Over the weekend, one of my friends posted a quote that got me thinking. Now, this wasn’t a new quote for me. In fact, the book that the quote comes from was one of the formative tomes of my late teens and early twenties. But this time, something in it struck me, and I started to make connections that I hadn’t consciously made before.

The quote my friend posted goes like this:

The Englishness of English is audible only to those who know some other language as well. In the same way and for the same reason, only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly, the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of Nature’s current.[1]

The author is C. S. Lewis, and despite knowing his works extremely well, both extensively and intensively, my brain went in a totally new direction this time around.

It’s true that Lewis’ primary point is that “Supernature” is about God. The divine is the primary referent of the term, whether we mean “the supernatural” to be grace or, as in this book on miracles, any constitutive order above, beyond, or outside the material realm. 

But my errant mind went off in another direction this weekend—the Angels. Lewis’ comments find application in the relationship of the Angels to the physical world and, by extension, in our care for the environment, biodiversity, and the climate.

A Thomistic primer on Angels and the visible created order

Like many of my principal influences—e.g., John of the Cross, Jacques and Raïssa Maritain, Pope Francis—I’m a Thomist at heart. But I don’t tend to argue about and for it. I tend to, as I say, take Thomistic metaphysics for granted. I have better things to do than to be an archaeologist or historian. Not that there’s anything wrong with determining what the Angelic Doctor himself thought. But reality calls, too. And there are problems of the day that we need to address—like John of the Cross, the Maritains, and Pope Francis. And I find that if I take the basic, foundational principles of Thomas for granted, then unleash them on the world that matters today, that gets me a lot farther—again, like Juan, Jacques, Raïssa, and the Holy Father.

So, let me just take Thomistic thought on the Angels for granted. You might have your own premises about the Angels. Maybe you’re a Scotist or a Teilhardian. Perhaps you’re an admirer of Bonaventure or Bonhoeffer. I’m convinced of something else, which for my part I think is really helpful nowadays. It goes like this:

Each human being has a specific guardian angel because each one is a person whose soul is spiritual and enjoys free will. There is no guardian angel for each individual of the animal species. But there is an Angel for the species: an Angel for the swallows, one for the bees, another for the elephants. And each of these angels is commissioned to equip one species or another only at that moment when it appears on earth and at which he confers on it the instincts that the species will keep as long as it endures.[2]

This is the exposition of Jacques Maritain in an essay “Concerning Animal Instinct.” That explains the specific interest in difficult-if-not-impossible-to-explain instinctual activities and origins. But his comments aren’t restricted to animal instinct alone. Nor do we have to follow him in his application of the general principle to the particular notion of animal instinct. It’s fine if we’re averse to what he’s saying about that topic (though the aversion might also arise from an incomplete context and understanding). What matters here is the main idea.

And that main idea is this: every animal species has an Angel. This is distinct from the notion that every human individual has a Guardian Angel. But it’s related. These are Angels that look after a species. Since the name “Guardian Angel” is already taken, we might call them the “Caretaker Angels” of these species. As far as I know, the notion doesn’t have a fixed name. So let’s stick with that for now. Each animal species has its own Caretaker Angel.[3]

Actually, it’s more than that. Maritain’s essay is about animal instinct, so he speaks only about animals. In reality, the broader principle here is that every natural species has an Angel. In other words, there’s a Caretaker Angel for white birch and another for sweetgrass, just as there is one for chipmunks and another for grizzlies. And analogically, just as there is one Guardian Angel for you and another for me.

We have, then, an idea of the identity of the Caretaker Angels. But since I’ve had the audacity to give them a collective name, I might as well go the whole nine yards and propose their unofficial liturgical memorial, too. That could shine some more light their ecclesial character. If I had my way, the feast day for the Caretaker Angels would be fixed on October 3^rd—within the Season of Creation and surrounded by the Guardian Angels, on one side, and Francis of Assisi, on the other. That’s exactly who these guys are. That’s how we should remember them. Maybe one day we will.

