Article 1: On Spirits (Part 4)

Just as spirits have influence upon matter, so conversely matter has influence upon spirits. The rejected spirits will suffer eternally in the fire of hell—in a material fire—and the holy spirits will be eternally blessed in the dwellings of heaven. Together with the holy spirits, the resurrected holy human beings will share in the joys of heaven and paradise in their bodies; and the resurrected sinful human beings will in their bodies be subjected to the same torments as the spirits. From this it is evident that spirits too have their own materiality—a materiality akin to the spiritual bodies of human beings. And how could the heavenly world lack its own materiality, when its head—the God-man—is clothed in a body? We confess that the body of the God-man is incomparably more excellent in spiritual terms than the angelic nature, and we sing to the Mother of God: more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim. This hymn, which is chanted to the most holy Virgin and to the angels as well,153 would have no place if holy human beings in heaven were not like and equal to the angels, as the Saviour himself affirmed.154 That angels are capable of singing, and that in this singing they utter words, is attested by both the Gospel and the Prophets.155—With particular detail and clarity the influence even of earthly matter upon spirits is depicted in the book of Tobit. The Archangel Raphael accompanied in the form of a man the son of Tobit, Tobias, on his journey from Assyria to Media. During this journey Tobias caught a fish in the river Tigris, and the Archangel commanded him to preserve the heart and liver of the fish. When Tobias asked why the heart and liver of this fish might be needed, the Archangel replied: the heart and liver—if anyone is troubled by a demon or an evil spirit, one must burn these before the man or woman, and the person will be troubled no more. Here it is stated that a certain material substance has in general an influence upon evil spirits, driving them away from men and women whom spirits trouble. The Archangel Raphael arrived with Tobias at Rages, a city of Media, at the home of Raguel, a kinsman of Tobias. The Archangel expressed his desire that Tobias be joined in marriage to Sarah, the only daughter of Raguel. Tobias objected: I have heard that the girl has been given to seven husbands, and all have perished in the bridal chamber, for a demon loves her. The Archangel said: Have no fear concerning the demon. Take with you in the bridal chamber a brazier for incense, and place on it some of the heart and liver of the fish and burn it; and the demon will smell the odor and flee and never again return for ever and ever. After the marriage had been concluded, Tobias carried out what the Archangel had commanded: he took the brazier for incense, placed on it the heart and liver of the fish, and burned it. And when the demon smelled the odor, it fled to the upper parts of Egypt, and the angel Raphael bound it.156

