How to Work with Angels: Steiner, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Angelic Hierarchy

Pseudo-Dionysius and the Celestial Hierarchy

The most systematic and influential account of angelic hierarchy in the Western tradition comes from a writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The name is a pseudonym: the author presented themselves as Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34, though modern scholarship dates the texts to approximately 500 CE, nearly five centuries after Paul's missionary activity.

The texts of Pseudo-Dionysius, particularly "The Celestial Hierarchy" and "The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy," were received as apostolic authority throughout medieval Christianity. No one questioned their attribution seriously until Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus raised doubts in the 15th and 16th centuries, by which time the texts had already shaped Christian theology, mysticism, and art for over 900 years. Thomas Aquinas cited Pseudo-Dionysius extensively. Dante placed "Dionysius" among the greatest theologians in the Heaven of the Sun in the Divine Comedy.

The Celestial Hierarchy presents a detailed account of the nine orders of angels and the principles governing their activity. Pseudo-Dionysius drew heavily on Neoplatonist sources, particularly Proclus, whose writings on the celestial hierarchies of pagan philosophy he Christianised with considerable sophistication. His theological method, sometimes called "apophatic theology" or "negative theology," emphasised that the divine is ultimately beyond all names and descriptions, and that even the descriptions of heavenly beings must be understood as provisional images rather than literal descriptions of spiritual realities.

His account of how angels communicate is particularly distinctive. In his model, the divine illumination flows downward through the hierarchies: the highest orders receive it most directly, and each succeeding order receives it in a form suited to its capacity, transmitting it further downward. The lowest order, the Angels, receives the illumination in a form appropriate for transmission to human beings. Pseudo-Dionysius uses the language of "purification, illumination, and perfection" to describe the work that each order performs for the one below it.

The Nine Orders: A Complete Overview

The nine orders of angels in Pseudo-Dionysius's schema divide into three triads of three, each triad characterised by its proximity to the divine and the nature of its activity.

First Triad: Closest to the Divine

The Seraphim are the highest order. Their name in Hebrew means "burning ones" or "fiery ones," and they appear in Isaiah's vision (Isaiah 6:2-3) as six-winged beings surrounding the divine throne and crying "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts." In theological tradition, they are associated with the fire of divine love, the most direct relationship to the divine of any created being. Pseudo-Dionysius describes them as "those who have the freedom to move eternally around the divine realities in a movement that never fails and never halts." In Steiner's corresponding terminology, the Seraphim are the Spirits of Love.

The Cherubim are the second order, associated with divine wisdom and knowledge. In the Hebrew Bible, they appear as guardians of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:24) and as the figures whose wings shade the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:18-22). The name may derive from the Akkadian karibu, meaning "one who prays" or "intercessor." Pseudo-Dionysius describes them as having "an overflowing, outpouring wisdom" and the ability to receive and transmit the divine illumination. In Steiner's schema, they correspond to the Spirits of Wisdom or Cherubim, whose activity is oriented toward cosmic intelligence.

The Thrones are the third order of the first triad. They are described as the "seat" of divine authority, the beings through which God's will is expressed in its most universal form. Their stability and permanence contrast with the burning dynamism of the Seraphim. Steiner calls the corresponding beings the Spirits of Will or Thrones, associating them with the primordial cosmic will-forces.

Second Triad: Middle Celestial Orders

Dominions (or Dominations) are the first order of the second triad. They govern the activities of the angelic orders below them and inspire the right ordering of creation. Powers carry the historical record of creation and, in Christian tradition, defend against the distortion of divine intentions by opposing forces. Authorities (or Virtues) govern the movements of the natural world including the stars and seasons in some traditions.

Third Triad: Closest to Humanity

Principalities (or Archons in some traditions) guide nations, institutions, and collective human activities at the societal level. Archangels carry divine messages to humanity collectively and guide the major movements of human history and spiritual development. Specific archangels are named in canonical and extra-canonical texts: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel are the four most widely recognised in the Western traditions. Angels (Angeloi) are the order in most direct, immediate contact with individual human beings, including the individual guardian angels that accompany each human soul.

Rudolf Steiner's Angel Lectures

Rudolf Steiner devoted numerous lectures to the nature and activity of angels, bringing his distinctive anthroposophical perspective to the questions that Pseudo-Dionysius and the theological tradition had addressed from within a Christian framework. While Steiner acknowledged and drew on the Dionysian schema, he modified it significantly and extended it with insights from his own claimed supersensible research.