Now, as much as the name and liturgical recognition of these Angels have been historically lacking, arguments for their existence have not. The fascinating cosmos of the Caretaker Angels is an inherently Thomistic one. Relevant passages from the Dominican theologian pop up in different works. Without giving an entire angelology, I’ll just look at the greater Summa. In it, Thomas’ main argument runs like this:

It is generally found both in human affairs and in natural things that every particular power is governed and ruled by the universal power… Therefore, as the inferior angels who have the less universal forms, are ruled by the superior; so are all corporeal things ruled by the angels. (ST I.110.1)

So, there are some Angels who look after different material beings. It’s all very proper. About the orderliness of it, Thomas is quite insistent. He’s also adamant that Angels aren’t reduced to, stuck to, or derivative of the material beings they look after. The reason for different Angelic extents of concern, care, and practice

is not that an angel is more fitted by his nature to preside over animals than over plants; because each angel, even the least, has a higher and more universal power than any kind of corporeal things: the reason is to be sought in the order of Divine wisdom, Who places different rulers over different things. (ST I.110.1.3)

If you like, Thomas gives a lot of detail on how Angels apply their knowledge, love, and power in the material realm.

Thomas will tell you, for instance, that “an angel’s power is not limited to any body [i.e., any material object]; hence it can move [i e., affect, change] locally bodies not joined to it” (ST I.110.3.3). There’s no barrier on the side of Angelic power. According to the theologian of Aquino, the Caretaker Angel of Chipmunks can quite happily have a presence of knowledge, love, and power everywhere there is a chipmunk—not present everywhere in the whole created order like God is (ST I.8.4), but neither as localized and restricted as a human body is; the Angel operates somewhere in between, within a range of concerns.

If Thomas has now hooked you, then he’ll do one better and point out that we’re foolish to think that Angels can’t number among the movers and shakers of whatever we see: “Spiritual powers are able to effect whatever happens in this visible world, by employing corporeal seeds by local movement” (ST I.110.4.3). This is not done, however, in violation of the laws of Nature. It’s done by respecting the constituent, active natures of material beings. That’s the Thomistic picture. Every last bit of what physical beings are is free to be its own cause and to cause others’ changes. Yet every last bit is also acted upon, guided at least from time to time in its bouts of randomness perhaps, certainly cared for with a divine oversight that the Caretaker Angel participates in. The only restriction is that Angels don’t work miracles, because by definition a miracle is something outside the created, not just the material, order (ST I.110.4.4).

Well, I don’t blame you if you can now feel a headache coming on.

This teaching is, to me, a lot of truth, a lot of density, and a lot of mediaeval baggage all at once. Thomas has some striking ideas that I can’t shake. But he’s also framed them in a way that seems to hinder, not help. Do I really care about the hierarchization of intellectual substances? Does it really matter that “lower” Angels look after material things, while “higher” ones look after other Angels? How invested am I in that language, really?

What I do believe in, however, is wisdom and the value of persons.

God’s wisdom is orderly, and it brings disparate things together. It relates and unites—that I believe.

Each Angel is a person—that I believe. Of course, an Angel is not a person in exactly the same sense that God is Three Persons, nor in the sense that a human being is a person. But each Angel is a person nonetheless. So, in this relation between and union of heaven and earth, every natural species is wisely looked after by a person. Well, the Trinity, of course. But I mean another person, an Angelic person, that species’ Angelic Caretaker—this, too, I believe.

We may rightly be uncomfortable with the Middle Ages’ genius for devising hierarchies, but that’s not the main point here. The real focus is the sapiential and personal penetration of the natural world by the Church of Heaven—specifically, its Angelic members. God in his wisdom has arranged, not just a Guardian Angel for each human person, but also a Caretaker Angel for each natural species. Behind every encounter with Nature is an encounter with the Church of Heaven. One species, an Angelic Caretaker. An ecosystem, a gathering of Angels in a way that we can hardly understand but still can touch.

