Why The Demons Fell
Adapted by the author for Sed Contra from the latest version of a lecture developed for chapters of the Thomistic Institute.
Angels are worthy objects of contemplation, because they reveal both God’s intelligence and something of his plan of salvation at work in our midst. By comparison to the angels, the demons don’t afford us the same kind of contemplative insights, because their natures have been darkened. Whereas you can gaze upon the angels and never be satisfied with their luminosity, you don’t want to be sucked in to the demons’ obscurity. Certainly, we refer to the demons (as revealed by our faith), but then we use them to pivot to other anthropological insights and by extension, to insights about God himself.
It is useful to think of the fall of the angels against the backdrop of the fall of man. We’re all intimately acquainted with original sin and its effects, because we experience those effects in every moment of every day. We are conscious of the fact that things could have been otherwise, or things could not have been as we currently experience them. Because of that, we harbor a real sense of tragedy or loss.
But, how could the angels have fallen? There are various options for sin in human beings, because there are various ways in which disorder can be introduced into our nature. Think about how we’re constituted—we are soul and body. We have a mind. We have a heart. We have emotions, or to use St. Thomas’s language: we have an intellect, a will, and passions. And whenever you have a variety of moving parts, there needs to be some kind of calibration so that each is properly attuned to the goods for which it’s intended in the appropriate way.
To demonstrate, just think about your experience of temptation. Imagine: your friend invites you to Chipotle, and it would be better for you to have the veggie option, because meat is too heavy, and you will have trouble focusing later. You resolve to order the veggie option or maybe sofritas. But when you arrive, they have a seasonal chorizo offering. That changes everything. You went in there with an eye to the good of your afternoon’s work, which contributes to your flourishing in a very concrete way. And then there’s this alternate good addressed to your lower appetite, and you realize there’s a conflict. And so, we have difficulty affirming the different goods in the way that they ought to be affirmed. We experience the upsurge of passion. Our lower appetite sometimes asserts itself in a way that complicates our higher appetite for things like the knowledge of God or life together in society.
Ignorance and Weakness as Occasions of Sin
This conflict doesn’t exist for angels, because they don’t have bodies or a lower appetite like we do. But there are far more places from which sin can arise in our human life. Another such place is ignorance. We, as human beings, are responsible for knowing certain things—things that pertain to us as Christians or that pertain to us as members of a community. In the Thomistic tradition, however, we make a helpful distinction between nescience and ignorance.
Nescience concerns those things you don’t know but aren’t responsible for knowing. It’s not the type of thing that needs to be or even should be known. For example, how many stones are there at the bottom of the Neshaminy Creek? We don’t know, and if we tried to learn, it would probably involve a lot of useless effort. Ignorance, on the other hand, concerns those things that we should know and don’t know. For example, you should know your mother’s birthday so that you can try to communicate with her on that day, even give her a gift. If you fail to learn it or fail to remember it, that’s a problem. That, then, is the distinction between nescience and ignorance. With this, we can turn back to the sources of sin.
Sometimes we fall into sin on account of ignorance. For instance, imagine your friend skips a meeting with you, offering no explanation. His excuse when you speak with him later is: “I just forgot.” You would be rightfully offended by this poor excuse, because as a friend, you ought to be closer to them than to your other responsibilities. Things can slip our minds because of what St. Thomas calls the “indisposition of matter.” Basically, we’re tired or hungry or distracted, and we don’t pay attention to the things we ought. But, as we saw with the passions, angels can’t fall into ignorance on account of the indisposition of matter, because again, they have no matter. Thus, nothing slips their mind. They’re furnished with their concepts at creation and are fully equipped for their identity and mission as angels.
Malice as the Source of Sin
So, then, what sources remain? We’ve ruled out weakness and ignorance. In the Augustinian tradition, which St. Thomas inherits, there’s one final option: malice. Malice, which is sin properly so called, is a twistedness of heart. You’re not drawn off course by some sense pleasure. It’s not that it slipped your mind. In fact, you just wanted to do it. You chose a lower good (and yourself) to the exclusion of a higher good (and God).
