For some reason I was thinking about how many angels there are. I forget what the triggering thought was, but it had something to do with whether or not Angels multitask. Angels are perfectly conformed to God’s will–it’s often described that at the moment of creation, the Angel chooses God or not-God, and abides by that choice perfectly. It makes sense that every choice an angel makes would be perfect, and every obedience to God’s will would be perfect.
Take Guardian Angels. Their one job is to watch over each of us. They care for us in Purgatory. I am sure we become best friends with our Guardian Angels when we finally pass into Heaven, because they spend their existence watching over us.
- Does God make new Angels as they are needed, or did God make all the angels and some wait for their assignment to arrive?
- I think if God pre-made Guardian Angels then there would be a problem with predestination, because there would be some number of Guardian Angels in Heaven and we are rapidly approaching that amount. Free will allows for the creation of Humans so out of love for us God must create Angels as we are created.
- God doesn’t destroy angels either. For Guardian Angels it is easy because they spend their whole existence watching over their charge, and even into Purgatory and Heaven. For souls which choose Hell, their guardian angels turn their attention to the praise and glory of God in absence of a charge to watch over.
So if we suppose that new Angels are created, and no angels are destroyed, then that means that for all the little reasons Angels get created there are some whose job has expired. There are Angels, I think it is fair to say, that carry the moon in her orbit–they will always be busy. There are Angels who ensure that Sodium reacts with water–always busy. But there’s also an Angel for the medieval Principality of Nizhny Novgorod, which doesn’t exist anymore.
So that means there is an Angel–I think it was referred to as the Angel of Death–who effectuated the Passover. Was their job just that one event or was that an extension of the duties of being the Angel of Death?
More to come on this–the subject of Angels and the spiritual reality in which we live is fascinating to me and I’ve wanted to write about it for a while without really knowing how.
AMDG
Times-Dispatch of Vichy Earth 
I wonder if there is a sort of “reversal” or “peripateia” across the threshold between the material world and the intelligible one with the effect that number becomes qualitative, and NOT quantitative, on the other side. In other words, One is the first and greatest integer and all other values are like fractals or proportions of One. In this case, to pose a question of “how many x?” could only be pertinent to material beings and not to angels. It also provides a mathematical analogy to illustrate how God can be both three and One. This seems right to me but perhaps you have further thoughts or perspectives.
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This is a really interesting thought. I’m not enough of a math wiz to be able to grok this, but it sounds plausible enough to me to be interesting. It would also explain how the Church comes to be referred to as the “Body of Christ” or how we could be united with Him in that way. We lose our numerical individuality and become assumed into the whole mystical body.
Not to say we lose our individuality–our individuality is one of the beautiful gifts of God–but we become properly ordered to God. I don’t really know how to talk about this because you’ve popped my brain but something about it strikes me as true.
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Yes, I think we both lose and do not lose our individuality in the way that 2 is not antithetical to 1, but a multiple of it: “he that shall lose his life shall preserve if alive.” This also helps me understand the fundamental importance of the Resurrection: “If Christ be not risen, then is our faith in vain.”
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This is an interesting post. Your statement about whether angels are continually being created or whether all already were created reminds me of a passage in a 1944 letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to his son Christopher:
“Your reference to the care of your guardian angel makes me fear that ‘he’ is being specially needed. I dare say it is so. . . . . It also reminded me of a sudden vision (or perhaps apperception which at once turned itself into pictorial form in my mind) I had not long ago when spending half an hour in St Gregory’s before the Blessed Sacrament when the Quarant’ Ore was being held there. I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it. (Not that there were individual rays issuing from the Light, but the mere existence of the mote and its position in relation to the Light was in itself a line, and the line was Light). And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God’s very attention itself, personalized.
And I do not mean ‘personified’, by a mere figure of speech according to the tendencies of human language, but a real (finite) person. Thinking of it since – for the whole thing was very immediate, and not recapturable in clumsy language, certainly not the great sense of joy that accompanied it and the realization that the shining poised mote was myself (or any other human person that I might think of with love) – it has occurred to me that (I speak diffidently and have no idea whether such a notion is legitimate: it is at any rate quite separate from the vision of the Light and the poised mote) this is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and equal) is a Person, so the love and attention of the Light to the Mote is a person (that is both with us and in Heaven): finite but divine: i.e. angelic. Anyway, dearest, I received comfort, part of which took this curious form, which I have (I fear) failed to convey: except that I have with me now a definite awareness of you poised and shining in the Light – though your face (as all our faces) is turned from it. But we might see the glimmer in the faces (and persons as apprehended in love) of others.”
Af far as the definite roles of angels, I wrote something speculating about that a while ago: https://nolongerreading.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-partial-order-of-angels-and-some.html
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Thomas Aquinas investigated the question of how many angels there are: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1050.htm#article3. He concluded that they existed “in exceeding great number, far beyond all material multitude.”
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Excellent find!!! “Great number beyond material multitude” is a big enough number for angels to be responsible for every little task and to exist for every thing that needs an angel. That makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for coming back to share this find!
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