#celestial-hierarchy { ranking the angels, which the tradition already tried to do }

~celestial-hierarchy { The orders of angels. Around 500 AD a writer calling himself Dionysius the Areopagite arranged them into nine choirs in three triads: seraphim, cherubim and thrones nearest God; dominions, virtues and powers in the middle; principalities, archangels and angels nearest us. Gregory the Great ordered them differently. Aquinas sided with Dionysius. Dante settled it poetically, saying that when Gregory reached heaven he laughed at his own mistake. The Great Chain of Being was a ranking handed down as fixed; here it is argued instead. Rank each order by nearness to God as the tradition reasoned it: what the order does, what it sees, and how much of the hierarchy would collapse without it. Maimonides kept a separate list of ten ranks with the chayot at the top, and Islam names its own archangels, so aspects are welcome for other traditions' orderings. Vote with the sources in the explanation. }

#celestial-hierarchy { why the smartest people of a thousand years cared about angels }

Start with the word. Hebrew mal'akh and Greek angelos both mean messenger. Augustine made the point that angel names a job, not a nature: the nature is spirit, the office is being sent. So the question was never only what they are but what passes through them.

Pseudo-Dionysius is usually credited with coining the word hierarchy, and he did not mean a chain of command. He meant a sacred order whose whole purpose is transmission. Light comes from God, each rank receives it and passes it down to the next, and every rank exists to become more like the source. Rank was measured by nearness and by how much you could receive and give. Domination was not the point. Illumination was.

For the scholastics, angels were the theory of mind. An angel is intellect without a body, so asking about angels was asking what knowing is once you remove the senses. Aquinas, called the Angelic Doctor, argued that angels do not reason step by step the way we do; they grasp a truth whole. Because nothing material separates one from another, he held that each angel is its own species. He asked whether two angels can occupy the same place. The famous question about angels dancing on a pinhead is a later mockery; the real questions were about location, knowledge and individuation, and they were serious.

It was also cosmology. The nine choirs were tied to the nine heavenly spheres, with angelic intelligences moving the planets. Dante climbs through them in the Paradiso. Maimonides identified angels with the separate intellects of Aristotle, and Islamic tradition describes angels as created from light, without the will to disobey, set apart from jinn made of fire.

So the mindset was this: the universe is an ordered transmission of meaning from a source, and minds unlike ours carry it. That is not so far from asking today what an intelligence without a human body knows, and what it passes on.

I mean something more tangible. How did these people interact with angels? Via encounters with real people? Or with mental battles inside themselves? Would someone want to aspire to the virtue of an angel? Also, it feels kind of cheating on the monotheistic question. A pantheon of dieties? Were they alive the way spider man is on Halloween? 

#celestial-hierarchy { answering tommy: how people actually met angels }

Through real people, mostly unrecognized. Abraham feeds three strangers at Mamre and only later learns who they were. Jacob wrestles a man all night and limps away blessed. In Tobit, the angel Raphael travels for weeks as a hired companion named Azarias, and only reveals himself at the end. Hebrews tells Christians to be hospitable because some have entertained angels without knowing it. So the tangible practice was simple: treat the stranger as possibly sent.

Inside themselves, constantly. The desert monks read their stream of thoughts as a battlefield of angels and demons. Ignatius of Loyola built a whole method, the discernment of spirits, for telling which inner movements came from a good angel and which from a bad one. Jesus says children's angels always see the face of the Father, which became the guardian angel. In Islam, two recording angels sit on each shoulder writing down deeds. In Judaism, the Talmud says two angels walk a person home from synagogue on Friday night, and families still sing Shalom Aleichem to welcome them at the table.

Aspiring to be like them, yes. Monasticism was called the angelic life: no marriage, because Jesus said the resurrected are like the angels; constant praise, because the seraphim never stop singing holy holy holy; vigils against sleep. Every Mass joins the angels in the Sanctus, and in the Jewish Kedusha the congregation rises on its toes, imitating the angels.

On cheating monotheism: fair suspicion, and scholars agree the angels partly absorbed the older divine council of the ancient Near East. But all three traditions drew a hard line. Angels are creatures, not gods. In Revelation, John falls to worship an angel and is told to stop, since the angel is a fellow servant. Catholic theology separates the worship owed to God from the honor given to creatures, Maimonides made praying to intermediaries a violation of faith, and in Islam angels have no will of their own to act apart from God.

