“They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”
We are in the company of angels, no more blessed company to be with in these disturbing times and yet, angels? What are we, pseudo-enlightened moderns such as we are, to make of angels? Cutsy decorations for Christmas trees? Chubby cherubs with rosy cheeks? The more refined and aesthetically pleasing Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque angels? How do we think about angels?
The simple point is that you can only think them. You can’t see them. The visual imaginary, the way in which angels are depicted in art, is only as useful as it contributes to our intellectual and spiritual understanding of the angels. As such The Feast of St. Michael and All Angels yesterday – today is Michaelmas Sunday, we might say – is a strong reminder to us that there is more to reality than the merely physical, a strong reminder that the most important things in our lives are things that you cannot see. At the same time today’s service reminds us ever so strongly that the things you cannot see are made known through the things you can see. Such are the sacraments.
Blythe’s baptism this morning is a wonderful reminder of that spiritual truth. Through the water of death, the water of life, the water of the washing away of original sin and all sin, she is reborn and made “a member of Christ, the child of God, an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven” (BCP, Catechism, p. 544). Such is baptism. It is all grace perfecting nature and as such requires the renunciation of all that stands between us and God; in short, “the world, the flesh and the devil”as the Collect for Trinity XVIII puts it (BCP, p. 247). But only because “the devil and all his works,” what Michaelmas alludes to as “the great dragon”, “that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world,” nicely gathering up a variety of biblical images for all that opposes the absolute truth and goodness of God, has been “overcome by the blood of the Lamb,” by the sacrifice of Christ. How can this be? we might ask, in the manner of Nicodemus coming to Jesus by night in the baptismal Gospel this morning. “How can a person be born again when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Note the literalism of such questions, as if the empirical and the physical were literally all there is.
Michaelmas is a splendid reminder to us of the nature and the reality of the spiritual without which we have no way to think anything. The greatest and most important things in our lives are the things we cannot see, only think and feel, the things of intellect and spirit. You cannot see love. You cannot literally see a number, only the representations of number; you can only think them for they are mental realities. You cannot see a quark or a neutrino or any of the many other features of quantum physics. You cannot see words which are thoughts before they are spoken or written, only then can you see or hear them physically as it were. Think of the magic and wonder of reading. Black marks on a white background that somehow entrance and engage our minds with the thoughts and ideas they represent. There is a constant dialectic between what is seen and unseen.
The angels are pure intellectual beings. They occupy no space. They are beyond number. How many can dance on the end of a pin is an idle and foolish question since unlike the bits and bytes of our cyberspace world they occupy no space whatsoever. They are the pure thoughts of God, the intellectual principles that shape and move our imaginations and strengthen our understanding. They are precisely about the truth and the nature of intellection, that more profound principle of thought upon which our more prosaic and linear ways of thinking ultimately depend. They remind us of a kind of unitive thinking as opposed to our divided thoughts. When we reduce reason to a tool, to a means of problem-solving, we can at best only discover that we are the problem. It is ancient truth represented wonderfully in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.
Intellection is a kind of gathering of everything into unity. It is to see things as a whole and not simply in a dissolution of things; of ‘this and that’. Angelic intellection speaks to an important feature of Michaelmas with respect to the confusions and the destructive follies of our disordered and disturbed world. It provides a strong counter to all and every form of dualism.
Michaelmas presents a cosmic vision that complements the cosmic vision of Genesis 1. The first chapter of Genesis unfolds the pageant of creation not as a prosaic temporal affair but as an orderly and intellectual process in which there is a litany of the distinguishing of one thing from another within an ordered whole. It cannot be read literally or, to put it another way, its literal meaning is of another order. It is really quite profound. “In the beginning” is, perhaps, best understood as “in the principle” from which all things come and to which all things return, the principle of God in whom all things have their being and their truth.
For the most part, the opening statement that “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” was usually understood to refer to things visible – the things of the earth – and things invisible – the heavens, especially the angels. It has really only been in more recent times that some atheists and some Christians have looked at things in a fundamentalist way, seeing everything in essentially material terms. The pageant of creation in Genesis 1 offers a cosmic vision in which God speaks things into being – such is the activity of an intellectual principle in which everything has its truth and being – and, most importantly, each created thing in the order of the litany of creation is seen and said to be good. “And God saw that it was good” is the recurring refrain that is finally concluded in the summary phrase that “God saw everything that he had made and behold, it was very good.” That is a strong affirmation of the essential goodness of all creation, literally of everything, because it is the product of the essential principle of all goodness and being, God.
Even “the great dragon, that old serpent, …the devil … Satan” as created is good. He just lives in contradiction with the principle of his own being. He exists, we might say, in denial. He exists as a standing contradiction, dependent upon what he rejects and opposes. Such is the nature of sin and evil. A lie after all depends utterly upon the truth. When we lie we are assuming that others will take what we say to be true. A lie has no power apart from the truth. It is nothing without the truth.
The lesson from the last book of the Christian Scriptures, The Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine also offers a cosmic vision. It seems to present the cosmic vision of the battle between good and evil. Left at that we would be seem to be trapped in the dualism of two equal but opposed principles and forces. But no. “There waswar in heaven,” not there is war in heaven. “Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not.” Why not? Because of the blood of the Lamb. Because of Christ. Because of the absolute truth and goodness of God which counters and overcomes all and every form of dualism. A cosmic battle, yes, but with a definitive outcome.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks notes that one of the sad and destructive features of our world and day is a “pathological dualism which sees humanity itself as radically divided into the unimpeachably good and the irredeemably bad,” into the good and the evil in which“you are either one or the other.” This is false and destructive of any kind of life in an ordered community and destructive of the life of the soul. Such are the deadly forms of dualism in our current social and political world. The cosmic visions of Genesis and Revelation counter such follies; if we will think with the angels.
“The line dividing good and evil,” Solzhenitsyn acutely observes, “cuts through the heart of every human being.” The real truth and dignity of our humanity is God-given; not human made. “The angels,”as Thomas Aquinas argues, “move our imaginations and strengthen our understanding.” Something of what this means is captured visually on the facade of the Romanesque Basilica di San Michele Maggiore in Pavia, Italy. Above the portal is an image of St. Michael, serene and calm and staring straight ahead, while his feet stand upon a serpent. Below that image, around the arches of the portal, are depictions of animals, natural and fantastical, all in a sequence in which they are, as it were, devouring one another. Human reason left to its own devices and limits can only create a world that devours itself. The cosmic vision of Michaelmas recalls us to the truth and goodness of God and to our participation and membership in a spiritual company. Such is the body of Christ, the Church catholic and universal. And all and only because of “the blood of the Lamb.” Here in our liturgy we dance with the angels in the dance of the understanding.
“They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb”
Fr. David Curry
Michaelmas Sunday/Trinity XVIII
Sept. 30th, 2018
Christ Church
(Baptism of Blythe Appleby)