Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Dogmatic treatise; Theophan the Recluse; incorporeality of the soul; nature of angels Orthodox; soul is spirit not body; Orthodox dogmatic theology; Church Fathers on the soul; Russian Orthodox theology; Religion & Spirituality; Christianity / Orthodox; Religion / Theology
Description: Is the soul a kind of body? When a revered Russian writer taught that the soul and the angels possess a fine, ethereal body of their own, Saint Theophan the Recluse answered with this treatise, defending the Church’s ancient confession that they are pure spirit — bodiless and immaterial. Marshalling the Fathers, then the Scriptures, then reason itself, he weighs the new opinion word by word and finds it wanting.

The Soul and the Angel Are Not Body but Spirit

Theophan the Recluse

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Творения иже во святых отца нашего Феофана Затворника. — М.: Изд. Афонского Русского Пантелеимонова монастыря (дореволюционное издание, переизд.).

Cover: The Dnieper in the Morning (1881) by Arkhip Kuindzhi (Russian, 1842–1910), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:dusha_i_angel:en:1

Introduction

The Author

Georgy Vasilievich Govorov—the man the Church remembers as Saint Theophan the Recluse—was born on 10 January 1815 in the village of Chernavsk, in the Oryol province of central Russia, into the household of a parish priest. He was raised in the piety of the rural clergy, schooled first in his own diocese, and in 1837 entered the Kiev Theological Academy, one of the great centers of Russian learning, where the nearness of the ancient Monastery of the Caves left its mark on him. Before completing his studies he received monastic tonsure, taking the name Theophan, and in 1841 he was ordained. There followed two decades in the teaching Church: he served as rector of ecclesiastical schools in Kiev, as rector of the seminary at Novgorod, and as professor and assistant inspector at the Saint Petersburg Academy, and for a season he was attached to the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, a sojourn in the Christian East that deepened his taste for the older, contemplative forms of monastic life.

Academic administration never satisfied him, and his true vocation lay elsewhere. On 9 May 1859 he was consecrated Bishop of Tambov, and in 1863 he was translated to the see of Vladimir. Yet after only a few years as a ruling hierarch he asked to be released from the burdens of governance. In 1866 he withdrew to the Vysha Monastery in the Tambov region, a quiet house he had come to love, and there he remained for the rest of his life—some twenty-eight years, much of it in strict reclusion, living in two small rooms with a chapel of his own, giving himself to prayer, to the Liturgy, and to an immense labor of writing. From that seclusion came the works for which he is chiefly loved: letters of spiritual direction, expositions of the inner Christian life, guides to prayer, and, above all, his Russian rendering of the Philokalia, which carried the ascetical wisdom of the Fathers to a wide modern readership. His particular gift was to make that ancient wisdom speak in the plain idiom of his own century. He reposed on 6 January 1894, and is commemorated on 10 January. In 1988 he was numbered among the saints by the Russian Orthodox Church, glorified at the Local Council held to mark the thousandth anniversary of the Baptism of Rus’.

Theophan is remembered first as a master of the interior life, a teacher of prayer and repentance rather than a systematic dogmatician. The present treatise shows a less familiar side of him: the trained theologian, at home in the Fathers and in the confessional documents of his Church, taking up a contested question of doctrine with patience, rigor, and a scholar’s care for the exact sense of a text.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

This is one of the few works of Theophan written for a single, datable occasion, and its origin lies in a friendly disagreement between two of the most revered spiritual writers of nineteenth-century Russia. In 1863 there appeared A Word on Death (Slovo o smerti) by Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov), a celebrated ascetical author and, like Theophan, later numbered among the saints. Ignatius’s book is a searching meditation on dying and on what awaits the soul beyond death—its separation from the body, its passage through the unseen world, its encounter with angels and with demons, the tradition’s sober depiction of the soul’s testing after death in what are called the aerial toll-houses. Within that work, and more fully in a Supplement (Pribavlenie) that he wrote to answer its early critics, Ignatius advanced a striking claim: that created spirits—the souls of men and the angels alike—are not wholly immaterial. They possess, he held, a fine, ethereal, bodily nature proper to themselves; God alone is Spirit without qualification, and no creature can be spirit in the absolute sense in which He is. Ignatius rested this reading on certain passages of the Fathers and on a pastoral conviction close to his heart: that the reality of the unseen world must be kept vivid and concrete against the rationalizing temper of the age.

The claim did not go unremarked. Critical notes appeared in the journal The Wanderer (Strannik) in 1863, and the exchange unfolded against a wider background that the treatise itself names—the contemporary vogue for spiritism, with its talk of a fine “envelope” around the soul (the language of Allan Kardec) and the counter-claim of another spiritist writer, Pierart, that the soul simply is an ethereal body. It was into this current that the question of a subtle corporeality of created spirit had drifted.

Theophan’s reply, The Soul and the Angel Are Not Body but Spirit, was first published in 1867. Its purpose is stated in its title and never wavers: to defend what he took to be the Church’s ancient confession that the soul and the angels are pure spirit, bodiless and immaterial, and to test the newer opinion against the three authorities to which its defenders had themselves appealed—the Fathers, the Scriptures, and the reasonings of the mind. It is essential to see what the work is not. It is not an assault on Ignatius, whom Theophan treats throughout with reserve and evident respect; elsewhere he commended Ignatius’s writings warmly, and he opens this very treatise by recommending them, with a single reservation touching only the article on death. He weighs an opinion, not a man. And the question he weighs was—and remains—an open one: the Church has not defined it as dogma. Two saints read the same Fathers and drew different conclusions about the mode of a created spirit’s existence, and the disagreement between them belongs to the realm of theological opinion, the theologoumena, rather than to the settled boundaries of the faith.

Argument & Structure

The treatise moves in six unhurried stages, and its architecture mirrors the order of authorities its opponents had claimed: after setting the question, Theophan examines the Fathers, then the Scriptures, and only last the arguments of reason.

The opening chapter lays out the terms of the dispute. Theophan sets down the new teaching in its own words—angels and souls are fine, ethereal bodies, furnished with members after the likeness of the visible man, the gross body serving as a garment for the subtle one—and he distinguishes it sharply from the older and milder view, long held by some, that souls and angels are spirits merely clothed in a fine envelope. Both of those older positions, he grants, still confess a spiritual being at the core of man and angel; the new opinion, by contrast, makes the ethereal body itself the thing that thinks, wills, and fears God. Against it he sets the confessional documents of his Church—the Orthodox Confession, in its answers to the eighteenth and nineteenth questions, and the standard Russian catechism of his day—which call the angels bodiless spirits and the soul a spiritual and immortal being, and range them within an “intellectual” or noetic world set over against the material. To deny materiality of the soul, he argues, is to deny all materiality, the fine no less than the gross, for the subtlety of a substance does not make it immaterial: however rarefied, ether is still matter. He closes the chapter by accepting his opponents’ own division of the ground and proposing to take it up in turn.

The long central portion—three successive chapters—is a patient gathering of the Fathers. Theophan begins with the two witnesses on whom the new teaching most relied, John of Damascus and Macarius of Egypt, reading each not in excerpt but in the full context of his teaching. Where the Damascene calls the angelic nature “bodiless and immaterial” only “in comparison with us”—since all things, set beside the incomparable God, appear gross and material—Theophan shows this to be a qualification, not a denial: the same Father plainly calls angels intellectual, formless, undimensioned, present in a place without being circumscribed by it, and created before all bodily things. The difficult passage in Macarius, which seems to call every creature a body, he handles with equal care, noting that the manuscripts and editions themselves append a caution that it is to be read in a relative and not an absolute sense, and observing that a single obscure text of one Father, even read at its strongest, cannot outweigh the consensus of the whole. From these he passes to Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom, and then to a wider company—Cyril of Alexandria, Athanasius, Methodius, Cassian, Augustine, Theodoret, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory of Nyssa—drawing out a recurring principle of reading: when the Fathers call a spirit “subtle,” or loosely “bodily,” they mean that it is not the tangible flesh of this visible world, not that it is a body in any strict sense.

Only then does Theophan turn to the Scriptures, gathering the passages that the Church has long treated as the sedes doctrinae, the seat of the teaching, on the spiritual nature of souls and angels, and weighing what the texts adduced on the other side will and will not bear. The final chapter meets the new teaching on its own chosen ground, the reasonings of the mind. He takes up the argument that only God can be spirit, since a created spirit would rival His incomparable majesty—answering that every good found in creatures is a limited share of what is infinite and full in God, so that a creature may be truly spiritual while remaining bounded and finite after its own manner. He takes up the argument from the soul’s union with the body—that soul and body must share a common materiality, an “affinity,” or they could not act upon one another—and answers it with a distinction that is the constructive heart of the book: besides material affinity there is a dynamic or intensive affinity, a unity of forms and laws of action. The soul, he proposes, is not an abstract force but a real one, existing among other realities, endowed for its activity with laws answering to those of the body it forms and quickens; and so it can act upon matter and be acted upon by it without itself being matter.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

Beneath the particular nineteenth-century controversy lies a question as old as Christian reflection and older still: what manner of being is the soul that thinks, and the angel that stands before God? Theophan’s treatise is a sustained attempt to answer it with the whole apparatus of the tradition, and its significance is twofold—in what it defends and in the manner of its defending.

What it defends is the plain confession that the soul and the angels are spirit: immortal, immaterial, unbounded by the properties of matter, and yet, as creatures, finite and localized after a spiritual and not a corporeal manner. Around this confession Theophan builds a small positive anthropology—a doctrine of the soul as a real and active spiritual substance, present to its body without being extended through it, capable of commerce with the material world by likeness of law rather than sameness of stuff. In this he is consciously answering not only a theological opponent but the larger currents of his century: the materialism that would dissolve the soul into the organization of the body, and the spiritism that would clothe it in an ethereal double. His book stands as a work of Christian theological anthropology addressed to a modernizing age.

The manner of its defending is where a reader must tread with the same care Theophan himself shows. The disagreement he engages is not one in which the Church has spoken a final word. She confesses the soul immortal and spiritual and the angels bodiless; she affirms the soul’s conscious survival, its accountability after death, and the reality of its testing at the soul’s passage—the shared ground on which both writers stood without dispute. But whether “spirit” excludes every trace of a subtle corporeality, or admits the fine, created materiality that Ignatius described, she has not defined. This is precisely a theologoumenon, a matter of pious theological opinion, and it is best received as one. Ignatius (Brianchaninov) is himself a canonized saint and one of the most beloved ascetical masters of the Russian Church, who advanced his view learnedly and in devotion to the concreteness of the unseen world; Theophan, who esteemed his writings, thought the opinion mistaken and said so with reasons. The two remain what they were before their exchange and after it—two holy hierarchs, glorified together by the same Church in the same year, who agreed in the great realities of death and judgment and differed over the metaphysics of created spirit. The lasting value of this treatise lies as much in the discipline of its method—read the Fathers whole, weigh the consensus above the single voice, keep the confession clear—as in the conclusion it presses.

Reception & Influence

The exchange between the two bishops became one of the more memorable theological debates of nineteenth-century Russian religious thought, and it has continued to draw the attention of students of Christian anthropology, who return to it as a model case of how two saints may read a shared inheritance differently. It has not been forgotten that both men were glorified together in 1988, nor that Theophan, even as he contested this one opinion, held Ignatius’s ascetical work in high and lasting regard. The question they joined over—the nature of the soul and of the angels—remains genuinely open in the tradition, and the treatise is read today less as a verdict than as one saint’s careful, sympathetic, and learned statement of the case for the soul’s pure spirituality.

The Text & This Edition

This edition presents The Soul and the Angel Are Not Body but Spirit in a fresh, readable modern English rendered directly from Theophan’s Russian. The translation was made from the text of his collected works—the edition of the Russian Saint Panteleimon Monastery on Mount Athos, as preserved in the widely used digital text of that edition—following the treatise as Theophan first published it in 1867. It carries the argument into plain contemporary English rather than borrowing the phrasing of any earlier version.

A few conventions of this edition are worth noting. The house practice is traditional attribution: Theophan the Recluse is named as the author and as the saint the Church receives, and Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov) is likewise named as the Church receives him; those who prepared this English text are credited as translators, never as authors. Theophan quotes the Fathers and the Scriptures constantly, and throughout he does so in his own Slavonic and Synodal Russian wording; those citations have been rendered from his wording as they stand in his argument, not conformed to any English Bible, so that the reader hears the texts as he heard and weighed them. Scripture references are given in the modern Arabic style (for example, Ps. 103:4). The translation is English-only; the trailing liturgical material and the digital source’s own editorial annotations, which form no part of the treatise, have not been included.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader new to the work will find the whole of it opened by its first chapter, which states the question plainly and sets the two views side by side; it is worth reading slowly. The three chapters on the Fathers are the longest stretch and reward patience, for their real subject is a way of reading—how to hear what a Father means when he calls a spirit “subtle” or “bodily.” The closing chapter, on the arguments of reason, is where the philosophy of the book lives and where Theophan makes his own positive proposal. Above all, the treatise is best read as its author would have wished it read: as one saint’s earnest reasoning on a question the Church has left open, and in company with the writings of the saint whose opinion he here weighs, honoring both.

The Soul and the Angel Are Not Body but Spirit

“Should one read the writings of His Grace Ignatius? Read them… Only do not read the article on death, and even then not all of it, but only a few pages at the beginning, where he says that the soul and the angel are bodily…” Bishop Theophan, Collected Letters, vol. 1, p. 187.

In 1863 there appeared in print “A Discourse on Death,” a discourse most edifying, yet in which there were put forth among other things opinions little known in the Christian world, such as, for example, the opinion concerning the materiality of the nature of the soul and of angels. In “The Wanderer” for September 1863 there were published brief but forceful notes against this novelty. These notes provoked counter-notes, which appeared as a separate booklet bearing the title “Supplement to the Discourse on Death.” The aim of the “Supplement” was to gather more evidence in support of all the views criticized in the “Discourse on Death,” and especially regarding the opinion concerning the materiality of the nature of the soul and of angels.

Whether anyone has examined these proofs, I cannot say. Yet it is evident that the idea concerning the materiality of the nature of the soul and of angels has been accepted and appeared to someone to be very firmly demonstrated. Entering into dispute with the spiritists, he contended against Kardec, who maintains that the soul possesses a fine material envelope, in defense of another spiritist, Pierart, who asserted that what Kardec considers an envelope is in fact the soul itself: the soul is an ethereal body and nothing more. To give more weight to his defense of Pierart, the author added that his view has been conclusively proven among us as well, namely in the aforementioned articles. This is what gave rise to the desire to examine whether it is truly proven. I have examined all the assertions and quotations of the articles in support of this view down to the smallest detail and have found no support for it anywhere; on the contrary, everywhere the articles thought to find confirmation of their idea, I encountered positions completely contrary to it. The conclusion of my inquiries I present to the attention of lovers of spiritual reading, who, if they do not weary of reviewing them, will be assured that this novelty, the materiality of the soul and of angels, is not proved at all, and that the ancient truth remains in full force and unshakable as before: that the soul and the angel are not body but spirit.

The essence of the new teaching consists in the following: “Angels and souls, though exceedingly fine in their nature, are nonetheless bodies. They are fine bodies, ethereal bodies, whereas, on the other hand, our earthly bodies are very material and gross. The gross human body serves as a garment for the fine body that is the soul. Eyes, ears, hands, feet, belonging to the soul, are covered by similar members of the body. When the soul separates from the body through death, it removes it as if it were clothing. Angels, like the soul, have members—a head, eyes, mouth, breast, hands, feet, hair—in short, the complete likeness of the visible human in his body. God alone is Spirit. There is no being consubstantial with God. And therefore, besides God, there is no other being spiritual by nature.”

Someone will ask: then to whom do consciousness, freedom, reasoning, the fear of God, and conscience belong in us (and in angels)? To the same fine ethereal body, which is the soul.

“Wise men understood that man is distinguished from animals by an inner quality, by a special faculty of the human soul. This faculty they called the power of reason, properly the spirit. Included here are not only the capacity for thought but also the capacity for spiritual sensations, such as: the sense of the sublime, the sense of beauty, the sense of virtue.”

But is not this faculty, properly called spirit, a special, non-material force dwelling in a fine ethereal body, which is also the soul, as a special spiritual being clothed in an ethereal body? No. Then there would indeed be a purely spiritual being among created things, and this cannot be allowed. Moreover, then it should be said that at the death of a man there goes forth from the body a spiritual being clothed in an ethereal body as in a covering; and accordingly of angels too it should be said that they are spirits clothed in an ethereal body. This must be decisively rejected, for the holy Fathers did not hold that angels are clothed in a fine body, but rather regarded their very substance, their very essence as a certain fine body. The same applies to souls.

Thus the fine ethereal body, that is, matter, now reasons, knows itself, acts freely, shows conscience and the fear of God, and in general displays all those spiritual actions which reasonable people could never and cannot attribute to matter.

I purposely present all these aspects of the new teaching so that the principal thought whose proof is to be expected may be evident.

Hitherto, as is known, there have been and are two opinions regarding the mode of existence of the soul and of angels: some have thought and do think that souls and angels are spiritual beings clothed in a fine material envelope; others have maintained and do maintain that souls and angels are pure spirits having no envelope at all. According to the first opinion, in the constitution of man a spiritual being is mediated in union with this gross body through a fine, ethereal body, and what departs from the body at the death of a man is a spirit clothed in an ethereal or generally fine material envelope; similarly too an angel, whether appearing or existing in his own realm, is also a spirit clothed in a like envelope. This mode of representing the existence of soul and angel is the most convenient for understanding, perfectly reconciling with all the narratives of the apparitions of angels and souls and easily resolving all questions pertaining to this matter. According to the second opinion, spirit is not some abstract mental notion but a being really existing among other realities, which by virtue of this reality of its existence enters directly into union with the body in man and into action upon the external world in angels.

Of these two opinions, let whoever wishes hold whichever he wishes. For in both the first and the second, what is essential in the angel and in man—that which thinks, acts freely, knows itself—is recognized as a spiritual being; and this is what the teaching on the nature of the soul and of angels must chiefly insist upon. But the opinion expressed in the “Discourse on Death” and supported in its “Supplement” cannot be tolerated. It is ultra-materialism, or materialism that has transcended its own bounds. True materialism fears to admit the separate existence of the soul, knowing that logic will inevitably compel it to recognize thereafter its spirituality as well, since it is impossible to attribute to matter all those phenomena and actions which the soul is considered to produce. Therefore strict materialism says that the soul, as a separate being, does not exist in man; all that is attributed to it is merely a reflection of the harmonious organization of the body. Though consciousness, sharply distinguishing itself from the body and acting independently of it, loudly testifies against this and relentlessly presses upon materialism, still it does not go further, from a sense of self-preservation. For if it merely says that the soul exists separately, it must immediately also acknowledge its spirituality; and this means attacking its own very life. So it persists. The view of our booklets is bolder, and this is, of course, because they did not set themselves face to face with the question: how to explain the thoroughly spiritual actions of the soul when it is an ethereal body? Only in one place, as we have already seen, is it casually said that thought and other higher manifestations of spirituality are faculties of the soul, as people ordinarily say, having seemingly forgotten their own position that our soul is ether—nothing more, that very ether from which the exact sciences derive light, heat, electricity, and so forth. How much incongruity is there in this—it is obvious. But we shall return to this subject again.

Thus an unusual opinion is formulated, and it is formulated not in the name of science (though it is given a small part here), the demands of which it is customary to invoke, rightly or wrongly, but according to the principles of holy Christian faith, on the basis of the Word of God and the writings of the Fathers. The question arises: has the question of the nature of the soul and of angels not been decided in the Church of God before now? It has been decided, and decided very clearly.

In the “Orthodox Confession,” in answer to question 18, we read: “God is the Creator of visible and invisible creation… and He created that intellectual world… then this material world… and finally man, composed of a non-material and rational soul and a material body. The very same is the Creator of both worlds, the immaterial and the material.” And in answer to question 19 it is directly stated that angels are spirits.

In the “Comprehensive Christian Catechism,” in the first article, to the question: “what is to be understood in the Symbol of Faith by the name of invisible things,” the answer is: “the invisible or spiritual world, to which angels belong.” To the question: “what are angels,” it is said: “bodiless spirits, endowed with mind, will, and might.” In the same article the question: “what is the breath of life breathed by God into man at his creation,” is resolved thus: “the soul, a spiritual and immortal being.”

From this there follow these irrefutable propositions: angels are invisible bodiless spirits, constituting the intellectual world, opposed to the material; souls too are spiritual and rational beings, invisible and immaterial.

Thus, according to the teaching of the holy Orthodox Church, in the nature of souls and angels materiality is decidedly denied, and, it must be understood, all materiality, not merely gross but also fine, because the fineness of matter does not make it immaterial. However fine ether may be, no one will call it immaterial; consequently, in denying materiality in the nature of soul and angels, the holy Church denies their ethereality as well. If by the words: “soul and angels are invisible, immaterial,” it was to be understood only that they do not possess gross materiality, tangible and visible, then this would certainly have been clarified so that Christians, instructed in the truths of Orthodox faith, could have exact concepts of the nature of soul and angels, without omitting such essential characteristics. But since this has not been done, we are obliged to give these words a general affirmative sense, especially since the words stand: “intellectual world,” “rational souls,”—terms which no one has applied or does apply to any material body, however fine it may be conceived. When angels are called the intellectual or noetic world, this suggests that just as thought has nothing material, so the nature of the intelligent angels has nothing material, and together with them, neither do the rational souls.

Such teaching is preached and taught everywhere among us: from the church pulpit, in seminaries, in academies, in universities, in gymnasia, and in all schools—everywhere that the catechism is read. Everyone among us confesses that souls and angels are spiritual beings.

How then: if such is the teaching and if all Orthodox believe thus, does it not follow that the view set forth in the booklets goes against the teaching of the Church and against universal Christian belief? Evidently it does. But the authors of the booklets do not recognize this. They do not at all think that they are departing from an immutable truth; rather, they are convinced that they are interpreting the authentic teaching of the Church, which our theologians, they say, have corrupted by studying almost exclusively from Western textbooks and not troubling to verify what is studied in them by the authentic documents of Orthodox truth. They adopt such a tone as if they are indeed discovering anew a truth that has been changed into falsehood. And since against such an assertion stands the obvious fact of their own departure from Orthodox teaching and the common understanding of these matters, they hasten from almost the first words to turn aside the possible unfavorable opinion that might arise from this by a special interpretation of the words: “invisible,” “immaterial,” “spiritual,” by which all distinguish souls and angels from other beings.

These words, they say, should not be understood in their proper sense. Souls and angels are invisible only to our gross senses; in themselves, in their nature, they are visible, and are indeed truly visible when someone’s eyes are opened to see them. Similarly, when they are called spiritual, this does not denote a special quality of their nature but expresses the same thing as the word invisible. “Although both Scripture and the Holy Fathers of the Church in general call both God a spirit, and angels, and demons, and human souls—spirits, yet this expresses only that God, like angels, demons, and souls, are invisible to our bodily eyes. They are called bodiless and immaterial for the reason that they are not subject to our senses and thus are distinguished from the category of objects of matter subject to our senses. In common usage, which learned men also employ outside their studies, what is subject to our senses is called material, and what is not subject—spiritual, immaterial. Common usage is employed most by Scripture and the Holy Fathers because the aim of Scripture and the Fathers was that the word proclaimed by them should be easily understood by all people.” (“Supplement to the Discourse…”)

It turns out that just as when we speak of the sun: “it rises and sets,” we say one thing but think another; so too when we speak of soul and angels: “invisible,” “immaterial,” “spiritual,” we must understand by this something other than what the words express, and not merely something different but something completely opposite—namely: by invisible to understand visibility, by immaterial to understand materiality, by spiritual to understand subtle corporeality. Is such an interpretation lawful? Why, in ordinary speech, even scholars speak of the sun: “it rises and sets”; but when the subject itself is at issue, or when one must answer the question: “does the sun stand still or move,” then even non-scholars nowadays answer that it stands still, and its motion is an illusion of sight. But regarding souls and angels, both in the studies of scholars and in books and in conversations, always and by everyone are the words: “invisible, immaterial, spiritual,” united with direct meaning, and as they say so they think—that they are immaterial and spiritual. In the book “Knowledge of the World of God,” written for the people, although everywhere it speaks of the sun and stars: “they rise and set,” yet in its place it is explained that they stand still and it is shown why they appear to move. But concerning the soul and angels, in no catechism, when the discourse turns to their nature, is it explained that their invisibility is merely apparent, and their spirituality—subtle corporeality. Until now it has never occurred to anyone to see figurative speech in these words. Why? Because in regard to angels and souls the illusion of sight or reasoning has not yet been demonstrated. Regarding the sun, before the discovery of its standing still, no one even thought that it stands still, and everyone was as convinced as they spoke—that it moves. Then, when it was discovered that it stands still, speech indeed remained the same, but thought changed. Thus it is proper to do concerning the soul and angels. First it must be shown that they are material and bodily, and then it can be interpreted that if they are spoken of as immaterial and spiritual.

