Angel

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day. Tonight: the first of the great ideas — Angel.

One word of orientation. In 1952 Mortimer Adler and a hundred readers finished indexing the whole western canon under a hundred and two great ideas, alphabetically, Angel to World. Tuesdays here will walk that list in order, reading the old books the index points to. It begins, wonderfully, not with Being or God or Truth, but with Angel.

From the ninety-first Psalm: For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

And the letter to the Hebrews, asking rather than asserting: Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?

Seven centuries ago Thomas Aquinas opened his treatise on the angels by asking whether any purely spiritual creature exists at all. From Aquinas, in the old Dominican translation:

There must be some incorporeal creatures. For what is principally intended by God in creatures is good, and this consists in assimilation to God Himself. And the perfect assimilation of an effect to a cause is accomplished when the effect imitates the cause according to that whereby the cause produces the effect; as heat makes heat. Now, God produces the creature by His intellect and will. Hence the perfection of the universe requires that there should be intellectual creatures. Now intelligence cannot be the action of a body, nor of any corporeal faculty; for every body is limited to here and now. Hence the perfection of the universe requires the existence of an incorporeal creature.

And when he comes to their number, he answers with a kind of joy: It must be said that the angels, even inasmuch as they are immaterial substances, exist in exceeding great number, far beyond all material multitude. This is what Dionysius says: There are many blessed armies of the heavenly intelligences, surpassing the weak and limited reckoning of our material numbers.

Scripture had said it first, in Daniel's vision: Thousands of thousands ministered to him, and ten thousand times a hundred thousand stood before him.

Four centuries after Aquinas, Milton gave the doctrine its English music. In the garden, Adam tells Eve that the night is not empty. From Milton, Paradise Lost:

These then, though unbeheld in deep of night, shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none, that heaven would want spectators, God want praise; millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep: all these with ceaseless praise his works behold both day and night.

And the ladder Jacob saw at Bethel, from Genesis: And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.

One poem to close, written at the beginning of the last century by Francis Thompson, a man who knew London's streets from below — the whole of it, called The Kingdom of God: In No Strange Land.

O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee, Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

Does the fish soar to find the ocean, The eagle plunge to find the air — That we ask of the stars in motion If they have rumour of thee there?

Not where the wheeling systems darken, And our benumbed conceiving soars! — The drift of pinions, would we hearken, Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places — Turn but a stone, and start a wing! 'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces, That miss the many-splendoured thing.

But when so sad thou canst not sadder, Cry — and upon thy so sore loss Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry — clinging to Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water, Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Good night.