Meditation for Michaelmas

admin | 30 September 2015

“Michael and his angels fought against the dragon”

“There was war in heaven,” John tells us in the lesson from The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine. While it might seem to be at the opposite end of the biblical spectrum this reading from the very last book of the Bible complements the opening chapters of the very first book of the Bible, The Book of Genesis. Angels are very much a feature of creation.

Angels cannot be seen. They can only be thought. In a way, that is the whole point. They are pure, intellectual and spiritual beings. Creation is not just about the visible world; it includes things unseen and invisible. Light is distinguished from the dark before there is even a sun and a moon. There is the whole idea of the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world. Angels are an important part of the theological reflection upon Genesis.

They are an inescapable feature of the biblical landscape for Jews, Christians and Muslims. For Muslims belief in Angels is a fundamental part of the Islamic faith. For Jews and Christians, they are associated with the invisible things of creation.

Angels help us to think about our humanity and our place in the world. They are an important reminder to us of our being as spiritual creatures, creatures who think and love, activities which are invisible yet real. In the theological tradition, angels are pure intellectual and spiritual beings; like us except they are incorporeal. They are, we might suggest in ways that connect to Plato and Aristotle and their successors, the thoughts of God in creation. So they remind us of an aspect of our being as spiritual beings.

They remind us that we are not alone. We are at once attracted to and fearful of the idea that we are cosmic orphans adrift in an indifferent universe. The angels remind us of a great and innumerable company of spiritual and intellectual beings of which we are a part.

Angels belong to our thinking about good and evil. In the opening chapters of Genesis, everything is positive and good. “God saw all that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” Unde malum? Whence evil? Where does evil come from and what is it? It can’t come from the material and physical world. It can only arise from spiritual creatures in the form of their relation to what is commanded and what is known to be true.

September 29th is The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels and ushers in what is known as Michaelmastide. It is the term used by the great medieval universities of Europe for the beginning of the school year and, in particular, by both Oxford and Cambridge. It is a richer and much more imaginative name than first term or Fall term.

I like to think of our liturgy as dancing with angels as we think about the big questions concerning our humanity and our world. The angels inescapably belong to those considerations. As Thomas Aquinas notes in his Disputed Questions on Truth, angels teach us by “moving the imagination and strengthening the understanding.” They especially teach us about good and evil. The story from Revelation is a further reflection on the story of the Fall in Genesis 3. The serpent insinuates doubt, asking questions that lead us away from truth and not towards it. It results in the eating of the forbidden fruit, the breaking of the only commandment that God had given the man and the woman in the Garden of Eden. “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” as Milton puts it in Paradise Lost. It signals a deep and profound view of evil. It is about going against what in some sense is known as true and good.

The story of St. Michael and All Angels is about the battle between good and evil on a cosmic level, a battle between the good angels and the bad. What does this mean? Spiritual creatures are defined by whether they will good or evil. The angels, as Augustine notes, know creation in God and in itself but only through their attention to God and not to themselves. When they turn from God to themselves they turn from light to darkness immediately and, it would seem, irrevocably. The story in Revelation references “the dragon,” “the serpent,” “the Devil,” “Satan” – all terms which relate to a basic idea which is captured best, perhaps, in the meaning of Lucifer, another term for what opposes the truth and the goodness of God. Lucifer means literally light-bearer. That is who and what he is. He is created for a purpose – to bear the light of God. What happens if he denies that truth? He turns his back on the light and becomes the prince of darkness; he denies the truth of his own created being and becomes the prince of lies.

But no lie has any power apart from the truth. Evil is privative; it is nothing in itself but depends upon the goodness and the truth of what is. That is why as Revelation puts it, “there was war in heaven.” Saved by grammar! The power of the good is greater than evil. The fallen angels live in contradiction with themselves and God and so do we when we turn away from what we are given to know and love. These readings challenge us about our thoughts and actions, about the ethical and the intellectual. They remind us that we are spiritual creatures and that we are in the company of angels especially in our thinking and loving God.