The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Can you fit two angels on the head of a pin?
Robert Leigh-Pemberton admires a humane study of Christianity’s struggle to define these celestial beings
GANGELS
352pp, Hodder, £20, ebook £13.99
regory the Great, described by Calvin as the “last great pope” (perhaps rather harshly, given that his reign ended in 604), was fixated by angels. It was to Gregory that, at the height of the plague in Rome, during a procession in which some 80 people are said to have died, a consoling vision appeared atop the mausoleum of Hadrian – not of Christ himself, nor any of his saints, but of the archangel Michael, with unsheathed sword, banishing pestilence from the city. And it is to Gregory that we owe not just the conversion of our damp islands, but history’s most famous angel-related pun, when he declared, on encountering the exotically fair-complexioned and curly-haired Britons in the slave market, that they could not be “Angli”; surely these were “angeli”.
Gregory’s template for an angel – a Pre-Raphaelite, pale, youthful, heavenly emissary – may fit with our own, but throughout history, angels have constantly shifted in appearance, purpose and place in creation. One thing that Peter Stanford’s admirably wide-ranging study makes clear is their tendency to pop up in the unlikeliest places, from the battlefields of 14th-century France to the fireplace at Cliveden, where one appeared to Bronwen Astor while her husband was out shooting: “tiny… going up and down as if on a ladder… in brilliant colours… and smiling”.
Stanford is no stranger to the trickier corners of European Christianity, having written biographies of Martin Luther and the “renegade apostle” Judas. Nevertheless, his new subject is a daunting one. Any study of the influences on Christian angels opens the gates to an infinity of earlier, more exotic spirits, demons and apparitions, from the winged “fravashi” of the Zoroastrians to the “daemon” that Plato tells us spoke privately to Socrates and was the source of his genius.
Even within more familiar scripture, things are scarcely less complex. In the earlier sections of the Old Testament, angels are at once consoling and violent, corporeal and intangible, and – in the story of Jacob, as recounted in Genesis – occasionally indistinguishable from God himself. Stanford goes even deeper, into apocryphal works such as the books of Enoch, a Hebrew text of the 5th century
AD, where things get spectacularly weird. Enoch himself becomes a vast angel called Metatron, “the length and width of the world,” with 72 wings and 365 eyes.
It is understandable, then, that angels have given rise to profound confusion, and misinterpretations verging on heresy. The Docetists, for instance, who were ferociously derided at the First Council of Nicaea, were convinced that
Christ himself was an angel. St Paul’s second letter to the Colossians contains the stark warning: “Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels, intruding into those things which he hath not seen, vainly puffed up by his fleshly mind…”
Angelology may no longer have heretical implications, but as Karl Barth is often (unfairly) quoted as saying, angels “are not a proper
subject for a theologian”. There is certainly a snobbery about them. Even though the Nicene Creed tells us that God created all things “visible and invisible”, any deep examination of “things unseen” can seem at best a little New Age; at worst openly suspicious. It feels telling that Arthur Conan Doyle’s preoccupations extended beyond hunting for fairies at the bottom of suburban gardens to the active role of angels in modern life.
Stanford therefore deserves credit for rescuing the study of angels from hippyish occultism. Historically, it has meant far more. To medieval theologians such as St Thomas Aquinas, the agency of angels was the most obvious means of understanding the creation of which we are a shared part. Aquinas’s famous satirical question – “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” – is actually a corruption; what he really asked was whether or not two angels could be active in the same time at the same point. As Stanford points out, this question, “can two forces act at the same point at the same time” is one that any modern physicist might ask. In a world of complete faith, angels were understood to be the driving forces of the universe – an idea first proposed by the Persian polymath Avicenna, who, rather beautifully, imagined the motion of the natural world and the rotation of the heavens as the result of the movement of angels in a perpetual climb towards God – and thus angelology was the most obvious means by which to penetrate the world’s mysteries.
It may be something of a leap, but it is an attractive idea that the early stirrings of scientific rationalism in the medieval world might have had angels at their heart. And yet it is perhaps no more improbable than the fact that René Descartes, the father of modern rational philosophy, was inspired in his youth by a visit from an
“Angel of Truth”, something that the more sceptical figures of the Enlightenment preferred, understandably, to ignore.
Stanford deserves praise for some wonderful art historical writing, ascribing, quite rightly, a theological authority to artists that writers can only dream of: the anguished faces of Giotto’s cherubs in the Scrovegni Chapel Lamentation move us in a way no treatise on the hierarchies of heaven ever could. Towards the end of this occasionally tricky and obscure, but ultimately immensely rewarding book, Stanford quotes John Henry Newman, who reminds us that, although according angels an excess of honour and authority may be the sin of a dark age, “the sin of what we call our educated age… is just the reverse… of resting in things seen, and forgetting unseen things, and our ignorance about them.”
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In apocrypha, Enoch becomes a vast angel called Metatron, with 72 wings and 365 eyes