The Nine Choirs of Angels

"The whole air about us is filled with angels." ~ St. John Chrysostom

Since I was a child facing the institute of American Middle School, I have held a fascination in angelology. Perhaps my interest began as a wedlock between my curiosity concerning the animals I would read about in books, and the theology I heard weekly in the Roman Catholic Masses my parents brought me to. Perhaps it was further fueled by my attentiveness to Catholic theology classes I attended in school, and my fondness for fantastical stories, including Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book.

For one class assignment, I decided I wanted to discuss the Catholic angels, namely their classifications. Living in the Information Age, I powered on my family computer and set to work to find the details on angels, which I was unable to obtain through the local public libraries at the time.

As many scholars have learned when their interests narrow into specific topics, discovering specific traceable information online is often no easy task, despite the World Wide Web commonly being viewed as containing everything you would want to know (and then some). To a budding researcher such as myself at the time, the situation was disheartening to the point I abandoned the subject for a while.

Throughout the years, I would continue my study of angelology on and off, learning a bit more each time. Here, I will discuss the nine choirs of angels and its somewhat confusing origin history in Roman Catholicism, including the enigmatic writer, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.

---

In my experience, the nine choirs of angels are viewed to be doctrine by many individuals who identify themselves as Roman Catholics. While the idea is a commonly accepted belief steeped in tradition and employed in art, it is not doctrinal. Mayhap the confusion arose from a combination of a particular papal speech and the common occurrence of most popular Catholic sites failing to clarify whether the idea is doctrine or not. Regardless, it is a well-supported and built-up concept dating back to over a thousand years ago!

What, then, are the nine choirs of angels?

---