The Glory of the Lord Shone Round About Them

WHETHER God is dead or not, his angels seem to be. The angel in 1970 is mere commercial decor--a mothlike doll with pink wings and a smirk of good cheer, dangling amid the glitter balls on a thousand plastic Yule trees or twanging its polystyrene harp in the window of a Brooklyn store. In fact, Christmas is about the only area of our culture in which angels survive at all. An archangel, Gabriel, told the Virgin Mary that she would bear the son of God; it was an angel (progenitor of a billion Christmas cards) who appeared to the shepherds in a field near Bethlehem to proclaim the birth of Christ. Or rather, it "came upon them; and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid."

No Macy's angel, that one. The awe that angels inspired in those who saw them, the terrible sense of epiphany, the momentary contact with God's blazing ambassador--all this has been lost in a welter of tinsel and feathers. The tongues of angels now speak with the voice of Muzak. It was not always so. Angels have an older ancestry than Christianity itself, and the most copious sources for named angels are not the New or even the Old Testament but Talmudic and Mohammedan writings. Still, for nearly 2,000 years the belief in angels was vital to Christianity. Only in the past century and a half have angels suffered a leakage of meaning, ending in their present debilitated condition.

Zero Population Growth. The angel of popular culture today is to his forebears what the last American buffalo, ailing in some future zoo, will be to the mighty herds that roamed the West: a token, a remnant of a spiritual breed that will never return. In the 13th century, Doctor of the Church Albertus Magnus held that there were nine choirs of angels, "each choir at 6,666 legions, and each legion at 6,666 angels." That made 399,920,004, all fluttering and hymning in orbit around the throne of God. Of these, one-third were flung down with Lucifer, leaving 266,613,336. Angels are sexless and cannot breed, so this population achieved Z.P.G. at the instant of creation. (Hebrew tradition disagrees; according to the Talmud, new angels are born with every word God speaks.)

What did they all do? Traditional Christian teaching holds that God created angels partly to adore and praise him--like a duke, forming his own opera company to entertain an audience of one--but also to serve as intermediaries between the worlds of spirits and of men, between Heaven and Earth. Angels intervened, visibly or unseen, at every moment of God's enterprises, beginning with the largest of all: keeping the universe in motion. Tasks were dealt out among the various grades of angels; so vast a society obviously needed a pecking order. The structure of this heavenly bureaucracy varied in detail--it was the subject of much squabbling among medieval theologians--but not in outline. It consisted of nine angelic types, of which ordinary angels were the lowest. In descending order: 1. seraphs; 2. cherubs; 3. thrones; 4. dominations; 5. virtues; 6. powers; 7. principalities; 8. archangels; 9. angels.

Now it came to pass, in the interlocking, abstract system of cosmology that medieval philosophers derived from Plato, that the universe was also divided into nine spheres. They nestled concentrically in one another like Chinese ivory balls. The innermost was the central and unmoving earth; outward from the earth were the spheres of the moon, of the five known planets, of the sun and the zodiac, and finally the primum mobile. The primum mobile contained no matter. Its energies kept the stars in their courses and the planets spinning. Seraphs, the most powerful angels, kept the primum mobile moving; cherubs moved the zodiac, thrones the sphere of Saturn, and so on down to the moon, which fell under the care of common angels. The motive force of all this gyration was God's love for his own creations--Dante's "Love, that moves the sun and the other stars."

Closing Diapason. The symbol of this beatific order was music. Musical harmony was an image of the perfect and immutable order that God had imposed on his creation, structure developing out of structure like an immense fugue; the "music of the spheres" was considered to be less a figure of speech than a cosmological fact, and angels made it. As Dryden put it, in Song for St. Cecelia's Day:

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,

This universal frame began:

From harmony to harmony

Through all the compass of the notes it ran,

The diapason closing full in Man.