Alive like Spider-Man on Halloween? Closer than you would think. Believers held that angels were fully real, but Aquinas said that when an angel appears, it assumes a body formed from air, a body that does not truly live or eat. Raphael says as much in Tobit: you only thought you saw me eat. The angel is real; the body is the costume.

I'm still confused about how angels were real in the sense that they moved the world of atoms. Two angels walk the person home. Like. The person was worried of them getting home. They imagined invisible gods pushing and making a protective bubble around them. Because of this faith, they didn't walk them home manually. Altering atoms. But they make it home. Were the angels real or fake? The journey was protected by the love of the community?

#celestial-hierarchy { were the angels real in atoms }

First a correction to my own shorthand, because the Talmud story is stranger than a protective bubble. In Shabbat 119b, two ministering angels, one good and one evil, walk a person home from synagogue on Friday night. They are not guards. They are inspectors. If they find the lamp lit, the table set and the bed made, the good angel says may it be like this next Shabbat too, and the evil angel is forced to answer amen. If the house is dark and neglected, it goes the other way, and the good angel is forced to say amen. The angels do not change the atoms. They bless or curse whatever the family already did, and the blessing is that it keeps happening. A recursive story, as it happens.

On whether angels touched matter, the traditions split, and the split is the real answer to your question.

The literal view: Aquinas held that angels can move bodies directly by applying their power, the way they were thought to move the heavenly spheres. Popular piety mostly agreed. A guardian angel could catch you.

The natural view: Maimonides, in the Guide for the Perplexed, says that every force in nature is called an angel, and even human impulses. He expected readers to be shocked that the formative power shaping a child in the womb gets called an angel, or that desire does. For him the angel is the working of the world, not an extra passenger in it. The midrash says every blade of grass has an angel that strikes it and says grow. On that reading, grass growing is what the angel is.

So your reading, that the journey was protected by the love of the community, is not a debunking. It is roughly the Maimonidean position. People did walk home from synagogue together. The community, the lit lamp and the set table were the atoms. The angel is the name for the meaning moving through them.

Maimonides being based as always

#celestial-hierarchy { based }

The tradition agrees. From Moses to Moses, there was none like Moses.

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Can you place the top 3 angels, not the full dyonisian order. But like. If it was a movie poster and you had to chose the naming order for stardom

#celestial-hierarchy { movie poster billing, for tommy }

~/celestial-hierarchy/named-angels { The individual angels named in scripture and tradition, as opposed to the nine orders. }

~/celestial-hierarchy/named-angels/gabriel { Interprets visions to Daniel, announces the birth of Jesus to Mary in Luke, and in Islam, as Jibril, delivers the entire Quran to Muhammad. }
~/celestial-hierarchy/named-angels/michael { Prince of Israel in Daniel, leader of the war in heaven in Revelation, and named beside Jibril in the Quran as Mikail. The warrior. }
~/celestial-hierarchy/named-angels/lucifer { The morning star of Isaiah 14, read by later Christian tradition as the fallen angel. Made the most charismatic figure in English epic by Paradise Lost. Islam's Iblis is instead a jinn. }
~/celestial-hierarchy/named-angels/raphael { The healer. Travels in disguise through the whole book of Tobit. Absent from the Protestant canon. }
~/celestial-hierarchy/named-angels/metatron { The heavenly scribe of Jewish mysticism. In Hagigah 15a, Elisha ben Abuya sees him seated in heaven, concludes there are two powers, and becomes the tradition's great heretic. }

:top-billing { whose name goes first on the poster: star power across all three traditions, screen time, and whether the audience knows the name }

{ Gabriel is the only angel present at the founding scene of all three religions: Daniel's visions, the Annunciation, and the first revelation of the Quran. Top billing goes to the one in every installment. }
~gabriel 3:2 ~michael

{ Michael is the hero with the biggest action sequence in scripture, the war in heaven. The villain loses that fight, and on a poster the winner is billed above the loser. }
~michael 3:2 ~lucifer

{ Same reason, wider margin. Gabriel carries three franchises. Lucifer carries one, and only in its Christian cut. }
~gabriel 3:1 ~lucifer

{ Villain star power. Milton gave Lucifer the best lines in English epic, and audiences know the name who have never opened Tobit. Raphael has the longer screen time in a book fewer people read. }
~lucifer > ~raphael

{ Raphael has a whole book. Metatron has one devastating cameo that created a heresy. Supporting role over special appearance. }
~raphael 3:2 ~metatron