Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil (34 page)

In 553, Justinian arranged the Fifth Ecumenical Council (the Second Council of Constantinople). This time the pope refused to attend. Justinian responded by arresting him and appointing Pelagius as the new pontiff.

Because there exists today no manuscript documenting any papal approval whatsoever of the council’s fifteen anathemas against Origen, some scholars deny that Origen’s condemnation at this council was ever formalized through ratification by the Holy See.

But experts agree that in essence and in practice, Justinian and the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem condemned Origen’s teaching on
certain points
and proclaimed it heretical—even if it did lack the signature of the Vicar of Christ.
[146]

And apparently all Christian churches in the Byzantine empire under the yoke of Justinian (Rome included) forbade Origen’s controversial teachings—most especially his premises concerning the preexistence of souls, which undergird the doctrine of reincarnation. In the centuries that followed, that doctrine was actively taught mostly among the heretical Cathars, Hermetic philosophers, alchemists, Rosicrucians, Christian Kabalists, and the like. For Catholic Christians it became a nonsubject, more than forgotten—dead by neglect.

So what
else
was controversial about Origen’s works? Origen seems to have thought that whenever angels fall (which they could do at any time, depending on their own free will), they then walk the earth as men. If they persist in their evil ways, they ultimately become demons, which have, according to Origen, “cold and obscure bodies.”
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For Origen, there were no hard-and-fast boundaries between angels and men. One fragment quotes him as teaching that “angels may become men or demons, and again from the latter they may rise to be men or angels.”
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Origen further explains the transition of angels’ bodies to men’s bodies in the following way:

When intended for the more imperfect spirits, it [the material substance] becomes solidified, thickens, and forms the bodies of this visible world. If it is serving higher intelligences, it shines with the brightness of the celestial bodies and serves as a garb for the angels of God, and the children of the Resurrection.
[149]

Elsewhere he elaborates on this theme, describing how an incorporeal spirit gradually assumes a physical body:

If any rational, incorporeal, invisible creature is negligent, it will gradually fall to lower levels and there assume a body. The sort of body it assumes will depend on the place it falls into. Thus, it will first take on an ethereal body, then an aerial one; as it draws near the earth it will put on a coarser one still, and in the end it will be harnessed to human flesh.
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Origen also speaks of

those souls which, on account of their excessive mental defects, stood in need of bodies of a grosser and more solid nature.
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One more comment of Origen explains further that there are

those who, either owing to mental deficiencies, deserved to enter into bodies, or those who were carried away by their desire for visible things, and those also who, either willingly or unwillingly, were compelled ... to perform certain services to such as had fallen into that condition.
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Later Church sources quote Origen’s idea that some of the spirits originally created by God (which were, in his view, even higher than the angels) fell in the following manner: “No longer desiring the sight of God,” Origen says that the spirits eventually “gave themselves over to worse things, each one following his own inclinations, and ... they have taken bodies more or less subtile,” according to the degree of their crime.
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Origen is also quoted as believing that these spirits who fell were those “in whom the divine love had grown cold” and states that these could have been “hidden in gross bodies such as ours, and have been called men.”
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In that statement, Origen evinces the belief that certain men are actually the embodiments of wicked angels.

Fragments of his other teachings elaborate on this idea. Origen pursues at one point a lengthy analysis of Ezekiel’s description of the prince of Tyre (Ezek. 28:12–19), showing that the prince described was actually “a certain angel who received the office of governing the nation of the Tyrians”—an angel who had fallen from his former holy place and was cast forth upon the earth. Origen’s point is that the passage obviously describes no ordinary human prince, but “some superior power which had fallen away from a higher position, and had been reduced to a lower and worse condition.”
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In his own words, he attempts to prove that “those opposing and malignant powers were not formed or created so by nature, but fell from a better to a worse position, and were converted into wicked beings.”
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Origen does not discount the possibility that this fallen angel had incarnated and literally governed the Tyrians. Indeed, that idea fits in well with Origen’s teaching that fallen angels can become men.

But Origen also believed that
good
angels could incarnate in human bodies for divine purposes. In his
Commentary on the Gospel of John,
Origen concludes that John the Baptist was an angel who deliberately chose to become incarnate in order to minister to Christ. Origen says,

From the beginning, those who have occupied the most eminent positions among men and been markedly superior to others have been angels in human form. This explains the passage in Scripture which says that John was one of God’s messengers, or angels, who came in the body to bear witness to the light.
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In Greek, the word for
messenger
is
angelos,
from which we get the English word
angel.
Our word
evangelist
has the literal meaning “one who brings a good message”—i.e., the gospel. The linguistic connection between
messenger
and
angel
is probably what prompted Origen’s comment that the message-bearer John the Baptist must have been an angel.

One can only wonder whether Origen did not state in some now-destroyed writing the converse of that statement: namely, that the worst among men have been fallen angels or demons in human form. Here the lost pieces of Origen’s angelology are sorely missed, for Origen is saying that both wicked angels and good angels incarnate among men—but whatever else he said on the subject vanished long ago.

