The Fall of the Angels and the Unnaturalness of Death
He will swallow up death for ever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken (Isa 25:8).
God is the one who will bring death to nothing. In the verse before this one, death is called “the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations” (Isa 25:7). Death is something which weighs us down and obscures our vision. But this state of affairs is temporary. That is the force of God’s promise to swallow it up forever. The Vulgate says death will be cast down—praecipitabit (Isa 25:8). Death’s dominion must come to an end. The claim that death needs destroying is implicit in Isaiah. It pairs well with Paul’s claim in the Letter to the Romans that “death no longer has dominion” over Jesus (Rom 6:9). That death did—or seemed to—have dominion over Jesus is assumed by Paul. That this is a future state, something achieved in Christ but not yet in us, can be seen in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he says, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor 15:26). The prophecy of Isaiah is accomplished and not yet fully realized in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.
In addition to being temporary, death is also temporal. Its dominion extends only as far as the distention, the painful stretching out, of fallen spacetime. This is not the only kind of spacetime there is. In addition to it, there is also the spacetime of heaven. To offer a formal definition, I mean by “heaven” wherever the ascended flesh of Jesus Christ and the assumed flesh of the Blessed Virgin are. Having bodies, they occupy space. In occupying space, they also occupy time. Space and time are intimate with one another in just this way. To be in one is to be in the other conjointly. And so it is fitting to say that death’s dominion over spacetime obtains where the spacetime of heaven does not. The spacetime over which death wields power is fallen. Death’s dominion in fallen spacetime is entirely negative in itself. Its rule is one of lack. This lack manifests itself in distention. What fallen spacetime lacks is the wholeness, the all-at-onceness, of heaven, a wholeness that makes it the image of God’s eternity.
Nothing in fallen spacetime, including spacetime itself, escapes the effects of the angelic fall. The distortion set in motion by angelic rebellion ramifies outward such that no creatures but heavenly ones escape its grip. The holy angels are not and have not ever been distended in spacetime. Holy angels occupy spacetime at its center—the still eye around which the hurricane rages. Distinguished from their diabolical counterparts by their recognition and embrace of God incarnate, the holy angels cleave to Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, who puts an end to death’s dominion, “bore our death and slew it by the abundance of his life.” He did so by being the Word made flesh—the eternal made timely. God enters fallen spacetime as a creature, the creature. He is the ratio of the cosmos because he is both God and man. Not only are space and time “created through him and for him” (Col 1:16), they are also redeemed by him who reconciles all things to himself, “whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col 1:20). Not only does the Son of God make time and space, he makes them right as well.
The holy angels are gathered to Jesus Christ and minister to him during his time on earth. The events of Christ’s earthly life are marked by the presence of the angels. Angels are present at the annunciation, the nativity, the temptation in the desert, the agony in the garden, the resurrection, and the ascension. Unfallen angels are active in fallen spacetime, and yet we should not think they suffer the effects of temporal distention. Even while acting in the fallen order, they remain fixed in heaven. Evidence for this view comes from the Gospel of Matthew, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones; for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt 18:10). The angels given the task of guardianship accomplish it without ceasing to also gaze upon the face of God.
In De Genesi ad litteram, Augustine takes the “Let there be light” of Genesis 1:3 to be an account of the creation of angels. He calls the angels the created form of God’s uncreated light. I want to extend this language with an analogy to help account for angelic action inside and outside of fallen spacetime. Compare the intellectual light of the angels in heavenly spacetime to a beam of white light in the visible spectrum. Crisp and simple, it illuminates what it touches. In heaven, what it illuminates will include other angels, the souls of the saints, and the bodies and souls of Jesus Christ and Mary. But a beam of visible white light, while simple in appearance, is also a complex of electromagnetic radiation, oscillating at different frequencies along the visible spectrum. When that beam of white light passes through a prism, it refracts. The various frequencies of visible light, of which the beam of white light is composed, bend at different angles. They exit the prism along distinct trajectories, and if you set up a screen on the far side of the prism to catch the light it lands as a rainbow.
