Angel

Scripture is the King James Version. The other voices are read from public-domain sources — Aquinas's Summa Theologica (Dominican translation), Milton's Paradise Lost and Nativity Hymn, the Nuttall Encyclopædia, and Day's Collacon. Quotations drawn from OCR sources were checked against their originals.

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the first of the great ideas — Angel.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

One word of orientation. In 1952 Mortimer Adler and a company of readers finished indexing the whole Western canon under a hundred and two great ideas, arranged from A to Z — and Tuesdays here 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. It is a fitting place to start a programme that meets in the dark, because the angel is the oldest witness that the darkness is not empty — that the quiet room where you are sitting is, if the old books are right, a good deal more crowded than it looks.

Begin with the plain question the philosophers could not leave alone: are there such beings at all — creatures of pure mind, with no body between them and God? In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas opened his great treatise on the angels by arguing that the universe would be incomplete without them. 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.

The perfection of the universe requires it. Aquinas's instinct is that a creation with rocks and beasts and men, but no pure spirits, would be a ladder missing its top rungs — that between the animals, who have bodies and little mind, and God, who is pure Spirit and boundless mind, the universe would leave a strange gap unless it were filled with creatures who are mind almost without body. And that, he says, is what an angel is: an intelligence, a will, a spirit, with no flesh to slow it or shut it into one place.

Scripture had said as much, and added fire to it. From the letter to the Hebrews:

Who maketh his angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire. Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?

Spirits, and a flame of fire. And the apostle Paul, when he lists the whole of what God made, does not forget them; he sorts the invisible creation into ranks, as if heaven had an order and a chain of command. From the letter to the Colossians:

For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him.

Thrones, dominions, principalities, powers. The old theologians took hints like that one and built from them a great ordered hierarchy of heaven — nine ranks, rising from the angels and archangels nearest to us, up through the principalities and powers, to the thrones and cherubim, and at the very summit the seraphim, who burn closest to the fire of God. The Nuttall encyclopedists give the topmost order in a line: the seraphim are the angels of the highest order and of ethereal temper, represented as guarding with veiled faces the Divine glory. Guarding with veiled faces — because even they cannot look full at the thing they worship.

And that is exactly the vision the prophet Isaiah was given, in the year King Uzziah died. From Isaiah:

I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and his train filled the temple. Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly. And one cried unto another, and said, Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory.

Six wings — and four of the six are for hiding. Two to cover the face, two to cover the feet, and only two to fly. The highest, fiercest, most burning creatures God ever made spend most of their wingspan in reverence, hiding themselves before a holiness they cannot bear to look upon directly. And below the seraphim stand the cherubim — the first angels the Bible ever names. When our first parents were driven from the garden, it was they who were posted at its gate. From Genesis:

So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

A flaming sword which turned every way. And it was the great winged cherubim, too, whose outstretched wings overshadowed the mercy seat — the golden lid of the ark, the very place where God met His people. Milton would later see them massed at the manger; in his hymn on the Nativity he watched the whole shining army stand to attention over Bethlehem — the helmed Cherubim, and sworded Seraphim, are seen in glittering ranks with wings display'd.

And a few of them the Scriptures single out and name — and the names are little sermons in themselves. Gabriel — the name means "the strength of God" — is the great messenger, who stands in the presence of God and is sent to carry the weightiest news heaven ever entrusted to a creature: to Daniel, to Zacharias, and at last to a girl in Nazareth. And mark when he comes, and how fast. To Daniel he arrived at the hour of prayer, in a hurry. From Daniel: Whiles I was speaking in prayer, even the man Gabriel, whom I had seen in the vision at the beginning, being caused to fly swiftly, touched me about the time of the evening oblation. Caused to fly swiftly — at the time of the evening prayer. The messengers are not slow and they are not far, and they seem to keep a particular watch over the hour when a soul is praying. Michael — whose name is itself a question, "Who is like God?", the very question that unmade the rebellion — is the archangel, the warrior, the great prince who fights the dragon and does not lose. And the older tradition adds Raphael — "God heals" — the guardian who walked a young man home through danger. And in Milton's telling of the war in heaven there is one more, unnamed in Scripture but unforgettable: Abdiel — in the encyclopedists' phrase, one of the seraphim, who withstood Satan in his revolt against the Most High — the single angel who, when a third of heaven turned traitor, stood up alone in the rebel assembly and said no. Even among angels, Milton knew, faithfulness can mean standing by yourself.

