.”
The last and lowest hierarchy is composed by principalities, archangels and angels. Principalities are named by Saint Paul in his letters to the Colossians and Ephesians as already noted above. Archangels are mentioned twice in the New Testament: Paul describes that “the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command with the archangel’s call…(1 Thes 4:16),” and the Letter of Jude in verse nine mentions the archangel Michael by name. Angels are found throughout the Scriptures at the service of God as messengers, which is what their name in Greek, άγγελος, means.
Pseudo-Dionysius found the names and attributes of the various heavenly creatures in Scripture, but he did not find a fixed order of the nine kinds of heavenly creatures. Mortimer Adler rightly asserts that, “nowhere in the Sacred Scriptures do the nine names appear in any one place nor are the different types of angels thus named ever ordered in one fixed scheme of organization.”[3] Scripture has an unsystematic and almost incidental presentation of angels. Pseudo-Dionysius however claims, “we should behold the intelligent hierarchies of heaven and we should do so in accordance with what Scripture has revealed to us,”[4] yet the hierarchy for heavenly creatures he develops has another source, the neo-platonic philosophy of Plotinus and Proclus. Dionysius justifies his speculation asserting that heavenly creatures in Scripture are represented with “material and incongruous images,” so the mind must move beyond these to the “sacred and hidden truth about the celestial intelligences” which he points out in his work.[5]
The central concept Pseudo-Dionysius took from neo-Platonists was the principle of emanationism. Found in Plato’s philosophy already, the teaching holds there is a transcendent principle from which everything is derived through an ordered series of begettings or emanations, each successive one of a lower rank. Plotinus taught the supreme principle was the One; a transcendent, ineffable and absolutely simple principle. The One overflows giving rise to intelligence, or nous. Intelligence in part gives rise to psyche, which as it continues to emanate, becomes less perfect and more multiple until eventually from it emanates the physical world.[6]
Proclus adopted this emanationist understanding of the world from Plotinus but modified it by stating the One could be known by varying degrees by all emanations, and by developing a triadic understanding of each emanation. Beginning with his principle ‘all things are in all things, in proper manner’ found in his Elements of Theology, Proposition 103, he argued that the One is mirrored in each emanation, but the farther away the emanation is, the more disintegrated the presence of the One becomes. This is due to the imperfection of the mirror since it cannot receive the One fully and not due to a defect in the One. Humans can really know the One through knowledge passed down from the emanation before them, but only in a human manner, as proper to human beings.[7]
Proclus identifies five emanations from the One which include Being, Life, Mind, Soul and Body. Each one contains a triadic structure of abiding-procession-return as Proposition 35 of Elements of Theology suggests, ‘every effect remains in its cause, proceeds from it and returns to it.’[8] In Proclus’ system, each emanation naturally transmits knowledge of the One, gives rise to a new emanation and immediately pulls the new, lower emanation upwards towards the One serving as a mediator of real knowledge between the One and the emanation below.[9]
Unlike Bonaventure who believed that special revelation was given to John the Evangelist and Paul about the angelic hierarchy that was later recorded by Dionysius the Areopagite, the organization of the celestial hierarchy depends on both Scripture and neo-Platonic thought.[10] Throughout the Dionysian corpus, God is described with the same qualities as the One of neo-Platonists especially in the opening hymn of The Mystical Theology:
Trinity! Higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness! Guide of Christians in the wisdom of heaven! Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, where the mysteries of God’s Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.[11]
Like Proclus’ striving to reach the One, Pseudo-Dionysius stresses the need to be united to the Transcendent One. All being participates in God already as the One in Proclus is present in all being, so the goal of the mystical life is to achieve union with God where intellectual activity stops and the experience of God alone is sensed since God is beyond being. Pseudo-Dionysius stresses the love and benevolence of God towards all hierarchies throughout his work, which is a parting from mainstream neo-Platonic thought that does not consider a personal, benevolent love between the One and the hierarchies below it since it is so other.
A careful definition of the celestial hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius and their function reveal that Pseudo-Dionysius organizes the angels in a hierarchy to supplant the emanations of Proclus. He begins by stating that order and rank on earth are a sign of an ordering towards the divine. He continues by defining a hierarchy as “a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine… a certain perfect arrangement, an image of the beauty of God,”[12] and its goal “to imitate God so as to take on his form… to receive and to pass on undiluted purification… and the understanding which brings perfection.”[13] God creates in hierarchies revealing Himself to creation through them. This order, which reflects God himself, allows creatures to gain real knowledge of God from the hierarchy above them.