“When we think about the excellence of another as a threat to our own good or a deprivation of goodness, those are the stirrings of envy. It seems to be in the air we breathe in the twenty-first century—we have been trained to compete from a young age, but we begin to think of all goods as scarce, all excellences limited. ”
This is the only option available to the demons, and St. Thomas directs his attention here. Because angels don’t have bodies, they don’t have the same experience of reality. The types of sin which can be introduced into a spiritual creature, in whom we only see the exercise of intellect and will, have to be spiritual sins—the gravest sins in St. Thomas’s estimation. The two options that he entertains are the sins of pride and envy.
Envy is sorrow at the good of another, which is an experience with which many of us are familiar. When we think about the excellence of another as a threat to our own good or a deprivation of goodness (as if there were a limited amount of goodness available in the world), those are the stirrings of envy. It seems to be in the air we breathe in the twenty-first century—an especially envious time. We have been trained to compete from a young age, but we begin to think of all goods as scarce, all excellences limited.
The only other option available to the demons is pride. Pride is an inordinate attachment to one’s own excellence, involving a misevaluation of one’s own greatness. Pride blinds you to reality. It makes you think yourself better than you are. St. Thomas treats pride as a sin opposed to the virtue of humility, which is a recognition of the ultimate source of your excellence: God. It’s not yours. You can’t arrogate it to yourself as if it were yours because we hold it in earthen vessels, as a gift. “Every good and perfect gift comes down to us from the Father of lights,” says the Letter of James. Saint Paul says in 1 Cor 4: “What do you have that you have not received? If therefore you have received it, why do you boast as if it were your own?” Or from 1 John 4: “We love because God first loved us.” Humility communicates to us the depth of God’s particular love for us, whereas pride imagines that we have it from ourselves. We pride ourselves on the things that we have done, having grown blind to their source and end.
The only two options for the angels that fell are envy and pride. There are voices in the tradition which choose envy as an explanation. They say that the angels envied after having previewed God’s choice in the Incarnation to take human nature rather than angelic nature. It was as if they became sad at the excellence accorded to human beings and chose against this dispensation of salvation and so against God himself. St. Thomas acknowledges that as a possibility. Ultimately, he chooses pride as a better explanation.
Now how does an angel commit a sin of pride? St. Thomas acknowledges two basic moments in the life of an angel. There’s the moment in which it’s created, and the moment in which it chooses. And then for the rest of its life, the angel harvests the fruit of that one choice sown for all eternity.
The angels knew at the moment of their creation that they were from God and for God. In the second moment of their creation, they had a choice to be from God and for God in the way that God willed. As St. Thomas describes it, their sin amounted to either one of two possibilities: choosing themselves as their own end, or taking God as their end but on their own terms. The only way in which to have God is by his grace, which he gives freely on his own terms. The litany of humility asks “that others become holier than I, provided that I become as holy as I should.” There’s a sense of God’s sovereignty. The demons reject that sovereignty, and in rejecting God’s terms, they reject God’s gift, which is to reject God.
Grace in Our Lives
My last point will be to discuss this grace to challenge some of our intuitions about what it means to strive for holiness, specifically in dialogue with the demons’ choice against God. They knew everything they needed to know, illumined by an abundant light, and they chose against, because they would not have God on God’s terms. Because knowing that they were from God and for God, they could not abide to be from God and for God in the way that God willed.
“What we learn from the angels is that the only life that you have to live is yours. And the only way to live your life is from God and for God in the way that God wills. Because God loves you with a particular love.”
A lot of us harbor a fear that God’s plans for us are not enough. That God hasn’t made me pretty enough, or smart enough, or quick enough, or lucky enough. That can be a real fear. And we can spend our time lamenting past graces that we fail to make good on or lusting after future graces which may never be conferred.
But, in doing so, we miss out on our own lives, because we wish that our lives were otherwise. What we learn from the angels is that the only life that you have to live is yours. And the only way to live your life is from God and for God in the way that God wills. Because God loves you with a particular love. In effect, he loves you with a non-comparative love. God loves all of us by the self-same act of love. But within that, we recognize that God gives some people more gifts than others, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, for instance. None of us have been afforded the grace of divine maternity. But it’s not like we resent her for that. Strangely, mystically, we profit from that. For not only is she the mother of God, but she is also the mother of the Church. She is our mother.
