Original Sin And The Angels

EWTN, Global Catholic Radio, and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life Is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on phonograph records in the 1960s, and the sound quality is sometimes limited, but the Word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now, here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. Looking back over our previous lessons, we have come to some such conclusions as these. First of all, our reason is capable of knowing God. By looking out upon the visible things of the world, we come to know the invisible God, His power and His wisdom. Everything of His power is shown, for example, in the mountains, and we see His beauty in the sunset, His purity in the snowflake. But no reason is able to know something about God and His nature. It cannot know everything. We look on a painting. As we study it, we can divine and guess to some extent perhaps the era or the century in which it was painted, the style of the artist. We may guess also something of His technique and His power with the brush and paints. But we could look on that painting from now until the crack of doom and never know the inmost thoughts of the artist. If we were to know those, He would have to tell us. And so we look upon creation, and we can reason to some understanding of God, but we cannot know His inmost thoughts. If we were ever to know those, God would have to reveal them to us. That brings up the question, well, how would we know that He ever revealed Himself to us? There are hundreds of people in history who have come upon its stage and said, I am from God, listen to my message, God sent me. So we have to use our reason to establish certain tests or standards by which we judge among the claimants. Now, previous to the judgment of any claimant, we establish the three tests of one, whoever comes from God, or claims that he came from God, must be pre-announced. That is the least that God can do for us. Let us know that His representative is coming to this earth. Secondly, God should give him certain powers so that he would be able to work miracles. But not in order to astound us so much as to be signs and witnesses and proofs that he comes from God because he could do the things which only God can do. And thirdly, the doctrine of this claimant must never be contrary to reason. He may indeed, this claimant, say something that is above reason, but he may never say anything contrary to it. In other words, his doctrine must be in keeping with right reason and the aspirations of the human heart. Those were the tests. Now we apply them. And as we said, we can line up every claimant in the history of the world, from the first to the last, and among them we put the person of Christ. And we apply the tests. We ask, was any one of you pre-announced? Only one can answer that question, as we saw, and that is the person of Christ. Secondly, we went on to show that Christ worked miracles, and particularly rose from the dead as a proof of his divinity. Now thirdly, the rest of this course will, to some extent, deal with the third point, namely, nothing that he ever taught was contrary to human reason, but it deeply satisfied the cravings of the heart. Then we began to study Christ, his testimony about himself, that he was the Son of God and the Son of Man, and then we showed how he was both God and man, namely, that he had a divine nature and a human nature, and they were both united in the unity of the divine person. Being man, he was like unto us in all things save our guilt and our sin. Being God, the reparation and the payment of the infinite debt that we contracted could be paid, because he was infinite. We then proceeded to demonstrate that our Lord was not but just a teacher, but a savior from sin. That brings us up to the fact and the existence of sin. We are not going to elaborate sin in general here. We might begin by saying, remember that there are two general kinds of sin. There is such a thing as personal sin, that is to say, the sin that we commit by an act of our own will, sin for which we are responsible. For example, stealing, lying, bearing false witness against the neighbor and the like. Then there is another kind of sin, which is not personal at all. In fact, our will was never explicitly involved. That is a sin which in some way attaches itself to our nature by the mere fact that we are human. That sin is called original sin. That is the subject of this lesson. There is a law that is running throughout the universe, the sacred scripture puts it. No one shall be crowned unless he has struggled. It is very evident in our own experience that we are offered certain gifts and blessings on condition that we pass certain tests. That happened during our school days, it happens in courtship, a man must be deserving of the woman that he loves. When we are free, and freedom is the basis of all love, it is the right use of our freedom that purchases for us certain freedom, for certain privileges that would not otherwise be ours. A father intends to send his son to college. There is a condition involved, namely the boy has to study. Because he does not study, he is remiss in his duty, he spends his time in playing, thus by an abuse of freedom he loses the privilege of a higher education. There