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Dear Father Angelo,

My name is Giuseppe and I would like to ask this question: when the fight between the angels (“Michael and the good angels against the rebels headed by Lucifer”) is described in the book of Revelation, what are the modalities of this battle, given that angels, being pure spirits, don’t have bodies?

I’ve always imagined it as some sort of melee combat, but as I said before angels don’t have a body. So how did it happen?

As I wait for clarification I thank you and greet you.

Dear Giuseppe,

1.  Yes, it is very hard for us to imagine this fight.

Not only because angels don’t have a body, but also because everything happened in an instant.

They have coalesced in the same instant that they’ve committed sin.

2.  Here’s what Saint Thomas said: “Although the demons all sinned in the one instant, yet the sin of one could be the cause of the rest sinning. For the angel needs no delay of time for choice, exhortation, or consent, as man, who requires deliberation in order to choose and consent, and vocal speech in order to exhort; both of which are the work of time. (…).

Taking away, then, the time for speech and deliberation which is required in us; in the same instant in which the highest angel incited the other angels by intelligible speech, it was possible for the others to consent thereto” (Summa Theologiae, I, 63, 8).

3.  The sin of angels, according to Saint Thomas, was a sin of pride and consisted in the fact that they desired to be like God by their own efforts, i.e without the help of God (cf. Ib., 63, 2 and 3) and without the communion of life with Him.

But through this very act, they separated from God by themselves, found themselves deprived of the sanctifying grace and established in evil, namely in hell.

4.  Saint Thomas doesn’t explicitly talk about the battle of the angels, which is narrated to us in two passages of the New Testament, more precisely in Jude: “Yet the archangel Michael, when he argued with the devil in a dispute…” and in the Book of Revelation: “Then war broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels battled against the dragon” (Revelation 12,7).

5.  However, we can find some information about how that battle happened by looking at the expression Saint Thomas uses to describe how the head of the rebel angels incited his followers. 

The highest angel incited the other angels “by intelligible speech“.

Well, intelligible (or intellectual) speeches are a form of communication that can be heard directly by the intellect without any mediation from internal or external senses.

Saint Therese of Avila, trained from her experience, explain it in these terms: “It is the same with another way in which God teaches the soul, and addresses it without using words, as I have said. This is so celestial a language that it is difficult to explain it to mortals, however much we may desire to do so, unless the Lord teaches it to us by experience. The Lord introduces into the inmost part of the soul what He wishes that soul to understand, and presents it, not by means of images or forms of words, but after the manner of the intellectual vision…

Now, returning to this method of understanding, the position seems to me to be that the Lord’s will is for the soul to have at any rate some idea of what is happening in Heaven, and, just as souls in Heaven understand one another without speaking (which I never knew for certain till the Lord in His goodness willed me to see it and revealed it to me in a rapture), even so it is here” (Autobiography, chapter 27, 6).

6. This is the language of heaven, as Saint Therese said, and it is also the language of angels.

Therefore we can say that as the head of the rebel angels incited others to act like him, in the same way Saint Michael the Archangel, Prince of the angelic hosts, fought this rebellion with an opposite intelligible speech and impeding Lucifer from contaminating other angels.

“The dragon and its angels fought back, but they did not prevail and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it” (Revelation 12, 7-9).

There was no longer any place for him in heaven.

All this happened in an instant.

I thank you for this question which is so original that most of the time biblical commentaries and theology texts don’t say anything about the modalities of this fight.

I bless you and I assure you of remembrance to the Lord.

Father Angelo