For that is the darker half of the doctrine, and we should not skip it: the angels are free. They are not automatons of light; they are moral creatures who love and choose, and some of them chose against God. The Revelation shows the rebellion at its height, and its outcome. From the Revelation:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

And Jude tells their end in one heavy line — the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day. Kept not their first estate. It is a sober thought at the end of a day: that the fall did not begin in a garden with a man, but earlier and higher, in heaven itself, with a creature far greater than a man. But it is not the last word, and it is not tonight's. For the elect angels — the ones who kept their first estate — are confirmed now forever in their joy and can no more fall than God can lie. So when Scripture says the angel of the LORD encampeth round about us, it is naming a guard that has already been tested in the only war that ever finally mattered, and did not break.

Then there is the question of number, and here the old writers reach for arithmetic and give up. Aquinas, when he came to count them, answered with something close to delight:

It must be said that the angels, even inasmuch as they are immaterial substances, exist in exceeding great number, far beyond all material multitude.

Far beyond all material multitude — more, that is, than all the grains of sand, more than all the stars, more than all the atoms of the visible world. Scripture had already tried, and been overwhelmed. Daniel, given a glimpse of the throne, could only pile the numbers up. From Daniel:

I beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow... thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was set, and the books were opened.

Ten thousand times ten thousand — a hundred million, and even that is only the front rank. They were there before we were; when the earth itself was laid down, they were already singing. For when God questions Job out of the whirlwind, He asks him where he was at the foundation of the world —

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?... When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

The morning stars sang together. Before there was a single human ear to hear it, the whole angelic host stood over the new-made world and shouted for joy. And at the other end of the story, when John is given the throne room of heaven, the number has not diminished — from the Revelation: I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne... and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands. And the letter to the Hebrews tells the Christian that this host is not a distant rumour but a company he has, in some real sense, already joined — ye are come unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels. An innumerable company. You are, tonight, already enrolled among them, a fellow citizen of a city whose other residents you cannot yet see. Milton gathered the whole doctrine into a single sentence that has never been bettered — that the night sky over a sleeping world is not empty air but a packed congregation. From Paradise Lost:

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.

Millions, unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep. Which raises the question the whole idea finally turns on: what are they all doing? And the answer the Scriptures give, first and above everything else, is that they are worshipping. That is the angel's native act, the thing he is for. We heard the seraphim at it — Holy, holy, holy. The Psalms call them to it by name:

Bless the LORD, ye his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word. Bless ye the LORD, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure.

They excel in strength — and they spend that strength not in conquest but in praise. And when John is shown the same throne room, he learns that the anthem never once stops: the living creatures nearest the throne rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come. They rest not — there is no night shift in heaven, no hour when the singing thins or pauses; the "Holy, holy, holy" that Isaiah overheard has not fallen silent for a single instant since. And in that vision the endless anthem finally finds its subject; the hundred million voices are not singing an abstraction, they are singing a name and a wound — from the Revelation: Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. That is the sound the universe is actually full of, under the traffic and the silence: worship, without pause, day and night.

But worship is not the only thing they are sent to do, and here the great idea comes down out of heaven and into your own life. For the same Scriptures that show the angels burning before the throne also show them dispatched, at speed, to the aid of very ordinary and frightened people. This is the note the ninety-first Psalm strikes, the promise that has been whispered over more sickbeds and more sleeping children than perhaps any other line in the Bible:

For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.

Charge over thee. And the thirty-fourth Psalm turns the guard into an encampment pitched around the frightened soul:

The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.

Encampeth round about. There is a whole army bivouacked in a ring around the person who fears God, though he cannot see a single tent. And once, God let a terrified young man see it. The prophet Elisha was surrounded at dawn by an enemy army, and his servant panicked; and Elisha prayed one of the great prayers of Scripture — not "Lord, save us," but "Lord, open his eyes." From the second book of Kings:

And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them. And Elisha prayed, and said, LORD, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.

The mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire. It had been full the whole time; the only thing that changed was the young man's eyes. That is very close to the heart of the whole idea tonight — not that the angels arrive when we are afraid, but that they were already there, and our fear is mostly a failure of sight. The old writers loved this thought. An English divine, Jones of Nayland, put it as plainly as it can be put: every sincere believer is under the constant care and never-failing patronage of the highest and greatest of the angels. And the German writer Jean Paul Richter gave it wings: the guardian angel of life sometimes flies so high that man cannot see it; but he always is looking down upon us, and will soon hover nearer to us. The Lord Himself seems to confirm the ancient belief that each of us, and especially the least of us, is so attended — for He warns against despising even the smallest child, and gives this as the reason: their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven. And Milton saw the errand not as rare rescue but as constant, cheerful traffic — that God, in his own words, will deign to visit oft the dwellings of just men delighted, and with frequent intercourse thither will send his winged messengers on errands of supernal grace. Errands of supernal grace. It is a lovelier way to think of the courier at the door than we usually manage.