The music-making angel became one of the favorite personages of medieval and Renaissance art, but his repertory was not restricted, as it is today, to harp solos. The choir of angels in Luca Signorelli's fresco of the Calling of the Chosen, circa 1500, pluck their lutes and viols and ecstatically flourish tambourines, and the arc of their overlapping wings becomes a metaphor of the circling cosmos.

If angelic creatures ministered to the universe in general, they attended to the earth in particular, and everything men did or were was affected by them. "Every blade of grass," says the Talmud, "has its angel that bends over it and whispers 'Grow, grow!' " An archetypical angel, that: like Mrs. Portnoy to young Alex: "Eat, son, eat."

Accidental Ingestion. Angels could cause or cure plague, summon up earthquakes and floods and paralyze whole nations with famine. They destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, assisted in the slaying of the first-born of the Egyptians and annihilated the army of Sennacherib; others fed Elijah, shut the mouths of the lions in Daniel's den, wrestled with Jacob, cured Tobit's blindness and announced the birth of Samson to Manoah. In a society whose world view was largely passive and deterministic, where every creature could symbolize some aspect of God, angels assumed vast importance.

Medieval Europe was such a culture. Angels (and demons) were everywhere. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that an English farmer living in 1300 would have believed more firmly that there were angels in Kent than that there were other farmers in France or Italy. You could meet an angel in a field, or accidentally ingest one if it perched on the tip of your fork. Every living man had his guardian angel, directed by God to the comparatively lowly task of helping to protect him from physical and spiritual harm.

"That is what an angel is, an idea of God." So said the great mystic, Meister Eckhart. But ideas have no visual form, and the struggle to make angels concrete absorbed the energies of Europe's artists for nearly 1,000 years. The angel became one of the master images of religious experience.

"The concept of an angel," wrote one recent student of the creatures, Theodora Ward, in Men and Angels, "is peculiar to the monotheistic religions, in which the immensity of the power concentrated in one universal god must somehow be channeled to reach the needs of man, as a great river may be diverted into a system of ducts to irrigate fields." But how to embody this concept? The first angels in Christian art look like ordinary men, whether painted on catacomb walls or preserved in mosaic on the 5th century walls of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. What the artist stresses is the power of assuming human shape and walking among men, who "entertain them unawares."

The sign by which angels are known today--wings-- did not appear for some time. Pre-Christian mythology abounded with winged, supernatural beings, and the Christian angel annexed the symbolic properties of wings--mobility, ascension, elevation and refinement of consciousness, power to move freely between Heaven and Earth. All the same, there were difficulties of symbolization, which is why the distinctions that early theologians drew between various levels of angels did not endure in art. The thrones, in their ceaseless orbit around God, were sometimes depicted as winged wheels, whose hubs were studded with eyes--to indicate their power to see into the heart of divine mysteries.

Cherubim and seraphim were sometimes interchangeable. The traditional pattern for both consisted of a head, hands, feet and six wings--one pair pointing down, one pair up, and the third pair spread to fly. It was a formula that could achieve a hierarchic majesty--no angelic being radiates more effortless authority than the mosaic cherub in St. Mark's in Venice, unfurling his blue wings against a blaze of gold mosaic. In the general humanization of angels during the Renaissance, the cherub's presence quickly succumbed. He became crossed with the amoretti, or baby cupids, of antiquity; the result, a tumbling, rosy piglet of an angel, did not (even in Rubens' hands) quite make up in charm what it had lost in austere dignity. The path to the winged brat on the Christmas card was open.

Recurring Gabriel. As the theological intricacies of Christianity spread, the character and role of angels became more complex and diversified. But if theology particularized, art tended to generalize; a painter could deal with only a limited number of symbols and attributes. More important, his audience--a heterogeneous one, not made up of theologians --could not be expected to carry all the minute subdivisions of angelhood in its head. Consequently only a few kinds of angels were identifiable, and these were linked to basic Scriptural events. The only spirits who stood out, time and again, as individuals were three archangels: Michael, Gabriel and --to a lesser degree--Raphael.