Steiner described ten hierarchies of spiritual beings above the human level, expanding Pseudo-Dionysius's nine. He named the first three hierarchies (closest to the divine) the Seraphim, Cherubim, and Thrones, following the Dionysian naming. The second triad he called Kyriotetes (Spirits of Wisdom), Dynamis (Spirits of Movement), and Exusiai (Spirits of Form). The third triad he called Archai (Spirits of Personality or Time Spirits), Archangeloi (Archangels), and Angeloi (Angels).

One of Steiner's most important contributions was his account of how the activities of these hierarchies relate to specific aspects of the human being and to human evolution. The Exusiai, for example, were responsible for creating the physical human form. The Archai inspired the characteristic soul qualities of entire historical epochs. The Archangeloi inspire the spiritual qualities of nations and peoples. The Angeloi accompany individual human souls.

A particularly significant lecture cycle from 1918, "The Work of the Angels in Man's Astral Body," described in concrete terms how the Angeloi (guardian angels) work within the astral body (the soul body) of individual human beings. Steiner described angels as working to create images in the astral body during sleep, images that carry spiritual intentions for the human being's development. He warned that if these images were not perceived and acted upon consciously by the human being, the angel's work could be intercepted by opposing spiritual forces (Luciferic and Ahrimanic in his terminology) and turned toward less beneficent ends.

This lecture, remarkable for its specificity, describes the angel as working on three specific impulses in the current epoch: the development of genuine brotherhood among human beings across all natural differences, the development of a free and individual approach to spirituality independent of traditional authority, and the recognition of the spiritual reality behind the physical face of each human being the practitioner encounters.

The Guardian Angel: How It Works

The concept of the guardian angel is among the most widely held in popular religious sensibility across cultures and religions. In Steiner's detailed account, the guardian angel is a specific type of spiritual being from the Angeloi hierarchy who accompanies a particular human soul across multiple incarnations, maintaining continuity between lives and working to create the karmic conditions that serve the soul's development.

The angel's primary tool is the astral body, the soul body that is the seat of feeling, desire, and the capacity for consciousness in the sleeping state. During sleep, when the I and astral body have separated from the physical and etheric bodies, the angel works directly in the astral body to place intentions, images, and impulses. What we experience as moral intuitions, the sudden inner knowing that a particular course of action is right or wrong, is often the angel's influence working from the astral body into waking consciousness.

Dreams, in Steiner's account, are frequently significant in ways that extend beyond their personal psychological content. The angel sometimes works through dream imagery to present the soul with the moral questions, karmic opportunities, and spiritual directions that are relevant to its current life situation. Developing the habit of recording and reflecting on dreams, particularly those that have a different quality from ordinary processing dreams, cultivates sensitivity to this dimension of angelic guidance.

The relationship between the guardian angel and the human being becomes increasingly conscious as the human develops toward the consciousness soul. In earlier epochs of human consciousness, the angel's guidance was received entirely unconsciously, woven into the fabric of instinctive moral feeling and religious experience without the individual being aware of its source. In the current age of the consciousness soul, the possibility opens for a more conscious, awake relationship with the angel in which the human being gradually learns to recognise and respond to the angel's activity with the same objectivity and clarity that the consciousness soul applies to external experience.

Thomas Aquinas and Angelic Nature

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) is the greatest systematic theologian of the medieval West and the thinker who most thoroughly integrated the Dionysian angelology with Aristotelian philosophical analysis. His treatment of angels in the Summa Theologiae (Questions 50-64 of the Prima Pars) represents the most rigorous philosophical account of angelic nature in Western tradition.

Aquinas argued that angels are pure intelligences: immaterial beings without any physical body. Unlike human beings, whose intellect depends on the senses for its material, angels know through "infused species," concepts or intelligible forms placed directly in their minds by God. They do not need to abstract general concepts from particular sense experiences as humans do; their knowledge is given to them directly and intuitively.

On the question of angelic location, Aquinas made the subtle distinction that angels are not "in" a place in the same way physical bodies are, but they are "in" a place insofar as they exercise their activity in that place. This analysis, known as the "circumscriptive" versus "definitive" presence, addressed the question of whether multiple angels could be in the same place (they can, he argued, since they are not mutually exclusive spatial volumes) and how angels can interact with the physical world without being physical.

Aquinas's analysis of how angels communicate with human beings identifies three modes: visions (direct presentation of angible images to the human imagination during waking or sleep states), illumination (the infusion of intellectual light that clarifies the human intellect's own thinking), and apparition (the assumption of a physical-seeming form for direct interaction). These three modes, though expressed in scholastic philosophical language, correspond closely to the accounts of angelic communication found in scripture, mystical literature, and later esoteric traditions.