And the errand can be gentler still than rescue or warning; it can be simple company. In Milton's great poem, God looks down on Adam at his day's work and, out of nothing but kindness, sends the archangel Raphael — not to guard him and not to alarm him, but to visit, as one friend calls on another. Hear the commission God gives:

Go therefore, half this day as friend with friend converse with Adam, in what bower or shade thou find'st him from the heat of noon retired, to respite his day-labour with repast, or with repose; and such discourse bring on as may advise him of his happy state.

As friend with friend. The affable archangel, Milton calls him — one of the burning host of heaven sent down to sit in the shade of a garden through the heat of an afternoon and simply talk with a man over a meal. Keep that picture: the same creatures who veil their faces before the throne are not too grand to keep a human being company.

Which is why the Scriptures leave us with a quiet warning that should change how we treat a stranger. From the letter to the Hebrews: Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Entertained angels unawares — Abraham did, at his tent door; Gideon did; and the sentence hangs there suggesting that the traffic of heaven is closer and more ordinary than we think, and that the tired traveler you were short with may have been carrying more than you knew.

And now the idea rises to the one place the angels themselves cannot follow. Because for all their fire and number and nearness, there is one thing an angel has never done and never will do: be redeemed. When the Son of God came down to rescue, He did not come as one of them, and He did not come for them. From the letter to the Hebrews: For verily he took not on him the nature of angels; but he took on him the seed of Abraham. He took not the nature of angels. He took ours. And so the angels find themselves, for the first time, on the outside of a mercy — spectators at a rescue that is not theirs. Peter says it in a phrase that ought to stop us where we sit: speaking of the salvation preached to us, he says these are the things which the angels desire to look into. The angels desire to look into it. The burning seraphim, who have stood before the throne since before the world, bend down over the gospel — over the cross, over the empty tomb, over the tired sinner forgiven at the end of a long day — and they lean in, longing to understand a love that was shown to us and never to them.

And they do more than study it from a distance; they celebrate it. The Lord Himself lets us overhear the very sound heaven makes when a single person turns back to God — likewise, I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth. Over one. Not over an empire won or a war ended, but over one tired sinner, at the close of one ordinary day, turning home — and the whole shining company leans in and rejoices. If you do only one thing in this last hour, and it is that, you will have set heaven singing.

No wonder, then, that they could not keep silent on the one night it all began. When the Word was at last made flesh, heaven could not hold its peace; the sky over a Judean sheep pasture tore open. From the Gospel according to Luke:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people... And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Suddenly there was a multitude — the same host that sang at creation's dawn, breaking out again at creation's rescue, spilling over the fields because the thing they had leaned down to look into was finally happening in the dark below them.

And having once broken into our sky, they never left His side. Trace it through: they announce Him to Mary and sing Him into the world; and then, when at the very start of His ministry He has gone forty days into the wilderness and beaten back the tempter, spent and starving, it is they who come to Him — the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him. At the other end, in the garden on the night before He died, when the weight of what was coming crushed Him to the ground, one of them is sent to Him again — there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him. They could strengthen Him; they were not permitted to spare Him. And on the third morning it was an angel who broke the seal on the grave — from Matthew: behold, there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it. His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow. He rolled the stone away and then sat down on it, like a man taking a seat on a defeated enemy. And they will be the retinue of His return: when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory. From the manger to the throne, the angels are the honour guard of the King — and the very salvation they are never offered, they spend their strength attending: the rescue of the creatures He came to save in their stead.

There is one image left, and it gathers up the whole night — the picture of the traffic itself, the ladder let down between the two worlds. A fugitive named Jacob lay down in the open country with a stone for a pillow, and God gave him a dream. 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. A busy stair between heaven and earth, and the angels going up and down it all night over the head of a sleeping man who did not deserve it. And Jesus would later take that very picture and fasten it to Himself. To a man named Nathanael He said: Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. Not a ladder of wood and rungs, then, but a Person — Christ Himself the open stair, the traffic between the worlds now running up and down over one Man, the one point where heaven touches the earth and stays touching it. And that is where a poet of the last century found the angels too — not in some far heaven, but here, in the city, at the bottom of a hard life. Francis Thompson knew London's streets from below, and he wrote the truest modern poem on this most ancient idea. We close with it whole: "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!

The angels keep their ancient places. Turn but a stone, and start a wing. Sleep well tonight in a room that is fuller than it looks. Good night.