This question also arises for those who carefully contemplate the intelligible Scriptures: if the lowest ranks do not participate in the universal excellences of the higher ranks, why is the high priest among us called by Scripture “the angel of the Lord Almighty”?
The answer, as I judge, is not contrary to what has already been defined.
For we say that the lowest ranks are left behind with respect to the universal and superior power of the greater orders. Yet they do participate in a middle and proportionate way, according to the one common and conjunctive fellowship of all. For example, the order of the holy Cherubim participates in wisdom and knowledge in a higher way; but the ranks of essences beneath them also participate in wisdom and knowledge, though in a particular way, subject to them.
To participate in wisdom and knowledge absolutely is common to all deiform intellectual beings. But to participate in them attentively, and first, or second, or lower down, is not common to all; rather, it is determined for each one according to its own proper proportion.
And perhaps one would not err in defining this same principle concerning all the divine minds. For just as the first ranks abundantly possess the holy and beautiful properties of the lower ranks, so the lowest ranks possess those of the higher ranks, though not in the same way, but in a lower manner.
Therefore, as I judge, there is nothing disordered if theology also calls the high priest among us an angel, insofar as he participates, according to his proper power, in the interpretive and annunciatory property of the Angels, and is extended, as far as possible for men, toward likeness with their manifesting office.
You will also find that theology calls both the heavenly and supernal essences gods, and likewise among us the men who are most beloved of God and are wonderful. For the divine hiddenness is superessentially removed from and set above all things together, and nothing among existing things can properly and altogether be named as like it.
Nevertheless, whatever power among intellectual and rational beings is wholly converted toward its unity, and is ceaselessly extended toward its divine illuminations as far as possible, becomes worthy—according to its power, if it is right to say so—of divine imitation and of being called by the divine name.