The Michael Impulse in Our Age

Rudolf Steiner identified the archangel Michael as having a particularly significant role in the current historical epoch. In his teaching on the seven archangels who serve as Time Spirits (Archai) in rotating succession, he identified Michael as having taken over as the guiding archangel from approximately 1879, the year he associated with a spiritual battle in which Michael defeated the forces that had been dominating the previous cultural period.

Michael's specific mission in the current age, in Steiner's account, is the spiritualisation of thinking. The ordinary abstract, analytical thinking that characterises modern intellectual culture is, for Steiner, a dried, lifeless form of thinking that has lost its connection to the living spiritual world. Michael works to inspire a form of thinking that is alive, imaginative, spiritually oriented, and capable of directly perceiving spiritual realities, while retaining the clarity and objectivity of the best modern scientific thinking.

Steiner described this as the "cosmic intelligence" that was previously managed by Michael as an archangel now having descended into individual human beings as personal thinking. Michael's task is to work with those human beings who consciously seek to reconnect their personal thinking with its cosmic spiritual source. Anthroposophy, in Steiner's account, is the specific cultural expression of the Michael impulse in the current age: an attempt to develop a form of spiritual knowledge that is genuinely rigorous and free from the credulity and vagueness that he considered weaknesses in many occult traditions.

Practical Connection with Angels

Steiner was direct in his practical guidance: developing genuine conscious connection with angels requires sustained inner work rather than wishful thinking or casual intention. He provided specific methods that, when practiced consistently, develop the soul faculties that make angelic perception possible.

The most important preparation is the development of inner quiet. The angel's communications are characteristically subtle, working at the level of the astral body rather than through the louder channels of sensation and ordinary thought. A mind habitually filled with noise, stimulation, and reactive thinking cannot easily perceive these subtle influences. The practices of meditation (settling into stillness), the Rückschau (backward day review), and the six subsidiary exercises described in the companion article on soul development all develop this inner quiet as a prerequisite.

Dream work is another significant avenue. The angel works particularly through the astral body during sleep, and dreams provide the most direct evidence of this activity for most people. Keeping a dream journal and developing the habit of recording dreams immediately on waking is the most practical first step. Not all dreams carry angelic content: many reflect psychological processing, somatic conditions, and the residues of daily experience. But a developing attentiveness to dreams gradually reveals patterns, particularly in morally significant or vivid dreams that carry a quality distinctly different from ordinary dreaming.

Prayer and contemplative practice, across all traditions, have functioned as the traditional primary means of communicating with the spiritual world including its angelic inhabitants. Steiner understood the effectiveness of such practices not as magical manipulation of external forces but as the development of the inner conditions that make the human being available to spiritual guidance that is always present but normally unperceived. The quality of attention and intention brought to prayer or meditation determines what can be received.

Jewish Angelology and Kabbalistic Angels

The Western esoteric tradition's understanding of angels draws significantly on Jewish angelology, which developed extensively in the Second Temple period (515 BCE to 70 CE) and in the subsequent mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The Hebrew Bible references angels frequently (the word malakh meaning "messenger" or "agent"), but it is in the extra-canonical texts of the period, including the Books of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, that systematic angel hierarchies begin to appear.

The Books of Enoch (1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, 3 Enoch) provide the most extensive early Jewish angelology, naming seven archangels (including Uriel, Raguel, and Sariel alongside Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Remiel), describing their specific cosmic functions, and narrating Enoch's journeys through the heavenly realms in which he encounters the angelic hierarchy directly. These texts significantly influenced early Christian angelology and, through that influence, Pseudo-Dionysius's systematic Celestial Hierarchy.

The Kabbalistic tradition, developed from the 13th century onward in Spain and Provence, placed angels within its cosmological system of the Sefirot on the Tree of Life. The ten Sefirot (divine emanations) each have associated angelic orders: the Sefirah Chesed (loving-kindness) is associated with the Chashmallim, Gevurah (strength) with the Seraphim in some traditions, Tiferet (beauty) with the Malachim (angels). The Zohar, the central text of the Kabbalistic tradition composed largely by Moses de Leon in 13th-century Spain, contains extensive angelological material integrated with its mystical readings of the Torah.

Steiner's own angelological system shows the influence of both the Christian Dionysian and the Jewish Kabbalistic streams, mediated through the Theosophical tradition of Blavatsky and its synthesis of Eastern and Western esoteric sources. His ten hierarchies expand the Dionysian nine and reconfigure their relationships in ways that reflect his distinctive understanding of cosmic evolution and the role of spiritual hierarchies in human and cosmic development.