Angels in heaven are like beams of unrefracted white light. Entering fallen spacetime is like passing through a prism. The single beam of created intellectual light is refracted. The unitary action of the angel in heaven, the unceasing praise and worship of God in the “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!” (Rev 4:8), reveals its component frequencies. The “colors” of the angelic light spectrum land at different locations in fallen spacetime. The angel Gabriel’s actions when he helps Daniel to interpret his visions (Dan 8-9) and when he announces the birth of Jesus Christ to Mary (Luke 1:26-38) are discrete events within fallen spacetime. They are also ingredient in the composite “white light” that is the angel’s unending hymn of praise before the face of God. As Gabriel says to Zechariah, when Zechariah questions him about the birth of his son, John the Baptist, “I am Gabriel, who stand in the presence of God; and I was sent to speak to you and bring you this good news” (Luke 1:19). He is standing in the presence of God, and he is speaking to Zechariah. The angel touches down in the devasted temporal order without being dragged into it. In so doing, the angel also snatches those moments up into the heavenly liturgical act.
This idea comports well with the Church’s liturgical practice. Each time the Mass is celebrated, the Church invokes the angels, uniting the prayer of the earthly liturgy to that of the heavenly one. This happens first in the preface to the eucharistic prayer. So, for example, in Preface I for Sundays in Ordinary Time, the priest says, “And so, with Angels and Archangels, with Thrones and Dominions, and with all the host and Powers of heaven, we sing the hymn of your glory, as without end we acclaim.” This is followed by the people’s singing of the “Holy, Holy, Holy” in unison with the angels in heaven. But while you might think the liturgical action of the Church simply points upward, straining to sing with the angels on high, it is also true that the angels themselves play an active role in the eucharistic sacrifice. In the Roman Canon, Eucharistic Prayer I, the priest asks God for the aid of an angel. He says, “In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God: command that these gifts be borne by the hands of your holy Angel to your altar on high in the sight of your divine majesty, so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son, may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.” The angels are active in offering the sacrifice of the Mass. At God’s command, the angels allow the sacrifice offered on the altar on earth to be offered at the heavenly altar. It is this angelic action that allows the worshipping Church to receive “every grace and heavenly blessing.”
Angels touch down with their various colors, refracted out of that one intellectual light in heaven, during each instance of the Mass. Angelic action dapples fallen spacetime with light from heaven. The refracted angelic light catches those moments of liturgical sacrifice and draws them into the heavenly worship of unfallen spacetime. This view offers a speculative account of what the dominical word of Matthew 18:10 might mean. On this model, any angelic action in the fallen world belongs to the singular act of that angel’s continual worship of God in heaven. An angel can act in fallen spacetime without becoming mired in it. This view also gets us some of the way toward understanding what the fall means for angelic creatures who cease to gaze upon the face of God.
In chapter three of Unnatural Death, I suggest reading Revelation 12 as a two-level drama. The events in Revelation 12:1-12 are best understood as cosmic in scope. They are a narrative of the battle demons have waged against God seen under the aspect of the conditio—the order of eternity. Michael and his angels throw down the dragon and his angels. They conquer Satan not by their own power, nor by some abstract might of God, but “by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony” (Rev 12:11). The devil has been defeated, the victory is won, and the victory is Christ’s and the martyrs’ who bore witness to the Lamb, “even unto death” (Rev 12:11). The angelic war is made effective, the devil is “thrown down to earth” (Rev 12:9), by Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary. To consider this under the aspect of the administratio, we must ask what it means to say that the fallen angels are cast down from heaven to earth. An answer has already suggested itself in my remarks on the holy angels. The most immediate effect upon the fallen angels who are cast down from heaven is that they no longer behold God’s countenance. Unlike the holy angels, whose perpetual adoration of the face of God in heaven allows them to act in fallen spacetime without being distended in it, the demons’ punishment includes being turned out of their heavenly participation in God’s eternity and painfully stretched out in the order of time.
