The Angels

Dom Anscar Vonier, Abbot of Buckfast, was among England's most celebrated homilists and theological writers in the early twentieth century. In this concise primer, Vonier introduces the reader to one of the most noble, but overlooked, elements of Catholic theology: the nature of angels. Drawing from Scripture, Patristic sources, and St. Thomas Aquinas, Vonier unfolds the metaphysical and moral characteristics of this mysterious group of spirits. Far from the soft, sentimentalized depiction of angels in much modern artwork, what emerges from Vonier's account is a picture of sheer vastness and awe, of an innumerable variety of pure spirits, filling the infinite space between God and humanity. To know these greatest of created beings, Vonier writes, will be "a great element in man's eternal happiness" and "the last thing in created love; greater love than that there could not be except man's communion with God himself."