It's my pleasure to welcome to this quarantine lecture session.

Father Basil Cole.

Father Cole is a Dominican friar.

He has a license in sacred theology from the Solstoir in Paris

and a doctorate from the Angelicum, which is the Dominican University in Rome,

and has been teaching here on our Pontifical faculty for more than 20 years, I believe.

So Father Cole, you are kind of an officiato of Aquinas' teaching and especially on angels and demons.

I know that you've taught a course on that, so we'll be speaking today about this very interesting subject,

angels and demons. So why don't we just jump right into it? Tell us,

what is an angel?

An angel is a perfectly created being that's a spiritual, no matter. No matter what, no. There's no material being in him.

So no body?

No body, no molecules. And that means that our knowledge of this is indirect. It's not direct.

We don't know. We don't know from reason or from faith or from faith what spiritual is. We know that it's not something material.

It's negative knowledge and therefore analogical knowledge as well.

So we've got a creature, billions of them, we presume, judging from sacred scripture,

who are absolutely invisible to us. Unless God decides to have them appear, as he did in the

old and the New Testament. And sometimes down the history of spirituality, some saints actually

experience something of their being.

They take on a form of sorts, etc. Therefore, they are immaterial and perpetual. They'll exist

forever. And they were created simultaneously according to the opinion and the common opinion of the teaching of the church,

nothing dogmatically to what absolutely, created together with the cosmos.

...