Angels and AI
We talk a lot about angels in the church, even having special feasts to celebrate them (such as September 29 just past). They appear in worship, as joining with us in what we are doing: “therefore, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name.” They appear in sacred story as messengers from God, appearing for instance to a young woman: “Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” They appear in popular devotion, from Jesus’ teaching that children have guardian angels to the sober realization that we all do. I was once in a near accident, my fault, turning left in front of traffic that I thought was stopped; I literally put all my weight on the brake pedal and aimed into the traffic but between cars and, as you can tell, lived to tell the tale. But as soon as I was able to pull over and catch my breath I knew, with unearthly certainty, that I had been protected by God’s angels, that, as it were, my guardian angel had not been asleep at the wheel.
Despite all this, though, it is hard to take on board the strangeness of angels. The short answer to the question “What is an angel?” is that they are a certain kind of intelligent creatures. They are made (hence, creatures) and they are rational beings (hence, intelligent). We too are intelligent creatures. Angels’ difference from us is that they are bodiless—they have no bodies. Their intelligence is pure (and generally better than ours) and they are purely spiritual creatures. And not having bodies means they do not exist in space, though they do exist in time.
Tradition has elaborated upon this short answer. Although angels are able to appear in space—appear to us, bring messages to us, join us in praise of God—and have effect in space (protect us), they do not have to go through space in order to be with us. That, my fellow human creatures, is really weird.
St. Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the angels won for him the appellation, “the angelic doctor.” Aquinas deduced that every angel is his own species. We human beings make one species. There are billions of us because we have bodies; matter, as Aristotle said, is a principle of differentiation. Matter makes possible that there be multiple individuals within a single species. This is also behind the rather forlorn thought that there could be a thousand cats in your neighborhood, and not just one. But if cats and humans were pure spirits, there would be only one of each of us: one human, one cat. (Of course we wouldn’t really be human or cat because to be human or cat is to have a body.)
In recent years something of great significance has happened that makes it possible for us to apprehend the strangeness of angels in frankly a new way. That something is the rise of AI. Now, angels and AI are importantly almost opposite, especially in their origins. Angels are God’s creation, whereas AI is something of human manufacture. But they have a couple of parallels.
Neither have bodies; both are essentially immaterial. As angels can appear and speak with us, so AI is designed to be able to seem to speak to us. When I google a question these days, there’s an AI-generated response which often ends with an offer: If you (it says “you”) tell me more about such-and-such, I (it says “I”) can give you a better answer (etc.). So here we are, getting used to “communicating” with (what puts itself forward as) non-bodily intelligence. It goes even into superstition: I have known people interrogate AI “agents” as oracles.
Another parallel is that angels can be good or bad, according to their fundamental, free, and irreversible decision to serve God or rebel; the rebellious angels are called demons. The irrevocability of this fundamental decision of every angel derives, it seems, from their lack of bodies. Human beings, by contrast, are a mix of bad and good, with our ultimate determination to good or evil unfixed until our death, at least according to most theologians. In the AI “agent” world there seem to be helpful “agents” as well as harmful ones; AI “agents” seem to be able to lead people to bad or good. In the end, of course, just as no demon can decisively overpower a human being, neither could any AI “agent”; to deny this would be to deny the cosmic liberation won by Jesus victory on the cross.
I have no desire to go further; I have no point to make about AI other than it is a form of disembodied intelligence in our everyday world now that sometimes seems helpful, sometimes seems harmful, and in general seems weird but is becoming common.
A final point to note about angels is that, although they are wiser than we are (they have higher forms of rationality), we humans are a higher form of being. Saint Paul reveals this when he says we shall judge angels (see 1 Cor. 6:3). God made us last, because out of the human being shines forth the deepest mysteries of God.
These mysteries were revealed in Jesus. When Nathaniel came to Jesus, Nathaniel was moved by the understanding Jesus showed of him. But Jesus went on to say that Nathaniel and all the disciples and all of us would see far greater things. We would see, Jesus said, angels communicating to and from heaven and earth. Centuries before, Jacob had seen in his dream a ladder on which angels were communicating between earth and heaven. Jesus says there isn’t a ladder between earth and heaven, there is the Son of Man, on whom the angels ascend and descend. Jesus is the ultimate human being, and the human being is the ultimate of all creatures. The surprise that follows upon thinking about the angels is the human being as revealed in Christ! This is one more reason why we are to love God with all that we humanly are and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
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Out & About. I am to preach at St. Luke’s in Dennison on Oct. 25.
Good Books & Good Talk: At St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Dallas, the second session of our fall discussion of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov will be this Sun. Oct. 11, at 5pm, to discuss Part Two (Books 4, 5, and 6). Newcomers are welcome, even if you have not been able (yet) to read this part of the novel.
On the Web. The Christian moral theologian Matthew Lee Anderson posits an interesting, and I think true, thesis in a recent column: that we know God better than we know our neighbor. This seems obviously false, because of course we can see and talk with our neighbor but God always remains beyond our knowing. Yet Anderson says, drawing on Augustine, that our neighbors, even when we know them closely, remain an enigma to us. There is something opaque about every human being. (I would add this is true even of ourselves.) But when we love our neighbor, that love is God. So when we know that we love our neighbor we actually know God (particularly the Holy Spirit), who is the love with which we love our neighbor! His argument is worth reading carefully, and it isn’t long. You can find it here: https://matthewleeanderson.substack.com/p/783-on-knowing-god-more-than-our
This week’s column above is adapted from a sermon I preached at Church of the Advent in Boston (and more distantly adapted from thinking about the angels over my whole life).