Errors on both sides

I think that the two primary errors to avoid here are secularization and New Age wishy-washy thinking. Both are anathema to the Thomistic understanding of Angels (even removed from its mediaeval framing).

Secularization eliminates the Angels from the picture altogether. Natural things are just natural. Of course, the Christian says, God does miracles. At least, Christ was resurrected. And probably other miracles happen, too. But the secular spirit says that the Angels aren’t present. They don’t show up at Mass, and God forbid they be continually present by their care, concern, knowledge, love, and power in physical things! No, that’s out of the question. Material beings are material, and we draw a line around them (exception made for God’s creative power, for miracles, and for grace, because we Christians have to believe in those). A constant interaction with the spiritual realm, a physical world continually imbued with the Angelic—out of the question, absurd, false.

The spirit of the New Age, meanwhile, wants to do just the opposite. Everything has an angel. But these angels aren’t the Angels of Christian tradition. They are loose cannons. They’re not—at least they don’t seem to be—sapientially ordered among themselves. Nor do these New Age angels appear to be entirely immaterial beings, like Thomas Aquinas’ Angels are. They seem too tied to physical things, too limited. Whereas a modern secularizing spirit hermetically seals the physical world from the spiritual (exception made for creation, miracles, and the experience of grace in a human soul, of course), the postmodern New Age spirit bounds what is in itself spiritual, i.e., the Angels, to the physical.

In short, the secularizing tendency seeks to keep the activity and influence of Angels in Heaven (and/or among human souls), while the New Age impulse is to lock Angels themselves within the material order. The Thomist says there’s a middle way between these two mistakes. That’s the one to take.

Talking about the Stone People, the Standing People, and the Bear People

There is, however, a third way common in our culture today, beyond the hard-nosed secularizing push and its complementary postmodern fuzziness. This is worth pausing on in its own right.

There’s a good chance you’ve heard Indigenous people on this continent, including Indigenous Christians, talk about rocks, plants, and animals as if they are people. Rocks might be “the Stone People.” Trees might be “the Standing Ones” or “the Standing People.” Some communities will speak of “the Bear People,” “the Salmon People,” and so on. These terms don’t refer to Lot’s wife, tree-huggers, and animal lovers. They mean the mineral, vegetative, and animal beings themselves.

The primary point here is that a mineral, plant, or animal being isn’t just an “it.” They’re subjects in themselves. We need to reclaim their place in Creation and stop degrading them. It’s a confederation of species that we need to seek, rather than an increasingly lopsided domination of our species over theirs, which we see in the environmental, biodiversity, and climate crises leads only to chaos.

The Western instinct is to dismiss talk of the Standing People and the Bear People as nonsense. There’s no shortage of critics who would say such language is incompatible with Christianity. They’d gladly offer a number of dismissive names and classifications for Indigenous beliefs and lifeways that we don’t need to repeat here. But I’d caution against that. And I’d caution against that because I take Thomas Aquinas very seriously, not because I’m into postmodern wishy-washy mumbo-jumbo.

To Thomas, and to me, each Angel is sui generis (ST I.50.4). Every Angel is a person. But quite unlike with human beings, there are no fellow members of the species. Thomas has his reasons for this conclusion. Because Angels are just spiritual and not material, he says, the only distinguishing marks between them can come from a difference in nature and kind. So, he says, every Angel is a species of one person—or, if we prefer, a “people” of one person. In the united and entire People of God, there are all the human peoples redeemed by Christ, each composed of innumerable human persons (whether on earth, in purgatory, or in heaven), and then all the “peoples” of the pure-spirit realm, each composed of a single person.

So, we have two important principles. First, just as every human being has a Guardian Angel, so too every natural species has a Caretaker Angel. Second, every Angel is effectively a people of one person. These basic principles should rightly translate into how we live our life.

It is for this reason that I find a lot more in common with traditional Indigenous speech than with the ideas of my fellow Westerners of a secularizing or New Age bent.

