Angels are spiritual beings. Humans also have a spirit/soul, so why can’t our soul see the Angels? Also, why can’t our soul see when we close our eyes? Is the soul’s sight limited by the body? When it is taken out of the body due to death, will the soul be able to see on its own? I know we will be able to see Angels and even God in Heaven and even with our bodies after resurrection… This has been bothering me for awhile I would like a satisfactory answer.
I don’t know if this will be satisfactory or not. But here goes.
We don’t know the full nature of angels. We do know a few revealed things about them. They are magnificent. They are pure spirits. They serve some kind of purpose, and the purposes of the different ones varies from that of the others.
We can’t well imagine pure spirits, and certainly not of that sort. We can sort of imagine a human spirit without a body because we know human beings. But we filter everything through the physical, and with significant limitations even in our physical world. We can’t hear color or see sound. We can feel some radiation we can’t see, like infrared, but we can’t feel radio waves at all, or see them or hear them. That’s because our bodies are not equipped for it. I understand elephants make sounds they can hear but we can’t. Same with bats. We just aren’t equipped.
Now, one might ask why we aren’t equipped to see angels. The answer is that we don’t know. But I recall reading once that if we somehow could perceive an angel as it truly is, we would not for a second doubt that it was God, so overwhelmingly magnificent they are. Possibly that’s part of it; to spare us confusion. Perhaps also to spare us madness, because angels are not all the same. Each is a different species; as different from each other as we are from them.
But I have also sometimes thought that our physical limitations prevent it for another reason. Could we actually survive the experience if we could fully perceive an angel as it is? Is it possible that our physical limitations are also a protection against something so overwhelming that we could no more survive the experience than we could survive a load of sand shot at us point-blank by a cannon, or the kind of radiation a neutron star emits?
It’s clear from the Bible that no man can see God face to face and live. Do angels reflect so much of the divine Being that we could not see one of them face-to-face and live either?
How would that happen? Why could we not stand it? Well, I don’t know, but I can imagine, for example, that if some angel holds within its nature the full range of all the math and chemical formulas composing our known universe, could that invade our heads without our having a stroke, an overload? Is one so beautiful that our hearts would burst trying to take the beauty in? Would we immediately, and despite ourselves, begin to worship it, as incomplete a reflection of God as it inevitably must be?
It is, for whatever reason, God’s purpose that we be creatures composed of the material as well as the spiritual, and the material part necessarily implies limitations. We don’t really know why God selected that mode of being for us. We could guess at it, but we don’t actually know. Perhaps He loves His material universe more than we know. Perhaps He loved it to the point that He decided from all eternity to “ensoul” it through us, so His communion with it would be complete. An interesting thought, but we really don’t know.
We are told in Scripture that we will see God face to face in another mode of being. Undoubtedly, we will see angels as well, as they, like us, are part of the Thought of God. And if then we are joined to the Mind of God while still being ourselves (as we are assured) we will see a lot of things; an infinitude we could not exhaust in trillions of years because one cannot exhaust the riches of the infinite.
No theologian am I. But I think about this quite a bit, and I hope my ruminations help a little.
