by CCW | 30 September 2011 10:00
Somehow angels are very much with us. They are very much a part of the biblical and spiritual landscape of the great religions of the world. They are found in the Jewish Scriptures, in the Christian New Testament, and in the Koran. They are present from creation to redemption, as it were. There is even in our contemporary secular culture a yearning for a spiritual company and a sense that we are somehow more than cosmic orphans cast adrift in wholly material universe.
But perhaps you still protest and reasonably so. “Are not angels simply the product of our imaginations, the creatures of our minds, as it were?” Creatures of the mind? Better to say creatures who are mind, wholly mind. The angels are pure intellectual beings of immaterial substance. They are the ordered and distinct thoughts of God in creation, the moving principles of his goodness and truth, the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world. And since the intellect transcends the sense, angels cannot be seen except by the mind in thought. The angels are creatures who are mind that only minds can think. Angels belong at the very least to an intellectual tradition that connects with Plato’s Forms and Aristotle’s Spheres; in short, to an intellectual understanding of the universe.
Angels, let us allow, are thinkable, but what does it mean to think with them? After all, there are endless numbers of things which are “able to be thought”. The ancient Collect for Michaelmas speaks of God as having “ordained and constituted the services of Angels and men in a wonderful order”. The services of angels are instituted of God and joined with the services of men in a wonderful order. Somehow thinking God means thinking with the angels who are God’s thoughts in creation. We are part of a spiritual community that is far larger than we realize.
Among the great cathedrals of Europe, the great Gothic Cathedral of Rheims in France stands as a kind of miracle. It does something more than just stand. It flies on Angel’s wings. A host of Angels, with wings outstretched, stand tabernacled upon the piers of the flying buttresses of Rheims. They raise that whole complexity of stone to heaven on the light wings of their simple prayer. In a way, the winged angels on the flying buttresses of Rheims provide a compelling image of their service and ours in the upward motion of lifting all things to God. Those wings signify the pure spiritual motions of reason and love and signify something about the purpose and the vocation of our humanity. The angels recall us to the truth of ourselves in the service of God as spiritual creatures who belong to a moral and spiritual universe.
September’s air, it seems to me, is angelic air, clear and direct and full of purpose. Yet September, too, is a very busy and almost frantic month, as so many of you know. Michaelmas is the term given for the feast of St. Michael and All Angels on September 29th. In the Jewish Calendar, too, it is close to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Both festivities intentionally recall the themes of creation and the fall, of good and evil.
Michaelmas is also the name given to the first term of schools and colleges which derive their traditions from the medieval universities of Paris and of Oxford and Cambridge. At a time in our culture when we confront our contemporary uncertainties and unease about the institutions of our lives, the service of angels may provide a kind of antidote; the antidote, in fact, to our contemporary woes, our cynicism and despair, our resentments and envyings, our lustings and revellings, our ennui and lethargy; in short, the despisings of our minds to what belongs to mind.
Perhaps you have been already much preoccupied in a multitude of things and are already fretting and worrying about the doing of things that are not done and the doing of things which ought not to be done at all! Perhaps the angels can recall you to the things which matter most of all and without which nothing else is worth doing at all.
In the Purgatorio of Dante’s spiritual classic, The Divine Comedy, there is a special place for those who are preoccupied with the sheer busyness of life. They rest in the Valley of the Kings to watch a spectacle, a symbolic enactment of the Fall and our Redemption, such as is signified in the reading from John’s Revelation. The serpent of our disobedience is banished by the angels. The night of grace descends that we may rise in the day. In a way, that is what our liturgy is about. We are bidden to rest and contemplate these great and grand themes. They are the counter to the intensity of our self-preoccupations.
That drama of angelic instruction echoes the ancient expulsion from the Garden of Eden and John’s vision of “war in heaven”. Our wills in rebellion have their spiritual counterpart in the disobedience of the angels, especially in Lucifer, the Prince of Light who darkens himself, we might say, by the denial of his creatureliness, a denial which, of course, cannot undo the truth of his being. Yet, what are our despisings of the mind except our refusings of the good in things both great and small? This “war in heaven” is equally the war in our hearts. It means more than a conflict of partial goods. It means the far greater denial of the good that is somehow known, a denial of God and an antagonism towards him and his will in creation, “men choosing darkness rather than light”.
But we are not simply left with the fact of this opposition of our own choosing. There was war in heaven. It has been overcome. Scripture shows us heavenly and earthly discord, but shows us, even more, the divine will for reconciliation. “Michael and his Angels fought against the dragon… and they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”. The angelic victory is the victory of “the light which shineth in the darkness and the darkness overcame it not”. The power of the good is greater than all evil. To think that is to think with the angels; it is to discover the truth and dignity of ourselves as spiritual beings, beings who think and love.
Fr. David Curry
Michaelmas 2011
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