The Origin of Principalities and Powers

None of the faithful doubts that before the forming of this visible creation God made spiritual and heavenly powers. He did so in order that, knowing they had been formed out of nothing by the Creator’s goodness for such glory and bliss, they might give him continual thanks and never cease to praise him. For we must not imagine that God first began to originate his creation and work with the forming of this world, as if in those countless ages before it he had given no thought to providence and the divine ordering of things, and as if we could believe that, having no one toward whom to show the blessings of his goodness, he had been solitary and a stranger to all generosity. That is too poor and unfitting a thing to imagine of that boundless, eternal and incomprehensible Majesty. As the Lord himself says of these powers: “When the stars were made together, all my angels praised me with a loud voice.” [a]

Those, then, who were present at the creation of the stars are most clearly proved to have been created before that “beginning” in which heaven and earth are said to have been made. For they are said to have praised the Creator with loud voices and with wonder because of all those visible creatures which, as they saw, came forth from nothing. Before that beginning in time, then, which Moses speaks of, and which in the historical and Jewish interpretation denotes the age of this world (leaving untouched our own interpretation, by which we explain that the “beginning” of all things is Christ, in whom the Father created all things, as it is said, “All things were made by him, and without him nothing was made”), before, I say, that beginning of Genesis in time, there is no question that God had already created all those powers and heavenly virtues. The apostle lists them in order and describes them like this: “For in Christ all things were created, both in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether angels or archangels, whether thrones or dominions, whether principalities or powers. All things were made by him and in him.”