was no change in the father's mind. One could never say to the father, you are cruel because you do not send your son to college. The father is very willing to send his son to college, but the boy cannot get into college. He does not pass the test. In like manner, God wants to crown certain gifts that we have. He wants to crown the right use of our freedom. He wants to give us something as our own which is not really our own. And all we have to do to possess the great gift and privilege of God is to pass the test. It's an easy test, a test of loving Him which is our perfection. The test is the acknowledging of our dependence upon God which is the condition of our relative independence. Now this law that pervades the universe was first applied to angels. Before we talk, therefore, of the fall of man, we are going to talk about the fall of the angels. Angels are very clearly mentioned in sacred scripture, and pagans believed in angels. Reason somehow suggested to them that just as there is matter in the universe, and just as the material universe is crowned with man who is a mixture, as it were, of matter and spirit, so there ought to be above man certain spirits, and these were called angels. Certainly one would not say that there should not be any intermediary, for example, between an oyster and a man. Would it not seem reasonable that between the development of the oyster in nature and the development of man there ought to be some other kinds of life in between? It is equally reasonable to assume that between the infinite God who is pure spirit and ourselves there ought to be intermediary spirits that are not infinite, but are certainly far more perfect than we are. God therefore created myriads and myriads of angels who are bodiless spirits. They have no noses, they have no mouths, they have no ears, they are just pure mind. They are therefore without bodies, they are without wings, despite all of the pictures that you ever see of angels. They have brilliant intellects, far greater than any human intellect, and an angel is created, every angel is created, therefore angels are creatures, they are dependent upon God. They are endowed with freedom, and because they are free, they also have the possibility of denying that dependence on God. This is the kind of a test, perhaps, that God put them to. He merely asked them to love him, to love and consist in them acknowledging their dependence and thus perfecting themselves. He would then confirm them in glory. They were not immediately confirmed. Perhaps this test could be explained to you something like unto maybe the test that a spider was once subjected to. A spider one day let himself down from the roof of a barn, and he let himself down through that tender and slight and slender web, just a string. The spider was very anxious to enjoy all of the flies and the gnats and the worms that were in the barnyard. When the spider got down to the barnyard, the spider spread a great web, and into that web came a great feast of flies and everything that can be served at a banquet of a spider. When finally the spider was full of all of these gifts and blessings, the spider looked up all the way to the roof of the barn and saw that slim thread reaching all the way down and he said, I wonder what's that doing up there? So he cut it down. He lost his web, he lost his banquet, he lost everything. Dependence as you see is sometimes a great independence, as it is in the Constitution of the United States. Why, for example, are we independent? Because as the Constitution of the United States puts it, God has endowed us with certain unalienable gifts. In other words, no state, no government, no dictator ever gave us our basic rights. They came from God. If the state gave us those rights, the state could take them away. It is therefore by acknowledging our dependence upon God that we are independent. So the angel, so with man, so with everyone. The sunbeam denies its dependence upon the sun, it's no longer a sunbeam. So the blessings, the gifts that the angel received were to be confirmed and made permanent only on condition that they would pass the test of love. Now their sin, for they sinned, was an abuse of freedom. It was a sin of pride. They wanted to be free. They wanted to be likened to God. They could not sin by sex, because they had no body. They could not sin by avarice, because they had no pockets, not even in their wings. For they sinned only by an undue exaltation of their intellect. In other words, I'm going to be independent of God, I'm going to be a God myself. There are some theologians who say that the angel looked into the future and saw God incarnate as Christ. And in seeing their own glorious angels, they said, well, we will not fall down and adore any God that would humble himself to human form. That is only a guess. But the truth is, they wanted to be like the uncreated, though they were the created. And the leader of them all, Lucifer, that fought his battle cry, Non servia, mine will not serve. They were guilty because they did not love, and so they lost all of the blessings that they received. And one third of them fell, and they became what are known as the fallen angels, the devils. Prophet Isaiah spoke of the angels as follows, What fallen from heaven thou, Lucifer, that once did herald the