Whether the new teaching has revealed materiality in what was considered immaterial, and subtle corporeality in what was considered spiritual, will be shown by the examination of the foundations upon which it rests, which we now undertake.

These foundations are set forth in full detail in the “Supplement to the Discourse on Death.” Here, on the very first pages, in order to hide that they are rising up against the teaching that prevails among us, quotations are given from a certain Western theologian, which are then refuted: thus the appearance is given that not the teaching of our Church is subjected to criticism but that of the West. We pass over without special comment this diversion and quote only the final lines from this section of the “Supplement”: “The Western writer thinks to base his opinion on Scripture, on the Fathers of the Church, and on science. In these three respects we,” it is said in the booklet, “are obliged to present a satisfactory refutation of it.” By these final words the new teaching on the materiality of soul and angels claims that it has support for itself both in the Word of God, and in the Holy Fathers, and in science, or generally in the considerations of sound reason. Under these three headings we too shall gather all the thoughts and testimonies with which this teaching surrounds itself. Let us, however, permit ourselves to deviate somewhat from the order which the aforementioned article follows, and first examine the testimonies adduced from the Holy Fathers; then we shall pass to an examination of the testimonies from the Word of God and, finally, to the scientific considerations of reason.

Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

We shall pay attention to the teaching of the Holy Fathers on this subject not only of those whose testimonies are literally cited in the booklet but also of all those to whom it refers in some way, hinting that it might have them on its side. Before all others we shall subject to examination the testimonies of the holy John of Damascus and the holy Macarius of Egypt, since they are the principal ones in this matter; then we shall turn to the teaching of the ecumenical great teachers and hierarchs—Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom; and afterward to all the other holy Fathers: Athanasius the Great, Cyril of Alexandria, Methodius, Cassian, Augustine the Blessed, Theodoret, Maximus the Confessor, and Gregory of Nyssa. Of all the patristic testimonies with which the new teaching wishes to fortify itself, only the testimonies of the holy John of Damascus and Macarius of Egypt can it somehow claim as its own. The testimonies of other holy Fathers cited by it do not speak of what it wishes; meanwhile in other places the Fathers clearly pronounce judgments completely contrary to it. Consequently, we need only remove the weight of proof from these first testimonies and the new teaching will remain without proofs in this regard.

I begin with the holy John of Damascus. Properly speaking, he alone is a weighty witness, deliberately reasoning about the nature of angels, whereas the holy Macarius expresses his opinion in passing. The opinion of the holy Damascus, in his own words, is very briefly set forth, as it is cited only in the “Discourse on Death,” while in the “Supplement” it is taken from a work on dogmatic theology, a textbook where it is, by the requirements of system, expressed rather as a paraphrase. But in excerpts what do you see? One must read all the teaching of the holy Damascus concerning angels in connection, and it will become clear that the holy Damascus holds thoughts quite different from those held by the new teaching.

Thus, in Book 2 on the Orthodox faith, in chapter 3, we read: “He (God) is the Creator and Maker of angels, bringing them from non-existence into being, creating them after His image—a bodiless nature, as it were a certain spirit and incorporeal fire, as the divine David says: ‘«Who makes His angels spirits and His servants a consuming fire»’ (Ps. 103:4).”

Note these words: “a bodiless nature, as it were a certain spirit and incorporeal fire.” The holy Damascus speaks here in precisely the same words as the holy Gregory the Theologian who, having said: “as it were a certain spirit and incorporeal fire,” and fearing lest anyone be led into error by these words and attribute to angels some sort of materiality, added: “by spirit and by fire is this nature (of angels) called, partly as intellectual, partly as purifying (and not as something material, though ever so fine); because the first essence (God) also receives these same names” (Discourse 28 at the end). See what the thought of the holy Theologian is? Just as in God, when He is called spirit and fire, one must not see anything material, so nothing material must be seen in angels either, when they are similarly called. Such is the thought also of the holy Damascus: that is, neither did he see anything material in angels, so calling them.

Further, in the same place we read: “Thus an angel is an intellectual nature, ever-moving, self-directed, bodiless, serving God, having received immortality by grace in its nature, and of which nature both the appearance and the measure are known only to its Creator. It is called bodiless and immaterial inasmuch as it is placed in comparison with us: for all things, when placed in comparison with God, the one beyond comparison, prove to be gross and material. Alone the Divinity is properly immaterial and bodiless.” Here is the main passage upon which the new teaching thinks to rely. Let us pause on it with full attention in order to determine whether there is here a decisive teaching about the materiality of the angelic nature or not. I assert that such a teaching is not here, and I advance this assertion, first, from an examination of the passage itself, second, from comparing it with other passages in the same chapter.

Does the passage itself say decisively that an angel is body, as the new teaching wishes? It does not. It says only that if one places the angelic nature in comparison with God, it proves to be gross and material, while remaining immaterial in itself (for this is the main position of this Father’s teaching on angels). It says: being compared, that is, when you look upon the angelic nature after contemplating God’s nature, which is compared with nothing, then it proves to be gross and material; similarly, I add, as when one has entered from a brightly sun-lit courtyard into a room not so brightly lit, one finds it dark, or as when a hand warmed in hot water touches lukewarm water, one finds it cold. But just as one who in the stated cases regarded the room as dark and the water as cold will later acknowledge the room as light when the eye is freed from the impression of bright sunlight, and the water as warm when the heated hand cools, acknowledging, that is, that there is no absence of light in the room and of heat in the water as appeared to him; so also regarding angels, when they are viewed directly, one cannot but acknowledge that they are spirits. Such is the thought of the holy Damascus. He does not deny the spirituality of angels and souls but only affirms that their spirituality is such that if compared with God’s it will appear gross. In human speech there are very many such turns of phrase. Generally, both the holy Damascus and other holy Fathers, when after the contemplation of God they turn their minds to creatures, see nothing essentially solid in the latter, though by the gift of God the Creator they possess many perfections. There are immortal creatures, but in comparison with God no one is immortal (the holy Damascus in the same chapter); there are simple creatures, but in comparison with God nothing is simple (Basil the Great, vol. 6, p. 27); there are good creatures, but in comparison with God no one is good; finally, all creation possesses being given to it by God, but in comparison with God, Who alone is “«He Who Is»” (Ex. 3:14), all are as it were a phantom and nothing. But just as in the latter cases the creatures are not denied being, simplicity, or immortality in the degree proper to them; so in the first case the immateriality of angels is not denied, even though they are acknowledged to appear material if compared with God’s nature. In the creatures of God, being, simplicity, goodness, immortality exist only by the Grace of God (understood, of course, the grace of creation), yet they do exist in their nature, as the holy Damascus affirms concerning the immortality of angels: “having received immortality by grace in its nature.” Accordingly, he still recognizes the angelic nature as immortal. Precisely thus should one interpret also his concept of the immateriality of angels, that is, that it does exist in them, though it exists by grace and in a degree compatible with creatureliness. When, for instance, he says (in the same Book, chapter 12, in the teaching on man), that what is bodiless, invisible, and formless is, on the one hand, according to nature as God, and on the other hand by grace, such as angels, demons, and souls, how can one doubt that he recognized these latter, each in its kind, as immaterial and bodiless?

Thus, those who, wishing to express the thought of the holy Damascus on the nature of angels and souls, straight out say that he recognized them as immaterial only in comparison with us, act most unjustly. The direct thought of the holy Damascus is that they are intellectual beings, immaterial, bodiless; the thought that they are such in comparison with us is stated in qualification, and this is not the same as stating it directly. In the passage cited he positively testifies to the immateriality of the angelic nature, and then makes a qualification regarding the relativity of this immateriality.

He expresses even more clearly his principal thought on the angelic nature when in chapter 12 of the same Book he proceeds to the teaching on man. “Thus,” he says, “God created an intellectual nature, that is, angels, and all the heavenly ranks,” implying that, according to his teaching, they are of intellectual nature rather than bodily. Here is his main assertion about angels.

The qualification moreover about comparative spirituality only guards against anyone equating the nature of angels with the nature of God: for though angels are godlike, they are not of one essence with God. Accordingly, the new teaching relies in vain on the passage of the holy John of Damascus that we have cited. It does not contain the thought which this teaching wishes to find in it. In drawing from it a decisive conclusion about the materiality of the nature of angels and souls, the teaching commits an error in reasoning.

Now observe what the holy Damascus further says concerning angels, and you will agree that in no way can one presume in him the thought of the materiality of the angelic nature. Listen, for example, to how the holy Damascus explains the mutual communion of angels with one another.

“Angels,” he says, “are intellectual lights, secondary to the first and originless light, possessing enlightenment, not needing language or hearing, but transmitting their thoughts and desires to one another without spoken language (proforicon)” (Book 2, chapter 3).

What materiality is there here? If the holy Damascus recognized them as material, he would have said that angels have language, eyes, and other members, see one another, speak with one another, and visit one another. This is how the new teaching recognizes angels as material—by affirming that they have a head, eyes, mouth, breast, hands, feet, and hair, in short, everything that man has. If the holy Damascus admits nothing of the sort but, on the contrary, explains the mutual communion of angels in a spiritual, intellectual manner, then it is evident that he does not recognize angels as material. Listen further to how the holy Damascus understands the relation of angels to place.

“As minds, they exist in intellectual places, being not circumscribed like bodies: for by their nature they have neither form nor shape like bodies, nor three dimensions, but intellectually are present and act where they are commanded, and cannot at the same time both be and act here and there” (Ibid).

This completely frees the nature of angels from those gross forms in which the new teaching represents them, based on apparitions of angels and transferring the form of appearance to the form of nature. But the holy Damascus teaches that although angels are not in heaven when they are sent to earth, and although they cannot at the same time be here and there; yet when they are in some place, they are not so as to be circumscribed there by some form extended in height, length, and breadth. Such dimensions they do not have; neither do they have any form, as is proper to bodies. Therefore one can say only that they are here and not there, that they exercise their action here and not there. So that you may not think I am arbitrarily interpreting the words of the holy Damascus concerning the relation of angels to place, which he calls an “intellectual” place, I quote how the holy Damascus himself understands this “intellectual place”.

“Now the intellectual place is that where the intellectual and bodiless nature is contemplated and exists, where it is present and acts intellectually and not physically or like bodies. For it does not have form, so as to be circumscribed physically” (Book 1, chapter 13).

Thus does the bodiless exist in a certain place. It exists, is present, acts, but does not occupy it and is not circumscribed by it. And here are further his own words, specifically about the angelic place.

“An angel is not contained in a place like bodies, so as to take on some form or shape. But it is said that he is in a certain place for the reason that he is intellectually present in it and acts according to his nature, and that at the same time he is not in another place, but there he is intellectually present where he also acts. For he cannot at the same time act in different places” (Ibid).

But if thus, according to the holy Damascus, angels do not occupy a place and are not circumscribed by it, if they do not have any extension or form; then evidently, according to his teaching too, they do not have any materiality, however fine one might imagine it; because nothing material can exist without these attributes; and what does not have them is not material. But the new teaching, as soon as it recognized angels as material, immediately began to insist that they are subject to space, have form, are bounded by their limits and extremities, have their appearance (“Discourse on Death”), thus insisting on something completely contrary to what the holy Damascus affirms.

But there is yet another passage in the holy Damascus unfavorable to the new teaching, namely concerning the time of the creation of angels.

“Some assert,” he says, “that angels were created before all creation, as the holy Gregory the Theologian also says: ‘First God conceived the angelic, heavenly powers, and the thought became deed…’ I fully agree with the Theologian. For it was necessary that the intellectual nature be created first, then the sensible nature, and finally man, who alone partakes of both.” (Book 1, chapter 13).

Basil the Great holds exactly the same opinion. Here we have three witnesses! And by “«the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established»” (2 Cor. 13:1). But which word? Not the word of the new teaching, surely, but ours. For if angels were created before all material and bodily things without exception, how can one think that they are body, even subtle body? The holy Fathers do not say that subtle bodies—angels—were created first, and then other gross bodies; rather they assert universally that angels were created before any material creature. Consequently, according to their teaching, one should see absolutely nothing material in angels.

Thus I conclude regarding the testimony adduced from the holy Damascus in proof of the opinion concerning the materiality of the soul and of angels, that from the examination of the passage itself and from a consideration of the general teaching of the holy Damascus on angels, it follows irrefutably that the holy John of Damascus had no thought of the materiality of the soul and the angel. Therefore the new teaching cannot point to the holy John as its patron and predecessor who laid down its first principles.

I turn now to the testimony adduced from the holy Macarius the Great.

“The boundless, inaccessible, and uncreated God,” says the holy Macarius, “by His boundless and ineffable goodness has embodied Himself and, so to speak, made Himself small in His unapproachable glory, so that He could enter into union with His invisible creatures, namely the souls of the saints and the angels, and they might be able to partake of the life of the Divinity. Yet every creature, whether angel, soul, or demon, is according to its own nature a body, because although they are refined, nevertheless in their essence, by their distinctive features and in form, corresponding to the refinement of their nature, they are subtle bodies, whereas our body is grossly substantial in its essence.” (Homily 4, chapter 9).

Viewing this passage in connection with what precedes and follows it, one must say that it is very difficult to arrive at the true thought of the holy Macarius. From certain phrases one might think that here too there is not the thought which the “Discourse on Death” wishes to find. However, even if someone were to prove that the holy Macarius held precisely the opinion connected with his words, still we would maintain the general principle that a private opinion belonging to one Father cannot express the teaching of the Church and is binding on no one, and we would remain calmly with the ancient opinion.

Consider that in not a single edition of the writings of the holy Macarius does this passage remain without a special note. Both in the present edition of the Moscow Academy and in previous translations, there is a notation below this passage that it should be understood not in an absolute sense but in a relative sense. This means that among us this passage has never been understood literally. The articles we are examining were the first to give it a literal meaning.

If we now reason about this matter according to the principles of the Church, where the consensus of opinion prevails over private judgment, we must conclude that the holy Macarius has no thought of the materiality of the soul and the angel, because heretofore no one has seen such a thought in him. Only the “Discourse on Death” has begun to impose such a thought on the holy Macarius. This is indeed a private judgment which, one must wonder, has dared to appear among the Orthodox, none of whom have ever looked at this passage in this way.

After this general remark I shall confine myself only to explaining why this passage cannot be understood literally.

Before the passage cited, the following stands: “I intend, to the best of my ability, to speak a certain subtle and profound word. Therefore hear me with understanding.”

Let us pause on this word. Do you see? The holy Macarius himself says that his discourse will not be ordinary and invites us to listen to him with care.

Judge then, what is this extraordinariness, subtlety, and profundity? What subtlety and depth is there in the words: “angel, soul, and demon are body”? If we understand them literally, they are far simpler and more straightforward than if it had been said that angel, soul, and demon are pure spirits. Would it even have been necessary in such a case to caution: “Behold, I wish to say something special”? But precisely because the words are simple, and yet a subtle and profound meaning is promised through them, they must not be understood in their proper sense. And when the holy Macarius says: “hear with understanding,” by this he surely wishes to suggest: “Beware, do not be deceived by the simplicity of the speech and do not understand it literally.” And this means the same as: “Beware, that although it says angel, soul, and demon are body, you must understand it differently.”

Let us also consider the first half of the passage cited. “The boundless, inaccessible, and uncreated God, by His boundless and ineffable goodness, has embodied Himself and made Himself small, so to speak, in His unapproachable glory, that He might be able to enter into union with the souls of the saints and the angels, and they might be able to partake of the life of the Divinity.”

The literal sense of this discourse shows that it speaks of the incarnation of the Son of God, for He made Himself small by “taking the form of a servant” (Phil. 2:7); but for what purpose did the Only-Begotten Son of God become incarnate? Surely the answer must be in the words of the Symbol of Faith: for us men and for our salvation. Why then are angels mentioned here? It is we who have fallen away from God, not they. In order to reunite us with Himself, He Himself condescends to us and becomes incarnate; but the good angels never fell, but have always remained in union with God, while the reunion of the evil ones is considered an impossible deed.

Where then is it stated that God became incarnate for union with the angels? The angels are thus placed on a level with us, and it seems that the incarnation was as necessary for them as for us. Who in the Church of God, or even outside it, has ever thought thus? In this way it is revealed that, speaking thus, the holy Macarius, a man full of the Spirit, did not know the first principles of Christian faith? This is the most direct and natural conclusion. Whoever understands this paragraph literally cannot escape this conclusion. The new teaching must either renounce the literal sense in order to preserve the honor of the holy Macarius, or, strictly adhering to the literal sense for the sake of its vain wisdom, will bring reproach upon the God-bearing Father.

We have no reason to fear such a calamity. Heeding the caution of the holy Macarius—to listen intelligently—we do not understand literally either this 9th paragraph or those that follow. In all of them there is a deep allegory which is difficult to explain. Only the general thought is evident: that the loving God is in every way ready to make Himself small in order only to enter into communion with rational creatures. But in the details many phrases here are absolutely incomprehensible.

Let them explain to us, for instance, why in the 9th paragraph it is not made clear by word that the Only-Begotten Son of God became incarnate, when this was required for precise expression? What sort of thought is there in the words: “He embodied Himself… the boundless One… in order to be able to enter into union with the souls of the saints and angels”? The souls of the saints are understandable, but the souls of angels—what are they? Following this the angels are called a subtle body. It follows, then, that according to the thought of the holy Macarius, the subtle-bodied angels have, besides a body, also a soul, or they are spirits clothed in a subtle body. It follows, then, that they are called body only because of this external aspect of their being, while being in their inner nature pure spirits. And since our souls are equal to angels, it follows that they too are called body only because of their external aspect, not because of their rational-spiritual essence. From this passage one should conclude that the holy Macarius belongs to those holy Fathers who recognized both the soul and angels as clothed in a subtle ethereal body. If that is so, then the holy Macarius is not on the side of the new teaching.

Who is not aware that the hypostatic union of Divinity with humanity exists only in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? How then in the 10th paragraph is it said that God, entering into union with believing souls, is with them “hypostasis with hypostasis”? Does this not suggest that He is hypostatically incarnate in each believer? And again, as is said right there, having made Himself small, does God clothe Himself in the members of the body just as the soul is clothed in them? This resembles the Apollinarian heresy, according to which instead of a soul in our Lord Jesus Christ the Divinity was recognized. What is this further, that in the 12th paragraph it is said of God that He transforms Himself into whatever the worthy and faithful souls desire, even into the city of light—Jerusalem, or into a mountain—the heavenly Sion? I intentionally gather all these passages together to show how dangerous it is to understand in a literal sense all the phrases contained in these paragraphs. The new teaching, strictly adhering to the literal sense, must either itself accept all these erroneous thoughts in order to show itself a student of the literal Macarius, or, protecting its own honor, bring reproach on the holy Macarius, as if he did not understand the very simplest Christian truths. It must be one or the other—but one way or the other is inevitable for it.

But if, to avoid this inexorable conclusion, it says that what is spoken of here is not the incarnation of the Word of God but rather the general drawing near of the merciful God to rational creatures, then it must agree that the word “embodied,” used repeatedly here, must be understood not in the literal but in the figurative sense. If that is so, then neither should the passage be understood literally where it is said that angel, soul, and demon are body; for otherwise, why should other passages be understood not literally while only this one literally, and precisely in order to establish a teaching never before heard in the Christian world: concerning the materiality of angels and souls; whereas in other places, precisely to avoid conceptions also never before heard in the Christian world, to this word a figurative sense is given?

Thus the general conclusion from the examination of the passage in which the holy Macarius says that angel and soul are body is that it should on no account be understood literally. But someone will say: if you do not wish to understand it literally, then tell us how it is to be understood?

I answer directly: I do not know. For with the holy Macarius there is much that is incomprehensible not only here but throughout all his writings. Wishing to bring people to an understanding of the highest spiritual truths as much as possible, he speaks of practically nothing without similes. Therefore in him there are everywhere images and comparisons, which then, in living discourse, perhaps with explanations, were understood, but now some of them cannot be understood by any means, cannot be applied to a practical matter, or explained to oneself. Therefore both to read him and to use him requires great caution. Take at least the first homily. In paragraph 2, for instance, it is said that the soul, having received the Spirit of God, becomes entirely face, entirely eye, entirely full of eyes, and has no rear or back side, but everywhere appears as face. See what a comparison! You cannot even reconcile it with itself. If the soul is entirely face, how is it entirely eye? If entirely eye, evidently one eye, how then is it full of eyes? If there is no rear side and there too is a face, how then is it one face? If behind is a face and to the left is a face, then it seems there are several faces? Is it not difficult to even imagine the simile itself, and still more difficult to understand what it means? But it is in every way evident that it cannot be understood literally. Let us remember at this point that the booklets, relying on the words of the holy Macarius, in other places affirm that the soul has all the members as the visible body does, that is, a head, eyes, ears, hands, the whole stature, feet. They understand these phrases of the holy Macarius literally, and they indeed do occur in him. But if we understand literally the passage cited just before this and insist: it is not so; in the soul there are not all parts, but it is entirely eye, or it is entirely face. If then, in order not to speak nonsense, this latter passage must be understood in a figurative sense, is it lawful to understand in its proper sense the passage adduced by the booklets, that the soul and angel have the form which a man ordinarily has? Is it lawful, again, at all to see in the words of the holy Macarius a thought concerning the materiality of the nature of soul and angels?

I am finally impelled to propose my conjecture, born from a close examination of the flow of discourse in the entire 4th homily of the holy Macarius and from comparing the content of paragraphs 9 through 13 with those preceding and following. Read the 13th paragraph. Upon reaching the last point, beginning with the words: “but the soul which has been deemed worthy to receive the power from above has the fire of heavenly life and is freed from the bonds of vice,” one cannot fail to notice that this point, though connected by the conjunction “but” with the preceding discourse of the paragraph (where it speaks of how God appears to the saints in various ways as He Himself wishes), is in complete discord with it. Upon observing this, I at first thought that this point was an addition not belonging here. But going back through paragraphs 13, 12, 11, 10, and 9—in which it is variously discussed how God in every way embodies and transforms Himself, sometimes in expressions giving a very strange sense—and stopping at the end of the 8th paragraph, I see that the end of the 13th paragraph is in complete agreement with this end of the 8th, and with the whole paragraph, where again it speaks of the receiving of the Spirit and the cleansing of our nature defiled by vice—and even in the same expressions; for just as in paragraph 8 it is said that “with much supplication, petition, with faith, with prayer…” grace is received, so also at the end of paragraph 13: “with great longing and hope, with faith and love” the power from above is received. This gave rise to the thought that the end of the 13th paragraph is separated from its own proper 8th paragraph by an insertion not belonging here.

Thus from all that has been said about the passage adduced from the homilies of the holy Macarius, it appears that it cannot afford the new teaching a firm foundation: for if it is genuine, then by the course of discourse it should not be understood literally; and if it is not genuine, then there is no point in referring to it. Is it not better, when checking one’s thoughts against the teaching of the holy Macarius, to pause on those passages which are clear, presuppose no allegory at all, and most importantly do not contain anything diverging from the teaching of the whole assembly of the holy Fathers?

The testimonies of the great hierarchs Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom are intentionally taken together: for they alone are powerful enough to settle the dispute. Of them the author of the booklets himself adduces passages only from the holy Basil the Great and the holy John Chrysostom as his defense. He mentions the holy Gregory in a quotation from a Western writer in the 15th excerpt, but in such a way that he considers him on his side.

All the passages from the holy Fathers adduced by the booklet must be said, as has already been noted, to speak altogether of something quite different from what it wishes to find in their words, as will become evident upon their closer examination, and this is what has prompted me, after the passages cited, to refer to other passages of the same Fathers in order to define their teaching more precisely on the nature of the soul and of angels. Such will be the general order of the remarks that follow.

