by CCW | 29 September 2016 21:00
“Is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress … In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” (T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock). Michelangelo? The ninja turtle? No, the great Renaissance artist. Or is this simply all a digression? The name, Michelangelo, derives from The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels’ which marks the closing down of September, on the one hand, and the beginning of the School Term, on the other hand, especially at Oxford and Cambridge and the schools which derive their traditions of education from them.
Turtles and angels do have something in common. They are both part of the created order. They both belong to our reflections upon the world as intelligible. Angels remind us of some very important features of our humanity. They remind us that we are spiritual creatures by virtue of our thinking and our loving. When we think and love we are in the company of angels.
Michaelmas speaks about the things which belong to our intellectual and spiritual life. One of the wonderful thing about angels is that you can’t see them. You can only think them! For some that seems crazy. If you can’t see it, then it doesn’t exist; it isn’t real, some may think. Well, to the contrary, there are lots of things which we can’t see but nonetheless respect and recognise: our thoughts and feelings for one thing as well as lots of things in particle physics such as quarks, neutrinos, and nuons or in math with such things as numbers and shapes – these are not sense perceptible things. They are realities grasped by our minds through our thinking. Like the angels, we can only think them.
Angels belong to a long and profound tradition of poetic and philosophical reflection, to the ways in which the world is intelligible. They are the invisible reasons for the visible things of the world, intellectual principles which are intermediate, in some form or other, between God and man. We can only think the angels and, in some sense, when we are thinking we are in the company of angels.
They are an inescapable feature of the scriptural landscape for Jews, and Christians and Muslims. For Islam, belief in angels is one of the five fundamental points of Faith. Michaelmas reminds us of the themes of good and evil, of suffering and misery. “There was war in heaven”, we are told, and we learn about the principle of evil, the fallen angels, led by that old serpent, the Devil and Satan – all terms for Lucifer whose name perhaps best illustrates the problem. Lucifer means the light-bearer. That is who he is. But he denies his creation and his Creator. He literally turns his back on the light which defines him. When you turn your back on what you know, then you choose the darkness. It is a way of thinking about the problem of good and evil, a way of opening us out to the reality of finding ourselves in a moral universe where how we think and act really matters.
Michaelmas opens us out to the perennial questions about good and evil and to the realities of suffering and death, to conflict and war. It emphasizes that this conflict between good and evil is not merely dualistic – between two equally competing principles. No. “There was war in heaven”; not there is. We are being opened out to the idea of the good as greater than all and any evil.
St. Michael and all his angels prevail against the Devil, against all that would define itself in opposition to God. They do so, in the Christian understanding, ultimately through “the blood of the lamb”, an explicit reference to Christ. It is about the power of divine goodness over and against every form of evil. Michaelmas recalls us to our being part of an intellectual and spiritual community. As Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelicus, as he is known, puts it, the angels teach us not by supplanting the light of nature and the light of grace, human and divine knowing respectively, but by “moving our imaginations and strengthening our understanding.” Nothing speaks more profoundly to our spiritual identity and life. A welcome digression, perhaps.
Fr. David Curry
Michaelmas 2016
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