In Catholic (and some Protestant) liturgical calendars, September 29 is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. In England and Ireland, it marks the beginning of the academic year, “Michaelmas Term,” and the end of the harvest season.

The Bible is alive with angels. St. Thomas Aquinas, who is called the “Angelic Doctor,” devotes a substantial section of his Summa Theologiae to a discussion of angels. The liturgy, at its most solemn part, invokes “angels and archangels, and the whole company of heaven.” Fra Angelico, the Dominican patron saint of Christian artists, bears that name because of his marvelously rich and colorful depictions of angels. It is impossible for Christians who respect the Biblical or Christian tradition to ignore these powerful, mysterious, spiritual beings; or to dismiss them as mythological; or to treat them as merely decorative objects.

Angels are part of the Biblical concept of creation. To put it simply, if man is the crown of the material creation, having the spiritual power to know and to love, it does not follow that we are naturally the crown of all creation: That would be the sin of pride. We humans are creatures composed of matter and spirit. Would not God, who is pure spirit, have made creatures with natures more like his own, and have made them first? Creation is incalculably richer than what we can know through our senses; there is much more above and beyond us than there is below us.

Pride deceives us into acting as though there were nothing, and no one, greater than ourselves. In that view, it is we who set the limits to our power over nature and the world. There is no divinely ordained order, or divinely given law, and even if there is a God, he is not personally interested in this world. He (or rather it, “The Force”) doesn’t care about the world, so we can do whatever we want with it.

I make these ideas sound absurd because they are absurd. It’s simply absurd to imagine ourselves the greatest, the highest of all beings—masters of the universe. Biblical and Catholic teaching about angels sets the matter straight: Between us and our Creator there are myriads of intensely powerful and active beings, the first and highest of God’s creatures, not composed of matter as we are, but purely of spirit.

The physical sciences have made us all aware of the astonishing complexity of the material order, whose operations are mostly invisible to the naked eye. This should bring us closer to an appreciation what our religious tradition teaches us about the angels—that they act as hidden agents, instruments of God’s providential care of his material creation. God is immediately present to all things, as the author of existence; but he ordains that everything should operate together in a complex web of causes, the highest and simplest of which are spiritual agencies under his direct command—the angels.

And, according to the Bible, God has given the angels special charge of human beings, because we have a special part to play in the drama of this world. Through our bodies, we are united to the realm of matter, and through our souls to the realm of spirit. We are the link between these two realms of God’s creation, so that when we turn against God, through the sin of pride, we introduce disorder into our whole world.

The order of the world can only be restored if human beings are restored to harmony with God—and so it is that we believe that God assigns to each human being he creates an angel to guard and guide us on our way back to God. Our angels, our invisible companions, arrange things daily to steer us off the path to death and back to the path to life. One of Fra Angelico’s most lovely paintings shows someone being led by his angel into the company of saints in heaven.

Of course, angels figure greatly in the Gospel, the story of the Son of God.  The angel Gabriel makes himself visible at the story’s beginning to announce to Mary the Lord’s conception in her womb, and again, at its climax, angels appear to the women at Jesus’ empty tomb. According to John’s vision in the Book of Revelation, at the world’s end angels will again make themselves visible, this time to everyone.

In his teaching, Jesus speaks with particular force about the angels when he wants to emphasize the value of the smallest of his human creatures in the sight of God: See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I tell you that in heaven their angels always behold the face of my Father in heaven. [Matthew 18:10]

From the moment of conception, God assigns to each child of earth a son of heaven; to each “little one” a “great one.” In all our interactions with each other, the Gospel tells us, we are dealing with one another’s angels too—just as Jesus tells us that whatever we do to the least of us, we do to him. The dimensions of our actions are, for good or ill, much greater than they seem. Even the whole of God’s creation is much greater than it seems. When we join together in an act of worship, we join ourselves to the company of heaven. And all these wondrous truths are set before us on the Feast of the Holy Angels.