It is the irrevocable character of the will

[MaximilianK]

How do we must understand, or how we can explain this teaching of the Catechism (about irrevocable character of the angelic will) “It is the irrevocable character of their choice, and not a defect in the infinite divine mercy, that makes the angels’ sin unforgivable.”

They choose not to change once for all eternity, or they can choose even now to change? Or they can’t want to change? We also will recice this irrevocable character of the will after death?

How and why a will become irrevocable?

 

[Magnanimity]

Briefly, the way for anything at all to change is that the potential for its change must be within it. Take yourself as an example. When you change your mind, it is in response to something having been provided to you, either new information or old information considered in a new light. You have the potential to grow in your understanding and learn and reevaluate your old beliefs and change those beliefs as you need. And when your mind is changed, your will can follow the mind and change with it. This is because potentiality is something you possess within you. However, in the middle ages various thinkers like Saint Thomas Aquinas advocated a view that would suggest that angels have no potential within themselves. When God creates an angel, a spiritual being, that Angel is fully actualized, which is just another way of saying it has no potential within it. The angel does not grow and increase in understanding as you do. So, once an angel has set its will, it cannot be unset. It cannot be altered. Because, on the basis of what, would the Angel make an alteration? It has no potential. It is not learning. Everything the angel knows is what it has always known and will always know. But this is all just speculative Angelology. But since Saint Thomas Aquinas is the universal doctor of the church, many of his teachings and positions have been incorporated into church teaching in the centuries that followed him.

 

[po18guy]

One other way of looking at it is that purely spirit beings are outside of time. They decide and their decision cannot be changed because change requires time and there is no time in their existence. Therefore, they are in a perpetual state of either service to God or of rejection of Him. Time has zero to do with it. Their nature does, and one cannot change their nature.

If that makes any sense. Typical Contrary Answers Forums debate to follow…