As an elaboration of his love for us, when given the choice between acting immediately or mediately, God prefers to act mediately. He does this precisely as testimony of his power. He implicates a secondary cause in order to communicate to you that you are loved, so you can know he loves you by (among other things) the testimony of Scripture, the witness of the saints, and the love of his mother—a decidedly maternal love. It’s not that God lacks a maternal love for you that the Blessed Virgin Mary somehow adds. Rather, he prepossesses this love virtually and super-eminently. What is more, he communicates it concretely through her so that we can have her and Him in her.
When it comes to our reception of grace, we must choose to be from God and for God in the way that God wills, because we recognize that God loves us in a particular way, a way addressed to us each individually. It’s only that grace which will transform our lives. It’s not the grace that he’s giving to somebody else, or the grace that he could have given to me but didn’t. It’s the grace that he is giving to me.
We can only respond to the graces that God actually gives. How, then, do we receive this grace? Freely. St. Thomas says there are three ways in which the word “grace” works in our language. It signifies freedom, the gift itself, and the thanks that we render. As the gift itself, we recognize it as given freely and meant to be acknowledged. It involves us in a cycle of gratitude, and in so doing, it spares us these spiritual sins which get us confounded in a push and pull of competition for self-aggrandizement. From God and for God in the way that God wills with a receiving and a rendering back of a grace freely given and freely acknowledged.
You were made a man or a woman. You were born to these parents in this country at this time. But that’s not something that we can really choose, not something over which we have any control. There’s an element of “givenness” in our creation. The demons experienced that. They were made as intelligences, with an intellect and will. They had the option to be from God and for God in the way that God willed. And they couldn’t abide the terms of their creation and God’s gift.
“Penitence does not signify Christian regret, looking back on the past and wishing it undone. It means looking back on the past and trying to find where Christ is hidden, in order to cultivate a better sense for where he is at present.”
How are we different from the demons? We, too, are created with the capacity to assent to God’s plan in our lives. But whereas the demons rejected God’s will in one movement, we live our lives through many movements. You might look back on your past and think of the many ways in which you have already failed, by not choosing God in the way that God willed. But those failings are also the backdrop against which God tells the story of present redemption. The only moment in which grace is active is now.
Certainly, we can look back in the past and try to find ways by which to acknowledge God as present, and we should. That’s what we mean by penitence. Penitence does not signify Christian regret, looking back on the past and wishing it undone. It means looking back on the past and trying to find where Christ is hidden, to cultivate a better sense for where he is at present.
God loves us in different ways. The temptation is to go from “different” to “better and worse,” or to “more and less.” You might observe someone and think, “This person is so much better than I am; God must love him more.” But our intelligence is not sufficient to take account of all the pertinent factors of God’s love. Your responsibility is to repent and respond to the grace that God is giving now, not to take your own spiritual temperature.
In saying that God loves us differently, our lives become an exciting scavenger hunt in which we try to determine the ways in which God is loving us uniquely. We can rely upon him to reveal that to us. God will make you as holy as he makes you. That doesn’t mean that you should despair, fearful that your contributions mean nothing. God gives you the grace to contribute. The straining inspired by the anxiety that God’s plans aren’t sufficient does nothing. You can rebuke the spirit of anxiety because it’s not of God. Again, God will make you as holy as he makes you.
So, though we might share the sin of the demons, we differ from them in a key way: They make one movement, while we make many. We can profit from further knowledge, from further grace, from further love and do so according to God’s plans with the certainty and confidence that God, who has begun a good work in us, will see it to completion. There’s something terrible and irrevocable about the choice of the demons, and it’s chastening to us. Even with acute intelligence, they could still choose against. And we realize in that most perfectly distilled act of malice that a potential infidelity at work in our own lives could take us off course, which is why we don’t look so much to that choice, but we look to God. We look to God who supplies the grace to be patient with his plans and to persevere therein.
Rev. Gregory Pine, O.P., is an Instructor of Dogmatic and Moral Theology at the Dominican House of Studies and an Assistant Director of the Thomistic Institute. He has published articles in Angelicum, Nova et Vetera (English Edition), and The Thomist. He is the co-author of Credo: An RCIA Program and Marian Consecration with Aquinas (TAN Books) as well as the author of Prudence: Choose Confidently, Live Boldly (Our Sunday Visitor). His writing also appears in Ascension’s Catholic Classics series, in Aleteia, and in Magnificat.