Annotatio CII
”Now I know that thou fearest God.” — Genesis 22:12
Origen, in the eighth homily on Genesis, is accused of having thought that the Angel speaking to Abraham was the Son of God himself, who had first been made an angel before he became man.1 For thus he wrote: “It must be considered that this Angel is reported to have spoken to Abraham, and that in what follows this Angel is evidently shown [to be] the Lord. Whence I think that, just as among men” [just as among] men he was found in habit as a man, so among the Angels he was found in habit as an angel.” I think that Origen in this place wished, by “the habit of an Angel,” to signify not the nature of an Angel, but the office — so that the sense of his words is that the Son of God, before he was found in habit as a man (that is, before he assumed the nature of our humanity), was in the habit of an Angel (that is, in [angelic] ministry), when he appeared to the ancient fathers in manifold ways and spoke in many manners. According to which understanding, St. Augustine (Tome 6, in the tractate on “I am who I am”2) judges that it can safely be believed and said that the Son of God not only appeared to Abraham and to Moses, but that he can also rightly be called an Angel — whom the prophet named the “Angel of great counsel”3 — by office, namely, not by nature.