womb-and-the-cloud:

Misunderstanding What the Angels Look Like

There’s quite a lot of posts floating around about angels and errors regarding what they look like. Although people are welcome to think as they please, the views espoused do not follow logically from the fact that angels are spiritual beings, thus literally applying physical features to them, as these folks are doing, is incorrect. There is also a misunderstanding of the Biblical texts when they speak about the angels.

The Christian view, based on the biblical text and apprehended in the light of Tradition, complemented by philosophical logic, makes it very clear that angels (descriptive of what they do, more than what they are) are spirits, thus they are immaterial, and do not have corporeal features. Whenever the Scripture uses language to describe the angels, this language is figurative, it is sometimes anthropomorphic and the descriptions draw from physical things, since this is the only reference point we have, to use material things to help understand immaterial things. Aquinas writes (Summa I.Q.88, 2, co.), drawing from the Arabian philosopher Avempace:

By the understanding of natural substances we can be led, according to true philosophical principles, to the knowledge of immaterial substances.

Hence when the Scripture describes the angels as sometimes having eyes, wings, feet, bronze this, golden that, a particular animal face etc., we are not supposed to envisage that such and such an angel literally looks like this, it is merely metaphorical, to help us apprehend something of the unseeable nature, character and role of a given angelic being.

Spirits are spirits, they are not physical, nor are they visible, nor do they have corporeal features; whenever a vision is had of them, the appearance is a figurative projection and visible form adopted and manifested to the seer for the sake of accommodating to human nature and our weakness in understanding.

To quote from Dionysus the Areopagite (or Pseudo, but authoritative nonetheless):

We cannot, as mad people do, profanely visualize these heavenly and godlike intelligences as actually having numerous feet and faces. They are not shaped to resemble the brutishness of oxen or to display the wildness of lions. They do not have the curved beak of the eagle or the wings and feathers of birds. We must not have pictures of flaming wheels whirling in the skies […] or any of those shapes handed on to us amid all the variety of the revealing symbols of scripture. The Word of God makes use of poetic imagery when discussing these formless intelligences but, as I have already said, it does so for the sake of art, but as a concession to the nature of our own mind. [….]

Using matter, one may be lifted up to the immaterial archetypes. Of course one must be careful to use the similarities as dissimilarities, as discussed, to avoid one-to-one correspondences, to make the appropriate adjustments as one remembers the great divide between the intelligible [the immaterial spirits being understood] and the perceptible [the forms figuratively applied to them]. (Celestial Hierarchy, Chp. II, 1,4).