Choose a topic from Part 1:
1. God gives the angels their knowledge of things when he brings them into existence. This knowledge is creatural knowledge,and hence is not comprehensive, as is the knowledge of God alone.
2. An angel's ideas or intelligible species are directly imparted by the Creator; hence an angel has no need to learn. God gives to angels that extent of knowledge that he chooses to give.
3. And the extent of knowledge is not the same in all the angels. There are higher and lower angels. Each receives what is fitting and necessary for its status and the service it is to render, and therefore some angels know more than others. As we shall see later, the imparting of knowledge to angels by the Creator is comparable to light that shines through a succession of panes of glass, one under the other, so that while the light pours out at once and penetrates the whole series of panes, it may be truly said that the lower panes receive their light from the upper panes. And so the lower angels (that is, the less perfectly endowed angelic natures) are illuminated or instructed by the higher angels. Nor, as we see, does this conflict with the fact that angels have their knowledge from God as soon as they come into existence.
"It is well to choose some one good devotion, and to stick to it, and never to abandon it."
St Philip Neri
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"Spiritual persons ought to be equally ready to experience sweetness and consolation in the things of God, or to suffer and keep their ground in drynesses of spirit and devotion, and for as long as God pleases, without their making any complaint about it."
St Philip Neri
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"The supreme perfection of man in this life is to be so united to God that all his soul with all its faculties and powers are so gathered into the Lord God that he becomes one spirit with him, and remembers nothing except God, is aware of and recognises nothing but God, but with all his desires unified by the joy of love, he rests contentedly in the enjoyment of his Maker alone."
St Albert the Great
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