Angels, when appearing to human beings, have always appeared in the form of men. Scripture makes no mention of any apparition of angels in any other form; in relating that angels appeared in the form of men, Scripture nowhere qualifies its account—which would certainly have been done if angels truly had no form at all, or had a form other than human. We have no right to understand angels otherwise than as Scripture depicts them. — The angels who appeared to Lot are called in Scripture first angels, then men. These same angels, before coming to Sodom, had appeared to Abraham at the oak of Mamre and were likewise called men in Scripture.157 The Commander of the Lord’s Host appeared to Joshua. In narrating this apparition, Holy Scripture says: Joshua was near Jericho, and he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. Joshua at first did not understand that this was an angel and asked the one he had seen: Are you for us, or for our adversaries?158—An angel appeared to the wife of Manoah the Israelite, the mother of the mighty Samson, announcing to her the conception and birth of a son marked by God’s favor. The woman reported the angel’s appearance to her husband thus: A man of God came to me, and his appearance was like the appearance of an angel of God, very awesome. The angel appeared to the woman a second time. The woman hastened to inform Manoah of this, saying: Behold, the man who came to me the other day has appeared to me again. And Manoah arose and followed his wife, and came to the man and said to him: Are you the man who spoke to this woman? And the angel said: I am. Manoah, supposing he was conversing with a man, offered the angel a meal; but the angel, declining the meal, proposed a burnt offering to the Lord. When the flame of the burnt offering rose very high above the altar, the angel entered this flame and ascended to heaven. Seeing this, Manoah and his wife understood that the one who had appeared to them was an angel.159 The Evangelist Luke, in describing one of the visits of the myrrh-bearing women to the tomb of the Lord, says that there appeared to them two men in dazzling apparel.160 When the Lord ascended to heaven in the presence of the Apostles, and their eyes were fixed on heaven, suddenly two men in white garments stood before them and said to the Apostles: Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven. Evidently these men were angels.161—An angel appeared to the centurion Cornelius. He saw an angel of God coming to him. In recounting this apparition to the Apostle Peter, Cornelius said: Four days ago, until this very hour, I was praying in my house at the ninth hour, and behold, a man stood before me in bright clothing.162—When Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, cast into the fiery furnace the three holy young men who had refused to worship idols, an angel163 descended with them into the furnace and removed the power of the fire. The young men sang in the spacious furnace a song of thanksgiving and praise to God, and Nebuchadnezzar, hearing them singing, was filled with astonishment and asked his nobles: Did we not cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? The nobles answered: Truly, O king. But the king said: Behold, I see four men unbound and walking in the midst of the fire, and the appearance of the fourth is like a son of God… Blessed be God, who has sent his angel and delivered his servants, who trusted in him.164—The holy prophet Daniel calls the Archangel Gabriel a man. While I was still speaking in my prayer, he says, the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, came to me in swift flight and touched me.165 In another vision there appeared to the prophet an angel whom he again calls a man. This man was clothed in linen, and his loins were girded with gold; his body was like beryl; his face shone like lightning; his eyes were like flaming torches; his arms and legs gleamed like burnished bronze; his voice was like the sound of a multitude.166 The companions of Daniel, being with him, did not see the vision, because their eyes had not been opened; only fear seized them, as commonly happens to those who are in the presence of a person who sees and converses with spirits. Toward the end of the vision Daniel saw that the man clothed in linen, who was standing above the waters of the river, raised both his right and his left hand to heaven and swore an oath.167—When the protomartyr Stephen, richly anointed with the grace of the Holy Spirit, stood before the murderous council of the Jewish chief priests and priests, all who sat in the council, looking intently at him, saw his face as the face of an angel.168—From the passages of Holy Scripture cited here, it is evident that angels not only have a human form, but also all the members of the human body. Scripture enumerates these members in them: face, eyes, breast, hands, feet. More than this! Scripture indicates that spirits possess the same senses as man: sight, hearing, smell, touch; it attributes to them the capacity for speech; to the fallen spirits it attributes the deficiencies of fallen humanity—deafness and muteness. The Lord himself—no one else—named one of the demons deaf and mute. You deaf and mute spirit, the Lord said to it, I command you,169 and the deaf spirit, which had not heard the voice of the holy Apostles and had not submitted to their command, heard the voice of God, and immediately—while terribly tormenting and being tormented—fulfilled the divine command. In another healing of a man possessed by a demon, the Gospel says that this demon was mute.170 It is entirely natural for spirits to have senses: the human soul, which by its nature belongs to created spirits, also has them. The senses of a man belong to his soul, not to his body, even though during the earthly life of a human being they operate through the members of the body. Through the members of the body the whole soul acts, even its rational power. The senses depart from the body together with the soul; more precisely: the soul, in leaving the body, takes with it the senses that belong to it. If the senses belonged to the body, they would remain with it after the departure of the soul—or would leave the body at a different time, not at the very time the soul leaves it.

Demons by nature have the same outward appearance as angels—that is, the form of a man in his body. Because of this likeness to man, the Lord called the devil a man.171 Demons have disfigured themselves by extinguishing good within themselves and by engendering and developing evil. For this reason Scripture calls them beasts, and their chief a serpent.172 Do not deliver to beasts the soul that confesses you.173 Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field,174 since the rejected angels and their chief have been cast down from heaven to earth.175 The malice and the fall of the demons have left their mark on their outward appearance as well: having retained their natural form, they have distorted it with the features of bestiality and terrible ugliness. Job saw the devil as a fearsome monster and depicted him in the fearsome imagery of his words.176

