"Their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father Who is in heaven."

 Amici, a chairde,

Today is October 2, the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels.

Perhaps the most famous Biblical passage about Guardian Angels is St Matthew 18:10

"See that you despise not one of these little ones: for I say to you, that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven."

Guardian Angels are a not a formal doctrine of the Catholic Faith. That Angels exist is a dogma, but Guardian Angels is an ancient belief, formally defined or not. "That every individual soul has a guardian angel has never been defined by the Church, and is, consequently, not an article of faith; but it is the 'mind of the Church', as St. Jerome expressed it: 'how great the dignity of the soul, since each one has from his birth an angel commissioned to guard it.' (Comm. in Matt., xviii, lib. II)." This is from the 1917 Catholic Encyclopedia at the New Advent site. For theological detail on Angels in general, and the Church teaching thereof, see this encyclopedia article. for the historical development of the Feast.

St Peter certainly had a Guardian Angel. See Acts 12:15: "You are out of your mind," they told her. But when she kept insisting it was so (i.e. that the imprisoned St. Peter was miraculously at the gate), they said, "It must be his angel." Clearly, by Our Lord's own words, children have Angels, and but this story from Acts, it is clear adults have Angels. Historically, theologians argued back and forth whether everyone has Guardian Angels.

Does everyone have a Guardian Angel? This from the Encyclopedia:

St. Thomas teaches us (Summa Theologica I:113:4) that only the lowest orders of angels are sent to men, and consequently that they alone are our guardians, though Scotus and Durandus would rather say that any of the members of the angelic host may be sent to execute the Divine commands. Not only the baptized, but every soul that cometh into the world receives a guardian spirit; St. Basil, however (Homily on Psalm 43), and possibly St. Chrysostom (Homily 3 on Colossians) would hold that only Christians were so privileged.

It is one of the greatest meditations on God that he created so many Angels in the first place, and that life on Earth is itself so "plush", so exuberant, so over-the-top abounding in life, that this probably reflects their spirit world (things visible and invisible). It's hardly a stretch to comprehend the Lord God just creating Spirit Life as abundantly as the biological life here below. The Bible of course has a number of quotes about the many hosts of Angels. Just one example, Hebrews 12:22 "But you are come to mount Sion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels...". "Thousands of thousands, thousands of hosts of Angels" is a typical style of putting it. And this from Revelation 5:11 "And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne, and the living creatures, and the ancients; and the number of them was thousands of thousands,...".

There's enough Angels, clearly, for God to appoint one to you.

In fact, Fr. Ripperger, the Exorcist, says that when created, each Angel was given a specific task. If the Angels refused, off to Hell he went. Satan, Lucifer, the Lightbringer, the Star of the Morning, one of the greatest of Angels, was given the task, Fr. Ripperger says, of being the Guardian Angel of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He refused. This, remember, from an exorcist who has forced many a demon to tell him information, information he extracts via inflicting severe pain on the devil. Go here for Fr. Ripperger's one hour long lecture on Guardia Angels. It is, of course, excellent and very well worth the time.

In any event, from this perspective, there's no doubt everyone has a Guardian Angel. And they chose to be your Guardian Angel, so, be right with them. Don't hurt them by sinful acts, and thank them for all they do. Today is their special Feast but you can (and should) thank them every day.

One great way to thank them is to recite this Traditional Catholic Litany for Guardian Angels. It takes a few minutes but it's a beautiful series of prayerful truths about the "Angel of Heaven, who dost love me tenderly."

From the Collect for today, from the TLM:

O God, who in Thine ineffable Providence hast deigned to send Thy holy Angels to keep watch over us: grant to us Thy suppliant people, that we may always be defended by their protection, and may rejoice in their fellowship for ever. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Three in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.

         AnP

An Article on Angels by Prof. Edward Feser

Any interest in Angels? Professor Edward Feser is an Aristotelian and Thomist (as in St. Thomas Aquinas) and I have a number of his books. In general, if you are interested in philosophy at all, Edward Feser's blog is great, and it has a wonderfully extensive list of links to a wide-range of blogs and websites. Here's the link to the Professor's essay:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.hu/2017/07/cartesian-angelism.html

Specifically, the article is partly about the nature of Angels via St. Thomas Aquinas, and also about the substance dualism of Cartesian Philosophy. A great deal of the discussion about the nature of Angels goes on in the Comment section.