Only one passage is cited from the holy Basil the Great.

The holy Basil the Great says: “As for his [the devil’s] nature, it is bodiless, according to the words of the Apostle: ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the spirits of wickedness’ (Eph. 6:12). His place of authority is the air, as the same Apostle said: ‘according to the prince of the power of the air’ (Eph. 2:2).” Further, in the same discourse the holy Basil says that “the hosts of demons subject to their prince remain in the air,” and that by the word “air” must be understood “all the space between heaven and earth.” (From the Discourse of Basil the Great that God is Not the Cause of Evil).

What then do these words of the holy Basil the Great prove? Absolutely nothing in favor of the new teaching, but everything in favor of ours.

He says that the nature of the evil spirits is bodiless. One must interpret greatly to make “nature is bodiless” mean a bodily nature. The nature of the spirits is bodiless because they have no flesh at all, neither gross nor subtle, because they are pure spirits. That such is the thought of the holy Basil is evident from the text which he adduces in confirmation: “our struggle is not against flesh and blood…” (Eph. 6:12).

What is this struggle? Not fleshly at all, but spiritual, occurring in thoughts and movements of the heart. An evil thought is sown and plucked out by a good thought. Is there anything bodily here? Therefore the Apostle says in another place: “the weapons of our warfare are not fleshly but mighty through God for the pulling down of strongholds, by which we overthrow reasonings” (2 Cor. 10:4). If the struggle to which the holy Basil points in confirmation of his thought concerning the bodilessness of those warring against us is spiritual, then it is evident that in calling their nature bodiless, he understood it as purely spiritual. That the holy Basil, following the Apostle, places the abode of the spirits in the air, this proves absolutely nothing, for somewhere the spirits must surely be. The force does not lie in that they are in a certain place, but in how they are there. Concerning this the holy Basil says nothing; but how this is to be understood we have seen in the holy Damascus: that they are in a certain place intellectually and spiritually, and the very place where they are is called an intellectual place. From this it is clear that neither the place itself nor the dwelling in it should suggest anything fleshly or bodily.

Thus it is evident that the passage adduced by the booklets from Basil the Great does not confirm their thought but rather ours.

I shall now adduce other passages from the writings of the holy Basil so that everyone might see for themselves what the teaching of this ecumenical teacher is concerning the nature of the soul and of angels.

This is how the holy Basil the Great teaches concerning the creation of the angelic world:

“There was, it is probable, something before this world; but although this is comprehensible to our reason, nevertheless it is not introduced into the narrative as unsuitable for the capacity of those newly taught and young in mind. Even before the world existed there was a certain state befitting the supramundane powers, exceeding time, eternal, eternally enduring. In it the Creator of all things made certain creations—an intellectual light suitable to the blessedness of those who love the Lord, rational and invisible natures, and all the adornment of those intelligible creatures surpassing our understanding, so that it is impossible to find names for them. They fill the essence of the invisible world, as Paul teaches us, saying: ‘By Him were all things created, things in heaven and things on earth, visible and invisible:’ ‘thrones or dominions or’ ‘principalities or authorities.’ (Col. 1:16)” (Homily on the Six Days of Creation, pp. 7-8).

After reading this passage, who will not be convinced that angels, according to the holy Basil, can have nothing material or bodily? They were created before any matter; therefore they are supramundane powers, intellectual light, rational natures, intelligible creatures. This thought is the same in Basil the Great as in Gregory the Theologian and is found more than once in both: therefore it is not a carelessly uttered phrase but a deliberate position that entered into the general system of their teaching. Based on this, we can regard all the expressions that occur in Basil the Great similar to those cited above as expressions of the concept of them as immaterial and bodiless spirits. And there are very many such expressions. I shall enumerate them.

In vol. 2, on p. 255, it is said: “Seraphim is a certain supramundane power.” If a supramundane power, how can it be a body or any substance? Beyond the world there are no bodies and no substance. The same word is applied by him to the seraphim a little higher, on pp. 251, 250. Moreover, on p. 250, he divides the entire multitude of creatures into intellectual and sensible, just as Gregory the Theologian does. And on p. 249 he calls the angels sent to help the saints divine powers. By intellectual creatures, surely, he does not mean anything bodily and material; for what intellectuality is there in body and matter? Similarly with divine or godlike powers. In God there is nothing material.

In vol. 3, on p. 287, the angelic supramundane powers are called pure and spiritual. By spirit there, on pp. 264-265, he means something bodiless, purely immaterial and non-composite.

Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

I believe that anyone free from prejudice will be satisfied with the testimonies adduced and will agree to acknowledge that the holy Basil the Great held angels to be pure spirits. But I believe these testimonies will gain even greater strength and persuasiveness if we add passages from Basil in which he expresses his concept of the soul as a spiritual power, completely immaterial. I shall adduce several testimonies on this as well.

In vol. 4, on p. 34, Basil the Great resolves the questions: “what are we, what is around us?” And he answers: “soul and mind are what we are.” Soul and mind are for him not as one in the other, but identical (vol. 5, p. 390). Consequently that which is conscious of itself in us, that which distinguishes and characterizes us—this is soul-mind. But who has ever considered the mind a body or something material? According to Basil the Great, what is the mind? “The mind,” he says, “is something beautiful, it is that which makes us created after the image of God” (vol. 7, p. 155). And is God a body, that we should think the soul-mind is a body? Therefore, when Basil the Great defines man in general with these words: “Behold what man is: tightly joined with a body adapted to him and suitable to him” (vol. 4, p. 330); no one would imagine that by soul-mind he means anything bodily and material. Holding the soul to be spiritual, the holy Basil also designates spiritual nourishment for it. “Just as man,” he says, “is twofold, consisting of soul and body, so his nourishment is twofold. The nourishment of the soul is the works of piety, the dogmas of faith, the lessons of morality; from them the soul grows and is strengthened. On the other hand, whoever does not taste the saving and life-giving teachings, impoverishes his soul-mind” (vol. 2, pp. 54-55). Tell me, how can matter, however subtle it may be, be nourished by spiritual, intellectual nourishment?

It seems this should be enough. But I deem it necessary to point out one more passage in which the relation of the soul to the body is defined. In vol. 5, on p. 381, it is written:

“The soul’s power is twofold, though the faculty is one and the same; namely: one is properly the vivifying power of the body, and the other is the contemplative power, which is also called rational… But the soul, insofar as it is naturally united with the body as a consequence of this union, and not by choice, communicates to the body vivifying power. For just as it is impossible for the sun that has shone to not illuminate that upon which it has sent its rays, so it is impossible for the soul not to vivify the body in which it dwells. But the contemplative power is set in motion according to choice.” This passage removes every pretext not only for considering the soul a body, but even for devising some medium for the connection of the soul with the body in some subtle envelope of the soul. For the soul is a real, living power, although intelligent and purely spiritual. By its existential, as it were, physical aspect, it orders the body, vivifies it, moves it, and acts through it; while by its other, higher aspect, at the same time it is conscious of itself, acts freely, contemplates the supernal, reflects on the earthly, and strives toward the Divine and eternal.

From this follows yet another conclusion: that if the soul possesses the power to act upon what is material while it is in the body, there is no ground for imagining it lacking this power when separated from the body; and that just as it is natural for angels to have the power to act upon material elements, so the departed souls have the same power; and that, consequently, when the departed appear, to explain this there is no need to suppose they have an envelope, and much less to think they are body, but it suffices to be convinced that it is natural for the soul to have the power to act upon the elements, which it can draw to itself and repel from itself when necessary. I recall that this thought is expounded at length in Gregory of Nyssa in his discourse on the soul and resurrection.

With this we conclude the excerpt of testimonies from the holy Basil the Great. Let us now turn to the holy Gregory the Theologian.

The “Supplement to the Discourse on Death” does not itself adduce testimonies from the holy Gregory the Theologian, but, pointing out sayings of the holy Fathers which troubled a Western theologian who recognizes the soul and angel as spirit, it places first: “Gregory the Theologian says that an angel is a being of fiery nature or a rational spirit.” We have already mentioned this when examining the testimony from the holy Damascus and saw that it not only should not trouble those who recognize the spirituality of the nature of soul and angels, but, on the contrary, it may boldly be adduced by them in their defense and in refutation of the opposite opinion.

For the holy Gregory, having called the angel fire and spirit, immediately clarifies that these words should be understood just as they are understood when applied to the First Essence, that is, nothing material should be joined with them. This passage is found in vol. 3, on p. 50. Having risen in thought to the intellectual, heavenly, incorruptible nature, he says that “it is called fire and spirit; for it is said that (God) makes ‘His angels spirits and His servants a flaming fire’ (Ps. 103:4). By spirit and fire is this nature called, partly as intellectual, and partly as purifying; because the First Essence also receives these same names. Nevertheless, let it be incorporeal for us.” As a result, a few lines later the holy Gregory defines the nature of angels with these characteristics: “they are rational powers and minds, natures pure and unmixed.”

From this the thought of the holy Gregory concerning the nature of angels is already evident. And wherever he happens to speak of them, they are depicted by him in such a way that nothing material can be joined with his words, although for the most part, in his poetic manner, he speaks of them figuratively.

So, in vol. 4, on p. 229, he speaks of the angels: “Let us think of the first beings from God and around God, that is, of the angelic and heavenly powers, who first drink from the First Light, and, enlightened by the word of truth, themselves are light and reflections of the perfect Light.” If angels are reflections of the perfect Light and themselves light, how can they be called material? The perfect Light, that is, God, is the purest Spirit, and therefore His reflections must also be pure spirits.

Saint Gregory expresses his thought on angels even more clearly in volume 3, page 22, where, in proving that God cannot be a body, he sets forth propositions that deny any corporeality in angels. “Will you call the Godhead a body?” he says. “But how then will you call it (if so) infinite, having neither bounds nor outline, untouchable, invisible? If you say that God is incorporeal heat, and moreover, as some think, simple and revolving (let both incorporeal and simple be granted), and if you will, even a bodiless body, since words among them are carried and composed arbitrarily: to what class of moved and carried things will this body belong?.. What then moves it again? What is it by which all things are moved? What sets in motion that by which all things are moved? And then what moves that very thing?—and so on to infinity.”

Thus, according to Saint Gregory, a body—no matter how subtle, even if incorporeal and bodiless—lacks the nature to move itself. An external force must move it; therefore, if an angel and soul are a body, even if incorporeal, we find it proper to ask: what then moves them? And if what moves them is again a most subtle body, then again we ask: what moves that itself?—until we arrive at something self-moving, which cannot be a body.

Further, on page 24, Saint Gregory says: “But if they say that God is some other kind of body, perhaps an angelic one, then whence is it known that angels are corporeal, what bodies do they have?” Here are words that strike the new teaching to the heart. Saint Gregory the Theologian never even thought that angels were corporeal, and he even questions others: where do you get this from?.. “No one of the divinely inspired,” he adds further (though he speaks directly about God, yet this can be applied to all said above, and consequently to the thought of angels’ corporeality), “no one of the divinely inspired has admitted this; such teaching is not of our order…” Let us repeat after the universal teacher that the teaching that an angel is a body is “teaching not of our order,” not the teaching of the holy Church of Christ.

Now I shall gather together those passages where the Theologian applies to angels names which he could in no way apply to them if he understood them as bodies. Thus (vol. 3, page 20) he says that they are higher and spiritual natures, which, being closer to God, behold Him more fully (vol. 3, page 50), that they are intelligent powers or minds, natures pure and unmingled (vol. 4, page 275), that an angel is a second light, a certain stream or participation in the First Light (vol. 4, page 154), that angels are the first beings, spiritual and pure (vol. 4, page 242), that they are pure servants, immaculate minds (page 335), that they are minds ever-moving, divine spirits. After all this there is no doubt that angels, according to the clear teaching of Gregory the Theologian, are pure spirits, unmingled—that is, not only not bodies, but even possessing no bodies.

I shall also bring forward that passage where Saint Gregory surveys all creation. There will be seen at once what he understood the soul to be (this in vol. 4, page 57 and following).

“Since it was not enough for Goodness to exercise Himself in contemplation of Himself alone, but it was meet that good should flow forth, going ever further… God first fashions angelic and heavenly powers. And thought became deed, which was accomplished by the Word and perfected by the Spirit. Thus came into being the second lights, whether we understand by them rational spirits or as it were an immaterial and bodiless fire.”

“Since, then, the first creatures were well-pleasing to God, He fashions another world—material and visible, and this is the orderly arrangement of heaven, earth, and what is between them… And by this God showed that He is able to create not only what is akin, but also what is wholly foreign to His own nature. Kindred indeed to Godhead are the intellectual natures, known by intellect alone.” Yet the new teaching insists that one cannot admit that anything should exist that is akin to God.

“Thus intellect and sense, so distinct from one another, stood within their own bounds and displayed by themselves the majesty of the Word that makes all… But there was not yet the mingling of intellect and sense—that experience of supreme wisdom, that generosity in the formation of natures, and not all the riches of goodness had yet been revealed. Willing to show this as well, the artistic Word creates a living being in which both are brought into unity—namely, the invisible and the visible nature—creates, I say, man; and taking the body from already-created matter, but breathing in life from Himself (which in the Word of God is known by the name of soul and image of God), He makes as it were a second world, great in littleness, places on earth another angel, composed of diverse natures, a worshipper, a spectator of visible creation, a mystic of intelligible creation, a king over what is on earth, subject to the heavenly kingdom, earthly and heavenly, temporal and immortal, visible and intelligible.”

What clearer indication could there be that, according to the Theologian, not only an angel but the soul too is pure spirit? The same thoughts are expounded by him in vol. 3, page 240; and in his poem on the soul, vol. 4, page 240.

In the latter, what is especially important for us is that Saint Gregory here condemns all who thought that the soul was some kind of matter.

“The soul,” he says, “is not the nature of destructive fire, not the nature of air, not a flow of blood running through the body, not the harmony of the parts of the body… I do not hold that the soul is some universal thing, divided by all and wandering through the air… And that—such teaching is not of wise men, but empty bookish trifling, as if the soul were constantly changing different bodies.”

After indicating these false teachings, he then sets forth his own opinion, which, for the beauty of its expression and the fullness of its contemplation, everyone ought to commit to memory.

“Now listen to our most excellent teaching on the soul. And we shall try to sweeten the song somewhat by beginning it thus.

There was a time when the sublime Word of Mind, following the great Mind of the Father, established the world that had not existed before. He spoke, and all came into being that was pleasing to Him.

But when all this—earth, heaven, and sea—made up the world, there was needed a spectator of Wisdom—the mother of all things—and a reverent king of the earth. Then the Word spoke: ‘Already pure and ever-living servants, immaculate minds, good angels, singers of praise who without ceasing hymn My glory, populate the vast heaven. But the earth is adorned only with irrational animals. Therefore it pleases Me to create such a race of creatures in which both would be joined—a race of creatures midway between the mortal and the immortal, a rational man, who would delight in My works, be a wise mystic of the heavens, a great ruler of the earth, a new angel from the dust, a singer of My might and My wisdom.’ Thus spoke the Word, and, taking part of the newly-created earth, with immortal hands He fashioned my image and gave to it of His own life, for He sent into it a spirit which is a stream of invisible Godhead. Thus from dust and breath was man created—the image of the Immortal; for in both kingdoms the nature of mind reigns. Therefore, as earth, I am bound to this present life, and as a particle of Divinity, I bear in my breast love for the life to come.”

Here is the complete teaching of Saint Gregory the Theologian on the nature of souls and angels! It is evident that the new teaching cannot use him as a support for its soundness.

The new teaching seeks support in Saint Chrysostom more than in other Fathers; yet even in this case it cannot boast that even a single quotation from his works justifies it. None of them speaks of the corporeality of the nature of angels and souls; rather, there are some that speak quite to the contrary.

The first passage from Saint Chrysostom (from “An Addition to the Discourse…”) speaks of air being filled with angels who protect us from evil spirits—the enemies of the world. “Do you wish to see angels?” Saint Chrysostom says at the beginning. “Open the eyes of faith, and behold this spectacle.”

Does this passage speak of the nature of angels? No; it speaks only of their presence in the air. As to their nature, the reader himself must draw a conclusion when thinking of this presence. What conclusion then? The pamphlet wishes everyone to conclude from this that angels are body, because they are present in the air. If this presence could be understood no other way than by occupying a corresponding place, then certainly one would have to conclude so. But according to Saint Damascene, the presence of spirits in a certain place is mental, free from all corporeality, and therefore there is no necessity to draw such a conclusion. Thus, the aforementioned passage provides nothing in support of the new teaching.

The second testimony of Chrysostom from the 22nd homily on the book of Genesis is presented not in the words of Chrysostom but briefly in his own words. Yet even in these few words it is retained that Saint Chrysostom calls angels bodiless. How then does the new teaching wish to prove by this its thought that an angel is a body? When they are bodiless, then surely they are not flesh and not body.

Here is how this passage stands in Saint Chrysostom without abridgment (on the book of Genesis, homily 22, p. 396): “Is it not madness to say that angels descended to cohabitation with women, and that an incorporeal nature was debased to union with bodies?.. Do you not hear what Christ says of the angelic nature: ‘«in the Resurrection… they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God…»’ (Matt. 22:30)? And indeed it is impossible that an incorporeal (angelic) nature should ever conceive such (fleshly) desire.”

This decidedly speaks against the new teaching. It is evident that Saint Chrysostom recognizes the nature of angels as incorporeal—incorporeal and therefore immaterial, and the immaterial is spirit.

And just then, a little further on, follows a triumphant testimony of Saint Chrysostom against the new teaching. The latter constantly insists that what is seen in appearing angels is their very nature, that they appear in their own nature, that the members seen in them are their own; but Chrysostom speaks quite differently.

Here are his words: “To hold such an opinion would be the greatest absurdity. For if even saints and men worthy of the Holy Spirit were unable to bear even the appearance of angels; if even the man of desires, upon seeing the presence of an angel, not the actual existence (for how can one see an incorporeal existence?), but an image received by him, was deprived of strength and nearly lost his very life, if even such a great and exalted man fell almost lifeless, then who, even the most thoughtless, would agree with these deceitful and utterly senseless words that an incorporeal and spiritual nature had congress with bodies?”

Is not the opposition between the teaching of Saint Chrysostom and the new teaching evident? Saint Chrysostom affirms that angels, when appearing, take on an image; but the new teaching teaches that angels have their own form and appearance, such as man has in his body. Saint Chrysostom says that when one sees an angel, one sees only the presence of the angel, not its very nature, which, being incorporeal, cannot be seen; but the new teaching asserts that those who see angels—see them in their own nature.

Saint Chrysostom has another passage that explains the appearance of angels not according to the new teaching. This is in his seventh discourse “Against the Anomoeans.” There it is said that angels often appeared on earth in human form, and even God Himself: but what appeared was not the truth of flesh, but condescension; that is, what appeared was not true flesh, but such an appearance as was formed out of condescension to human weakness (Saint Chrysostom, vol. 1, Migne edition, page 765). Here too Saint Chrysostom says that what appeared is not true flesh, but the new teaching insists: no—this is true body, the angel itself.

The third testimony from Saint Chrysostom speaks of the appearances of good and evil angels at the deathbed. According to Saint Chrysostom’s opinion mentioned before, this means that angels not only take on an image but also appear; and that those who see them see not the nature of angels, but the image they assume. Saint Chrysostom explains the appearance of angels in the same way as he explains theophanies. Those who see God see not the very being of God, but an image adapted to them. The “Addition to the Discourse” also cites this last thought of Chrysostom.

The fourth testimony of Chrysostom is from the discourse “On the Incomprehensible.” There the appearance of an angel to Daniel is described—the very same account we cited from the homilies on Genesis. But for the particular purposes Saint Chrysostom had in the discourse “On the Incomprehensible,” the explanatory thoughts that so strongly refute the new teaching are omitted there. Thus here is merely a description of the appearance of an angel, which proves nothing.

The fifth testimony from Chrysostom says that demons fly about in the air and can show us their terrible form (from his commentary on Psalm 41). What then does this prove? To be present in the air is possible for both the incorporeal and the immaterial. According to Saint Chrysostom, demons show their terrible form not in the same way as, in his view, angels show their beautiful form—that is, do demons also take on an image, as do angels? This last thought is also expressed in the “Addition,” where we read that fallen spirits assume various false images when appearing to men, in order to seduce, confuse, and destroy them; and they assume these images, having the natural capacity to do so. The image of appearance is the same for demons and angels; only the purposes differ.

Finally, the last testimony is taken from the 34th homily on the Gospel of Matthew, where Chrysostom says that demons wander about at tombs (in the original: “gather at tombs”). The force of this passage is the same as the first, where it is said that angels and evil spirits fill the air. Therefore there is nothing more to say about it.

Thus, the “Addition” has cited not a single passage from Saint Chrysostom which in any way, even indirectly, would support its opinion. On the contrary, the testimony which it cited in its own abridged words, when given in full, clearly contains a teaching about angels quite contrary to this opinion. And it must be said that this is only one passage from Saint Chrysostom that speaks of the nature of angels; all the others do not speak of this; consequently they are entirely irrelevant. The second testimony, taken together with another we have cited, determines quite precisely the thoughts of Saint Chrysostom on angels. Namely—they show that he recognizes them as incorporeal—that is, not only not body, even if subtle, but also as not having a body, and that when they appear, what appears is not true flesh but an assumed image. After this, seeking other testimonies from Saint Chrysostom on the nature of angels I consider entirely unnecessary. That is enough. Now I shall indicate only two or three passages on the nature of the soul.

Where can this be better seen than in the description of the creation of man? What, then, is said here? In homily 13 on the book of Genesis, p. 204, we read: “When you hear that Scripture says: ‘«God created man»’ (Gen. 1:27), understand these words in the same sense as the expression: let there be. When you hear also that ‘«God… breathed into his face’ (the man’s) ‘the breath of life»’ (Gen. 2:7),—understand that He, just as He brought forth the incorporeal powers, so was pleased that the body of man also, formed from the dust, should have a rational soul, which could make use of the bodily members.” Saint Chrysostom here impresses upon us that the rational soul in the body is an incorporeal power; and the incorporeal in the body is, of course, no longer any kind of subtle body.

Further it is said: “Observe also the difference between the creation of this wondrous rational animal and the creation of the irrational ones. Of the latter God says: ‘«let the waters bring forth the creeping things, the living soul»’ (Gen. 1:20),—and at once there came forth from the waters the animate creatures; and of the earth again in the same manner: ‘«let the earth bring forth the’ ‘living soul»’ (Gen. 1:24). But with man it was not so: rather, the body is first formed from the dust, and then the life-giving power is given to it, which constitutes the very being of the soul. This is why Moses also said of the irrational creature that ‘«the soul of the body is in the blood»’ (Lev. 17:11). But in man there is an incorporeal and immortal essence, possessing a great preeminence over the body, precisely such as it befits the incorporeal to have over the body.” Again the incorporeal in the body! How can one understand by this anything corporeal? In that case one would have to say: in a gross body a subtle body, and not an incorporeal power. Hence it is evident that the word “incorporeal” in Chrysostom means perfect incorporeality and immateriality, or, what is the same, pure spirituality.

On page 228 of the same volume 1 on Genesis (homily 14), Saint Chrysostom says: “Whoever named the animals in this way—was he not filled with wisdom and understanding? Conclude from this, then, how great is the power of that breathing, and how great is the wisdom with which the Lord endowed the incorporeal soul, forming from two essences a wondrous and rational animal, and joining the incorporeal essence of the soul with the body, as a great artist with his instrument.” Here it is said that the very essence of the soul is incorporeal; but the new teaching insists: the essence of the soul is body.

Thus, according to Saint Chrysostom as well, both the soul and angels are immaterial and incorporeal. Consequently, all three great luminaries of the Church—Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom—are against the new teaching. And as they teach, so the entire Church teaches. Is it not true after this that the new teaching is “the teaching not of our order,” as Saint Gregory the Theologian expressed it? In the writings of Saint Athanasius on the nature of angels, almost nothing is said. There are a few passages, and strong passages, on their subjection to God the Word and their worship of Him; but on their nature, there are scarcely two brief sayings.

In the theology of Bishop Macarius, one saying of Saint Athanasius is cited, namely: “An angel is a rational, immaterial, singing being; a demon—a mortal one”; but I was unable to find it in the original. Yet there is no doubt that this is an authentic saying of Saint Athanasius.