Spirits have their own dwelling places, their own abodes corresponding to their nature and to the qualities they have freely acquired—by reason of which some have entered into a closer communion with God, while others have been rejected by God and have become infected with a frenzied, senseless hatred toward him. The dwelling place of the holy angels is heaven. The Lord has revealed this to us. The angels in heaven, he said, always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.177 In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels of God in heaven.178 From many other passages in Scripture as well it is evident that heaven is the dwelling place of the angels. While residing in heaven, they are sent by God to earth to carry out various divine commands, as we have seen from the narratives of Scripture that we have cited; they are also sent to assist all who are working out their salvation, as the holy Apostle Paul said: they are ministering spirits, sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation.179 At his Second, glorious, and awesome Coming, the Lord will send out his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.180

As long as the devil was a bright and holy angel, he dwelt in heaven. In heaven the dreadful transformation took place, and a great assembly of angels separated itself from the holy host of the Heavenly Powers and became an assembly of dark demons, with a fallen cherub at their head. Many of the higher angels—from the dominions, principalities, and authorities—were drawn into the fall and into perdition.181 As a result of this transformation, war arose in heaven: Michael, the Archangel of the Heavenly Host, and his angels, who had remained faithful to God, waged war against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But they were defeated, and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down—that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him.182 The abode of the fallen angels became the space beneath the heavens—which all the ancients called the air—the surface of the earth, and the abyss, or hell. This is evident from Holy Scripture. In the Book of Job the devil twice testifies of himself that he had gone to and fro over all the earth and walked about beneath the heavens.183 The abode of the fallen angels in the air—or in the space beneath the heavens—is indicated, by the unanimous opinion of the Fathers, by the following words of the Apostle Paul: we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers and world-rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil beneath the heavens.184 This assembly of spirits the Apostle calls the authority of the air, and the chief of the demons—properly called the devil—he calls the prince of the authority of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience.185 The abode of the demons on earth is entirely clear from the accounts in the Gospel, which relates the various actions of demons on earth and their various evil deeds. Demons not only live on the surface of the earth but sometimes enter entirely, in all their gaseous being, into the bodies of human beings and cattle.186 They enter the interior of the human body in the same way as air enters it, drawn in by the mechanism of breathing—in the same way as other gases may enter it. A demon that has entered a person does not mingle with the soul but remains in the body, forcibly possessing both soul and body. Gases possess in a special degree the property of elasticity—that is, the property of occupying a volume of varying size: it is evident that demons also possess this property, by virtue of which a multitude of them can occupy a single human being, as the Gospel attests.187

At the present time the dwelling place of the devil, the chief of the fallen angels, is the abyss—tartarus, hell, the underworld, the interior of the earth. The holy prophet Isaiah foretold this dwelling place for the fallen archangel: You shall descend into hell, he said to him, and to the foundations of the earth.188 The prophecy was fulfilled upon the prince of the authority of the air by the power and authority of the Saviour of mankind, the God-man. The Saviour is that great Angel who is God—who holds the key of the abyss, who descended from heaven and, having become man, used his human flesh—this great rope, as it were, stretched out upon the cross—to bind the serpent, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan. The Lord bound Satan for the entire span of time between his two comings, and shut him up in the abyss, and locked it, and set his seal over him. Being locked and sealed in a material prison, the devil of necessity must have a material nature: otherwise no material prison could hold him. Before the Second Coming of the Lord, Satan will be released from his prison and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth.189

Created spirits are called incorporeal both in the writings of the holy Fathers and in common usage. This name is founded on Holy Scripture. A spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have,190 said the Saviour to his disciples, appearing to them after the resurrection in his glorified body—rebuking and refuting their thought that they were seeing a spirit. The comparison as you see that I have is a comparison with the human flesh of the God-man. The holy Basil the Great sees the same comparison of the nature of spirits with human flesh in the Apostle’s words: we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against spiritual forces of evil.191 This Father speaks more precisely than the other Fathers about the gas-like materiality of spirits; but basing himself on the apostolic words just cited, he maintains that “the nature of the devil is incorporeal,”192 evidently meaning that it does not possess such flesh as human beings have. In this sense the human soul, when it has departed from the body, becomes an incorporeal being. It is in this sense that Tertullian, the ecclesiastical writer of the second century, says that “the soul is non-material and at the same time a body; to deny its corporeity would be equally to deny its existence.”193

