Ebook: Angels: A History

Angels are all around us. They flutter in stained glass windows, of course, and in cemeteries, but little ones shoot arrows into hearts, especially around Valentine's Day, and they show up in movies like _It's a Wonderful Life_ or _Wings of Desire_. Something like seventy percent of Americans believe in real angels, not just the one shown in art, and they believe that angels are busy doing things and helping us along. Belief in angels seems to be increasing when our age is proud of its science and rationality. Why are we infested with these celestial beings, or at least with those who are certain of their existence? There are answers in an agreeable little book _Angels: A History_ (Oxford University Press) by David Albert Jones. Jones has been a friar, and is a Professor of Bioethics in the School of Theology, Philosophy, and History at St. Mary's University College in Twickenham, England. He thus knows angels up and down. He's not going to tell you if they exist or not, advising that it is foolish to try to prove or disprove their existence; but since he advises keeping an open mind about the existence of immaterial spirits (just as others might advise us to keep open minds about fairies or alien abductions), it might be clear upon what side he leans. Nonetheless, there are reasons we think of angels the way we do, and depict them, for instance, with wings or with harps or arrows. Jones's book is a welcome examination of millennia of religiously-approved folklore, true or not.

One of the first mentions of angels is of three of them visiting Abraham, a story in the Old Testament that is alluded to in the New Testament and is also related in the Quran. These angels are described as men; it took a while for Abraham to realize that they were angels, as it would not have if they had come equipped with wings and halos. The earliest depictions of angels go back to the third century CE and show no halos or wings. In the next century, they started getting their wings, probably influenced by pagan depictions of Nike or Eros, although the Bible alludes to cherubim and seraphim having wings. The Quran states that angels have wings, perhaps not just one pair of wings, but two, or four, and tradition says that the archangels have 600. Somewhere around the fifth century, angels got halos, which were originally used for depictions of the head of Jesus; halos, too, were borrowed from pagan art to show the gloriousness of a god, or of an emperor. Philosophers discuss such things as souls and life after death still, but angels don't have as much intellectual appeal as they used to. Thomas Aquinas said that angels were real but not physical. They have no birth, death, appetite, or weight. Those who saw angels, he said, were seeing a body that an angel made by some nonce process of condensing air. Aquinas also taught that at birth, a particular guardian angel is appointed to every person; he did not think this appointment happened before birth because the mother was in charge until then, with her guardian angel in charge of the pregnancy, too. Aquinas also tried to answer the questions of how angels can sin. Humans can sin pretty easily, since we have greed and desires, but angels are supposed not to have such drives, plus they are supposed to know about right and wrong better than humans can know. Angels can be bad, Aquinas said, by being too prideful; for instance, the Devil (a former angel) had pride manifested by a desire to be like God, and although angels are like God in many ways, the Devil seems to have the problem of trying to make himself like God on his own. This might be a little difficult to understand, and it is hard to figure out how we could be sure that a particular guardian angel might avoid making the same mistake. Who is to say that a prideful guardian angel might not start some sort of mischief in the life of the individual over whom the angel has charge? The naughtiness of angels, remember, was enough to make a war in heaven.

Jones can't resolve such issues, but of course no one can; not even believers would insist that the actions and impulses of angels are always subject to our rational understanding. His book is a welcome history and gathering of cultural facts about angels. It is not much bigger than the little booklets that you can pick up in the line for the cashier at the supermarket, with titles like "How to Contact Your Guardian Angel." I have seen such books, but I admit that I have not read them. Even so, I am willing to bet that the current volume is much more intellectually satisfying.