The Language of Angels

Do angels speak and manifest their thoughts to others? It would indeed be inconceivable that such a vast multitude of pure spirits endowed with superior intelligence and an abundance of clear ideas should lack the means of communicating among themselves.

Saint Paul speaks of such things as "the tongues of angels." From sacred Scripture we learn that angels do talk with one another; they talk to men every time they are sent as God's messengers into this world. The examples are many: The Archangel Raphael and Tobias, Gabriel the Archangel and Saint Zachary and the Blessed Virgin Mary; an Angel spoke to Saint Peter, etc. If they talk and they sing in a manner and a voice that is not their own, how much more must they be able to talk and sing in the language of the spirits.

At the birth of Christ, the heavenly messenger of joy and of great tidings, an angel of God announced the nativity of the Savior of the world to a few shepherds in the hill country around Bethlehem. Messengers had come down to earth many times since man's creation, to advise, to warn, to help, or to punish man. On this occasion "a multitude of the heavenly army" was heard for the first time singing, caroling, and praising God and saying: "Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will." Only the angelic mind could well understand the mystery of the Incarnation, and the great honor and dignity that had come to poor human nature when the Son of God, the Eternal Word, assumed and substantially united it to His Divine Person for all eternity.

The fact that angels possess a language of their own is beyond all doubt; the nature of that language, however, is little known to us. When the angels appear to men, a human language is spoken by them, the one spoken by the addressee. The sound of human voice is produced, and human words are spoken when the angelic apparition is a sensible one; only mental words, the conveying of ideas, are used in cases of imaginative or intellectual visions.

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