Concerning the form and the nature of the human soul, Holy Scripture speaks only in passing and very briefly. Yet from these accounts in Scripture it is entirely evident that the human soul has the form of a man in his body, and resembles the other created spirits both in outward form and in nature and in properties. The Apostle John the Theologian relates in his Revelation that he saw in heaven the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God. And there was given to each of them a white robe.194 The vision was repeated to the Theologian. I saw, he says, and behold, a great multitude from every nation and tribe and people and tongue, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.195 Scripture depicts souls in exactly the same way as it depicts angels. The Theologian, having said that he saw souls comprising a great multitude, thereby reveals that he saw the souls in human form: only an assembly of persons is called a multitude. By the account of their clothing and of the palm branches in their hands, the concept of their form and of their materiality is confirmed. — When the witch of Endor summoned the soul of the prophet Samuel from the subterranean dwelling of souls, and he appeared to her, she saw an old man coming up out of the earth, and he was wrapped in a robe.196 The soul appeared in human form, in human clothing, and with the marks of sex. Here the soul is depicted just as the holy John the Theologian depicted souls. — At the Transfiguration of the Lord on Mount Tabor, the Lord’s face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light.197 The Lord showed in what glory the first man had been created, and how far his body in that state excelled the body corrupted by the fall. Moses and Elijah appeared before the Lord, heard from him of the sufferings and death on the cross to which he was willingly submitting himself in Jerusalem for the healing of the human race. Elijah stood in his body, transformed at his rapture to paradise; Moses stood in his soul, which evidently bore the full form of a body—without this, how could the Apostles have seen him? How could the Apostle Peter have spoken of preparing a tent for Moses? The Apostles saw Moses as they saw Elijah, with their eyes opened. Moses was present there in his soul: the Fathers198 relate that the Lord, descending into hell, brought Moses up from hell together with the other Old Testament saints and raised him, which the Gospel does not contradict—proclaiming as it does the resurrection of many saints immediately after the resurrection of the Lord.199 In particular, Scripture mentions only the burial of Moses and is silent about his resurrection proper.200—The Apostle Paul, in speaking of his rapture to paradise and to heaven, said that he did not know whether it had taken place in the body or out of the body,201 that is, in the soul alone. If the soul were distinguishable in form from the body, the Apostle could have said easily in what manner he had been caught up—in the body or out of the body. It can be said with confidence that it was the soul of Paul that was caught up. Just so, the soul of the holy Andrew was afterward caught up, and he, like Paul, said of himself that he did not know how he had been caught up—in the body or out of the body—even though he saw himself with all the members and all the sense organs that the body possesses. To this conclusion we are led by the teaching of the Fathers on this subject, by similar events from their lives, and even by certain contemporary experiences.202 The holy martyr Maura reported of herself: “At the time when she was nailed to the cross, a certain wondrous man appeared to her, whose face shone like the sun. He took Maura by the hand and raised her up to heaven. There the blessedness prepared for her and her husband, the companion of her struggle, was shown to the martyr. After this the luminous man led her back to the body hanging on the cross, and said to her: Return now to your body; tomorrow, at the sixth hour, the angels of God will come for our souls.”203

Reviewing the passages of Holy Scripture cited here, we are naturally led to the conviction that created spirits and the human soul possess a materiality proper to them, have an outward form similar to the form of a man in his body; like human beings, spirits are subject to space and time, and they have movement. The matter of spirits is far more refined than the matter of the human body: for this reason spirits in their actions are far more free, and in their capacities far more developed, than human beings. Such is generally the property of matter. In its refined state it acts incomparably more powerfully and extensively than in its coarse state; in its refined state it acquires new properties which it did not possess at all in its coarse state. To make this readily comprehensible to all, let us point to water in its three states: solid, liquid, and vapor.