Heavenly creatures, his argument states, model their intellect on God because they behold God as immaterial beings. They have a communion with God impossible to achieve by other creatures. Pseudo-Dionysius holds that creatures of the third hierarchy have revealed divine things to humans, lifting them towards God. He finds support for this statement throughout Scripture such as in Luke 1:11-20 where the angel Gabriel announces to Mary the birth of Christ. He finds in Luke 22:43, where angels strengthened Jesus before his passion, and in Matthew 4:11, where angels ministered to Jesus after the devil tempted him in the desert, proof that God the Father communicated with Jesus through angels. Angels even mediated the giving of the Law of God at Mount Sinai.
Pseudo-Dionysius firmly holds that knowledge of God that reaches human beings is always mediated through the lowest hierarchy when he writes, “by the third [hierarchy] our hierarchy is hierarchically uplifted, in due proportion and divine concord.”[14] This follows Proclus’ hierarchy where knowledge of the One is passed down in a specific order through the hierarchies and where the higher hierarchy wishes to pull upwards the hierarchy below it. Pseudo-Dionysius states, “when the first rank has directly and properly received its due understanding of God’s Word from the divine goodness itself, then it passes this on, as befits a benevolent hierarchy, to those next in line. It also pulls up the one next in line towards God.”[15] This process continues through the three hierarchies of angels until the lowest celestial hierarchy passes knowledge to human beings and lifts humans towards God. Pseudo-Dionysius seems to restrict contact with God through the hierarchies and specifically for human beings through principalities, archangels and angels.
Pseudo-Dionysius defends this bold teaching from a noticeable objection in chapter thirteen of The Celestial Hierarchy, “Why the prophet Isaiah is said to have been purified by the seraphim.” The problem Pseudo-Dionysius must resolve is that his teaching does not allow for direct contact between a human being and an angelic creature of the first hierarchy as it happens in Isaiah 6:1-13. Pseudo-Dionysius must explain this passage of Scripture to maintain the fusing of Proclus’ emanational system and heavenly creatures. After describing the event recounted in the passage, he asserts that the vision of Isaiah actually came from an angel, not a seraphim. He concludes that “under the illuminating guidance of this angel [Isaiah] was raised up to such a sacred contemplation that, if I may speak in symbols, he was able to look upon the most superior beings established under, around, and with God.”[16] An angel produced Isaiah’s vision, which contained things of a higher order, thus preserving the hierarchical order of celestial creatures. The seraphim did not revel himself directly to the visionary, but rather an angel granted Isaiah a vision of higher things.
Scripture does not state that a celestial hierarchy exists, so Pseudo-Dionysius’ argument in chapter 13 justifying what Scripture records is to justify the bringing together of Proclus’ system and Scripture. If this were not the aim, there would be no reason to explain how a human in Scripture can see a seraphim. Scripture does not suggest humans’ inability to see types of angels, only the inability to behold God face to face. The Blackfriars’ edition of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica sheds some light on this mingling of neo-Platonism and Scripture in its first appendix. The Blackfriars attribute the western angelic tradition to Dionysius, Augustine (AD 354-430) and Gregory the Great (AD 540-604) who all “derived essential data from Scripture, but inevitably derived much also from the assumptions and preoccupations… of the culture in which [they] were born and grew up.”[17] This accurate assessment of Pseudo-Dionysius’ work is echoed by Karl Rahner who points to an excessive concern in the Church Fathers and scholastics with orderliness like “the importance attached to dividing angels into so many choirs or orders and so many hierarchies.”[18] Pseudo-Dionysius devised an order for the unsystematic presence of angels in Scripture with available, respected sources.
