CHAPTER XXVII. Answer to the objection based on the immortal angels (Matt. xxii. 29-30), and the finger of God, with which He wrote on the tables of stone (Exod. xxxi. 18).

Further, we will state the proposition in due measure concerning the angels and their immortality, and how in the kingdom of heaven "they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as angels in heaven." Christ, wishing to show the blessedness of those who have been granted to dwell in the heavenly place, and the misfortune of those who dwell amid the corruption of the earth, and have received their condition through the unclean growth of the flesh, being begotten and begetting and departing quickly like leaves, conveys the following meaning: "Those who have been thought worthy to enter into a life which knows no destruction, embark on a course which is worthy of kings, and is such as the angels have. They are rid of physical union, they no longer experience death, nor even birth, and are shut off from earthly embraces and bonds." He said this in order that any man who was well disposed, on hearing of a rational existence in heaven, which is associated with the Word of immortality, might adapt his life to the imitation of them,³⁰¹ and in his deeds would zealously affect their merit, refraining from marriage and fleeing from the symbols of corruption. And in the end he would pass through the door of death, and rise, with earthly weights removed, to the hall of the blessed, that is, of the angels. He does not however represent them by fashioning images of them,³⁰² as you yourself declare, nor does he speak to |148 what is a shadow and rejoice in that which his imagination has created, associating with things soulless and material as if they were possessed of life, delighting in dead visions of forms, bringing his supplication to a dumb thing which he has moulded, deciding that the divine lurks in stone and wood, imagining that such matter as cannot be held at all, is held by bronze and iron, and picturing in a dead vision and without any sense that he is catching that which cannot be caught.³⁰³

And again, if it be true that angels have sometimes appeared in human form, yet they were not really that which appeared, but that which they were was invisible. And if any one fashions a picture or a representation in bronze, he does not make that which it really is, nor does he enclose its nature therein.

[As for God being so material as to have "fingers," etc., Scripture does not mean that He can be divided into limbs and parts of a body. This is not meant to refer to His nature, but He is thus spoken of in order that men may understand. To suppose that God has material fingers and other parts because man must conceive of Him thus, is no more true than that it is a real lion that a man has seen when he has beheld one in a dream. Similarly the angels who appeared to Abraham were not really of the human form and behaviour they appeared to be, as is sufficiently proved by the way they consumed the food offered them. So Abraham made no image of them, except in the mindful tablets of his mind.] |149