Holy Scripture teaches us that there are earthly bodies and there are heavenly bodies; that there are natural bodies and there are spiritual bodies; that the nature and excellence of these bodies differ from one another.204 Holy Scripture calls our bodies—those in which we exist in our earthly life—natural; and these same bodies it calls spiritual when they rise with the property of immortality and with the other properties necessary for immortality to truly be immortality. In their spiritual bodies holy human beings will dwell forever with the holy angels, having attained together with them one blessedness and equal development, equal relationship to space and time. Science, in its teaching about matter, enters into a necessary harmony with Scripture. It acknowledges matter wherever there is space. The concept of materiality and the concept of space are inseparable and indivisible. Science has researched and proven that the gases belonging to the earth and known to us are layered in the atmosphere according to their specific gravity. In a similar proportion, other gases unknown to us—lighter and more refined—must follow upon the gases of our atmosphere. These gases, which in common usage are called ether, must necessarily exist, because no space can be without the matter proper to it. The space which we call heaven must of necessity have its own matter.

What is a human being? A created spirit of the same kind as the angels, but clothed in a body. The other created spirits differ from man in that they do not possess his body, his flesh. For this reason they are called bodiless, incorporeal, immaterial. They are called invisible because we—having been corrupted and terribly damaged by the fall—do not see them in our ordinary state. Our body is not at all what it was when it was created: it has become for man a fetter and a prison; it has been deprived of many capacities; it is burdened with manifold infirmities. It will rise as something altogether different, and man—without ceasing to be man—will enter the ranks of created spirits, will be numbered in their company, will exist in their society and in communion with them. The relations of human nature to all its surroundings will be the same as those in which the nature of spirits exists. The Lord has declared this.

Holy Scripture decisively contradicts the teaching of Descartes, which has been generally adopted by Westerners. There is not a single passage in Scripture that is in the least favorable to the teaching of the Westerners. On the contrary, accepting the Western teaching and reasoning on its basis, one would of necessity have to reject all the most important accounts in Scripture concerning the ministry of spirits. The Lord, proclaiming his Second glorious Coming, says: The Son of Man is to come with the glory of his Father with his angels.205 The Son of Man will come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him.206 The resurrected human beings will behold207 the Son of God—invisible in his divinity, visible in his divine human body—and will also behold the angels in their own form. If the angels had no form, the resurrected human beings could not see them, and the Son of God would appear in a strange solitude. If the angels had no movement, they could not come with the Lord, who by virtue of his humanity naturally possesses movement. Here the Lord depicted the movement of the angels as similar to his own movement; movement is united with movement in a single action. Yet we believe that the movement of the Lord’s body, by virtue of the divinity of that body, is incomparable with the movement of which angels are capable—so superior is the one movement to the other. Some of the saints have already been shown in sacred vision the manner in which the Second Coming of the Lord will take place. The holy Dionysius the Areopagite, in a letter to the monk Demophilus, tells of a disciple of the holy Apostle Paul—the blessed Carpus, a man great in virtues and, on account of the purity of his mind, very capable of divine vision. Carpus had attained such spiritual progress that he never began the Divine Liturgy until the grace of the Holy Spirit had visibly overshadowed him. Once he was granted to see the heavens opened—as was the protomartyr Stephen—and the Lord Jesus standing in the midst of a most numerous assembly of angels; and at this vision the holy Carpus saw the angels in human form. Thus will they appear at the dread Judgment of Christ.

The appearances of spirits to the servants of God in the New Testament Church have a decisively identical character with the appearances of which Scripture speaks. By these appearances it is proved that spirits are material, that they have the outward form of human beings, all the members of a man, the capacity for speech, weeping, and laughter; that in the world invisible to us—in which spirits dwell—there is its own matter; that spirits are in a relationship to matter and are dependent on space and time, and that they possess movement. As proof, we shall present a few examples, leaving those who wish to gain a more detailed knowledge to draw it from the lives of the saints.