Is there, like Indigenous people say, such a thing as the Stone People, the Standing People, or the Bear People? Well, if we dissect in the philosophical or scientific abstract the nature of a grizzly or a jack pine, no individual possesses the spiritual plane that makes humans and Angels into persons. So, the theoretician says, no. Plants and animals aren’t people. Still less is basalt or silver a person. Try again, rejoin the abstract philosopher and biologist, while the geologist and materials engineer just roll their eyes.

But like it or not, the philosopher’s and the scientist’s is a very reductive way of dealing with the world. I don’t live my life in the abstract. I live it interactively.

When I go outside and appreciate or contemplate Nature, or when I act to protect, restore, and promote Nature (and even when I destroy it), I am interacting with a people—the personal Caretaker Angel of each species, who is in fact like a people of one person.

Every grizzly bear that I think of or encounter is bringing me into contact with the Grizzly People, i.e., at one and the same time, all the members of its species who are cared for by the Caretaker Angel of Grizzlies and also the Caretaker Angel of Grizzlies himself considered as a spiritual species or people unto himself.

The same can be repeated for each of the Stone People(s), the Standing People(s), the Salmon People, the Chipmunk People. Each has a Caretaker Angel. That Angel is a person. He’s also basically a people (of one person). So, while no plant or nonhuman animal itself is in abstract Christian philosophical understanding “a person,” any particular, real plant or animal will always, necessarily bring us into contact with a particular, specific person—its species’ Caretaker Angel, who is not just a single person but also an entire species or people.

In the abstract, no. In practice, yes. That’s the Thomist’s answer to the language of Stone People, Standing People, and Animal People. It’s an extreme secularization that turns the abstract no into a practical no. Similarly, it’s New Age wishy-washiness that converts the practical yes into an abstract yes. It’s not the tenets of Christianity, and it sure isn’t the philosophical theology of Thomas Aquinas.

The language of Stone People and Standing People is not my own. But I’m far more comfortable with such modes of expression than I am with the modern and postmodern impulses of so many of my fellow European and Euro-American Christians. And I’d bring the full weight of Thomas Aquinas’ theology to defend traditional Indigenous language when detractors come its way. As usual, it is reasonable that Indigenous people become the principal dialogue partners of (other) Catholics. It is from them that we have much to learn, and it’s with them that we’re most likely to find a common cause.

Forgotten earth, forgotten Caretakers—vulnerable earth, vulnerable Caretakers

Every encounter with a natural species is an encounter with the Caretaker Angel whose knowledge, love, and power lie just behind the scenes. Each experience of an ecosystem is an immersion in an Angelic concert that we know not fully how to hear. This is one face of how we, as C. S. Lewis says, can truly appreciate Nature only if we know first the world above Nature. But this beautiful revelation also has terrible meaning in the environmental, biodiversity, and climate crises.

Think first of how distant we have become from the natural world itself. So many of the things in our life are hyperprocessed. We often can’t identify all the ingredients in our food. While many of us could accurately name the species of wood in the furnishings of our home, the constitutive components of our fabrics and paper products are more elusive. Metals confound us, and plastics are totally opaque. The result is that, even if we wanted to, we would struggle to connect with the Angels who looked after the foods’ and materials’ origins. They’re out of sight, out of mind. It takes great effort to surmount this and reconnect with the Church of Heaven just behind the curtain. If intentionality matters, we’re not making this easy on ourselves.

Now, to measure the problem yet better still, take it to the extreme: the extinction of a species. This must have an immeasurable impact on the Church of Heaven. It would be absurd to imagine that a species’ Caretaker Angel could be utterly indifferent to its permanent loss. What, from the moment of its own creation, the Angel knew with marvellous intuitivity, loved with not only his natural abilities but with all the love poured into his will from the Blessed Trinity, and applied himself to in every moment of time of the species’ existence—now it has to end. The species has disappeared forever. This event could, of course, be part of the evolution of life on our planet. In that case, the Angel would surely know from God that his loss is for a greater good. But when we are the ones to destroy a species, not by living in concert with the earth and its species (and their Angels), but by selfishly appropriating, plundering, and wrecking habitats—that’s a whole other story.