The Second Council of Constantinople in 553
A.D.
pronounced the following anathema against Origen’s teaching:

If anyone shall say that the creation of all reasonable things includes only intelligences without bodies and altogether immaterial, having neither number nor name, so that there is unity between them all by identity of substance, force and energy, and by their union with and knowledge of God the Word; but that
no longer desiring the sight of God, they gave themselves over to worse things, each one following his own inclinations, and that they have taken bodies more or less subtile,
and have received names, for among the heavenly Powers there is a difference of names as there is also a difference of bodies; and thence some became and are called Cherubims, others Seraphims, and Principalities, and Powers, and Dominations, and Thrones, and Angels, and as many other heavenly orders as there may be: let him be anathema.
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(emphasis added)

The council also directed two other anathemas against Origen:

If anyone shall say that
the reasonable creatures in whom the divine love had grown cold have been hidden in gross bodies such as ours, and have been called men,
while those who have attained the lowest degree of wickedness have shared cold and obscure bodies and are become and called demons and evil spirits: let him be anathema.

If anyone shall say that a psychic condition has come from an angelic or archangelic state, and more over that a demoniac and a human condition has come from a psychic condition, and that from a human state they may become again angels and demons, and that each order of heavenly virtues is either all from those below or from those above, or from those above and below: let him be anathema.
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(emphasis added)

Thus three of the fifteen anathemas against Origen curse his teaching on the incarnation of fallen spirits and angels becoming men. The long proclamation condemning each of Origen’s ideas, “If anyone shall say [this]: let him be anathema”—let him be cursed—must have weighed heavily upon the conscience of the believer. Would anyone thereafter dare to believe that fallen angels could incarnate?

So despised—or perhaps, so
feared
—were the writings of Origen that only tattered fragments remain of the 6,000 works he wrote. Even in his own lifetime, Origen had to contend with falsifications of his works and forgeries under his name. Later Church Fathers, like Vincent of Lerins, quote Origen as the example of a prominent teacher who became a misleading light.

Origen endured the tortures instigated against Christians by the Roman emperor Decius—chains, an iron collar, and the rack. Upon the death of the Tormentor, he was released from the innermost dungeons of the imperial prison at Tyre in 251. Weak in body, mighty in spirit, Origen died in 254.

“If orthodoxy were a matter of intention,” comments Oxford’s Dean of Christ Church Henry Chadwick, “no theologian could be more orthodox than Origen.”
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In truth, he stood in steadfast support of the Church and the Faith. Yet in his own lifetime bishops and priests alike spurned him. For what? For purity of heart?

It was a dead-robed orthodoxy that crucified Origen, the Best exponent of Christ’s doctrine, the Best of teachers, the Best of priests, and the Best of the embodied angels. Those who should have loved and defended him as brother feared him as heretic—and treated him worse. They put him on a cross inscribed “anathema.”

Who will take him down?

We will—we will lay him in a tomb lined with white lilies and inscribe thereon “Origen—Bodhisattva of the Western Church.”

It seems that ever since the fall of the angels (not Adam and Eve), pride and lust have been the cause of iniquity on planet Earth.

If people understood that conscious minds, embodied as fallen ones in their midst, use every advantage in the media to turn their attention to the lusts of the flesh and the eye, and the pride of life, might they not all the more resist temptation—knowing it is part of a conspiracy against their souls, the very revenge of the archdeceivers against their innocence and against the mutual love and promised presence of the Father and Son who take up their abode within the obedient and loving heart?

This promise is given to the servant-sons of God—not to the Watchers and the Nephilim. And they have never ceased their campaign to ‘get even’.

After
Man, know thyself
the most important injunction in the battle of life is
Know thy enemy.
What the fallen angels who invaded the early Church—at what level we know not—conspired to take from God’s people was an accurate and scientific knowledge of the enemy and his modus operandi.

Could these “rulers of the darkness of this world” who purvey their “spiritual wickedness in high places” be the wolves in sheep’s clothing—the false Christs and false prophets against whom Jesus warned?

Making the victim believe that the seed of the lie is born in his
own
mind and therefore conditioning him to accept the immediate guilt of self-incrimination for sin, rather than rise up to overthrow the
real
enemy, both within and without—this is the brainwashing of the principalities and powers of the fallen angels.

Their technique ought to be kept in mind wherever mass manipulation becomes a factor in deciding the issues of life—where definitions are redefined and the Truth is seen as the lie, and the Liar is heralded as the saviour of men and nations.

What many Catholics today sense as “something wrong” with the Church—something they cannot quite put their finger on—may very well be the infiltration of their ranks by fallen angels who have clouded the issues of Truth and error to their own devices.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the institution of the Church or with religious organization. There is nothing wrong with Jesus Christ or the office of his Vicar. There is nothing wrong with God and his true angels.

People may fail—but God never fails. And the Rock of Christ upon which the Church is built remains the witness for Truth in the heart of every son of God. When the individual dedicates his temple to be the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, when through his loving obedience Father and Son dwell with him and in him (John 14:23), he becomes a ‘member’ of the Mystical Body of God—a white stone in the temple made without hands, eternal in the heavens. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against this the living Church, which by definition is, must be,
universal and triumphant.

The revelations of Enoch and the exposé of the fallen angels’ conspiracy against Truth within both church and state need not bring a message of despair. For did not our Lord, the great World Teacher, and his messenger John the Baptist expose and denounce the seed of the wicked as a generation of vipers and the violent who storm heaven and take it by force, prying the secrets of creation as impostors of the Word?

If we then take heart and courageously lay the ax at the root of the trees of doctrinal error to make way for the tall tree of Truth noted for its good fruit, then hope, blest hope, is born.

And we will learn much about ourselves from this exposure of the seed of the wicked: Is our faith in man or in God? Have we made gods of the Church Fathers and the saints, believing them incapable of human error during their lifetimes? Do we stand straight as pillars of Truth or do we yet grovel in the idolatry of mortals
and embodied angels?