The professor also has a link to the relevant Angel section of St. Thomas's Summa.

An excerpt:

You do not have to believe in angels in order to find the notion of philosophical interest.  Working out the implications of the idea of a purely incorporeal intellect is useful for understanding the nature of the intellect, the nature of free choice and its relationship to the presence or absence of the body, the nature of time, and other issues too.  In fact there is such a thing as rational angelology, and here as elsewhere Aquinas often surprises with his demonstration of how much might be established via purely philosophical arguments.

The position of angels in the hierarchy of reality illuminates the similarities and differences between the kinds of things which exist (or, if you don’t believe in angels, which could exist).  At the bottom of the hierarchy come inanimate material things – rocks, dirt, water, and so forth.  Next come the vegetative forms of life, which take in nutrients, grow, and reproduce themselves but do nothing beyond this.  Then we have sensory or animal forms of life, which carry out the vegetative functions but add to them sensation, appetite, and locomotion or self-movement.  Above mere animals are rational animals or human beings.  Human beings do everything other animals do, but on top of that possess intellect and will; and for Aquinas and other Scholastic thinkers, these are incorporeal activities.  A human being is, accordingly, the kind of substance which possesses at the same time both bodily and non-bodily attributes.

Now, there is, as it were, metaphysical room in between human beings and God for a further kind of thing – something which is entirely incorporeal rather than being merely partially incorporeal (as human beings are), but which is nevertheless finite and in need of being created (as God is not).  That is what an angel is.

On Aquinas’s analysis, among the things we can say about angels are the following:

1. Being utterly incorporeal by nature, angels lack sense organs or brain activity.  They do not have sensory experiences, or the mental imagery that follows upon these.  Hence their mode of knowledge is not like ours.  We come to know things through the senses, and form concepts by abstracting them from the things we experience.  An angel, by contrast, has all its concepts and knowledge “built in” at its creation.  In other words, it possesses innate ideas.

2. Angels are not in time, though they are not strictly eternal either.  What is in time, as corporeal things are, is changeable both in its substance and in its accidents.  What is strictly eternal, as God is, is utterly unchangeable.  Angels are unchangeable in their substance, since they are incorporeal.  An angel is not composed of matter which might lose its substantial form and thereby go out of existence.  It is in this way incorruptible or immortal.  But it can change in its accidents insofar as it can choose either this or that.  This middle ground between time and eternity is what Aquinas calls “aeviternity.”

3. For these reasons, an angel does not know things in a discursive way.  It does not have to engage in processes like reasoning from premises to a conclusion, weighing alternative hypotheses, or otherwise “figuring things out” the way we do.  It simply knows what it knows “all at once,” as it were.

4. Unlike the human soul, an angel is not the form of any body.  A human being, again, is the kind of substance which possesses both corporeal and incorporeal activities.  It accordingly has the substantial form of the kind of thing capable of both activities.  When its corporeal side is destroyed, the substance itself is not thereby destroyed, because it was never entirely corporeal in the first place.  That is why the human soul carries on beyond death – qua substantial form, it continues to inform the now incomplete substance of which it is the form, a substance reduced to its incorporeal operations.  But this is not its natural state.  In the absence of matter, the substance in question cannot do all the things it is naturally inclined to do (seeing, hearing, walking, talking, etc.).  But angels are not like that.  Being incorporeal is their natural state.

5. All angels fall under the same genus (which is why they are all angels), but there cannot be more than one member of any angelic species.  The reason is that, for Aquinas, matter is what distinguishes one member of a species of thing from another.  Hence, since angels are completely incorporeal, there is no way in principle by which one member of an angelic species could be distinguished from another.  If there are two or more angels, then, there are ipso facto two or more angelic species.  The way these species differ is the only way they can differ in purely intellectual substances, viz. degree of intellectual power.

See (among other works) Summa Theologiae I.50-64 for more details.  But this much gives us enough to understand why, from an Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, the Cartesian view of human nature is deeply mistaken.