How many and what sort the orders of the supercelestial essences are, and how the hierarchies are perfected according to them, I say that only their own contemplative principle of perfection knows exactly. Furthermore, I say that even they themselves do not know their own powers and illuminations, and their own sacred and super-adorned ordering, except insofar as the Divinity, knowing its own mysteries well, has taught us through them whatever things it has taught us as proper to them.
It is impossible, therefore, for us to know the mysteries of the supercelestial minds and their most holy perfections, unless someone should say that we know those things which the Divinity has taught us through them, as through beings who know well what belongs to themselves.
Therefore we do not speak anything from our own motion. But whatever contemplations of the angels have been contemplated by the holy theologians, these we shall set forth, teaching them as far as we are able.
Theology has called all the heavenly essences by nine manifesting names. These our divine holy initiator divides into three threefold dispositions.
He says that the first is that which always exists around God, and which is handed down as being attentively and immediately united to Him before the others. For he says that the manifestation of the divine Scriptures hands down that the most holy Thrones, and the many-eyed and many-winged orders called in the Hebrew tongue Cherubim and Seraphim, are placed immediately around God, according to a nearness set above all others.
Therefore this threefold order, our common guide says, is one and equally ordered, and truly the first hierarchy. There is no other more deiform than it, nor any more immediately intent upon the first-working illuminations of the Divinity itself.
He says that the second hierarchy is completed from the Powers, Dominations, and Virtues.
And the last of the three heavenly hierarchies is the disposition of the Angels, Archangels, and Principalities.