In the life of Saint Anthony, specifically in the discourse of the elder on the snares of evil spirits addressed to the brothers, it is said: “What is surprising if they, using bodies more subtle than the human, and having seen those entering the path, go before them in their journey and announce concerning them?” The word used here—“using”—gives us reason to see in Saint Athanasius the thought that demons are not body and do not bear bodies, but only temporarily use them when necessary, as one might use some instrument which one takes up when needed and sets aside when it proves unnecessary. But if we understand it even so, that they constantly use this most subtle body, we must distinguish the user from that which he uses—and consequently, in Saint Athanasius there is still the thought that the fallen angels are spirits, only clothed in the most subtle bodies. And if the fallen spirits are such, then so are the unfallen, for the fall did not change their nature. No matter how you understand this passage, it is still against the new teaching. Despite the fact that we can bring forth only two sayings from Saint Athanasius, any unbiased person will agree that from them one cannot presume in Saint Athanasius the thought of the corporeality of angels.

In the “Addition,” an extensive quotation from Saint Athanasius is made, with the purpose of showing that he recognized spirits as bodies. But however extensive it is, it does not at all prove what they wish to prove with it. This quotation is taken from the same discourse from which we previously drew one passage, clearly alluding to the thought of Saint Anthony and Saint Athanasius on the incorporeality of spirits. There is only this one passage in the entire discourse that can be referred to the definition of the nature of spirits. It portrays the various appearances of evil spirits and the snares which they employ for the seduction of the ascetic, and teaches how to detect them and resist them. But to draw from the appearance of spirits the thought of the corporeality of their nature is unlawful and dangerous, for God too appeared. Consequently, all this long quotation is made in vain.

It occurred to me to try whether we might not supplement the lack of testimonies from Saint Athanasius on the incorporeality of angels with his testimonies on the immateriality of the soul. If it can be proved from the words of Saint Athanasius that the soul is not a body, then this alone will be against the new teaching, since according to it there is nothing immaterial except God.

In his discourse against the heathens, Saint Athanasius deemed it necessary, for simple people, to briefly prove both that every human being has a soul and that it is a rational soul; because some, especially heretics, deny even this, holding that man is nothing more than “the visible image of a body.” This is precisely against the “Discourse on Death,” according to which the soul is also an ethereal, very subtle, volatile body, having the entire appearance of our gross body, all its members, even hair, the character of its face—in short, complete likeness to it. This means that in man there is nothing at all except the visible image of the body, now gross, now ethereal.

Saint Athanasius, rejecting the thought that in man there is nothing but the visible image of the body, rejects generally the thought that the soul is material.

“First,” he says, “a not insignificant sign that the human soul is rational serves the distinction of it from the irrational creatures; for by natural habit do we call them irrational precisely because the human race is rational. And then a not unimportant proof will be also this: that one man mentally represents what is outside him things which are not before him, and again deliberates and considers, so as from what he has considered to choose the better” (actions entirely foreign to any matter, no matter how subtly one might imagine it). “The irrational creatures see only that which is before them, they strive for that alone which they have before their eyes, even if afterward they might suffer harm from it; but man strives not for what is visible, but on the contrary, what is visible to the eyes he evaluates by reason” (that is, he is not subject to the law of mutual impressions and mutual attractions that reign among bodies, even subtle ones, but stands outside them, because he possesses a soul wholly immaterial, and in consequence is capable of freeing himself from the laws with which all material things are bound). “Often, when already bent (man), is held back by reason, and what he has considered, he considers again.” Just try to hold back something material when it is aroused! Stop electricity when it is already in motion. You must interrupt the current, and it will stop. But the soul, without ceasing to act within itself, ceases one direction and takes another. It is clear that its characterization is quite unlike the characterization of even the most subtle material forces. And every one, if he is but a friend of truth, recognizes that the human mind is not the same as bodily senses (and let us add, the human soul is not the same as the body and all material things in general: they are opposites in their properties and actions). Therefore (mind), as nothing else, becomes the judge of the very senses. “The function of the eye is to see alone, the function of the ears is to hear, of the mouth to taste, of the nostrils to receive scents, of the hands to touch; but to deliberate what should be seen and heard, what should be touched, what tasted and smelled—this is no longer the function of the senses; but the soul and her reason judge these things.” Is there even a faint shadow of such purposefulness in the realm of even the most refined substances? There reigns the law of necessity, and the deliberation of actions there is out of place. Is it not clear that where it is fitting, there must be a power wholly immaterial?

Further: “The soul deliberates and knows what to do and how to act. But this property belongs only to men, and this—namely, the rationality of the human soul—by means of which it distinguishes itself from the irrational and proves concerning itself that it is truly not the same as what is visible in the body.” And generally the same as all material things, even the most subtle. This capacity to deliberate, to stop and to begin its actions according to its own judgment, to give to itself and to all its works one or another direction, not at all regarding what is in the body and outside it, clearly proves that the soul is wholly immaterial, because no material thing can be characterized by such free and independent, internally rather than externally determined self-activity. In matter, whether it be subtle or gross, everything is guided by the inexorable law of mutual relations and interactions, which can be stopped only by the destruction of the material body.

“The body often lies on the earth, yet man represents and contemplates what is in heaven. The body often rests, is silent, and sits, yet man within is in motion and contemplates what is outside him… What is this but a rational soul, which in man thinks and represents what is above him?” Self-activity, activity within and from within, is wholly opposed to matter. Electricity sleeps. To make it act, one must excite it from without. And being excited, it is not at all independent either in power or in direction. But the soul is ever-moving and self-active. External impressions are only the occasion of its activity, not its source or cause. A tangible indication that the nature of the soul cannot be recognized as material.

“The body by nature is mortal—why then does man deliberate on immortality and often from love of virtue bring death upon himself? Or: the body is temporal; why then does man imagine the eternal and therefore despise what is before his feet, desiring the eternal? The body by itself would not conceive anything like this; it would not have conceived even of what is outside it. It is necessary that there be something else, which might think of what is opposite and unnatural to the body.

So then, what again will this be but a rational and immortal soul? Not from without, but within, in the body, like a musician on the lyre, does it produce the most perfect sounds.”

If the soul is a body, even if it were ethereal, whence in it these strivings to detach itself decidedly from all material things? Whence in it the striving for the infinite, when matter, if it could have thought, could extend this thought only as far as it itself extends, when it would not even have conceived of what is outside the body? However subtle a body, it would gravitate toward the material, whence then these delights in mental contemplations and constructions? If the soul is ether, and sunlight is of an ethereal nature, how did men, the best in their strivings, consequently the most ethereal, sometimes deprive themselves of light for their entire life?

No, there must be in us something wholly immaterial, which might think of what is opposite and unnatural to the body.

Further: “So then, I think, by what has been said up to now it is proved that in men there is a rational soul. But… one must know that the soul is also immortal… If in our discourse it is proved that the soul is not the same as the body, and the body by nature is mortal, then it is necessary that the soul be immortal, precisely because it is not like the body. And again, if the soul moves the body, and is itself moved by nothing else, then it follows from this that the soul is self-moving, and after the union of the body with the earth is dissolved, it will again bring itself into motion… If the soul were moved by the body, then when separated from that which moves it, it would be necessary for it to die. But if the soul moves the body, then it is all the more necessary for it to move itself. Moving itself, by necessity, will it live even after the death of the body; because the movement of the soul is nothing other than its life.”

The self-motion of the soul is the most striking proof not only of immortality, but moreover that it is not some subtle, ethereal body. Inertia, immobility is an inseparable attribute of matter. Electricity will remain in inactivity for ages if not aroused; and ether does not shine if not brought into agitation, or as is said, vibratory motion. And both of these are produced by action from without. There is not a trace of self-activity in these, apparently very subtle substances. Whence then would self-activity arise in the soul, if by nature it is ether? And if it is self-active, does this not mean that it is not ether? And again, any substance, when set in motion, moves in a given direction, and in general motion in substance is determined by a single form, from which deviation is unthinkable.

Look at the activity of the soul—what inexhaustible diversity is here!… What happens, for example, when the soul reasons? It draws together representations acquired often no one knows when and how; it places beside each other what is completely different and discovers likeness or difference; it abstracts one or another property and considers it alone independent of the object; often it breaks down the entire object into its characteristics and then again combines them in a clearer representation of the whole; to an action it finds a cause, often invisible and unknown, and from an operating principle it draws consequences of which there are yet no traces in experience; it builds a chain of causes and effects, means and ends; sometimes, withdrawing from all experience and diversity, it contemplates all in a single whole, and so forth.

In what substance, the most subtle and excitable, can one see anything like this? One and the same force—let us say, applying itself to visible movements in matter—moves straight and obliquely, from itself and to itself, up and down, right and left, circularly, elliptically, diagonally, at angles, in zigzags, in waves and so forth, changing all this in the blink of an eye and passing from one opposite to another without disturbance, having at the same time the ability to stop the most heated and diverse motion and begin again.

If anyone could point to a similar physical force, then one could compare the self-active soul to it. But even then, surely one could point out that no physical force retains in itself the trace of past movements, whereas the soul preserves in itself all its diverse activity and nourishes itself by its works, and from this grows stronger, becomes fuller, perfects itself, and—what else?—awaits being approved or condemned by the Master of all things at His impartial judgment… Are all such manifestations possible in any substance? Of course not. Well then, one must abandon the thought that the soul is an ethereal body.

“The soul, shut up in the body and joined with it, is not limited by the smallness of the body and is not measured by it: the body often lies on a bed and, as if having fallen into a deathlike sleep, remains immobile; but the soul, by its power, keeps watch, rises above the nature of the body, and although it remains in the body, it is as though transmigrating from it, represents and contemplates what is above the earth; often, urged on by the purity of mind, it soars to the holy angels, dwelling apart from earthly bodies, and converses with them… The soul has the conception of the contemplation of God, and becomes for itself the path, not drawing from without, but from within itself drawing knowledge and understanding of its God.”

The impossibility of presuming such occupations, strivings, and knowledge in a being whose nature is corporeal has already been mentioned; and it is evident from itself. But I draw special attention to the following words: “the soul often, urged on by the purity of mind, soars to the holy angels, dwelling apart from earthly bodies.” What is the thought here? The thought is that the holy and angels are incorporeal and not only incorporeal—that is, immaterial by nature. Someone might observe: they dwell apart from gross earthly bodies, but not apart from ethereal bodies. I shall say to this: let it be so, let angels not be apart from ethereal bodies. This would mean that they are in ethereal bodies, as in a garment, clothed in them, wear them: but they themselves are not ethereal body, but spirits, clothed in an ethereal body. Thus, this thought too is against the new teaching.

If the new teaching thought this way, we would not spend so much time arguing with it, but would simply say: as you will. You thus, and we thus. But it constantly insists: the soul is body, an angel is body, their very nature is corporeal. Here indeed one cannot refrain from saying that one cannot think thus, because none of the holy ever thought so.

I shall say a few more words on the opinion of Saint Athanasius. I take, first, the words literally: “apart from earthly bodies,” understanding them as: apart from all bodies, for ethereal body is a contrivance, invented without necessity and bringing no clarity to the teaching on the spiritual world. I draw, second, this thought from the comparison in this place of angels with the saints. All the passage of Saint Athanasius we have examined unfolds one thought: that the soul is not a body. In the remarks we have made, explanatory thoughts are added: that the soul is not only gross body, but even ethereal. And if Saint Athanasius had known of such an assumption, he would certainly have directed the phrases of his speech against it. I say: the phrases—for his thoughts in their present form completely deny all corporeality whatsoever in the soul and firmly establish that the soul is a spirit, foreign to all materiality. In the second-to-last quotation from him is the thought that the soul departs from the body such as it was in the body. But if, according to his teaching, it is a spirit in the body, then it is a spirit also outside the body. Consequently, Saint Athanasius recognizes that the holy who have departed in the present condition are pure spirits. But if alongside them he ranks the angels, then it means he recognizes them as pure spirits too—that is, not only immaterial but bodiless.

With this we shall conclude the examination of testimonies from Saint Athanasius on the nature of souls and angels.

From the person of Saint Cyril of Alexandria in the “Discourse on Death” is placed an extensive quotation from his discourse on the departure of the soul. In the “Addition” to the “Discourse on Death” the content of this quotation is briefly indicated in these words: “Saint Cyril calls demons terrible, wild, cruel. He says that the dying soul sees them, that the soul having departed from the body is held by holy angels; that with them it passes through the air, from earth to heaven, that evil spirits hinder this ascent, accusing the soul of sins committed by it; that holy angels stand against demons and dispute with them over the soul. The saint says that pious souls ascend to God, and a rejected soul demons seize in their power, open the earth, lower the soul into the depths of the earth and shut it there in the prisons of hell.” In the “Discourse on Death” after the quotation from the discourse of Saint Cyril on the departure of the soul are cited the accounts of those who died and were returned to life concerning what happened to them, namely: the account of the warrior Taxiotes, Peter the publican, Aretha of the Caves, and Saint Theodora. In these accounts examples confirm what Saint Cyril depicted only in words.

The force of the argument for the corporeality of the nature of angels and soul, drawn from these words, accounts, and visions, lies in the fact that here are depicted events taking place beyond this world, as it were the life of the spiritual world is painted. When angels, demons, and saints appear to the living on earth, one can, following Saint Chrysostom, explain their appearance by saying that they assume an adapted image. But when souls, freed from the body, enter another world and see there angels, saints, and demons in the same form in which they appear on earth; that is, in a form resembling the human; then the thought very insistently imposes itself that they are such in reality, for there is no need for them to assume an image adapted to the soul when the soul, having departed from the body, becomes such as they themselves are.

Of all the documents which the author brings forward to confirm his thought, this last one is, one might say, the most striking. For all that, the inference drawn from it regarding the corporeality of the nature of souls and angels cannot be considered well-founded and free from prejudice.

It is immediately apparent that this conclusion is broader than what the fact contains. The fact says that the soul upon departing from the body enters the realm of spirits, where both it and the spirits act according to the same forms that are visible on earth among men: they see one another, speak, walk, dispute, act. The only difference is that there the realm is of subtle substance, ethereal, and in them all is therefore subtle—material and ethereal. What direct conclusion follows from this? That in the world of spirits the external form of being and mutual relations is the same as on earth.

But on the other hand this conclusion says less than it should. The conclusion from a fact should be drawn according to the full breadth of the thoughts to which it can lead. And to stop here only at the external form of spirits is unlawful. One must take everything into account—namely also that they deliberate, feel, are well-disposed or ill-disposed, grieve and rejoice, and so forth. Let us take all this into account—what will result?

The result will be the following: just as on earth, when we see all such actions in men, we do not refer them to the body, although they are manifested through the body, but always attribute them to the soul as the cause—the soul separate from the body, though dwelling in it; so also, when the accounts tell us of similar actions of spirits, we must conclude that in them too it is not a subtle ethereal body alone that produces them, but that in this visible subtle body there dwells a spirit separate from it, which both reasons in mutual conversations, and acts, and produces through its ethereal body all that, as we see, souls produce in men on earth through this coarse body. This conclusion is as inescapable and immediate in regard to the spirits in heaven as it is inescapable and immediate in regard to men on earth. Thus both the word of Saint Cyril and the accounts of those who came back to life, taken in the full compass of their content, lead to the thought that angels, souls, and demons are spirits clothed in a subtle ethereal body. If the pamphlets did not draw such a conclusion, they were hindered by a prejudice in favor of their own opinion, formed no one knows how.

Moreover, consider all these accounts and depictions in all their details, and say sincerely: can one definitively say that all that is presented in them is reality, is in fact as it is depicted?

Are there not inserted here comparative images for a vivid and complete representation of reality, not in such forms as it existed? Consider, for example, traits which cannot but be referred to this latter category. Saint Theodora relates that Death came in a visible form, with instruments, and began to sever from her one member after another, and finally gave her bitter potion, from which the soul was shaken and departed from the body: is this reality or a figurative representation of reality, not existing in this form?

Saint Basil appears and gives the angels a little purse filled with gold, from which the angels afterward drew wherewith to pay the debts of Saint Theodora presented by the spirits of malice: is this a reality, or a figurative representation of a reality that was not in this form? The warrior Taxiotes saw that the angels held in a little ark all his good deeds, and, taking them out from there, compared them with his evil deeds; Peter the publican and Aretha saw how the angels weighed on a balance their good and evil deeds: is this a reality, or a figurative representation of a reality that was not in this form? All these images impressively express a reality; but that the reality itself should be exactly such, no one, I think, can even suppose, notwithstanding that he always represents it to himself in no other way than under these images.

But if these and similar traits must be acknowledged as comparative images, employed for the most vivid representation of reality, then how is one to set the limit to which, in these depictions and narratives, such an admission of comparative images extends? Let us recall the interpretation of Saint Damascene concerning how angels speak. Angels converse among themselves, he says, without articulate, audibly uttered speech; they communicate their thoughts directly, from mind to mind—that is, their conversation is intellectual, spiritual, unlike ours—in other words, they speak without a tongue. Why then, applying this, should we not allow that they move without feet and act without hands, by the single power of the will and its strivings? This is the more readily to be accepted because, according to Saint Damascene, they are in a place as it were without place, present in it without occupying it, but only manifesting their presence by the power of their spiritual action. If on this ground it can be granted that they are in a place without place, then how can one not grant that they are in a form without form? Yet from this comparison it is to be desired that a single conclusion be drawn: that the spiritual world is for us something mysterious, which it is impossible for us to represent in its genuine reality. Whenever anyone happened to reason his way to the state of things there, or it pleased the Lord to grant a revelation about it, both the one and the other were done under the images of our earthly life. These images represent reality, but are not reality itself. It is spiritual, intelligible, having in itself nothing fleshly. The Apostle Paul was caught up to heaven, and what did he say of it? That he heard there “«unutterable words, which a man cannot retell»” (2 Cor. 12:4). We have no words to express that. Our words are gross, sensory, figurative.

Taking this observation into account, we must bridle our propensity to draw conclusions concerning what happens in the spiritual world. Read, reflect, be edified, but do not hasten to draw definitive conclusions from it. For what is there, the eye has not seen, the ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man.

Thus we have the right to say that the new teaching from the words of Saint Cyril, in connection with the accounts relating to the same subject, drew its conclusion in its own defense too hastily. For us such a resolution must be considered all the more reliable, for Saint Cyril has direct sayings on the spirituality of angels and souls.

Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers on the Nature of Souls and Angels. Part 3

As far as I recall, whenever Saint Cyril speaks of angels, he consistently calls them rational beings. Thus in volume 2, page 23 on Genesis according to the Migne edition, angels are called holy and rational creatures.

Similarly in the Thesaurus, volume 8, page 187, they are called rational, superior creatures. The same appears in many other places.

Rationality, thus established as the distinctive property of the angelic nature, certainly does not favor the opinion that it is a body: for how can one call a body rational? But this becomes even clearer from his teaching about man and his soul.

Saint Cyril frequently gave a definition of man, and man for him is everywhere a rational animal, possessing mind and knowledge, and certainly by the soul. What, separately, is the soul according to Saint Cyril? A truly incorporeal nature (commentary on the Gospel of Luke). Thus, if the rational soul for him is incorporeal and immaterial, then all the more are the rational angels incorporeal and immaterial, whom he places everywhere far above man. And here is one place where both to the soul and to angels is attributed spirituality. This is in the book “Against the Anthropomorphites” (vol. 9, pp. 1083–1084). Here he says that the image of God is not in the body, for God is foreign to matter and corporeality, but “in the qualities of character, in that spiritual form which is constituted from the beauty of virtues.” And this is proper to angels as well—the superior and rational powers.

Let us stop here, however. Brief as are the notes adduced, I do not think anyone, considering everything together, would permit himself to suppose in Saint Cyril any thought of the corporeality of souls and angels. Each of them carries more weight in determining the opinion of Saint Cyril about the nature of souls and angels than the long excerpts we have read. They directly concern the subject at hand, whereas the latter speak of it indirectly.

In the fifteenth excerpt from a Western theologian is cited the following opinion of Saint Methodius: “souls are rational (intellectual) bodies.” The “Addition” wishes to see him on its side.

It is not stated from where this saying is taken, and there is no possibility to see in what sense the holy Father applied the expression: “rational bodies.” For according to the usual understanding these two concepts are incompatible. If bodies, then irrational; if rational, then not bodies. Is it not in the sense that the word body is used by him, as it is also used by Tertullian, in which, it is said, it means a substance in general, in which sense it is applied also to God? In that case this saying is not in justification of the new doctrine but against it. That is indeed how we should understand it; for in Saint Methodius there are other definite passages speaking of the spirituality of the nature of the soul. Thus in the “Symposium of the Virgins,” at the end of the second discourse, he traces the origin of souls to the immediate action of God, just as also in the creation of the first man, saying: irrational and thoughtless people may perhaps listen to someone who would say that this fleshly garment of the soul, sown by humans, is formed of itself without any special action of God; but no one will believe one who would teach that the immortal nature of the soul is sown together with the mortal body. For it is only the Almighty, only the Creator of invisible and indestructible beings, who breathes into us the immortal and unaging nature. “He breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). Had Saint Methodius said only that the soul, clothed in the garment of the body, is immortal and invisible, one could, if one wished, understand by soul a subtle body; but when he traces its origin directly from God, and specifically from the breath of God, then there is no doubt that he acknowledged the soul as spiritual and immaterial, for the origin through the breath of God, pointing to a special communion with the purely spiritual Divine being, excludes all thought of corporeality, even the most subtle.

In another place, speaking of the creation of the soul in the image of God, he expresses the same thought even more clearly. “In the unspeakable and Wisdom-akin beauty we appeared in this world, for an immaterial, unborn, having neither beginning nor end, all-creating and all-sustaining Beauty arranged the soul in His image. Therefore the soul is rational and immortal” (Discourse 6, Chapter 1).

If the immaterial Beauty arranged the soul in His image, then certainly the soul too is immaterial: for otherwise how would it be in His image?

We consider these few extracts from Saint Methodius sufficient to deprive the new doctrine of the right to claim this Father on its side.

In that same fifteenth excerpt appears also the opinion of Blessed Augustine, that the soul is in some sense a body, together with the observation that this opinion created difficulty for the Western writer who asserts that the soul is immaterial and spiritual.

If the soul, according to Blessed Augustine, is a body only in some sense, then of course it is not a body as commonly understood. This becomes even more certain regarding Augustine’s opinion, for he had an entire book, “On the Quantity of the Soul,” devoted to explaining and demonstrating the thesis that the soul is not a body—and in his treatise on the Holy Trinity one chapter (Book X, Chapter VII) is wholly occupied with refuting false opinions about the corporeality of the soul.

Here are several thoughts from the first book. “The soul is from God and is like God.”

“Do not think it difficult for God to create something like Himself. Being immortal, He created the soul immortal as well, in His Image.”

“One cannot possibly speak of the soul as: long, wide, high. These are bodily qualities, but the soul is incorporeal. That is why we see that whoever desires to become as he was created by God—that is, god-like—despises all that is bodily and turns away from this world, because the world is corporeal.”

“Yet from the fact that the soul is neither long nor wide nor high, it does not follow that it does not exist. There are many things that do not possess these qualities, and yet are acknowledged to exist. Who, for example, doubts that truth exists? Yet one cannot say of it that it is long, nor that it is wide or high.”

“The soul is not from earth, not from fire, not from some dense element, not from all together, not from several.” If they had known of ether then, Blessed Augustine would certainly have said: not from ether. “Created by God, it is not a substance, neither earthly, nor fiery, nor aerial, nor aqueous: but it is a rational substance—the mistress of the body.”

“And since the soul is not a body, it is able to contemplate what is incorporeal. Being no body itself, it has no spatial dimensions. All that is spatial it holds in memory, yet it is not itself spatial. The soul is not corporeal, not extended in length, not stretched in width, not distended in height—and yet it has such power in the body that the governance of all human actions rests in its hands, and it holds, as it were, the lever for producing all bodily movements.”

These excerpts suffice to show the thought of Blessed Augustine, which should create difficulty for those who do not acknowledge the soul as spiritual and who teach that the soul is a body.

From Blessed Theodoret, the new doctrine brings no testimonies, but supposes that Saint John of Damascus borrowed from him, among other things, his teaching about the alleged corporeality of the angelic nature.

