Angels and Argyle Socks
“Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress” to talk of angels and how they dress? Whether they wear argyle socks or not and how many can dance upon the head of a pin? “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” With apologies to T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock), all our talk is of angels. September closes down with The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. We are in the company of Angels.
But argyle socks and dancing on the head of a pin? How absurd and utterly ridiculous! Yes. I have never seen angels wearing argyle socks even in the many, many representations of angels that belong to the history of art and sculpture. Of course, the angels cannot be seen. And so too, the supposed question about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is pure nonsense and a complete misrepresentation of the entire intellectual and spiritual tradition to which angels belong. The whole point is that they are immaterial spirits, the pure ideas and the reasons of God in creation, the intellectual principles of things. They are invisible and don’t occupy space. You can’t see them. You can only think and feel them. That is the wonder of the angels. The most important things in life are the things you cannot see, like love and thought, like quarks and electrons, too!
That is the great and wonderful point about the angels. They remind us of an essential aspect of our humanity – that we are intellectual and spiritual creatures, albeit embodied with flesh and blood. The angels remind us of the intellectual and moral nature of reality.
They are an inescapable feature of the biblical landscape for Jews and Christians, from Genesis to Revelation, and for Muslims in the Qur’an, and they have their counterparts in the other religions of the world, too. For Muslims, angels are one of the five articles of Islamic Faith along with the belief in Allah, God as One; the Qur’an; the Messengers in the Qur’an – from Abraham to Jesus to Mohammad – and the Day of Judgment.
They are an inescapable feature of our intellectual culture. To think with the angels is to think with Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus and Iamblichus, Proclus and Porphyry, Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine and Eriugena, and, of course, Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, to name but a few in the pantheon of thought. To think with the angels, too, is to find ourselves in the company of the poets – Homer, Virgil, Dante, Donne, Herbert, Milton, again to name but a few.
In 1257, perhaps at this time of year at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas debated the question whether we can learn from angels and answered that, far from extinguishing either the light of nature or the light of grace, the angels “move our imaginations and strengthen the light of our understanding”. We are in their company in thinking about the intellectual nature of reality and, especially in the Christian sense, in wrestling with the moral questions about good and evil.
Our lesson from Revelation speaks about “war in heaven”. A disturbing thought at first glance. After all, we have enough worry about wars in our world, let alone heaven. The point, though, is that there was war in heaven, not that there is war in heaven. It is another matter on earth.
The reading from Revelation is a commentary on the Genesis stories of creation and the fall. We are given a deeper insight into sin and evil. The beguiling serpent has become the image of all that opposes the truth and goodness of God: the great dragon, Satan. We confront the sad potentialities of our humanity in terms of the betrayal and the denial of the goodness of God and his creation including ourselves. Satan is also Lucifer, the light bearer, who denies and refuses the truth of his very being and so becomes the prince of darkness. The good news is that the power of the Good overcomes all such betrayals and denials. We are very much in the company of angels in our intellectual and spiritual life together (with or without argyle socks)!
(Rev’d) David Curry
The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels’