“Intelligible Patterns in the Mysteries of Grace”

God has imprinted truth and meaning into the history of salvation, making that history not just a series of events in which he did something, but a carrier of revelation. The sequence of divine actions and human responses is so structured that it communicates, by design, something about God that could not be communicated otherwise. That history is, in a word, an economy: a deliberately arranged medium bearing a divinely appointed message. Looking down on it from above, salvation history is like a wax seal that has received (and until the eschaton, within certain established lines, is still receiving) the impression of the signet. That signet signifies authoritatively the personal presence of its owner.

In Ephesians 3:9-10, Paul says that his purpose is “to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.”

If you take seriously the idea that angels are somehow students of the church, you may try to picture to yourself what kind of lessons are being taught and being learned. Surely we are not to picture these “rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (such majestic titles!) as stooping down to listen to sermons. Surely they aren’t taking notes on apostolic documents like Ephesians, underlining phrases like “manifold wisdom” and jotting in the margins exclamations like “wow–did not know this!”

Thomas Aquinas pondered this question, and agreed that even the lowest angels must have a clear and comprehensive vision of the truth of all created things. They behold the unity of all truth in the mirror of the divine Logos. How then could angels learn “through the Apostles preaching in the Church” –which is the interpretation handed down to Aquinas by an authoritative gloss in his Bible. Basically, they can’t: even the highest apostle would know less than the lowest angel.

But Aquinas found the solution to this apostles-teaching-angels problem in the language Ephesians uses to set up the scenario: what Paul’s ministry brings to light is “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things.” The illuminating information is not so much in the theology of Paul itself, but in the unfolding economy (ἡ οἰκονομία τοῦ μυστηρίου) about which Paul theologizes. The angels are illuminated by the course of this economy as it gradually displays what God had hidden before. What was hidden “in God” and not on display in creation itself is now at length displayed in the economy of salvation:

There exist certain intelligible patterns [operative in] the mysteries of grace which transcend the whole of creation. These intelligible patterns are not impressed on the angelic minds but are hidden in God alone. Thus the angels do not grasp them in themselves, nor even in God, but only as they unfold in the events [which the mysteries] effect. Now, the intelligible patterns relative to God’s manifold wisdom belong to this category. They are hidden in God and gradually unfold in external effects. (Aquinas on Eph 3)

“Intelligible patterns in the mysteries of grace” [rationes mysteriorum gratiae] encode some things that “transcend the whole of creation” [totam creaturam excedentes]. The angels stand by to see these intelligible patterns/rationes as they unfold over the course of a special history, and from this gradual unfolding in the course of events, they are instructed. The economy is thus a mystery in the Biblical sense of disclosing something eternally planned out by God but kept hidden until a late stage. The economy has a twofold character: it is very deliberately conducted by God to display intelligible patterns, and it is carried out in the work of the Christian churches. Thus “the manifold wisdom of God” is now “made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” by the Apostles. Aquinas illustrates thus:

This is like the case of a house, or the concept of a house to be built, in the mind of an architect. As long as it remains in his mind it can be known to no one—except God who alone penetrates into human souls. However, once the concepts are realized externally in the construction, in the house after it is built, anyone can learn from the building what previously was concealed in the architect’s mind. Yet, they are not taught by the house but in the house.

You might say angels do go to church to learn things, but they don’t so much listen to the sermon as attend to the object lesson. And that lesson is the churchly unfolding of the intelligible patterns of the mysteries of grace.

[I’d like to say more about the contrast between creation and grace here. I’m trying to lay my hands on some dimly remembered patristics scholarship about the role played by the cosmos in pagan theology; its status as source for knowledge of God was strictly limited in Christian thought and replaced by (a) the Logos and (b) the economy.]