dawn? I will scale the heavens, such was thy thought. I will set my throne higher than God's stars, the rival and most high. That in the language of Isaiah was the sin of the angels, and their sin cannot be forgiven. Our sins can. Now why cannot an angel's sin be forgiven? Well an angel's sin cannot be forgiven because when an angel decides anything, it sees all of the consequences of its acts with perfect clarity. It sees the effects of all of its decisions in exactly the way that you and I see, for example, the principle of contradiction once it is explained to us. Principle of contradiction is that a thing cannot be and not be at one and the same time and under the same formal circumstances. For example, a bee cannot be an elephant at one and the same time and under the same formal circumstances. Once that statement is made, you see it clearly. You can never go back on the principle of contradiction. This microphone is not a rose. Absolutely clear to you. Now an angel sees the consequences of all of its resolutions and choices just as you see that principle. You can never take the principle of contradiction back. It's part of your mental life always. When an angel therefore chose to rebel against God, to make itself God, to deny love, it made pardon for every impossible. But with you and me it's a little different. We do not always see so clearly the effects of our decisions, and because our mind is darkened and because our intellect is weakened and our will is poor in its resolutions, God allows pardon. In fact, our Lord said to Peter in answer to his question, how often should I forgive? Our Lord said seventy times seven. That did not mean four hundred and ninety. It meant that no limit was to be placed upon forgiveness. In the form of the angels, therefore, we can see sin in its nakedness. There is pure sin. It is an attempt to undo the creative act, an affirmation of self-existence. Now there's evil in the universe by an abuse of freedom. The only way that evil ever came into the world and the only way that evil ever can come into the world. Notice also that the world is out of joint before man arrived in it. Somewhere in God's universe there's a crack, a fissure. Something has gone wrong. And it has gone wrong because someone did not use freedom rightly. Someone used freedom in the sense of the right to do whatever you please instead of the right to do whatever you want. Look back over the evolution of the universe. See all of the prehistoric animals that have come into being passed away. Everywhere in the unfolding of the cosmos there have been deformations. Biological sprouts came to dead ends. Everywhere there are blind alleys. To ask why should the sin of the angels affect the universe? Well one reason might be that lower creation was put under the supervision of some of the angels and when they rebelled against God the effects of it in some way were registered in the material universe. Nature became dislocated. Look at a complicated machine. Disturb one of the big wheels, break a cog, and you will also disturb all of the little wheels. Throw a rock into a pond, it will affect in some way through ripples even the most distant shore. It could be therefore that the fall of the angels accounted for maybe the chaos that was on the earth. As described in the book of Genesis, there is every indication that something went wrong before man was made. Now maybe this evil influence is going to affect man. When I began this lesson I said that I was going to talk about original sin and I had every intention of doing it. The reason our timing is off and we did not get into the subject of original sin is because we are talking without notes. If we had written everything out there would not be any of these mistakes, but it's always better perhaps to talk without notes. I always remember what an Irish woman said when she heard a bishop read a sermon. She said, Glory be to God, if he can't remember it, how does he expect us to? This does not mean that we're not going to talk about original sin. You can already see the beginnings of it to some extent and in a very broad kind of way. Perhaps the fall of the angels might be called the original sin because it introduced evil into the world. But I know that you will forgive this imperfection. There are many imperfections in these talks, but because we're giving them to converts and giving them out of our heart, we show the effects of original sin, the occasional mistakes that you hear. They would not exist if there had not been the fall of the angels and eventually the fall of man. We suffer from the penalty of the introduction of evil into the universe. But to conclude, there is evil somewhere in God's universe. Something has gone wrong. Maybe those spirits that have lost the great blessings that God gave them and would have been theirs if they had only been true to the test of love, maybe those evil spirits will be jealous of God ever giving us blessings. They might try to destroy us, to win us away from privileges. God will certainly put us to the test. That test takes place in the garden of paradise. That will be the subject of our next lesson. God love you. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the U.S., call 818-331-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 © BF-WATCH TV 2021