Are angels masculine?

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Spyridon said:
No, but traditionally they are depicted masculine.
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Most Christian art actually depicts them as being pretty androgynous, i.e. young, long-haired, beardless, and just overall “pretty.”
 
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All we know is that three of them were named Michael, Rafael and Gabriel. We don’t know the names of any other angels.
 
Fr. Hardon in the quote you gave me says nothing about angels being genderless he says that after resurrection human beings will live like angels.
One of my source is the Bible. Michael, Raphael and Gabriel are referred as “he”. The Hebrew language is gender specific.

“An angel is an image of God, a manifestation of the invisible light, a burnished mirror, bright, untarnished, without spot or blemish, receiving (if it is reverent to say so), all the beauty of the absolute goodness, and (so far as may be) kindling in itself, with unalloyed radiance, the goodness of the secret silence” (St. Dionysius the Areopagite). And God is not genderless.

If what we see are not the angels themselves since they are bodiless then the actual presence we see when contacted by them is God. And God is a He.
 
Mtdobbs said:
Not only are angels not defined by gender but every angel is it’s own species according to popular thought.
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This is definitely not a Church teaching nor is it a tradition with a small “t”. There is no popular thought about this.
 
@Tis_Bearself
Another source - St. John of Damascus.
" By their nature, angels are active spirits endowed with reason, will and knowledge; they serve God, fulfil the will of His Providence and praise Him. They are incorporeal spirits, and because they belong to the invisible world, cannot be seen by our bodily eyes. St. John of Damascus writes: “When it is the will of God that angels should appear to those who are worthy, they do not appear as they are in their essence, but, transformed, take on such an appearance as to be visible to physical eyes.” In the book of Tobit, the angel accompanying Tobit and his son says of himself: “All these days I was visible to you, but I neither ate nor drank, this only appeared to your eyes” (Tobit 12:19).

But St. John of Damascus also writes: “An angel can only be called incorporeal and non-material in comparison with us. For in comparison with God, Who alone is beyond compare, everything seems coarse and material, only the divinity is totally non-material -and incorporeal.”"
http://orthodoxinfo.com/death/angels2.aspx
 
OraLabora said:
As the cliché goes, “not a hill worth dying on”. Or “how many (masculine or feminine) angles can dance on the head of a pin”.
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I look forward to us becoming “like the angels” as Jesus said, and no longer having a gender ourselves, nor having sex, so we will no longer have to have these constant Battle of the Sexes discussions.
 
Mary888 said:
And God is not genderless.

If what we see are not the angels themselves since they are bodiless then the actual presence we see when contacted by them is God. And God is a He.
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You seem to have now gone off down some theological path where you’re making the angels into God (on top of presuming the incomprehensible God in heaven in his non-corporeal form even has a gender, but I’m not going to open that can of worms up again).

Thanks, I’ll stick to what Fr. Hardon said…and 1ke…and wesrock.
 
Mary888 said:
. . . And God is not genderless.

If what we see are not the angels themselves since they are bodiless then the actual presence we see when contacted by them is God. And God is a He.
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Jesus is male. The Divine essence in itself is neither male nor female sex.
CCC 238 Many religions invoke God as “Father”. the deity is often considered the “father of gods and of men”. In Israel, God is called “Father” inasmuch as he is Creator of the world. Even more, God is Father because of the covenant and the gift of the law to Israel, “his first-born son”. God is also called the Father of the king of Israel. Most especially he is “the Father of the poor”, of the orphaned and the widowed, who are under his loving protection.

239 By calling God “Father”, the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God’s parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God’s immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. the language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father.
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It’s actually a common misconception that TOB refutes. We are both body and soul, rather than a soul trapped in a shell, if that makes sense. I’m not well versed in that but basically, there are male and female human souls. So we would be male and female in heaven too.

I’m not that educated in TOB, but it’s something I’ve heard repeatedly in all of the TOB talks?
 
In one of my philosophy classes, we discussed that each angel is it’s own species. I forget why that is so and I am away from my notes so I’ll have to look it up later but that is what my professor taught.

Blessings
 
Lea101 said:
Is it really a surprise though 💀
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Newp. It is not. How convenient for the male proponents of this stuff that they were born with the superior parts, though.
 
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In Thomist thought material beings are a composite of form and matter. We all participate in the same form or essence, but we are distinguished and plural by being made of different matter. An angel in Thomist thought is an essence, and since they are not material, two angels of the same essence woupd be absolutely identical and therefore, by the law of identity, the same being. Each angel, therefore, can only be distinguished by its essence. Each angel has a unique essence then, and so is a different “genus” or species. Whereas all humans participate in the same essence (and all dogs in their own, and all white oak trees, and all hydrogen atoms, etc…), each angel is one of a kind and has a different essence than all other angels.

So Thomist thought goes.
 
He says that because only God is perfectly bodi-less because He is perfect all else (including angels) must be less perfect, more coarse than Him. From this it results that the argument of the angels being perfectly bodiless hence genderless may not be true since they are not perfect, only God is perfect. Being imperfect in themselves some of their attributes are not perfectly defined and this may include the possibility that their lack of body may not be perfect in itself which may mean that they have a gender even if they can’t reproduce.

I think the Church is vague about angels. A cult dedicated to them specifically is forbidden - 35th Canon Law of Laodiceea. Since they are not the object of worship in Christianity the missing information about angels was not revealed to us people.
Depicting angels as females I have never seen it done in Church. Only in people’s private devotions, private cemeteries etc.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
on top of presuming the incomprehensible God in heaven in his non-corporeal form even has a gender
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Given that God is infinite, I’d presume that He contains every “feminine” attribute in its most perfect form, thereby being the most feminine Person of all (in addition to being the most masculine Person).
 
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Benadam said:
relative to humans they are better imaged as masculine. Relative to God they are better imaged as feminine. Maybe they will seem more feminine to a glorified human. But then I doubt there is a need to attach earthly images in heaven.
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Where is this from, if anywhere?
 
It’s okay, the concept of our church is referred to as ‘she’. So this means that there is no inequality at all, clearly! 😂
 
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