The fall of the angels from heaven is not only into the successiveness of fallen spacetime, it is also the cause of its distention. Time is one of God’s creatures. “For you have made time itself,” Augustine says to God in Book XI of his Confessiones. It is one of God’s good creatures. The fall of the devil and his angels corrupts time’s goodness. As Paul Griffiths has put it, the time that belongs to the devastation, “metronomic time,” is nothing other than time damaged. It is “an artifact of the fall.” The ticking of metronomic time “is what time is like when it has been devastated. The principal mark of that devastation for us—the sign that shows us most clearly that metronomic time is devastated—is that time is a metronomic countdown to death.” This identification of the ticking of time and the reign of death is an Augustinian claim. In Book XIII of De civitate Dei, where Augustine deals most explicitly with the fact of death, he says something coordinate with Griffiths’ remark on death’s countdown. “And daily,” Augustine says, “what remains becomes less and less, so the whole time of this life is nothing other than a march toward death in which no one is permitted either to stand still for a little while or to go a bit slower.” The fall of the angels is an atemporal event that damages all creation apart from the holy angels, including the fabric of spacetime. The angels being thrust out of heaven is coincident with the painful stretching out of the fallen temporal order.
The light of the demons, the created form of uncreated light, is not extinguished. It is distended in the order of fallen spacetime. To stick with the analogy of light, we might say demonic light is diffracted rather than refracted. Passing out of heaven and into the medium of fallen spacetime, the demons’ light is occluded, though not entirely. Were their light to be entirely obscured, they would cease to be. Instead, the light of the fallen angels is forced to pass through tiny openings in a barrier. Because light behaves like a wave, passing through these narrow openings means their angelic light no longer illuminates clearly. The light waves exiting the far side of the barrier end up fragmented. When a beam of light passes through two or more slits in a barrier, diffraction occurs. It happens because the ripples of light, like intersecting ripples on the surface of a pond, bump into one another and cause interference. When the peak of one light wave intersects the trough of another of the same intensity they cancel one another out. The light caught by a surface on the far side of the barrier will not appear as the differentiated spectrum colors as in refraction through a prism. What you find instead are bits of light interspersed with darkness.
The bits of darkness caused by diffraction are not caused by the slits in the barrier they pass through. Two slits in the barrier do not issue in two points of light on the far surface. The far surface receives many points of light and darkness in a wave interference pattern. The absences are caused by the light itself, interfering with its own activity. The light shines, the waves roll, and when peak and trough meet, light cancels light. This is a fitting analogy for the fallen angels. Passing out of the participated eternity of heaven and into fallen spacetime, they are the cause of their own darkness. Their powerful and beautiful light is marred when it comes into conflict with itself. Their light ceases to be what it is created to be. The light of the fallen angels spreads out in fallen timespace—the ripples extend to its edges—but it is a broken, ineffectual light. The light of the fallen angels does not help us to see clearly. The light interspersed with darkness illuminates just enough to deceive, “for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light,” says Paul (2 Cor 11:14).
The punishment of the devil and his angels is self-imposed and self-inflicted. The essential piece of this argument is that this is an event occurring ex quo creatus est—since the devil was created. Time begins ticking in its metronomic, death-dealing fashion from the moment of the fall, which happens outside of the clock-ticked temporal order. With this claim, I am arguing against a time of idyllic perfection in the created order. God creates all things from nothing and makes them good, but that is a claim made under the aspect of eternity. In the temporal order, where things have a beginning and an end, creation is stretched out and unfolds in a cosmos that is good and fallen at all times. The great disjunction that causes spacetime to fall happens outside fallen spacetime and so permeates it. The always already fallen world means the good things God creates will have certain possibilities and eventualities foreclosed to them. Entropy and decay are woven into and corrupt the fabric of the cosmos from the beginning of fallen time.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is excerpted from Unnatural Death: Creation, Sin, and the Angelic Fall (Fortress Press, 2025). All rights reserved.
