Pramable: I am writing the following becaue I enjoy reading it. Others may not. But if you can get through it then I think a great lesson is to be learned! This discussion is based on A Lesson in Spiritual Theology from Aquinas' S Summa Theologiae.
Aquinas asks if God created the angels in beatitude; in other words, were the angels in the state of eschatological bliss that comes from gazing on God's essence from the first moment of their creation? Aquinas then answers (like you would if you were Aquinas) that there are two kinds of beatitude. First there is a beatitude that is a rational nature's perfect operation; that is it's perfect knowing and loving of created truths and goods; this is what we might call natural happiness. For rational natures this means the contemplation of God as creator. Yet this beatitude is incomplete--it sdoes not have a vison of God in His essence of trinity.
Besides this happiness Aquinas avers there is still another --whereby we will see God as He is. This bliss is beyond the nature of every created intellect. This kind of engaemnet occurs only without supernatural grace, and this is a happiness for an angel that consists simply in being fully an angel.
But there is another happiness, which an angel cannot experience fully by flourishing as an angel from the resources of his natural created powers; this is a happiness that come's from seeing God's essence. For angels to see this they need a gift beyond the first gift of a created nature--a second gift of deification in which the angelic mind and will turn towards God. as their perfect truth and good. It seems strange to speak of angels being deiform in glory, but this is what Aquinas is saying.
The angel needs to be able to know and love God in norder to be fully in bliss, and yet his powers of knowing and willing are important in taking him there. We might say that God has to open up the capacities of mind and will beyond their created abilities. God has to extend their reach.The only supernatural agent is God, of course, since the angels even though not corporeal, are as natural and created and as in need of theological virtues as humans. So God takes abode in the soul of the angel, which means God's knowing and loving, his very self, takes into its current of life the angelic knowingand loving, so that the angel can know and love God like God knows and loves Himself.
So this stae of sanctifying grace is the mid-point between the "purely natural" created life of the angel--which exists for Aquinas in theory alone3--and the vision of glory that is the angel's eschatological destiny.
Aquinas thinks the pride which caused satan to fall. He assumes , without argument, that the devil wanted to be like God. And in this wanting to be like God, without destroying either himself or God, the devil made his fatal error.
He decide he would reach his deificatrion in his own time and by his own efforts. He did not want to wait for the work or the timing of God. To try ro seize glory by the creature's own power , to try to give oneself the gift only God can give, is sinful and indeed the sin of pride; it e;limintes the distinction of creator and creature, of the giver of gifts and the receivers.
This then gives us the pedagogy of patience in the Spiritual life. The pilgrimage that begins with the Christian turning to God by God's initial grace, continues in meriting of beatitude through the presence of God working within her by sanctifying grace, and consummates in the final glory of beatitude which she enjoys when she sees the Word in His essence. What is distinctive about this journey is that it is a journey through time . The Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement has written "Time is the HGod-give opportunity to learn to love". Aaquinas would agree!
This is because in speculating on why the devil fell seems to make the astonishing claim that the devil fell because he lacked patience! The devil rejected the necessity of taking time in the spiritual journey into God. Sanctifying grace is a seed in the soul which brings one to Glory in God's time.
Each step of the journey is also of God's time--so wanting our destinies, our jobs, our mates, our families outside of God's timing can be detrimental to the success of our journet--or at least an impediment to it -leading to pain and suffering and grief. The devil lost what would have been his had he patience to wait instead of running after it in his own timing!
Pray for the patience and the wisdom to operate in God's timeline in all your doings . Amen!
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