Here are passages from Blessed Theodoret that say the very opposite. In question 69 on Genesis, he writes: “Scripture says that Abraham saw men. Thus, if we attend only to the letter, men, not angels, were eating. But if we penetrate the meaning, then angels appeared as eaters. For as having an incorporeal nature, they, like their Master, only seemed to have bodies in which they were seen, so they only seemed to eat, not putting food into mouth and belly, for they had no bodies.” Here angels are recognized as not having a body, just as the Lord does not. But the Lord Himself is immaterial and has no body whatsoever; consequently, angels are the same according to Theodoret.

In question 69 on Exodus, he asks: “Why did the prophet call manna the bread of angels?” and answers: “Because angels served in giving it. But the incorporeal nature has no need of food.”

And here again angels are incorporeal. Nor can we think that Blessed Theodoret acknowledges them as incorporeal only because they lack dense bodies, for in the first case they are named incorporeal on a par with their Master, who has no subtle body whatsoever.

In Blessed Theodoret’s commentary on verse 7 of chapter 12 of the prophet Daniel, we read: “We know that the nature of angels is incorporeal; they take on forms for the benefit of those who see them, and appear sometimes meek by condescension, and sometimes stern for instruction.”

Even these testimonies suffice to show that Blessed Theodoret considers angels incorporeal, as incorporeal is their Master Himself.

In the “Discourse on Death” is cited the following passage from Saint Cassian the Roman: “Although we,” says Cassian, “call many beings spiritual, we must not regard them as incorporeal. They have their own body in which they exist, though far subtler than our body.” (Conf. 7, ch. 13). The very content of the excerpt shows that Saint Cassian’s thought is not what the new doctrine holds. Saint Cassian says that angels, archangels, and other powers have a corresponding body in which they exist, though far subtler than our body; and to these bodies in which angels are clothed he refers to the heavenly bodies mentioned by the apostle when he says: “«and heavenly bodies, and earthly bodies»” (1 Cor. 15:40) and so forth. But the new doctrine asserts that angels are subtle bodies, that angels themselves are bodies, so that besides body they have nothing. Yet these are two completely different opinions. If the new doctrine said only that angels have bodies, one could refrain from disputing with it; for even then the chief sovereign attribute in angels would still be the rationally free spirit. But when it is said that an angel is a body, then one must deny in it freedom and consciousness; for these qualities cannot belong to any body, no matter what one imagines.

Conceding this and having no way to avoid seeing rationality and freedom in angels, the only remaining explanation is to say that God acts in them, and thus arrive directly at pantheism. For after angels, how long before we say that God acts in and manifests Himself in all else? Thus I say: the opinion of Saint Cassian does not support the new doctrine. There were a few other Fathers who thought similarly; but the majority and the most illustrious of the Fathers acknowledged angels as pure spirits.

The “Addition to the Discourse on Death” wished to bring the opinion of Saint Gregory of Nyssa to its defense, but did not fulfill the promise. Let us see for ourselves what he has to say.

In Saint Gregory of Nyssa there is very little said of angels, but concerning the soul there are deliberate investigations in special treatises, such as, for example, “On the Soul and the Resurrection” and “On the Constitution of Man.”

In the first, there is the following:

“It (the soul) is immaterial and incorporeal, and moves in accordance with its own nature, and displays its proper movements through bodily organs.”

“The soul is a created substance, a living and rational substance, which imparts to the organic body life and receives sensitive power.”

“The sense organs do not give knowledge: the mind guides them to understanding, as indeed one philosopher (Epicharmus) says: the mind sees, and the mind hears.”

After describing how man comes to the construction of automata, Saint Gregory says: “Is it not evident that in man there is some mind, something other than what is visible; and by that which is invisible and spiritual in his own nature, he prepares in himself this (that is, how to construct an automaton) by thought, and then the thought formed within him in this way he brings to visibility by means of matter.”

“What is this invisible thing?” he asks. “It is not something material.”

“What does this immaterial thing mean—or what is the intellect-soul in its very essence? Whoever does not doubt the existence of that concerning which we speak will find it sufficient to acknowledge that it is not something perceived by the senses, not a color, not a shape, not elasticity, not weight, not quantity, not extension in three dimensions, not local position, and generally not anything perceived in matter.”

These are positions that completely reject the new doctrine, which holds that in the soul there is both shape and extension and local position.

Then to the question: if we deny one after another the material properties of the soul, shall we not come to think that it does not exist at all?—the answer is: if by the denial of material properties we must necessarily come to deny the existence of the being in which they are denied, then by such a course of reasoning we would have to deny also the existence of God, for it is known that the Divine nature is incorporeal and has no form. But if the latter is absurd, then so is the former.

From this comes the objection that by such a line of thought we shall fall into another extreme—we shall have to acknowledge that the intellect or soul is one and the same with the Divine nature. This is an objection raised by the new doctrine, prominently put forward by it (“Discourse on Death”).

And here is the answer of the holy Father:

“Do not say: to recognize as one and the same, for this speech is impious; but, as instructed by the Divine Word, say: to recognize one as like the other. For that which is created in the image certainly has likeness to the original in all things—the intellectual to the intellectual and the incorporeal to the incorporeal, free from all time, like the archetype, similarly avoiding all spatial dimension, but by the property of nature it is something different from it, since it would not be an image if in all things it were one with the original; on the contrary, by those characteristics in which the archetype is distinguished in uncreated nature, by those same characteristics created nature shows the image; and as often in a small piece of glass, when it happens to lie in a ray of sunlight, one can see the whole circle of the sun displayed in it, appearing not in its proper magnitude but in such a circle as the smallness of the glass fragment can contain, so also in the smallness of our nature shine the images of those inexpressible attributes of the Godhead, so that the intellect guided by them does not swerve from the representation of mind in its essence when investigating a subject cleansed of bodily property, and again does not equate with the invisible and most holy nature a nature small and temporary; but although it acknowledges the substance to be intelligent, because it is the image of an intelligent substance, it does not call the image identical with the archetype.”

“Local position is proper to bodies alone, and the soul, as incorporeal, has by nature no need whatsoever to be contained in any places.”

“Three states of rational nature—one, which from the beginning received an incorporeal life, which we call angelic, another, joined with flesh, which is called human, and still another, separated from the body through death, as is observed in souls.”

And here is a brief word about angels:

“For the incorporeal and spiritual, what effort is it to fly across an abyss, even the widest? Because the spiritual by nature, wherever it wills to be, appears there without expending time.”

And the new doctrine is entirely perplexed in explaining the movement of angels and souls, if one acknowledges them as spirits!

Saint Gregory of Nyssa presents these same thoughts also in the treatise “On the Constitution of Man.” I shall cite only those which have some new emphasis. Here, for example, it is said that “God placed in man a twofold principle in the foundation of his constitution, mingling with the earthly the Divine, that through both of these he might enjoy pleasure as befits and suits both the one and the other, enjoying God according to his Divine nature, and the earthly according to sense akin to it.” “The soul displays its distance from matter precisely by the fact that, not being subject, it freely and with full authority orders its desires.” “As Godhead is mind and word, so not far from this is human nature.” “To strive toward perfection of life in God is a property of the spirit.” “Incorporeal substance is not enclosed within any local boundaries.” “We do not have three souls but one, intelligent, immaterial, joined through sensation with material nature.” And so forth, and so forth…

All this taken together requires no interpretation. It is clear as day that Saint Gregory of Nyssa acknowledged the soul as pure spirit. We need not even regret that we cannot cite from him particular passages about the nature of angels. For if the soul is spirit, then all the more is an angel. However, one thought of his about angels is expressed by him in passing and has already been cited by us. A similar thought is contained in his fourth discourse “On Prayer,” where it is said that all rational creation is divided into incorporeal nature and that clothed in flesh; the incorporeal nature is angelic, while the other kind of nature is we humans. The decisive definitiveness of Saint Gregory of Nyssa’s teaching on the spirituality of the soul—of one rational creation—removes all possibility of confusing incorporeality with subtle corporeality. But here is one place where he directly calls angels not merely incorporeal but entirely immaterial:

“You, man, an angel touches, and, being incorporeal and immaterial, he does not despise you, who are constituted of flesh and blood.”

Saint Maximus the Confessor—the “Addition” places him among the teachers of Saint John of Damascus and mentions him in the hope that he too has something about the corporeality of the nature of souls and angels. But one can say that the hopes of the new doctrine have nowhere been so disappointed as in this case.

Saint Maximus the Confessor had to reason deliberately about the nature of the soul and solve directly the question: is it material? To this especially belong his small treatise “On the Soul” and his letter to John, the archbishop of Cyzicus, concerning the fact that the soul is immaterial and incorporeal. Let us make excerpts from both.

In the treatise “On the Soul” (Patrologia Graeca, vol. 91, p. 356 and elsewhere), after explaining how the soul knows, proving its existence and that it is a substance, Saint Maximus then solves the question: is the soul immaterial?

“If,” he says, “the soul is a body, then its movement comes from without or from within. But it is given to it neither from without; for it does not receive impulses and is not drawn like soulless things—nor from within, as in ensouled things, for it would be absurd to say that the soul has a soul. Thus, the soul is not a body and, consequently, is immaterial.”

“If,” continues Saint Maximus, “the soul is a body, then it must have sensible qualities (perceived by external senses) and must be nourished. But it is not nourished, or if it is nourished, it is not with bodily food as the body is nourished, but with incorporeal food, for it is nourished by the intellect. Nor does it have sensible qualities; for one cannot, for example, see justice, or courage, or anything like that, yet these are qualities of the soul. Thus, the soul is not a body, and consequently is immaterial!.”

After explaining that the soul is simple, immortal, and rational, he concludes: “Thus, what then is the soul? The soul is an immaterial and incorporeal being, rational, dwelling in the body and giving it life.”

In the letter to the archbishop of Cyzicus the thought about the immateriality of the soul is explained more fully and comprehensively. It is clear that even then there were people disturbing the peace of Christians by spreading the false teaching about the corporeality of the soul. The archbishop of Cyzicus, having fought with them himself on the basis of the Word of God and the writings of the Fathers, turned to Saint Maximus with the request to gather for him natural proofs of the immateriality of the soul, without appealing to Scripture and the holy Fathers. Saint Maximus answered:

“Who are these who assert that there is no incorporeal and immaterial creature? And what trivial inventions and fantasies do they oppose to the unalterable truths you have stated!.”

“A body in itself is unmoved. If the soul is a body, even if the most subtle, as they say, then it too will be unmoved. But if this is so: whence comes our movement? If from something else, and that something else is also a body, then again the question: whence comes that movement? And this chain of questions stretches to infinity, until we reach a creature that is immaterial. If they say that God moves us, then they must acknowledge Godhead as the cause of those unseemly and shameful movements which we have, as is known, in abundance.”

“Every bodily being is determined by quantity and quality, mass, form, shape, and color. The determination of these aspects ends the investigation. Now, if the soul is a body, it should likewise be determined in the same manner—which is absurd; consequently, it is not a body.” “If they (the disputants) do not doubt that the soul exists; and the intellect, acknowledging its existence, cannot ascribe to it qualities by which every body is determined—neither color, nor form, nor density, nor weight, nor mass, nor extension in three dimensions, in a word, none of the properties by which a body is ordinarily conceived—then the soul, having none of such things and being none of them, must be not a body—immaterial, if it exists.”

“If all composition and decomposition and division are appropriate only to bodies, and that which is free from all composition, decomposition, and division must necessarily be recognized as not a body; then the soul is not a body, since it has no share in any of these.”

“If all that is bodily is either ensouled or unensouled; then the soul, if it is a body, will be an ensouled or unensouled being. If it is an ensouled being, then certainly it will be ensouled by some ensouling thing, or by some being or power, or attribute. But generally to say that the soul is ensouled, as also to say—light is illumined, or—fire is warmed, is very absurd. If, further, we acknowledge that some being ensoul the soul, then we must call it either a body or not a body. If we call it a body, then again the question: what ensoul it—and we must drag on in this manner without end this most inappropriate going around and around in questioning, until we acknowledge the soul as an incorporeal being. But if we say that the soul is ensouled by some power and ability of it, or by some quality and attribute, then in that case that which is not a being in itself will be the animator and mover of a being. At this point the order will be upset, by which one rules and another obeys. Our soul is created by nature to be mistress of the body, as an incorporeal being: but if it is a body, according to these, then it will be subject to that which is not a being itself… That it has this body, which is of different substance from it, we do not refuse to acknowledge, knowing that this is indeed so; but we do not consent to the ignorant position that it itself is a body, knowing that there is a great difference between having a body and being a body.”

“If they do not agree to acknowledge the soul as incorporeal for fear of raising it to equality with God, Whom they acknowledge as incorporeal—and thereby fear where no fear is—then let this war of their folly be displayed in its entirety: let them also take from us all else that is ascribed to us as those deemed worthy to be sharers in Divine goods, and which, conversely, is ascribed to God as Creator and Giver. What is this? Being, life, light (consciousness), goodness, thought, knowledge, wisdom, righteousness.”

“For as we are called existing, living, lights (conscious of ourselves), good, thinking, rational beings? So equally we call God the Being, the Living, the Light, the Good, the Mind, the Reason.”

‘What sense, then, is there in their position (the disputants’), if the soul, in many other respects, is such and is so called (as God is), and if it can in no way be corporeal, because God is such? On this reasoning it would follow that either we ourselves should not be called by any one of the names shown before—because God is such—or that God should not be called such—because we are such. But indeed we are such and are so called not as being equal to God, but as an effect in relation to its cause, as partakers of good things in relation to their Giver, as having received being in relation to its source—not on equal terms or by identity of name, as befits things consubstantial, but by likeness of name, or, so to speak, by mere participation in the name, while the reality of the one stands off from the reality of the other by an infinite distance; for God is above nature and infinitely higher than every nature and every reality.’

“But how, if we concede to them that the soul is a body, will our excellence of being in the image of God be preserved, when we allow that the soul is not in all respects like the archetype? As the image of the intellectual we call it intellectual, and as the image of the immortal, incorruptible, and invisible, we recognize these qualities in it. In the same manner nothing prevents us from acknowledging it as incorporeal, that is, foreign to all matter, all spatial extension and dimension, although at the same time it will be recognized as completely distinct from the Divine nature.”

‘In whatever features the archetype is contemplated in the uncreated, unchangeable, and beginningless nature, in those same features created rational nature too is seen actually to appear, yet in no way identically, nor in the same degree and force, but as the last, all but vanishing reverberation of an echo still shows the trace of a word. And just as, from the harmonious combination of what is and comes to be in the universe, the wisdom-loving mind, raising itself by its thought to the pure and immaterial, distinguishes the mover from the moved, and, understanding Him as one, simple, self-existent, ever equal to Himself, and the Creator of all things, acknowledges Him to be inaccessible to all else, yet at the same time containing all, ordering all, and knowing all before its being, by reason of the boundlessness of His power: so also, through the varied and harmonious movement of the parts and members of the small world (I mean man), drawing near to the cause that sets this mechanism in motion within us, it comes to know something else, distinct by nature from this organic structure of the body, and contemplates it not as a body within a body—as it seems to our new sages and undemonstrating dogmatists—but as simple and indivisibly single, not determined by the form and limits of the body that surrounds it.’ Behold the wise philosophizing of Saint Maximus! Is it not evident how, at every point and with what force, it refutes the new teaching and our dogmatists?

With this we conclude our examination of the first argument used by the new doctrine to support its position—the examination of the testimonies of the holy Fathers and Teachers of the Church. Anyone without prejudice will surely agree that on the side of the new doctrine there appeared not a single holy Father.

A small shadow of such an opinion appears in Saint Macarius, but very, very indefinite.

Saint John of Damascus had in mind nothing of what this doctrine draws from him, and the other holy Fathers stand directly against it. Having such a cloud of witnesses, and at their head the great teachers and hierarchs—Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom—who among the Orthodox would agree even for a moment to allow the thought that an angel is a body, and the soul is a body?

Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Turning to the discussion of the passages of Holy Scripture in which the new teaching hopes to find support for itself, let us first observe that, since the teaching on the spirituality of souls and angels is not new but has always existed in the Church, she has gathered for herself the passages of Scripture which are always used by everyone whenever it becomes necessary to speak of the spiritual nature of angels and souls. These passages constitute, as is said, the sedes doctrinae. The new teaching has not made even a hint at these passages, as though it had never heard of them and no one else knew of them.

Thus, to prove the spirituality of the soul, everyone points to the manner of man’s creation. Man was created in the image of God; this image is not in the body but in the soul, for God is not corporeal. But in the soul, in what precisely lies the image of God? Either in the nature of the soul, or in its aspirations, or in both. Yet upon whichever of these one settles, one must acknowledge the soul to be spiritual. If the image of God is in the nature of the soul, then it is spiritual, because God is spirit. If the image of God is in the higher spiritual aspirations, then, since spiritual phenomena and actions cannot proceed from a corporeal being but must proceed from a spiritual being, the soul must again be acknowledged as spiritual, so that spiritual actions may be produced from it—actions whose presence in the soul and whose indispensable power are recognized by all.

All the holy Fathers, as we have already ascertained, saw in the creation of man in the image of God an irrefutable proof of the spirituality of the nature of the soul. The manner of man’s creation, it is to be supposed, left in the human race a conviction of the spirituality of the soul, which among pagans was obscured and lost—but in the people of God it was preserved in its full integrity and purity.

The Ecclesiastes expressed the common faith of the people of God about this. “«The dust,»” he said, “«will return to the earth as it was; and the spirit will return to God who gave it.»” (Eccl 12:7) No one has ever doubted or doubts that by spirit here is meant the soul as an immaterial and incorporeal being. This belief, as a heritage from the people of God, passed also into the Christian world, for which it, however, received a special seal of confirmation in the words of the Lord who commanded not to fear “those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Mt 10:28) and commanded to “«worship»” God in spirit “«and in truth.»” (Jn 4:23-24)

Little attention is paid to this last passage, yet it is very decisive in the dispute occupying us. To worship God in spirit, one must be a spirit. Even if by ‘spirit’ here we understand only a spiritual turning toward God—that is, an indication not of the nature of the soul but of the spiritual actions proceeding from it, as with truth—even in this case the conclusion will be one and the same: that the soul must be a spirit, for spiritual actions, so bindingly laid upon the soul by the Lord, cannot proceed from the body, however subtle it may be. To interpret this word in any other way is not permitted by the construction in which it here stands. It is applied here both to God and to the soul. If in relation to God it signifies a pure, immaterial, and incorporeal spirit, then by what right may it be given a different meaning in relation to the soul—and that within one and the same utterance? And, finally, how then is the spiritual relation of the soul to God to be defined on the basis of the pure spirituality of God?

Such are the direct indications of the Word of God concerning the spirituality of the soul! The spirituality of the angelic nature is affirmed by the holy Apostle Paul, directly calling them “ministering spirits sent forth to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation” (Heb 1:14).

Just as in the commandment of the Savior cited before, the word spirit means an immaterial and incorporeal being, so the same meaning belongs to it in the utterance of the apostle, who was taught the mysteries of faith by the Lord Himself. By these two utterances the biblical meaning of the word spirit in its application to the soul and angels is definitively established: it means in this regard an immaterial and incorporeal being, as also in relation to God. Therefore the thought of the new doctrine, that there are no spiritual beings among creatures, is contrary to the clear indication of the Word of God.

If in the Word of God there are repeated mentions of the appearances of angels in visible body, then in all such cases they displayed intellect and will, and generally acted in a manner befitting rational, free, spiritual beings.

The form of man in which they appeared does not constitute their nature but represents only the visible form of their appearance; therefore it in no way disturbs confidence in the spirituality of their nature, just as theophany does not disturb confidence in the spirituality of the Divine nature.

Such are the foundations of the spirituality of the nature of souls and angels, drawn from the Word of God by the Church teachers! The new doctrine should have first demolished these foundations and then laid new ones so that it might more reliably erect its building afterward; but it has not done this. If one can point to anything in both pamphlets in this regard, it is only a false interpretation of the word spirit and an improper application of this interpretation.

The cited passages of Scripture clearly say that an angel and a soul are a spirit; the new doctrine turns its eyes away from the brilliance of the light of truth emanating from here. “Let it be so,” it interprets, “but they are called spirits only as subtle beings, and nonetheless material,” or: “but this only expresses that they are invisible to our bodily eyes.” But since such positions are put forth without any proofs, they should be considered as mere assertions.

For my part, I find them not only assertions without proof but also dangerous. For if this word is equally applied, even in one and the same passage, to God, and to angels, and to souls; then, when in relation to the latter it is given the meaning only of subtle invisible corporeality, an inexperienced mind can easily transfer such a meaning to the Divine nature as well.

In order not to fall into such a dangerous conclusion, the new teaching provides no guidance and indicates no criterion for distinguishing the meaning of the word ‘spirit’ when it is used in relation to God and when it is used in relation to souls and angels. On the contrary, there are in it such turns of speech as lead directly to such a conclusion. For example, in the ‘Addendum’ we read: ‘Holy Scripture and the holy Fathers call both God a spirit, and angels, and demons, and human souls—spirits. By this is expressed only that God, like the angels and demons and souls, is invisible to our bodily eyes.’ Here it is stated outright that even in relation to God the word ‘spirit’ does not signify immateriality but only indicates invisibility. And invisibility, in another place, has been construed as subtle corporeality.

Thus it turns out that God too is a spirit only by virtue of His invisible subtle corporeality. In vain does the new teaching keep repeating: God alone is spirit. If we have already suspected it of being unfounded in its conviction, then we have the right to demand of it: show us wise teachers who understand the word ‘spirit’ in the proper way—teachers of whom we would have no doubt. But how is it to point them out, when it says that both Scripture and the holy Fathers, in using the word ‘spirit’ in relation to God, meant by it only invisibility to our coarse eyes? Of other teachers, undoubtedly faithful to the truth, there are and can be none for us. See where the new teaching has led us!

I bring all this up to make clearer how “falsehood lied to itself” (Ps. 26:12). Falsehood cannot be hidden: however much one covers it with twisted speech, it emerges anyway. The word spirit, applied in the Word of God to the soul and angel in the same sense as to God, strikes the new doctrine in the heart; that is why it tries to ward off this blow—but in warding it off, it inflicts even greater blows on itself.

To such equally unsuccessful evasions must be assigned yet another interpretation of the word ‘spirit,’ in the sense of air, wind, human breath. This interpretation is brought forward in order to split, and thereby to weaken and to cloud, the conception of spirit as an immaterial being that stands firm in everyone’s mind. But these citations have no force whatever. It is true that the word ‘spirit’ does sometimes acquire such meanings as well; but these meanings are incidental, not proper. The proper biblical meaning of this word, as we have seen, is spirit—a being rational, immaterial, and incorporeal. The same meaning was attached to this word by the whole host of the holy Fathers, as we have likewise seen.

It is impossible to understand how it could be written that ‘by the word spirit, in the patristic writings, according to a notion contemporary with the Fathers and only recently lost (?), there were always denoted gases (gases?! did they even know of them then?) and vapors, and most of all air, wind, and human breath’ (‘Discourse on Death’). This is a wholly illegitimate generalization, contrary both to the Word of God and to the patristic writings. This illegitimacy takes on yet another character when the new teaching itself knows that such a generalization cannot be made lawful, and when even it does not always use the word ‘spirit’ in such meanings.

It is evident that the meaning of the word ‘spirit,’ so clearly expressed in the Word of God and among the holy Fathers, gave our novelty no rest. And so at last it resorts to a final refuge—an interpretation of where the very word ‘spirit’ came from—in order to conclude from this that it does not signify anything immaterial. ‘The word spirit,’ it says, ‘is taken from breathing. Breathing is a sign of life. The soul leaves the body amid intensified breathing. With its departure, life ceases. It was natural, therefore, to call the being that lives within the body spirit and soul. The soul, once it has left the body, is invisible; it was natural to call the soul, or spirit, an invisible, bodiless, immaterial being. And it was equally natural to recognize in the soul a materiality proper to it, indicated by that special fullness of breath amid which it departs’ (‘Addendum’).