The Caretaker Angels are vulnerable before us. They experience some kind of suffering at our hands. Our sin touches them in the environmental, biodiversity, and climate crises, as it must also touch our Guardian Angels more generally. What good the Angel wants to be a part of—the human person or collective says no. We deny the Angels. We block the extent of their applied knowledge, love, and power. They are vulnerable before us.

This fills in some of my thoughts on vulnerability. I think it’s a property that isn’t just found in material beings. Vulnerability exists in the spiritual realm, too. Whether we say, with Pope Francis, that “vulnerability is another manifestation of beauty,” or whether we get all metaphysical like I do, and speak of the very vulnerability of God, what we’re saying is that vulnerability is an analogical notion. It has a range of meaning centred around a core commonality.

God is vulnerable before our sin, because he is merciful, and mercy implies a pull on the heartstrings, pity, or compassion. God’s own perfection consumes this suffering without hesitation and at a rate that infinitely exceeds the motion of the least speck of the universe. But it is somehow real. God is wounded by our sin. He is vulnerable before us.

The Angels, too, are vulnerable in their way, despite having no bodies and being purely spiritual creatures. As ministers of nature and grace, our sins in general impact their mission. What they want to cooperate with God and us in realizing, doesn’t at that time and place materialize. As participants in the divine nature by grace, they must participate in the mercy of God towards us.

For the Caretaker Angels in particular, their vulnerability is linked to the vulnerability of the earth and its species. Where the ecosystems and confederations of species are restricted, hemmed in, and suffocated, so too is the application of the knowledge, love, and power of the Angel limited.

The work of the eighth work of mercy, as Pope Francis calls contemplative and active care for Creation, can have a special regard for the Angels. Of course, the eagle-eyed know that Angels don’t feature in Laudato Si’ and Laudate Deum. But the reason, I think, is not that the Angels have nothing to do with grateful contemplation of God’s Creation and active care for it. It’s simply that these documents are by their own admission “addressed to all people of good will” (cf. LS 62). The intended audience probably wouldn’t benefit from hearing about Angels.

For the Christian, though, the Angels can be united to the creation care of contemplation and action. They are very much concerned. Like our human brothers and sisters of the Church of Heaven, the Angels form with us wayfarers one Church. Like God, they have some kind of vulnerability before our sin, especially, in the case of the Caretakers, our ecological sins. If we would learn to see things as they do, relying as they do on the overwhelming love and vulnerability of God—that is, his mercy—and seeking their presence, like God’s, behind the species and ecosystems of this visible world, then we would expand our list of friends who can prop us up, challenge us, and spur us on in the ever-more-needed eighth work of mercy, in its contemplative regard for creation and Creator, as well as the action that flows out of that very contemplation.

[1] C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001; orig. 1947), 104.

[2] Jacques Maritain, Approches sans entraves, in Œuvres complètes de Jacques et Raïssa Maritain, vol. XIII (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires, 1995; orig. 1973), 413–1222, here 670; the English translation is Untrammeled Approaches, trans. Bernard Doering (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), here 145.

[3] If we want to get really precise and technical, I would clarify that I am referring an Angel to each ontological species—which, for all we know, might vary in extent from taxonomically defined species. I’m certain, for instance, that an Eastern chipmunk is a different ontological species from a grizzly. Nothing will convince me that these are philosophically the same species. But while their taxonomical classification differs, whether squirrels and chipmunks are the same ontological species, or grizzlies and polar bears, or Bactrians and dromedaries, I myself remain open to persuasion. I’m not an expert in the philosophy of Nature, and I wouldn’t commit myself to an opinion. But this hardly matters for a lay argument.