The one most often painted was Gabriel, the angel of the Annunciation, sent by God to disclose to Mary that she would give birth to Christ. In the history of a civilization that abounded in images of the Madonna, Gabriel recurred insistently, whether as the impassive, rhythmically contorted enamel figure on the 11th century cover of the Ariberto breviary in Milan or the rainbow-winged presence, solid as a Doric column, who confronts a submissive Mary in Fra Angelico's Annunciation.

One of Gabriel's functions was to preside over Paradise, and this he shared with Michael. The resonant titles of the Archangel Michael read like a blast on the horn of resurrection: chief of the order of virtues, chief of archangels, prince of the presence, angel of repentance, righteousness, mercy, sanctification . . . and, by decree of Pope Pius XII in 1950, the patron angel of policemen. In painting, his main roles were two: driving the rebel angels down to Hell (Michael replaced the fallen Lucifer as chief angel of Heaven) and weighing the souls of the dead, as in Memling's Last Judgment, for virtue and sin. The main reason for Gabriel and Michael's dominion in religious art may be that between them they summed up the main uses God had for his envoys: Gabriel the mediator, the bringer of grace, and Michael the warrior and deputy judge.

Sentimental Ramp. The angelic form, like any other, responded to its environment. As if in answer to the formal strictness and intricate metaphysics of early medieval thought, with its insistence that the world is only a screen and a simile for divine existence, angels like the one who blows the last trump across the wall of the llth century Italian Basilica of St. Angelo in Formis are stern, unbending, and (literally) otherworldly. But the host of warrior angels that a North Italian artist, Guariento, painted in 1344-45, minus their wings and with a few adjustments of costume, could have stepped from some 14th century condottiere's parade ground.

The effect that humanism had on angels (in art, at least) was to stress what the creatures had in common with man. Before angels slid down the ramp of sentimentality at whose bottom they now lie, a perfect balance between their human and spiritual aspects was achieved by, among others, Giotto. The dead Christ was a sight to make angels weep, and in his fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Giotto summed up all its terrible pathos in the little angels that tumble like shot birds in the sky.

After the triumph of High Renaissance naturalism, it became hard to make an angel look as if it belonged in Heaven. That could only be accomplished by the sheer hallucinatory pressure of religious vision, skewed at an angle to match the orthodoxy of the times. The isolated exemplar was William Blake: in 1810, in Vision of the Last Judgment, angels danced on his retina: " 'What,' it will be Question'd, 'When the Sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?' O no, no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying 'Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almight.' "

Angel painting never recovered from the blow dealt by the Reformation. After Luther's proposal that men could approach God directly by faith through grace, with no intermediaries, the angels were theologically unemployed. The gap they were meant to close had been written out of existence; they were reduced to mere attendant lords, thunderbolt carriers to swell a scene or two. Nineteenth century rationalism seemed to finish them off for good. The remark of a Victorian doctor, that he had never met the soul in a dissection, found its artistic parallel in Gustave Courbet.

And yet . . . and yet . . . The thought that angels are dead is a nagging one. It is unsatisfactory, and the root of the dissatisfaction goes back to an early angelologist, the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius, who warned in the 6th century that "in dwelling upon the nobler images it is probable that we might fall into the error of supposing that the Celestial Intelligences are some kind of golden beings, or shining men flashing like lightning."

Precisely. The physical shape of angels is only a metaphor, but the spiritual experience to which the now dead form refers may be very much alive. That is the process of revelation, of stepping between levels of awareness. "The angel," Carl Jung wrote, "personifies the coming into consciousness of something new arising from the deep unconscious." As the rigid boxes of 19th century positivism disappear from our culture and new epiphanies of consciousness unfold themselves, it is possible that we may return to that receptiveness in which earlier civilizations saw their angels. Except that, inevitably, we will call ours something else.

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