A guess is proposed about the origin of the words: spirit and soul. But that this origin is truly thus should require some basis. One cannot elevate something to the status of truth on a mere guess about it. We have another explanation, closer to the essence of the matter—not from the exit of the soul from the body, but from its entry into it. What came first—the soul’s exhalation or inhalation? Inhalation. So is it not better to derive the words spirit and soul from this inhalation? And it is both better and necessary, at least for those who reason by Scripture and the holy Fathers. “«He breathed into his face the breath of life,»” it is said in Scripture, “«and man became a living soul»” (Gen. 2:7). That is the moment the soul became known! Saint Gregory the Theologian says that “the soul is the breath of God” (vol. 4, p. 240) and that “the life placed by God in man is known by the name of soul” (ibid., p. 158). That is the true Christian derivation of the word soul and following it of the word spirit! But in that case, out of two naturalities derived by the new doctrine from its assumption, according to our explanation only one will be appropriate—to acknowledge the soul as an invisible, incorporeal, immaterial being, such as God Himself who breathed it into man; the other, which acknowledges in the soul a corporeality proper to it, will be absolutely against nature.

If in this way all evasive interpretations of the word spirit prove themselves decisively untenable, then there is no doubt that they will shake no one’s sound understanding of spirit drawn from the Word of God and patristic writings. Consequently, the proofs we have cited from the Word of God concerning the spirituality of the nature of souls and angels stand in all their force, and the new doctrine’s attempt to paralyze this force by such means is futile.

Let us now see what passages of Scripture it itself lays as its foundation, or in general, how it proves itself on the basis of the Word of God.

“Holy Scripture does not set forth a separate, definite teaching about spirits, as it does about many other subjects; but at the same time the teaching of Holy Scripture about spirits is clear. Created spirits are called incorporeal in comparison with us. ‘A spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see I have,’ (Lk 24:39) said the Savior to His disciples when He appeared to them after the resurrection in His glorified body, refuting and overcoming their thought that they were seeing a spirit. The comparison ‘as I have’ is a comparison with the flesh of the God-man. Saint Basil the Great sees a similar comparison in the words of the apostle: ‘our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against … spirits of wickedness’ (Eph. 6:12) (Homily that God is not the Cause of Evil).”

‘Holy Scripture testifies everywhere that angels appeared by their own declaration of the will of God to that effect’ (‘Addendum’). There follow many of the angelic appearances recorded in the Word of God—namely, to the wife of Manoah, to the myrrh-bearing women, to Cornelius the centurion, to Joshua, to Gideon, and others. Here too conclusions are drawn from the cited appearances, which are afterward reduced to this: that angels have the appearance of a man, are dependent on space and time, and possess movement; and the whole concludes thus: ‘Holy Scripture, in recounting the appearances of angels, always depicts them as appearing in the form of men, and therefore the teaching of Saint Macarius—that angels are subtle bodies, invisible to bodily eyes, and having the same image and form that a man has in his body—is founded upon the constant testimony of Holy Scripture.’

Since this conclusion rests on the thought that angels are exactly such in themselves as they appear—while against this stands another thought, that perhaps they assume bodies—the new teaching hastens to ward off this latter thought with the following remark: ‘A Western writer says that spirits are clothed in subtle bodies when they appear to men. This is nowhere to be seen in Scripture; nor is it seen that angels undergo any change when appearing to men. On the contrary, Scripture says that God opens a man’s eyes when it is well-pleasing to Him to allow the man to behold the angels. The fallen spirits assume various false forms, having a natural capacity for this. The Western writer would do well to enter into the question—where are the subtle bodies kept in which the spirits clothe themselves for their appearance to man?’

Here in extenso is all the proof of the new doctrine taken from the Word of God. At first glance it is evident that it had in view only angels, leaving in oblivion the human soul, created in the image of God-Spirit, and that in relation to angels it relies principally on angel apparitions. Let us go through all this proof in order.

“Holy Scripture does not set forth a separate, definite teaching about spirits, as it does about many other subjects; but at the same time the teaching of Holy Scripture about spirits is clear.” In passing let us remark, how does Scripture, not teaching definitively, teach clearly? Where there is no definitiveness, what clarity is there?

Holy Scripture teaches clearly and definitely that angels exist, that they are spirits, and that they are sent by God to men to help them in the works of salvation. But that angels, being spirits, have no body—this is not stated directly, but is deduced from a comparison of scriptural passages. Such a teaching may possess clarity and definiteness for one person, while for another it will remain unclear and indefinite, so long as he confines himself in this to Scripture alone. But when one adds to this the teaching constantly held by the Church, then this teaching on the incorporeality of angels will give him decisive clarity and definiteness.

“Created spirits are called incorporeal in comparison with us.”

There is not the slightest hint of this in Scripture. And if some of the holy Fathers, motivated by impeccable intentions, had not used the phrase “in comparison with us,” we would never have thought of such comparative incorporeality. That this is indeed the case is proven by the rather unsuccessful attempt of the new doctrine to confirm such a thought by the Word of God.

“‘A spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see I have,’ (Lk 24:39) the Savior said to His disciples when He appeared to them after the resurrection in His glorified body, refuting and overcoming their thought that they were seeing a spirit… The comparison: as I have—is a comparison with the flesh of the God-man.”

It is absolutely incomprehensible how one can see here the thought of comparative spirituality of angels! Yet the Savior after the resurrection appeared in precisely the same way as angels appear. As they are sometimes visible and sometimes invisible—in the same place—so too was the Savior visible, for example, in Emmaus and immediately became invisible (Lk 24:30-31). As an angel appeared, for example, to the apostle Peter in the prison with its doors locked (Acts 12:5-7), so the Lord appeared to His disciples “with the doors shut” (Jn 20:19). If then the Lord, when the apostles, basing themselves on this similarity of His appearance with that of angels, thought He was a spirit or an angel, told them not to confuse Him with an angel, adducing as the reason that “a spirit” appearing as an angel “does not have flesh and bones” (Lk 24:37-39): then by this He showed that spirits-angels have no flesh at all, not even such as He has, which becomes visible and invisible there, according to His will. He has flesh, which becomes visible and invisible and appears “with the doors shut”; He is clothed in it, always wears it. But the spirit-angels have no such flesh; they are not clothed in it, do not wear it constantly, though they too are sometimes visible and invisible and appear “with the doors shut.” That is the direct thought of the text! How the new doctrine wrests it to its side is incomprehensible. Moreover, one must also say that this passage is itself difficult to understand, itself requires clarification. One must first determine its thought before drawing conclusions from it. For it is not clear what kind of body the Savior has, with flesh and bones yet being visible and invisible and appearing “«with the doors shut»”? And further—whom did the Savior mean by the spirit in which He denied flesh and bones? He says: “Handle Me,” (Lk 24:39) yet angels too can be touched when they appear.

One may also think of it in this way. Ordinarily flesh and bones, such as we have, cannot appear “«with the doors shut»”. Therefore, when the Savior speaks of flesh and bones in Himself, they cannot be understood in the literal sense; they have here a figurative meaning. The Lord wished to say that His body possesses solidity, tangibility, and is not, as it were, something dissolved in the air. But, applying this to angels when they appear, one cannot say that they lack it, for they too are at times tangible and act upon visible objects—for example, they roll away a stone. Therefore it is probable that when the Savior says: a spirit has not flesh and bones—that is, a spirit has no solidity, no tangibility—He points not to an angel, but to a phantom. The apostles thought they were seeing a phantom, dissolved in the air, having no solidity whatsoever. And the Lord says to them: “I am not such; handle Me: but a spirit, that is, a phantom, you cannot handle” (Lk 24:37-39).

The apostles’ thought here was probably the same as what they had when they saw the Savior walking on the water (Mt 14:25-27). But if we understand the passage in this way, then no conclusion can be drawn from it regarding either the corporeality or the incorporeality of angels.

Neither the words of the Apostle Paul nor their interpretation by Saint Basil make even the slightest allusion to a comparative bodilessness of spirits. Had Saint Basil the Great held the thought of a comparative bodilessness, he would have added to the phrase ‘their nature (the nature of spirits) is bodiless’ an explanatory qualification—that this bodilessness in them is relative, while they themselves are body. But since he did not do so, and spoke without qualifications that their nature is bodiless, this means that he acknowledged it to be precisely such—acknowledged that spirits not only are not body by nature, but have no body at all.

We have already seen the complete teaching of Saint Basil; we saw that he acknowledged angels as pure spirits, created when nothing material had yet been created; and now let us confine ourselves to this remark simply to show that in the words: “our struggle is not against flesh and blood” and so forth (Eph 6:12), there is no indication of comparative incorporeality.

“Holy Scripture testifies everywhere that angels appeared by a special manifestation of the will of God…” Here is the chief proof of the new doctrine. We shall now see how strong it is.

All Scripture is filled with testimonies of the appearances of angels; likewise in the accounts of the deeds of the holy apostles, of the lives of the holy hierarchs, martyrs, venerable and God-bearing Fathers—everywhere these appearances are not infrequently mentioned. But all these facts bear a single inscription: “«Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?»” (Heb. 1:14). Since, among other things, they were created for this very purpose—to assist us in our spiritual needs—they are sent to us and appear whenever there is need.

Now, from the circumstances of their appearance, nothing can be directly concluded about the nature of angels. For one cannot say this: since angels appeared in bodily form, therefore they are body. The natural course of reasoning in this case ought to be as follows: angels in the ordinary course of things are invisible, but when they appear to us they are seen in bodily form. What does this mean? It means—one must answer—either that angels, spirits invisible and incorporeal, assume a body upon themselves when by God’s command they are sent to us; or that they constantly bear, as a natural part of their constitution, a body capable of being visible and invisible, tangible and elusive; or, perhaps—merely to gratify the new teaching—that they are body. If no fourth supposition can be added to these, then one ought thereafter to reason thus: neither the first nor the second can be affirmed, and consequently the third remains true.

The new teaching did not do this, which means that it did not wish to submit to the yoke of the logical laws of a definite course of thought, and acted willfully and arbitrarily. That is why the conclusion which constitutes its fundamental thought is an arbitrary conclusion, having no legitimate ground in the facts adduced. It ought first to have proved that one can agree neither that angels—immaterial and incorporeal spirits—assume a body upon themselves, nor that they, being inwardly spirits, bear an outward subtle body capable of becoming visible and tangible: then, perhaps, its third opinion might have emerged. But by drawing such a third opinion directly, it sinned against logic and left its thought unproven.

One could proceed thus only if the inappropriateness of the first two ways of explaining angel appearances were at once evident; but what is evident is only the inappropriateness of the conclusion drawn by the new doctrine.

Judge for yourselves: if from the fact that angels appeared bodily one concludes that they are body, then one must necessarily conclude that God too is body, for God also appeared bodily. Thus, to Abraham come three radiant youths: one of them is the Lord, and the other two are angels; yet the visible appearance and all the circumstances of their appearing are identical (Gen. 18:1–2). Tell me now: on what ground will you conclude that the two angels who appeared to Abraham are body—on the very ground that they appeared bodily—while the Lord, who appeared together with them in exactly the same way as they, is not body? Having granted the one, you must grant the other as well; that is: if the angels are body, then the Lord too is body. But if this latter thought you can by no means grant, then you must renounce the former conclusion as well and acknowledge it to be untenable. I have taken only this single instance, but it is not the only one, for the Lord God appeared visibly more than once, from the very beginning of the creation of man.

God gives commandments to the first-created, is heard walking in paradise, and pronounces judgment upon those who have sinned; He rebukes and condemns Cain, gives commands to Noah, appears repeatedly to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, converses with them and acts visibly and tangibly, appears to Moses in the Bush and sends him to lead the Israelites out of Egypt; on Sinai He verbally utters the commandments to the whole people, writes the Decalogue with His finger upon the tablets, and so forth. In the Old Testament God the Father and God the Son appeared bodily; in the New the voice of God the Father is heard at the Jordan, on Tabor, and in the temple, while the Holy Spirit appears now in the form of a dove, now in the form of tongues of fire… You see how many Theophanies there are in Scripture!

I think not fewer than angel appearances. If we philosophize in the way the new doctrine philosophizes, that is, gathering all the testimonies of Scripture about theophany, we would come to the conclusion that Holy Scripture with full clarity testifies that God is a subtle, ethereal, fiery body, and we could even apply a direct Scripture passage to this: “Our God is a consuming fire.” (Heb 12:29).

But against such a conclusion all creation would rise up in unison—and would rise up rightly—and the new doctrine would not dare say a word against it. It would have acquired the right to do so if, renouncing its reasoning, it had acknowledged that from angel appearances one cannot make conclusions about their corporeality without violating the lawful orders of reasoning and without giving others’ minds occasion to make conclusions in this way.

After this it is obvious of itself that all the other conclusions the new doctrine draws from the passages of Scripture about angel appearances prove to be inappropriate.

“Holy Scripture,” the new doctrine reasons, “testifies with full clarity that spirits have movement similar to that of humans.” When spirits appear in human form, they indeed display movement similar to that of humans. But in themselves, in their incorporeality, they can also have movement, for they are real beings, existing among other creatures and endowed with the ability to act among them.

Real existence and real testimony of its existence through action and movement do not necessarily lead to the thought that a being appearing thus is a body. There is no basis for such reasoning. Like humans angels move and act, they appear in human form, but when they remain in themselves, in their sphere, they certainly move in their own particular way.

“Holy Scripture,” says the author, “testifies that they are dependent on place and time, but much less so than we are.”

On time they are dependent no less; but with respect to place one must say—not much less, but altogether otherwise than we and every body. They exist and act in a definite place, and when they exist and act in one place, they are not in another. But they are in a place without filling the place, as bodies do, for they have no extension and consequently no spatial dimensions. They are in a place spiritually, as Saint Damascene explains: ‘Being minds, the angels also exist in noetic places, not circumscribed after the manner of bodies, for by nature they are not clothed in flesh and have no extension, but are present and act spiritually where they are commanded’ (Exposition of the Faith, bk. 2, ch. 3).

Holy Scripture testifies that they have form and appearance.

The form and appearance in which they appear, not what they have in themselves. In themselves they have a spiritual, intellectual form and appearance, which consists not of any external shape but of relationships of spiritual powers and the manner of their action. In this sense the Supreme Being Himself has His form, and the Only-Begotten Son of God is the image of the hypostasis of the Father.

But, having this spiritual form and appearance, they by their nature have no bodily form and appearance like the form and appearance of man, and only when they appear do they become visible in human form. This is what Scripture testifies to, not about the form of their essence. The conclusion based on these cases of man-like corporeality of angels is entirely unlawful, as is altogether any conclusion about corporeality drawn from the appearances of angels.

I shall make one more remark about the passages of Holy Scripture adduced by the author. He cites the following: “«the angels in heaven always see the face of my heavenly Father»” (Mt 18:10). This is to show that angels, according to the testimony of the Word of God, have their own dwelling place. What we should think about the angelic place—Saint John of Damascus has told us; but how do the angels see the face of God?

According to the new teaching, angels, like the soul, have eyes, a face, hands, and other members. Since the being of angels, according to the new teaching, is a body, then, apart from bodily eyes, nothing else can be supposed in them—for instance, an eye of the mind and noetic sight. Consequently, when the angels behold the face of the heavenly Father, they behold it by nothing other than bodily eyes. We explain this vision by noetic sight—we say that the angels behold the face of the heavenly Father spiritually, noetically, that they contemplate Him, for they are noetic, immaterial spirits; but the new teaching cannot say this, for with it the very being of angels is a body, though a subtle one, which can have no noetic eyes.

See, then, what follows from this. Angels, being body by nature, see, of course, with bodily eyes. And since with bodily eyes one can see only what is bodily, it follows that the heavenly Father too has a bodily face, or is a body, just as the angel who beholds Him is a body. This conclusion follows directly from the propositions of the new teaching, and it cannot renounce it. It only remains to apply the turn of phrase often used in mathematics: a proposition is absurd when the consequence that follows from it is absurd; it is absurd to think that the nature of angels is a body with a head, a face, eyes, and the other members that we ordinarily see in a man, when this leads to an absurd thought about God.

Also cited is the passage about the second return of an unclean spirit into an inattentive soul with seven other, more wicked spirits (Lk. 11:24–26). First, this passage, as well as the one which speaks of a legion of spirits that entered into a single man (Mk. 5:8–9), is very difficult to comprehend. And from that of which it is difficult to form a definite thought, how is one to deduce anything definite? Second, if anything is to be deduced from it at all, then one must deduce a thought entirely contrary to the one the new teaching wishes to see. What follows from it is not that angels are dependent on place, but rather that they must be wholly independent of it—for how could seven spirits, or a whole legion, be within a man? It cannot be otherwise than this: to be present without occupying place, as we noted earlier concerning the relation of angels to place.

Thus it is evident that angel appearances provide no solid support for the new doctrine. Let us now see whether it skillfully removes the possibility of pure spirits temporarily assuming subtle bodies.

“A Western writer says that spirits clothe themselves in subtle bodies when they appear to men. This is nowhere seen in Scripture.”

In Scripture it is clearly seen that angels are rational powers, immaterial spirits, and that they appear to men in human form. One who reasons about this will naturally ask: whence comes this form, visible and tangible?—and then take from the holy Fathers one of the solutions to it, the most general and the most consonant with the essence of the matter, namely the very one against which the new teaching now speaks. That Scripture does not speak of it—from this one can conclude neither for nor against. This teaching itself said, as it began to adduce the passages of Scripture, that there is in it no complete doctrine of spirits; hence there is nothing to expect from it by way of a resolution of all questions. Scripture in general speaks of heaven and of heavenly things chiefly on that side from which it can edify; but the question of nature is more contemplative, and for that very reason it has been left not fully disclosed on every side.

“It is not seen (in Scripture) that angels change when they appear to men.”

Whether by the word ‘change’ one should understand that angels temporarily assume a body upon themselves, or that, being constantly clothed in a subtle body, they coarsen it when appearing to men—Scripture speaks of neither the one nor the other, leaving it to our own freedom to resolve this question. Silence is neither affirmation nor denial, and from the fact that Scripture does not speak of the changes that occur in angels when they assume bodies, one should not conclude that no such change takes place. Saint John Damascene speaks of this, contrary to the new teaching, thus: ‘When by the will of God the angels appear to the worthy, they appear not such as they are in themselves, but in a certain transformed guise, so that those who see may be able to see them’ (Exposition of the Faith, bk. 2, ch. 3).

Saint John Chrysostom and Blessed Theodoret explained angel appearances this way before him, as we saw.

“Scripture says that God opens the eyes of a man when He is pleased to permit him to see angels.”

The first question—concerning the vision of angels, as to how they appear—the holy Fathers for the most part resolved thus: that they temporarily assume a body upon themselves and become visible; and very few resolved it by saying that angels constantly have a natural body which, undergoing change, becomes visible. It remains to resolve the second question: how do men see angels? The pamphlets resolve it thus: ‘God opens their eyes, and they see.’ The resolution is narrow and does not embrace all cases. It is better to resolve it in accordance with how this is spoken of in the Word of God. Ordinarily Scripture says: ‘such a man or such a woman saw a holy angel,’ and only in very rare cases is it mentioned that God opened their eyes, and they saw. So let us resolve it thus: that the ordinary manner of seeing angels at their appearances is this—that by God’s condescension to man they become embodied to such a degree that they are seen, like all other visible objects; but in special, extraordinary cases of angelic appearances God, by a special action, opens the eyes of men—all the more since it is He who in other cases also restrains the eyes of men from seeing. But to accept exclusively this last mode of seeing angels and to extend it to all cases is by no means possible. The Sodomites, for example, saw the angels: can one really suppose that God opened their eyes, when this vision was not for their edification? It is equally difficult to agree that angels were seen in the same way when a multitude of people saw them—both good and evil, both faithful and unfaithful—as was the case, for example, with the angel who guided Tobias. But it is still more incongruous to apply this same mode to the seeing of unclean spirits. Their nature, even after the fall, remained angelic, invisible in the natural order of their being: can it really be that, in order to see them too, God opens the eyes of the beholders? It cannot be! In what dreadful and hideous forms they appear! And is God to open the eyes so that these monsters may be seen?!

No, a prohibition has been laid upon them, that they should not dare to appear and disturb the peace of men. It is only by a special permission of God that they do appear; and when they appear, they are seen naturally. But if for the seeing of them God does not open the eyes of men, and they themselves appear and become visible naturally, then why, in regard to them alone, should we allow such a privilege?

Further, the new teaching says of the unclean spirits that out of hypocrisy, malice, and cunning they assume various false forms, having a natural capacity for this. How natural it would be, after this, to extend the reasoning a little and say that, if the unclean spirits by a natural capacity assume various forms without any special participation of a higher power, then men too see them by a natural capacity, without any special action of God—and then to add: if this mode of seeing spirits is admitted in regard to the unclean spirits, why not admit it in regard to the angels?

‘The Western writer,’ it says further, ‘would do well to enter into the question of where the subtle bodies are kept in which the spirits clothe themselves for their appearance to men, when there is no need of these bodies—since, in his opinion, the spirits clothe themselves in subtle bodies only when they are about to appear to men.’

Not the Western writer alone, but all those who acknowledge spirits to be incorporeal, must enter into the consideration of this. I undertake to answer for myself, and perhaps for them too, if they will be pleased to agree with me. The question is: where are the subtle bodies kept in which the spirits clothe themselves when appearing to men? I answer: in the same place where the body of the Lord was kept, in which He appeared to Abraham, in which He wrestled with Jacob, in which He was seen in paradise, and so forth. In all these and similar cases He assumed a body for a time, and consequently took it from somewhere. Thus, where the Lord took a body, there the spirits take theirs as well; and where those bodies of the Lord were kept, there the bodies of the spirits are kept too.

They will say: when the Lord commands, the elements gather around them and form a body; when He commands again, the elements disperse and there is no more body.

But that same Lord who created the spirits after His image and likeness could have granted to them too the capacity to gather the elements around themselves and to clothe themselves in a visible body, whenever this becomes necessary for the fulfillment of His holy will. I see nothing impossible in this. It is not impossible on God’s part: He is ready to grant to a creature every good that it is capable of holding. The question is: can a spirit hold such a capacity? I answer: it can, for it is a power actually existing among the other creatures, and a power higher than everything material, however strong and mighty the material may prove to be. And that which is higher by nature can naturally hold dominion over the lower natures, and the lower natures must naturally yield and submit to the higher.

Thus I suppose that God granted to the incorporeal spirits the capacity to draw to themselves, when required, certain elements and to form from them a certain envelope around themselves, and then, when the need has passed, to detach them from themselves and return them to their former state. In this way the angels form for themselves both the body in human form in which they usually appear, and their clothing and everything with which they appear; and in the same way all of this is again resolved into its elements. And it seems to me that this manner of explanation is the simplest and most natural, and, above all, the one that embraces all cases of angelic appearances.

Take a magnet and place it among iron filings—they immediately attract to it and adhere to it from all sides. Neutralize the power of the magnet in some way—all the filings fall off and the magnet remains as before, without this covering.

In exactly the same way the spirits too have a natural capacity to attract and to detach the elements, with this only difference: that what in the magnet acts mechanically is, in the spirits, accomplished in subjection to freedom and reason. Our soul, as Saint Gregory of Nyssa teaches, itself forms its own body. But this process of formation is very long, and moreover the soul, having formed its body, has not the freedom to dissolve it at will. The higher spirits, however, both form their bodies and dissolve them freely, and that too according to their own wish or God’s good pleasure. Again: our soul, in sleep, and sometimes even when awake, imagines itself in various states and forms. I transfer this to the spirits and say: what the soul can only imagine, a higher spirit can actually produce—according, of course, to the conditions of its higher spiritual mode of existence and action, and in subjection to the governing Supreme Being.

Thus I explain whence the angels take, and whither they put away, the bodies in which they appear. Now, in my turn, I too permit myself to ask the new teaching: angels are by nature a body—but the appurtenances of their appearance: their various clothing, their various implements—a sword, for example, or a staff—and likewise their various ages, the form of a youth, of a man, and so on—these, of course, do not belong to their nature; whence, then, comes all this? Let it explain as best it can; only there is one thing I cannot grant beforehand, namely, that angels live sensuously, have sensuous dwellings, and sensuously clothe and feed themselves and associate with one another—even though this sensuousness be reckoned the most subtle. This, in my view, is crude, and, for all the refinement allowed it, unworthy both of God and of angels.

Here is all that can be said about the passages of Scripture cited by the pamphlets in confirmation of their opinion about the corporeality of the angelic nature. It is clear that they have proved nothing from Scripture to show that an angel is a body; rather, they have themselves proven the contrary.

Meanwhile the passages of Scripture by which the spirituality of the soul and angel is proved, which we have cited above, remain in their force, because the pamphlets left them untouched. From this it follows of itself that the common faith of the Orthodox Church concerning the spirituality of the soul and the incorporeal nature of angels stands firm and unshaken.

I shall, however, make one general inference about this. The new teaching supposes that God alone is spirit, while all creatures are body. From Scripture, however, it is proved that, besides the Spirit-God, there must be spirits that are also creatures, for in the Gospel of John the Lord says: “«God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth»” (Jn. 4:24). Tell me, how is one to worship in spirit, when among creatures there is no spirit? To worship in spirit, one must have a spiritual nature, for otherwise, how shall a body worship in spirit? And so, at the requirement of the Word of God, I conclude that among God’s creatures there must be spiritual beings, like God in spirituality.

But when it is thus proved that the word spirit in relation to creatures in one passage of Scripture means spirituality akin to God, then we have no basis to interpret this word differently when it is applied to angels and souls in other passages of Scripture and to understand by it some subtlest ethereal body. Thus, when it is said of angels: “ministering spirits” (Heb 1:14), no one has the right to understand by these words anything but spirituality akin to God.

With this observation we conclude our examination of the testimonies of Scripture concerning the nature of angels and souls.

An Examination of the Rational Arguments Advanced in Defense of the New Teaching

The final recourse upon which the new teaching hopes to establish itself consists in the rational considerations of the mind. Some of these considerations, drawn chiefly concerning angels, are drawn from theological concepts of the infinitude of God’s nature and the limitedness of angels (“Appendix”), while others, drawn chiefly concerning the soul, are taken from its relations to the body, whether true or supposed.

The first consideration can be expressed thus: God has nothing in common with creatures; He is distinguished from them by an infinite distinction. But He is spirit; therefore it cannot be that there are spirits among creatures; for one cannot place a creature on the same level as God, with whom nothing is comparable. In this reasoning there is praiseworthy reverence before God’s majesty, but the conclusion drawn from it cannot be deemed sound. Every creature, even the highest, has nothing of its own. All that is in it is a gift of God. But every good seen in creatures is a fragment of the perfect good that exists in God. What in God is infinitely perfect and full appears in creatures in various degrees of limitedness.

Thus, for God “«all things are possible»” (Mk 10:27), and a creature can do something, but only something, within its sphere, according to the measure of its powers.

God is all-knowing, and a rational creature knows, but only little and not always without error.

God is all-good, and a creature is good, but with a very narrow goodness and not always wise.

If one were to survey in this manner all the good things in creatures, it would appear that all of it is a participation in limited degree of God’s infinite good. God was pleased to bestow upon creatures from Himself all the good of which they are capable of being partakers, and to bestow it so generously that nothing remained ungiven that could have been given.

Thus we see that very much that is infinite in God, this very infinitude has not prevented from appearing in creatures in a limited degree.

Now, in order to have the right to conclude soundly to the denial of limited spirituality in creatures from the conception of infinite spirituality in God, one would need to prove that spirituality is such a good among God’s other goods that it is impossible to communicate to creatures when they have become partakers of God’s other goods. But this cannot be proved in any way, for the nature of God is incomprehensible. Neither can it be comprehended which of God’s infinite perfections can be communicated to creatures in limited degree and which cannot.

If one must speak of what is possible, one should be inclined toward the possibility of communicating limited spirituality to creatures rather than toward denying it, for on one hand it is known to us that God’s goodness in creation wished to pour into the creature all the good that it could contain, and on the other we see traces of spiritual manifestations in creatures which we call rational.

Keeping this in mind, one cannot deny the possibility of communicating even spiritual nature. Moreover, one must say that to give being is harder than to give quality to being. If the infinite fullness of God’s being placed no barrier—indeed served as the source—for granting being to finite creatures, what ground is there to suppose that His infinite spirituality will be a barrier to creatures appearing with limited spirituality? On the contrary, should we not conclude that inasmuch as there is infinite spirituality, there ought to be finite spirituality as well?

Observe how far from us the Holy Gregory the Theologian placed the Triune God: “The Trinity,” he says, “transcendent over the world and above time… is invisible. The Trinity alone enters the Holy of Holies, leaving all creation without, and separates some by one veil and others by a second. Thus, celestial and angelic beings are separated from the Godhead by the first veil, and our nature is separated from celestial beings by the second veil.”

See how far he placed the distance! And the angels are left outside, and we are even outside the angels. Yet, notwithstanding the contemplation of such a distance of God’s nature from creatures, when he came to depict the creation of creatures, he did not hesitate to say that God creates creatures akin to Himself, that is, rational spirits. His mind, so full of reverence and high contemplation, saw no impossibility in finite spirits existing by the gift of the one infinite Spirit; the infinite spirituality did not diminish in his view the possibility of finite spirituality.

However exalted and separated God may be from creatures, this did not prevent, in the mind of the holy Theologian, there being among creatures natures akin to Him: and natures akin to God are only intelligent natures. Indeed, we have already seen this passage when examining the teaching of the holy Theologian concerning angels.

Let us now see how the new teaching defends its position: “God,” it says, “is an absolutely perfect being, having nothing in common with created beings.”

Can one so sharply sever the creature from the Creator? High is God’s nature—but communicative is His goodness. Is it possible that the Creator is not seen in the creature? And if He is seen, how then is there nothing in common with the Creator?

There are creatures of whom the Creator Himself said that they are created in His image. Surely, even there, where there is image, there is nothing in common? Again, when the fallen are being restored, the Restorer Himself sets the goal of the restorative acts and institutions—communion with God, praying thus: “…that they also may be one in us… as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You…” (Jn 17:21), and those who cleave to Him are deemed worthy of communion with God the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ. To enter into such communion, one must have something in common with God in one’s own nature.

“God,” says the new teaching, “is properly speaking being: ‘I AM that I AM,’ He said of Himself (Ex 3:14).”

Let God be properly speaking being, yet creatures also truly exist. And when they exist, their existence is not God’s existence in them, but their own, though bestowed by God. So too with regard to spirituality: properly speaking spirit is God; yet there are also creatures—spirits—and this spirituality in them is their own spirituality, though bestowed by God.

“The existence,” it is further explained, “and the life of rational creatures differ from God’s life, just as the light which objects illuminated by the sun emit from themselves differs from the light which flows properly from the sun, from the source of light.”

But this passage evidently does not favor the new teaching. No one says that the spirituality of rational creatures is identical to the spirituality of God. It is similar to God’s spirituality, but incomparably lower in dignity. Nevertheless, it is still spirituality, just as reflected light, though weaker than sunlight, is still light, and light from the sun.

Similarly, what is further cited from the Holy John of Damascus provides occasion for drawing inferences contrary to the new teaching. Saint John of Damascus says: “The Good, the all-good, and the most good God, being wholly goodness, by the immeasurable wealth of His goodness, did not permit that goodness, that is, His nature, should remain alone and that no one be a partaker of it.”

If God’s nature is spiritual, then what did not God’s goodness permit? It did not permit that no one be a partaker of this spirituality. If it did not permit this, then how is it that there are not spiritual creatures among creatures with godlike spirituality? They exist, as Saint Damascus further says: “For this reason He created intelligent and heavenly powers, then the visible and sensible world, and then man from intelligent and sensible nature.”

This passage is taken almost word for word from Saint Gregory the Theologian. And in him, as we have seen, intelligent and heavenly powers are called natures akin to God or godlike natures.

There follows a lengthy quotation from Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Macarius concerning the unapproachability and incomprehensibility of God’s nature: but this is not what we are concerned with. From unapproachability only this follows: that God cannot be known by us directly, but is known only by the communication of this knowledge from Him Himself, and moreover only in limited degree.

But from the very fact that we have thoughts of the infinitude of God’s nature and feel strivings toward the infinite, does it not follow that there is in us something akin to Him, something that by its strivings and thoughts, so to speak, strives to coincide with His boundless bounds? Does not this trait of boundlessness in the manifestations of our inner life suggest that we bear within us a non-corporeal spirit, not bound by the limits that bind all material and bodily things?

The quotation from Saint Macarius that follows was discussed by us at length before.

So then, the new teaching did not succeed in deriving from the unapproachability of God’s nature a decisive denial of spirituality in creatures.

On the contrary, partly it guided us toward the conclusion that among creatures there must be spiritual beings, godlike in nature.

The originator of this teaching himself felt that nothing could have prevented creative goodness from granting being to spiritual creatures.

Therefore, from creative infinitude he passes to created limitedness and urges that spirituality is incompatible with created limitedness: though God might have willed that there be creatures with a spiritual essence, yet the creature, inasmuch as it is a limited creature, cannot contain this spirituality. This is the second consideration of the new teaching. Here are its words: “if created spirits are limited, then both their essence and their properties are limited. If their essence and their properties are limited, then their spirituality too is limited.”

“On the contrary, if we ascribe to them perfect immateriality, that is, unlimited spirituality, then with this, by necessity, we must also ascribe to them unlimited existence, for only one unlimited being can have and must have unlimited properties.”

All these propositions are grouped around one central point: if the spirituality of created spirits is limited, then they, by necessity, must have a certain degree of materiality proper to their nature.

The question arises: from what does it follow that limited spirituality must necessarily be to a certain degree material? Whence comes this necessity?

“Angels,” it is further said, “are subject to time and space. The concept of subjection to space is inseparable from the concept of subjection to form.

Rejecting the concept of subjection of angels to space, one must either deny their existence altogether or acknowledge them as boundless, that is, ascribe to them God’s omnipresence. Only two indeterminate magnitudes—nothingness and infinity—are not subject to any form; every determinate magnitude, on the other hand, however great or small, necessarily has form by virtue of its very determinateness.”

Having agreed that angels are limited, we must accept also that they have form in relation to space, and that in relation to the subtlety of their nature they have a certain degree of this subtlety, that is, they are necessarily bodies, however subtle these bodies may be.

The form of a limited being is necessarily outlined, so to speak, by its very bounds and endpoints; a being outlined in this way has its appearance.

The infinite is not subject to any form, as it has no ending in any direction: for this same reason it cannot have any appearance. “No one has ever seen God” (Jn 1:18). An infinite being cannot be body, because it is finer than all the finest subtlety: it is wholly spirit.

There is your proof! But is it really proof? If, when speaking of God as an infinite being, nothing else can be understood except that God’s nature has no ending in any direction, that is, that it is infinite in extension, then it will follow automatically that the finite is also finite in extension, that is, it has endings in all directions and consequently occupies a certain space in three dimensions, has its own form, and is therefore a body. But if the infinite does not mean this lack of ending in any direction, that is, if it does not mean infinity in extension, then it will in no way follow that the finite is necessarily already a body.

Let us, however, give a precise meaning to the word “infinite.”

In Latin there are two words: infinitus and indefinitus. We too have two corresponding words: bescondless, or infinite, and indeterminate—two terms expressing completely different concepts. Indeterminate means having no definite boundaries and outlines, while boundless and infinite mean having no degree of perfection lacking, or being all-perfect in every possible respect, the fullness of being, life, and perfection.

The relation to space and time is not taken into account here, for the boundless is beyond these relations. One cannot speak of it as either infinitely extended in time or infinitely vast in space. It is eternal, by which temporality is denied, and omnipresent, by which spatiality is denied. Had the pamphlet kept this in mind, it would not have come to those conclusions we have seen. All of its error lies in an incorrect concept of the infinity of God’s being.

If the infinite is understood to mean that it has no ending in any direction, that is, that it is extended without end in every direction, then it will disappear into indeterminateness, like something of which we say it “scattered into the air.” Therefore, if by saying that the infinite is not subject to form, or that it has no appearance, the new teaching understands this to mean lack of ending in extension, then while exalting God in words, in meaning it destroys His being.

The new teaching, as is evident, also has an incorrect concept of God’s spirituality. “The infinite,” it says, “cannot be body.” Why? Because it is “finer than all the finest subtlety, it is wholly spirit.”

It turns out that God’s being is spirit because it is finer than all the finest subtlety, that is, the highest, most perfect subtlety, than which no finer subtlety could possibly exist. Since subtlety in general is an attribute of matter, the highest and final degree of subtlety will also point to matter. From this it would directly follow that God too is material.

Proceeding from incorrect concepts of infinity and spirituality, the new teaching built its entire interpretation of the corporeality of angels and souls. But if it is an inviolable law that whenever concepts are imprecise or wrong, then everything derived from them is wrong, then by this measure all of this teaching’s construction is false.

If unlimited, infinite being does not mean unlimited spatial extension, then the limitedness of a being does not necessarily mean limitedness in relation to space, and therefore does not require that this being necessarily have form, be outlined by its bounds and endpoints, and have an appearance.

All this may apply to the finite, but it in no way follows from a correct concept of the infinite. Equally, the following position does not follow: “Rejecting the concept of subjection of angels to space, one must either deny their existence altogether or acknowledge them as boundless, that is, ascribe to them omnipresence.”

If unlimitedness or boundlessness is infinite extension or occupation of all possible extension and space, then it will necessarily follow that as soon as angels are not subject to defined space and cannot by reason of their limitedness occupy all space, then they do not exist.

But if they do exist and are not subject to defined space, then one must suppose that they fill all space or are everywhere. This follows only if we take as a foundation the incorrect concept of the infinite as being that which has no ending in any direction. Put a different concept of the infinite at the beginning and this entire inference collapses of itself.

From the concept of the infinite as all-perfect, it follows that every limited being can have only a certain share of perfection and moreover to a certain degree. But that it necessarily must occupy space, have all three dimensions, have its own form and appearance, and be therefore a body—this in no way follows. These attributes are derived from other positions concerning created beings, namely, from the position concerning material creatures. With the concept of matter is necessarily joined the concept of extension; the concept of extension leads to the concept of form; a formed, extended being is a body.

From the concept of non-material creatures flow different positions: instead of extension, or as it is called, extensive quantity, there is found in them intensive quantity, the degree of intensity of spiritual forces and intellectual-moral qualities. Such a property of spiritual beings does not require that they be necessarily formed in space, although their activity must necessarily manifest itself somewhere.

They exist, but do not occupy space as it is occupied or filled by a body, but only manifest their presence in it by the activity of spiritual or intellectual forces that constitute their essence.

Not being formed in space, they have no outlines; having no outlines, they have no appearance.

These are the direct consequences of a correct concept of the infinite and the finite—consequences diametrically opposite to the conclusions of the new teaching! There can be no dispute about the conclusions. All the dispute, if it is appropriate to have one, can revolve around the concept of the infinite. Whoever has the correct concept of infinity is on the side of truth.

In the “Comprehensive Christian Catechism” it is said thus concerning the being of God: “God is an eternal, all-good, all-knowing, all-righteous, all-mighty, omnipresent, unchangeable, self-sufficient, all-blessed spirit.” All of this in conjunction can be expressed in one word: all-perfect, or infinitely perfect.

In the theology of Bishop Macarius it is said: “When we call God boundless, we mean that He is not only free from any limitation and deficiency in any respect whatsoever, but at the same time possesses all possible perfections (existences—realitatibus) and moreover to the highest degree, or without any degree or measure.”

On page 78 it is written: “One must remember that boundlessness or all-perfectness in God is not some particular divine property, but a general one encompassing all the others. God,” says Saint Cyril of Jerusalem, “is perfect in all things… perfect in knowledge, perfect in power, perfect in greatness, perfect in foresight, perfect in goodness, perfect in justice, perfect in loving-kindness.”

This is how one must understand the boundlessness of God’s nature! Nowhere is it mentioned, not even by the slightest hint, that it is infinite because it has no ending in any direction. Consequently, angels and souls should not be understood as the new teaching understands them, basing itself on its incorrect concept of the boundless. One must not suppose that angels and souls, inasmuch as they are finite, must necessarily possess outline, figure, appearance, or defined extension in space in three dimensions.

What angels and souls are like in space was explained to us by Saint John of Damascus, according to whom they are in space in such a way that they do not acquire form or shape and have no need to have three dimensions. And that souls have neither outline nor quantity nor extension in three dimensions nor local position—this was taught to us by Saint Gregory of Nyssa, whose teaching must be considered not as that of an individual but as representing the agreement also of Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian.

And Saint Gregory of Nyssa also removed that perplexity which arises from the denial of these qualities in the soul (and I add—in the angel), as if therefore one must consider it of one substance with God the infinite—removed it by explaining that godlikeness is not consubstantiality. Saint Maximus the Confessor did the same.

Thus, the desire of the new teaching to derive from the limitedness of angels and souls that they are body can be considered very unsuccessful.

Why the subsequent appeal to religious feeling that says, look, by ascribing spirituality to creatures, angels and souls, you ascribe properties of the Creator to creatures and consequently fall into blasphemy, proves to be unnecessary after the explanations we have made.

One might even address a similar speech to this teaching itself: “Look, indeed you, wishing to defend God, prescribe to Him commands about what He can and cannot create; and while He Himself testifies that He has created creatures like Him, you by your denial, so to speak, say to Him: how could it be for You to create!”

In considering angels to be spirits, we do not think we fall into excess of honor; on the contrary, one must fear lest, calling them body, we insult them, thinking of them as less than they are. Who would take offense at excess of honor? But for failing to give them their due, they might even become indignant with us.

“The connection of soul with body,” reasons the new teaching, “proves that despite the significant difference between body and soul, body and soul have something in common, have, let us use an expression from chemistry, affinity.

If there were no affinity, there could be no connection. But if there is affinity, then the soul must necessarily have a certain materiality proper to itself.”

One almost always hears an objection, calling upon psychologists who acknowledge the soul as a spiritual substance, for an explanation: how is the soul connected with the body, and how do they act mutually upon one another? The distance between spirit and body seems too great.

And so, to bring them closer and thereby weaken the force of the proposed questions, they say: spirit too is body, only a subtle one. But is the difficulty thereby eased? One might view it differently.

Another might think that the perplexity remains and persists in its former force, and moreover this concession, while not easing the explanation of one aspect (the union and interaction of soul and body), raises insuperable difficulties on the other side (the spiritual actions of the soul—consciousness, freedom, thought, and so forth).

To such and we incline. But of this later. For now let us turn to the main foundation. Is it true that in order to be in connection and interact, one must be homogeneous? And is it therefore necessary that the soul, being spiritual in nature, be body in order to be in connection and interaction with body?

In our view, this is not necessary. Besides material affinity there is dynamic affinity, intensive affinity, consisting in the unity of forms and laws of action. It is enough to suppose that the soul, being a spiritual substance, received for its activity laws and forms identical with the laws and forms of the material world and its body, in order to understand how it acts through them upon the body and conversely receives action from the body, without being itself a body.

The soul is not an abstract force, as the new teaching seems to think, but a real, actual force, actually existing among other realities. In this reality of being lies the foundation of the possibility of acting on the surrounding world and of receiving action from it. And in order that this interaction not be destructive, it is guarded by an inner harmonious disposition, by the identity of laws and forms of action.

The soul-spirit, a real force, by its physical, so to speak, side acts and sets all the body in motion, and as spirit, transcending matter, appears in us as the dominant and sovereign. Even the very formation of the body is accomplished by this same side independent of the consciousness and free activity of the soul.

Understanding the very body in this way as the product of the soul-spirit, we shall have no further need to solve the question of how the soul is connected with the body by the assumption that the soul is body. Recall one quotation we took from Saint Basil the Great about the twofold power of the soul—vital and rational, and agree that our thought is not altogether our own. Let us bring that passage here: “The power of the soul,” he says, “is twofold, though the soul is one and the same, namely: one is the vital power of the body properly speaking, and the other is the power that contemplates what exists, which we may also call rational. But the soul, inasmuch as it is united with the body, naturally, as a consequence of this union and not voluntarily, imparts to the body the vital force. And the contemplative power is set in motion by the will!”

There is the source and the particular form of affinity between body and soul, according to which there is no requirement whatsoever that they both be bodies.

We do not claim that by this explanation the mystery of the soul’s union with the body is revealed, but we cannot help insisting that with it there is no necessity for other assumptions, all the more not for such strange ones, according to which the soul itself should be acknowledged as body. The soul unites with the body and acts upon it naturally, and conversely receives its action naturally.

Let us now focus our attention on the word “affinity” taken from chemistry. It alarmed us when we first met it here, reviving the fear: is the theory of the new teaching connected with the principles of chemistry? The fear was not in vain.

In the “Appendix” the following is written: “The body remains a body until the moment life leaves it. From the moment life leaves it, its decomposition begins. Moreover: through this departure decomposition is accomplished; further decomposition is only a consequence of the principal, essential decomposition. The decomposition of matter, according to the laws of chemistry, can only happen by the separation from it of one or several of its constituent parts.

Here is science’s indication of the materiality of the soul: the separation of something non-material or abstract would not produce any influence on matter. But the soul is invisible. What of it? Caloric is also invisible. It is an imperceptible principle, but separates chemically from water by a separation imperceptible and incomprehensible to the senses, and water transforms into another substance—ice.”

You read it and don’t believe your eyes! Every word is unheard-of news! You’d think that one word, affinity, which perhaps slipped out unintentionally, could lead to this! The soul ended up in the chemical elements of the body… Who ever read or heard such news?!

Note first of all that the independent, self-contained realm of chemical processes is inorganic nature. There are chemical products also in plants, but chemical processes here are dependent upon another principle, which chemistry does not understand, as the new teaching itself says. As long as this principle is in action, chemistry has no entry into its laboratory. But when it departs, and only the body it produced remains, then chemistry takes its products, decomposes them, and determines: which element went into which part and to what degree—but of the work of production itself it knows nothing.

After examining everything, all that remains is for it to say: see what this principle—life—has wrought; but how, who knows!

In the animal we see the very vegetative principle subject to another principle, from which sensation, movement, and understanding are communicated. And in man we see an even higher principle, sovereign over all this and transcending all that. Such is the ladder of powers!

I cite the teaching of Saint Gregory of Nyssa on this subject: “We almost forgot the order in creation according to which the growth of plants from the earth precedes and after this come irrational animals, and then, after their arrangement, man.

It seems to me that Moses sets forth in this some hidden teaching and mysteriously communicates wisdom about the soul, which even higher learning yearned for but could not comprehend in clarity. For Scripture teaches us that in three distinctions the vital and spiritual power can be discerned.

There is a certain power that is merely vegetative and nourishing: taking what is suited to the growth of the nourished, it is called natural and is seen in plants, for in what grows one can observe a certain life force devoid of sensation.

But besides this, there is another kind of life, which includes the first, and to it is joined the capacity to govern itself through sensation; such is the life in the nature of irrational animals: they not only feed and grow, but have sensory activity and sensory perception. But perfect life in the body is seen in the rational nature—I mean human nature—nourished, feeling, possessing the gift of speech and governed by reason…

Therefore the lawgiver (Moses) says that after inanimate matter, as it were as a foundation for animate beings, this natural life was first formed, embodied in the growth of plants, then introduces into being creatures governed by sensation… Last, after plants and animals, man was arranged. All kinds of soul are merged in this rational animal—man… He is nourished, and with the vegetative (nourishing) power is joined the sensitive… Then with what is refined and luminous in the sensing nature, there is accomplished a kind of adaptation and merger of the intelligible essence, so that man is constituted of these three natures.”

Such is the complete depiction of the forces acting in creatures! A similar teaching can be seen in the 166 instructions of Saint Anthony the Great in the Philokalia.

We mention in passing the teaching of the holy Fathers about the ladder of forces, chiefly so that the falsity of the new teaching might be more clearly seen, which cast the human soul into the ranks of chemical elements. And this is done by them to gratify contemporary science, which itself confesses that it does not understand the body and still less its life.

“The life of the body,” it is said in science, “is inaccessible to our comprehension,”—and this is still only organic life, plant life; all the more inaccessible is the life of an animal, which has, beyond the first, also sensation and voluntary movement and understanding; and incomparably more inaccessible is the life of man, in whom the soul or spirit is capable of knowing God, of feeling God, of completely free activity independent of anything external, of making comprehensive views of all that exists, of yearnings that draw consciousness and heart away from all.

If all this is unknown to science, then reason commands that we not take it as a guide in making pronouncements that define the essence of human life.

And yet a pronouncement is made and made in the name of science, that our soul is material—that it is present in us precisely as a chemical element, the separation of which marks the beginning, or even accomplishes the decomposition of our body.

