There is an unseen spiritual world and it usually escapes our senses. That idea lies behind the discussion of angels. It is an ordered world that is meant to glorify God. It’s an angelic world that was created “in silence.” There are two worlds created for each other and which work together toward singing praise to the Holy Trinity. Angels act in heaven and on earth. They surround God and us; they fill the invisible world. They are mediators, ministers, and messengers. They are assigned to guard the smallest to the most important people, and they even have been given territories and zones on earth to watch over us. They will return at the Second Coming to gather up the faithful and separate them from those who rejected the Kingdom of Heaven. Angels are also ranked and ordered, according to St. Isaac the Syrian, Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Gregory the Theologian. Another important idea, then, is that the natural and spiritual worlds have an ordered existence. All creation is centered around the Light of the Holy Trinity.
Angels reflect and transmit the Light throughout creation. The three main ranks of angels are: Thrones, Cherubim and Seraphim. God is seated in glory and rests on the Thrones of Angels, the Cherubim stand in for the eyes of wisdom and knowledge, and the Seraphim’s six wings burn with the Light of God. The tradition of the scientific community usually treats these subjects within the category of miraculous blind faith and superstition. But in a homily on July 5, 2020, the 4th Sunday after Pentecost, Metropolitan Hilarion spoke about faith as the source of miracles, not miracles as a source of faith, which is knowledge of God. Some may ask whether or not angels have bodies. It’s reasonable to believe, within the patristic tradition, that angels do have angelic bodies, but they do not hold physical bodies exactly like humans. With a kind of body, all of the angels have a way of transmitting the Divine Light. Angels and humankind are meant to receive and send out Beauty from the source of and procession of all Beauty, the Holy Trinity, as Dionysius the Areopagite says.