At this point Pseudo-Dionysius’ insistence on the transmission of knowledge of God from angels to humans seems to question the role of Jesus Christ as sole mediator between the Father and humans. Saint Paul writes in his first letter to Timothy, “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Jesus Christ,” yet Pseudo-Dionysius inserts the lowest hierarchy as the immediate mediator between God and humans. He states, “Jesus himself, the transcendent Cause of [heavenly creatures], came to take on human form… but I observe that never once did he abandon that human form which he had established and chosen, and he obediently submitted to the wishes of God and the Father arranged by the angels.”[19] Jesus in his human nature conformed to the hierarchy of being according to where humans belong, yet mysteriously remained the transcendent God. René Roques states, “l’activité [des anges] ne s’oppose pas a la Providence divine.” Roques approaches this question arguing that there is only one providence and angels simply participate in this single providence of God. Their mission is simply to transmit the knowledge they receive from God, thus when a lower creature turns towards them, the creature is actually turning towards God.[20]
Roque’s proposal shows there is no opposition between divine providence and angelic providence since knowledge of God is all the same knowledge, yet this still does not resolve the role of Jesus as mediator between God and human beings. The opening lines of The Celestial Hierarchy illustrate Pseudo-Dionysius’ belief that through Jesus humans have obtained access to the Father, yet the work leaves the exact role of Jesus vague. Based on Pseudo-Dionysius’ understanding of a hierarchy and other works in his corpus, the following may be proposed. Jesus Christ is God, the One of Proclus, that mysteriously breaks through the hierarchical system and descends into the human rank. God thus imparts real knowledge of Himself to human beings, while keeping with Proclus’ principle that ‘all things are in all things, in proper manner.’ The knowledge of God human beings receive is limited by their humanity, not by an imperfection in Jesus, but rather it is human beings knowing God as it is proper to human beings.
The belief that Pseudo-Dionysius was Dionysius the Areopagite of the Book of Acts gave his works an exalted position among Christian thinkers. The proving he actually wrote four to five centuries later does not decrease the power of his knowledge and insights. Pseudo-Dionysius found a possibility to unite Scripture and neo-Platonic thought because he was not afraid of looking for truth wherever he found it as he wrote in his seventh letter, “once an argument has been properly established because of its own truth… everything which is not completely in harmony with this will automatically be overthrown by the direct unshakable presence of truth.”[21] The admiration of Dionysius the Areopagite by centuries of Christian thinkers did not depend exclusively on his link to Paul, but because Christian thinkers found truth in his writings. The order of angels into three hierarchies may not be divinely revealed through Scripture, but Pseudo-Dionysius presented a coherent argument that is not ‘mere babbling’ as John Calvin described it in the sixteenth century. Since the Church has not articulated a hierarchy for heavenly creatures, Pseudo-Dionysius’ speculations do not go against that which has been revealed as long as his celestial hierarchy is not enshrined as a definitive treatment on the mysterious realm of angelic beings.
Bibliography
Adler, Mortimer. The Angels and Us. London: Collier Macmillan, 1982.
Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, vol. 9. Kenelm Foster, OP, ed. Appendix “Angelology in the Church and in Saint Thomas.” Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1968.
Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius the. Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.
Inwood, J. “Proclus.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Ted Honderich. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Merlan, Philip. “Emanationsim.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2. Paul Edwards, ed. London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967.
Roques, René. L’univers dionysien: Structure hierarchique du monde selon le Pseudo-Denys. Paris: Aubier, 1954.
Rosan, Laurence. “Proclus.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 6. Paul Edwards, ed. London: Collier-Mamillan, 1967.
Schäfer, Christian. The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.” 6 Sep 2004. See
[1] “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite” in Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2004. See .
[2] All Biblical citations are from the RSV Translation, Catholic Edition.
[3] Mortimer Adler, The Angels and Us (London: Collier Macmillan, 1982), 44.
[4] Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Colm Luibheid, ed. (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), The Heavenly Hierarchy, 145.
[5] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Celestial Hierarchy, 153, 149.
[6] Philip Merlan, “Emanationism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2, Paul Edwards, ed. (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), 473.
[7] Laurence Rosan, “Proclus,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 6, Paul Edwards, ed. (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967), 480.
[8] J. Inwood, “Proclus,” in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Ted Honderich, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 721.
[9] Christian, Schäfer, The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 61.
[10] Adler, The Angels and Us, 46.
[11] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, Mystical Theology, 135.
[12] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Celestial Hierarchy, 153-4.
[13] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Celestial Hierarchy, 162.
[14] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Celestial Hierarchy, 173.
[15] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Celestial Hierarchy, 166.
[16] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Celestial Hierarchy, 179.
[17] “Angelology in the Church and in Saint Thomas” in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 9, Kenelm Foster, OP, ed., Appendix I (Cambridge: Blackfriars, 1968), 303.
[18] “Angelology in the Church,” Summa TheologiaeFoster, ed., 304.
[19] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, The Celestial Hierarchy, 158.
[20] René Roques, L’univers dionysien: Structure hierarchique du monde selon le Pseudo-Denys (Paris: Aubier, 1954), 147-150.
[21] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, Letter Seven, 267.
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