The last indication from experience—that the departure of the soul marks the beginning of the body’s decomposition—seems to have been the occasion for such a pronouncement. For the new teaching, as is noted in our quotation, reasons thus: the decomposition of matter, that is, of some chemically complex body, according to the laws of chemistry, cannot happen in any other way than by the separation from it of one or several of its constituent parts.

Since the soul, in separating from our body, accomplishes its decomposition, it is evident that it is a constituent part of the body. And since, furthermore, our body is material, then all its constituent parts are material, consequently the soul too is material as a corresponding part of it.

And there you have the famous indication of science concerning the materiality of the soul! “The separation of something non-material or abstract would produce no influence on matter (the body)…”.

Even if something were to follow from the principles of chemistry in favor of the new teaching, it would still not be necessary to give this much weight. Chemistry is not concerned with the same sphere of objects to which the soul belongs. Therefore it cannot be a competent judge concerning the soul.

Though the new teaching prides itself on not being contrary to chemistry and hopes to find justification for itself therein, it could neither explain this nor prove it. To somehow prove according to chemistry the materiality of the soul, one would first need to prove that it is similar to the chemical elements of the body and is chemically joined with the body.

The soul, however, is hindered from entering into affinity with these elements by its invisibility and intangibility, so that by this property of the soul one can immediately reject any attempt to prove its materiality by means borrowed from the chemical laboratory. The new teaching hastens to remove this obstacle to the success of its conclusions, insisting that if the soul is invisible, this is nothing, and it is not contrary to chemistry for there to exist something evasive and unobservable.

That the invisibility of the soul does not prevent it from being placed in the group of chemical elements is explained by the example of the combination of caloric with things.

“The soul is invisible: what of it? Caloric is also invisible. But it separates chemically from water by a separation imperceptible and incomprehensible to the senses, and water transforms into another substance—ice.” That a similar chemical separation of the soul from the body is accomplished, making it cold and dead, is left for readers to complete.

But a comparison, even if successful, is not a proof, and here there is neither proof nor is the comparison apt—inapt because it does not lead to the thoughts the new teaching wished to clarify through it. Heat does not combine with things, does not separate from them chemically. It is a force free from chemical bonding: it enters and leaves according to its own laws. Chemistry takes no part in its workings and therefore does not number it among its elements.

Thus, if we give this example its proper meaning, we must say that the soul is not chemically combined with the body and, consequently, when it leaves it, at that moment the principal, essential decomposition does not take place—that is, we must reject the position upon which the new teaching hoped to base itself in order to derive from the laws of chemistry the materiality of the soul.

That water transforms into another substance—ice—upon the separation of caloric may be an accidental slip, but the mention of the imperceptible and incomprehensible-to-the-senses separation of heat seems intentional, so that this separation would more resemble the separation of the soul from the body. And again it is inapt and not to its advantage! Though the separation of heat is imperceptible to the senses, physicists have extremely sensitive instruments by which they know and, so to speak, feel the effects of heat in all degrees.

And this leads further to the following: physicists have instruments for determining the properties and effects of all the most subtle material forces: heat, electricity, light—all these forces are considered manifestations of ether and all of them are subject to artificial empirical observation. Why then has no one yet attempted to invent some instrument to test the soul, if it too is ether, so as to directly determine its own intensity and then the degrees of the action of its powers—reason, will, feeling, passions? Is it not because the soul is unsuitable for such treatment? Yes. And why is it unsuitable? Because it belongs to a completely different sphere than all the known manifestations of ether to us. But whoever agrees with this—and one cannot but agree with it—also cannot but agree that the soul is not only not any chemical element, but is not even an ethereal body. Thus the inapt comparison used by the new teaching in its own defense has led us to conclusions that undermine it.

To show that the elusiveness of the soul does not deprive it of the possibility of belonging to the objects with which chemistry concerns itself, falsehood is attributed to chemistry in the following words: “The existence of something material, having no effect on our senses, or having an effect which we do not notice, is not only not contrary to the teaching of chemistry, but is evident from its teaching.” (“Appendix”)

What lies beyond the scope of our senses and the effects of which we do not observe, neither chemistry nor all the natural sciences know nor wish to know. To concern themselves with it is not their task. Their task is to observe what is observable, to subject it to various senses, to make experiments, to compare, to generalize, to make inferences, and so forth. But all this is in the realm of the observable, if not by everyone, then at least by one sense.

As for chemistry, it has oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen—the finest, than which none are finer—which have neither color nor smell nor taste, yet they are not imperceptible. It extracts them, bottles them, weighs them, combines them, determines the proportions in which they combine with various substances and so forth. They are in its hands, under its constant observation, it follows their actions everywhere and thereby determines them. That is its domain! What is beyond this, chemistry does not touch, about it it says neither yes nor no. Is not the existence of spirits, as the new teaching proposes, precisely not contrary to chemistry because it concerns itself with them not at all? Whether they exist or do not—it makes no difference to it.

Furthermore: one cannot fail to reproach the new teaching for confusing concepts. It confused, and confused entirely unlawfully, the decomposition of bodies in inorganic nature, where chemical processes are complete masters, with the decomposition of organic bodies, where they serve another, supreme mistress, called the vital principle. This mistress herself is a most clever chemist. An organic body is her laboratory. She takes chemical elements and from them manages to construct all the diverse parts, for example, of the human body.

How she does this is incomprehensible to chemistry. While this mistress is in the body, she keeps all her creations in the organism in her fashion and structure and does not allow them to decompose.

When she leaves the body, then the parts of the organism, having lost the vital principle that produced and maintained them, are subjected to external influences of air, heat, and moisture and begin to decompose into their constituent elements. The departure of the vital principle does not accomplish decomposition: for this principle is not an elemental part of the organism, but is the force that produces and maintains it.

After this force departs, the body remains whole in its composition; but since it is left to itself, remains without protection and support, it begins to decompose. Decomposition only begins then. The departure of the vital principle is not decomposition, but only the granting of freedom and space to the decomposing processes. It is then that elemental decomposition begins. It is then that chemical laws properly come into force; in the departure of the vital principle they do not participate: that is a realm unknown to them.

In inorganic nature it is different. Here no departure of some higher principle precedes decomposition, but the very act of the separation of some element is itself decomposition, after which the body immediately ceases to exist. Heat a mixture of sulfur and mercury—cinnabar will form, a body chemically composed. Place iron in the cinnabar and heat—the sulfur will combine with the iron and the mercury will separate, and the cinnabar will be no more. This is the very act of separation of constituent parts. But there it is not so: the vital principle departs and the body remains whole as it was.

The last example gives occasion for the following observation. Elements in chemical combination each lose their natural properties and from their combination there is formed an entirely new body, resembling neither one element nor the other.

If the soul is chemically combined with the body, then it is not a soul there, but becomes a soul only upon leaving the body. How then do we call it a soul? But if it is a soul here in chemical combination with the organism, then upon being freed from it, it ought to be no longer a soul, but something else. Should the new teaching not concern itself with discovering its proper name after it leaves the body?

I will add one more thing. The new teaching thinks that the soul becomes some sort of abstraction when it is acknowledged as spiritual. No, in acknowledging it as spiritual, we do not think for a moment that it is some sort of idea, but that it is a real force, actually existing. The separation of it from the body produces an influence on the organism because it animates the body. The soul departs—life is no more. For the separation to produce such an effect on the organism, there is absolutely no need for it to be material and to exist in chemical affinity and union with the organism.

To dispel these unpleasant thoughts about the soul, prompted by the new teaching, I cite the words of Saint Gregory of Nyssa about the soul and its relation to the body.

Here is what he says about the soul: “The soul is a created essence, a living, rational essence, which imparts to the organic and sentient body the vital force and the power of sensation for as long as the nature capable of receiving it proves competent to do so.”

This is what he says about the soul while it is in the body. But what happens when it leaves the body?

“When… this vital cause, which once existed in the body, suddenly becomes invisible and imperceptible, just as the flame that burned in an extinguished lamp; then with the severance of the affinity of the elements, in each of them there arises a tendency toward that with which it shares a property, for the very nature of the elements, by a kind of necessary inclination, returns to its homogeneous what is proper to it…” (ibid.).

If such is the consequence of the separation of the soul from the body, is not the soul itself then an element of the body?

No, the soul “exists in itself, by a particular nature distinct from bodily density. It is non-material, incorporeal, acts and moves in accordance with its own nature and manifests its proper actions through bodily organs. The organic structure of the body is the same even in the dead; but it remains motionless and inactive through the absence of spiritual power in it.”

One cannot fail to note the last words of this sorrowful section of the new teaching’s reasoning, where it speaks of chemistry and mathematics. “These sciences, separating God from the creature by an infinite difference, as if open a door to faith, explaining the necessity of revealed knowledge of God. They cannot reject it because of the omnipotence of God and the independence of His actions from human judgment that they acknowledge.” (“Appendix”)

Chemistry and mathematics have pushed back the idea of God to do without God altogether. They have cast aside the thought of God behind themselves. Chemistry knows nothing but matter; mathematics too in its applications pursues everything only to material things.

Poor guides they are to faith in God. They do not open but close this door. To them precisely applies what Saint Gregory of Nyssa says of Epicurus: “The visible alone was for him the limit of the nature of beings, and he took sensation to be the measure of the knowledge of the universe, having completely closed the sensory faculty of the soul and being unable to turn his gaze to anything intellectual and incorporeal, as one confined in a hut remains unseeing of the wonders of heaven, because the walls and roof prevent him from seeing what lies outside the hut.

For all that is sensible which is seen in the universe is truly a kind of earthen wall which for men of feeble mind prevents access to a view of the intellectual. Such a man sees only earth, air, and fire, but whence each of these elements comes, or what it consists of, or what keeps it in its place—this he cannot discern because of the weakness of his mind. And though one, seeing a garment, concludes about the weaver, understands the shipbuilder from the ship, and looking at a building, imagines the hand of the builder, yet even he, gazing at the world, remains blind to the discernment of Him whom he shows.” (ibid.)

This is what one must expect from these sciences! Chemistry especially has buried itself in the elements—and where can it lift its head to gaze at heaven? I have elements, says it, and the law of affinity—what more is there to want? I have no need of any outside force.

A pious chemist and mathematician, marveling how everything is wisely arranged by measure, weight, and number, will thus kindle religious feeling in themselves; but the sciences themselves, as sciences, in the production of their work, proceed entirely without any thought of God. “They cannot reject God,” says the new teaching. But why then, with the predominance of the natural sciences, has there developed a cooling toward faith in God and His providence? Because these sciences refuse to acknowledge the power of God. For them nothing is more powerful than the laws of nature. They have put aside the idea of God. Together with them the new teaching zealously does the same. Will this lead to anything good?!

So far we have examined the new teaching in its foundations, followed how it developed itself. Now let us face it directly and discuss it according to the form in which it crystallized and according to the position in which it expressed itself.

Accordingly, first of all: is it consistent with itself and does it not contradict itself? Further, if we accept it as a hypothesis for explaining a certain range of phenomena, does it explain these phenomena?

The answer to the first question is simple. The new teaching says: “The soul and the angel are a complete body, having the entire appearance of a man: a head, hair, face, eyes, ears, breast, hands, feet.”

For this diversity of parts to exist and for these parts to differ from one another and be distinguishable from each other externally, it is necessary to admit a diversity of elements in their composition.

The composition of the eye must differ from the composition of the hand, foot, and so forth. If this is so, then these soul-bodies cannot consist of one ether alone, as the new teaching supposes, for ether is recognized as the simplest of all worldly elements, which in itself cannot give the diversity of constituent parts necessary to form the soul-body in its complete aspect.

One might suppose other subtle substances similar to ether in tenuity but different in properties, to make up the soul. But still one cannot say that the soul is simple and uncompounded; rather, one must recognize it as a composite organism, even if subtle.

Will the new teaching agree to supplement itself with this proposition? If it agrees—and it can hardly avoid agreeing—then it must agree at the same time that the soul is a body, not composed of ether alone, or confess its inadequacy.

Thus the essential meaning of the new teaching necessarily requires a diversity of elements in the composition of the soul-body, however fine they may be. Standing on this point, we ask: who is the organizer of these diverse parts from elements—fine and ethereal? Who keeps them in wholeness and proportionate relationship? Surely someone must!

In our body’s organism everything flows from one central vital force and is preserved by it. Such a force must likewise be present in the soul-body’s organism.

If we do not allow for such an organizer, we will come to the thought that all parts of the soul-body do not exist in a vital mutual combination, but are merely attached to one another. From this, further, everything will become incomprehensible and obscured: movement, sensation, and every action, even in its simplest form.

Does the new teaching recognize the necessity of this addition too? If it does—and it cannot avoid doing so—then it must alter its main proposition that the soul is merely a fine, ethereal image of the visible man and nothing more.

One could go further, enquiring who is the organizer of the soul’s organism: a body within the body, or something else—but we pass over this, for it suffices to look at the soul as the new teaching depicts it to be convinced that this teaching contradicts itself and undermines itself.

We turn to the second question. Does the position devised by the new teaching explain the circle of phenomena for which it was devised to explain?

The soul is the source and cause of our inner life, composed of thoughts, desires, feelings, acts of freedom, fear of God and conscience, concentrated in consciousness, from which it issues like from a focal point. Here is the soul, departed from the body and standing before you in the form of a visible man with all the diversity of his body’s parts and acting like him.

In its totality all this is a soul, thinking, freely acting, conscious of itself. If every action flows from the soul and is received by the soul, and the soul is entire as a whole, then every action must flow from the whole and be reflected in every part. Not just one part should think, but the entire soul-body; not just one part should be conscious, and likewise the soul-body as a whole should receive external action, not just some part of it.

Is this actually the case? Hardly! Rather, in it as in ordinary man, only the eye looks, only the ear hears, only the tongue speaks, and thought is only in the head. From this a direct conclusion is drawn that there is in the soul-body someone who looks with the eye, hears with the ear, acts with the hand, receives a question and answers, and so forth. There is, that is, in this composite organism, the soul-body, a single managing all the actions, which sees, hears, reasons, and does all things. The question arises: who is this single entity?

If it is the whole body, how can this entity be singular when the body’s composition is so diverse? If it is one part, then inasmuch as consciousness is the characteristic mark of the soul, that part alone would be the soul, not the whole body. If it is the trace of the harmony of the whole body, then the soul vanishes and we are left with an incomprehensible automaton.

Thus it follows by itself that this entity, conscious of itself, freely acting, thinking, willing, and feeling, cannot possibly be the soul-body itself, but must be something existing within this body, so that the soul-body would be for it only an organ and a dwelling place. Again the question arises: what is this? At this point we have an answer from the teaching itself, already heard by us. It is “a faculty of the human soul which the wise called the rational power, namely the spirit, to which they ascribed not only the faculty of thinking but also the capacity for spiritual sensations such as: the sensation of the sublime, the sensation of beauty, the sensation of virtue. In this respect the meaning of the words soul and spirit are very different.” (“Appendix”)

But receiving such an answer, we do not step into light, but are covered in a fog of indeterminacy, for it is known that the main thought of the new teaching is that the soul is an ethereal body in the image of man and nothing more.

But here a spiritual faculty appears in the soul-body, and not just one faculty but a collection of many faculties, the highest and most characteristic in human life, under the name of spirit, which is recognized as very different from the soul. A position evidently irreconcilable with the main proposition and destructive of it.

One might immediately conclude: so then the soul is a spirit clothed in an ethereal body? But this is flatly denied by the new teaching. And this is what leaves us in utter perplexity! Surely the new teaching has not agreed with itself and has not established its own peculiarity of expressing itself in accordance with its spirit, which is evidently very exceptional: for this reason the question of what this faculty is remains unsolved, yet it must be solved.

We take the new teaching at the point where it acknowledges in the ethereal soul-body the faculty of thinking, or more generally the faculty to manifest spiritual actions. The question is asked: is this faculty given to the ethereal body itself, the material one, or is a power different from matter implanted in this ethereal body—an immaterial, spiritual power, a spirit?

But the first is unthinkable: the faculty of thinking is as incompatible with matter as fire is with water. If someone tried to assure us that God granted matter the faculty of thinking, even this cannot be accepted, for God Himself is not able to create what contradicts itself.

One cannot give matter the faculty of thinking except by transforming it into immaterial spirit. At the moment matter began to think, it would have to cease being matter.

But the new teaching still has a refuge: it can say that it recognizes the ethereal soul-body as a substance and in this substance contemplates a particular force contained in it, which produces all the spiritual phenomena observed in the soul. But will matter hold this spiritual force? Is it capable of controlling it? Hardly. This would be a diamond set in clay. Moreover, if the soul-body holds this faculty, then it is the mistress and that force is its servant; that is, the thinking will be subordinate to the non-thinking, the free to the unfree, the self-conscious to the unconscious, the ever-moving spirit to the immobile body. How contrary to the order of things this is, Saint Maximus the Confessor already taught us. And again, where is the truth of the thought?

If the characteristic marks of our inner life are spiritual manifestations, then in referring all that is inner to the soul, one should define the soul itself by these marks, or see it where spiritual manifestations issue from.

If they issue from the admitted spiritual power or faculty, then one must count it as the soul, the dominant part of the body, which constitutes the distinctive mark of man or makes man a man and the soul a soul; and what is imagined under the form of a thin ethereal body should be counted as an organ subordinate to it—that is, the truth of thought requires that dominion be transferred from the ethereal soul-body to the faculty admitted in it for spiritual actions, called the spirit, and that this latter be recognized as the substance of the soul while the body is recognized as an appendage, an organ, a dwelling. Such have always been the representations both of the departed soul and of the appearing angel. The external is recognized as an organ. The active entity is seen within, from there it governs in dominion.

Had the new teaching resolved to reason thus, we could immediately lay down our weapons of battle. But since it stands its ground, we cannot extend our hand of reconciliation or cease reproaching it for its circular inconsistency. Thus by a direct path of thought we arrive at the acknowledgment of the spirit, even if it be in an ethereal body. One could go further to bring the matter to the liberation of the spirit from this covering, but we stop here. We only need the assurance that what is conscious in us and thinks is a spirit. The new teaching tries to convince us that, apart from the ethereal body which it thinks is the soul and the angel, nothing exists. In all the totality of creatures there is no spirit. Spirit is God alone.

Spirit only in God?.. But when in the totality of created phenomena there are spiritual phenomena, what are these—phenomena without a subject, wandering lights, or do they have their own subject?

If they must necessarily have a subject from which they issue, and among creatures there is no such subject, for they are all acknowledged as material, incapable of spiritual manifestations, then such a subject must be sought beyond the realm of creatures and, of course, in the Creator.

But can all the totality of spiritual phenomena known to us be such that it can without disturbance be wholly attributed to the Creator as their cause? Thus even reverence for the most pure and all-perfect creative nature should lead us to the acknowledgment among creatures of finite spirits.

With these few considerations we conclude our humble struggle with the new teaching, in the full hope that it alone will remain without a subject and disappear as wandering lights vanish in the distance, leaving no trace behind.

Scripture Index

Every Scripture reference identified in this book, sorted in canonical Bible order. Tap a reference to jump to the verse where it appears.

Genesis

Genesis 1:203. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

Genesis 1:243. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

Genesis 1:273. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

Genesis 2:73. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2; 4. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers on the Nature of Souls and Angels. Part 3; 5. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Genesis 18:1–25. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Exodus

Exodus 3:142. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

Leviticus

Leviticus 17:113. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

Psalms

Psalms 26:125. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Psalms 103:42. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1; 3. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

Ecclesiastes

Ecclesiastes 12:75. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Matthew

Matthew 10:285. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Matthew 14:25–275. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Matthew 18:105. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Matthew 22:303. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

Mark

Mark 5:8–95. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Mark 10:276. An Examination of the Rational Arguments Advanced in Defense of the New Teaching

Luke

Luke 11:24–265. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Luke 24:30–315. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Luke 24:37–395. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Luke 24:395. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

John

John 1:186. An Examination of the Rational Arguments Advanced in Defense of the New Teaching

John 4:23–245. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

John 4:245. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

John 17:216. An Examination of the Rational Arguments Advanced in Defense of the New Teaching

John 20:195. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Acts

Acts 12:5–75. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

1 Corinthians

1 Corinthians 15:404. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers on the Nature of Souls and Angels. Part 3

2 Corinthians

2 Corinthians 10:42. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

2 Corinthians 12:43. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

2 Corinthians 13:12. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

Ephesians

Ephesians 2:22. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

Ephesians 6:122. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1; 5. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Philippians

Philippians 2:72. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

Colossians

Colossians 1:162. Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

Hebrews

Hebrews 1:145. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

Hebrews 12:295. Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

The Author: Saint Theophan the Recluse

Saint Theophan the Recluse (1815–1894) is among the most beloved teachers of the spiritual life in the Russian Orthodox Church. He was born on 10 January 1815 in the village of Chernavsk, in the Oryol province of central Russia, and given the name Georgy Vasilyevich Govorov. His father was a parish priest, and the boy was raised in the ordered piety of a country rectory. He studied first at the theological school in Livny, then at the Oryol Seminary, and finally at the Kiev Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1841. The ancient monasteries of Kiev, and above all the Monastery of the Caves, left a deep mark on him during those years.

In his last year as a student, in 1841, Georgy Govorov was tonsured a monk and given the name Theophan, after Saint Theophan the Confessor, a defender of the holy icons. He was soon ordained hieromonk and set on the path of teaching and administration in the Church’s schools: he served in the theological schools of Kiev, as inspector at Novgorod, and as an instructor in moral and pastoral theology at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy. For several years he lived in the Christian East, attached to the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, where in Jerusalem, Constantinople, and on Mount Athos he studied, copied, and gathered the writings of the Fathers that he would later render into Russian. In 1857 he was appointed rector of the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy.

In 1859 he was consecrated Bishop of Tambov and Shatsk, and in 1863 he was transferred to the ancient see of Vladimir. As a bishop he was known for gentleness, tireless preaching, and care for the education of his people, founding diocesan schools for girls in both dioceses. Yet the labours of administration drew him away from the inner life he most desired. In 1866, at his own request, he was released from the government of his diocese and withdrew to the Vyshensky Hermitage, a quiet monastery he had come to love while at Tambov.

At Vysha, Saint Theophan gradually gave himself wholly to prayer and writing. Beginning in 1872 he entered strict reclusion: he no longer left his cell for the monastery church, received almost no visitors, and lived for the remaining years in two small rooms, celebrating the Divine Liturgy alone in a chapel he had arranged. This seclusion, far from being idleness, became the most fruitful period of his life. From it flowed the works for which he is remembered: The Path to Salvation and What the Spiritual Life Is; his translation and great expansion of the Philokalia (the Russian Dobrotolyubie) and of other monastic writings; Unseen Warfare; his commentaries on almost all the Epistles of the Apostle Paul, together with expositions of several Psalms; and an immense correspondence, in which he answered, often at the rate of dozens of letters a day, the spiritual questions of people throughout Russia. In 1890 the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy conferred on him a doctorate in theology.

Saint Theophan reposed on 6 January 1894, the Feast of the Theophany whose name he bore, at the age of seventy-nine, and was buried at the Vysha monastery. In 1988, during the Local Council of the Russian Orthodox Church that celebrated the millennium of the Baptism of Rus’, he was numbered among the saints. His feast is kept on 10 January.

His significance for the Church lies in the way he gathered the whole ascetical and patristic inheritance of Orthodoxy and made it speak to ordinary Christians. He wrote not for specialists but for anyone seeking God, tracing with unusual clarity the movements of the heart, the discipline of unceasing prayer, and the long work by which grace and human freedom together bring a soul to salvation. In his Scripture commentaries this same pastoral aim is at work: he reads the sacred text through the eyes of the ancient Fathers and turns every doctrine toward the reader’s own inner life. For this the Russian Church honours him as a Father in her own age and a sure guide on the path of salvation.

Colophon

The Soul and the Angel Are Not Body but Spirit
by Theophan the Recluse.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
The Dnieper in the Morning (1881)
by Arkhip Kuindzhi (Russian, 1842–1910), Wikimedia Commons, which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction

- The Soul and the Angel Are Not Body but Spirit

- Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 1

- Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers Concerning the Nature of the Soul and of Angels. Part 2

- Examination of the Testimonies of the Holy Fathers on the Nature of Souls and Angels. Part 3

- Examination of the Testimonies of the Word of God on the Nature of Souls and Angels

- An Examination of the Rational Arguments Advanced in Defense of the New Teaching

- Scripture Index
- The Author: Saint Theophan the Recluse
- Colophon