Christ Church

They overcame him by the blood of the lamb

Above the entrance to the Romanesque Basilica San Michele Maggiore in Pavia, in northern Italy, stands a bas-relief of the figure of St. Michael the Archangel. He is depicted as looking straight ahead, calm and serene, while standing upon a dragon-like serpent. Around the portal a whole collection of creatures are arrayed, each chasing and devouring one another. It depicts. in an imaginative way, the important contrast and connection between two different forms of thinking: ratio and intellectus.

The angels remind us of the necessity and the priority of intellectus, the power of understanding, without which we are lost and consumed in ratiocination, our linear, calculative kind of thinking, chasing one thing after another without any sense of the whole; literally lost in the parts. Intellectus is about the gathering together of all things into understanding, into wisdom, and as such redeems our more instrumental forms of thinking which by themselves lead to destruction and despair. The redemption of ratio is found in its participation in intellectus, something which is wonderfully shown in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, a work which draws upon Augustine and important intellectual developments in late antiquity. Both Augustine and Boethius are buried in another church in Pavia; San Pietro Ciel d’oro, mentioned by Dante in the Paradiso of his Divine Comedy. Such are just some of the profound aspects of intellectus, a gathering into understanding.

We need to be reminded about the different forms of thinking. The angels are part and parcel of the scriptural landscape and intellectual thought-world of the ancient Greeks and of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic imaginary. They belong to our life together as an intellectual and spiritual community which is especially the role of Chapel in the life of the School. They remind us of the important truth and insight that there is more to reality than what is known by our senses. We can’t see the angels. In a way, that is the point. We can only think them. They are pure mind, spiritual and intellectual beings who are the invisible thoughts of God in creation.

This term is properly and traditionally known as Michaelmas term. Michaelmas derives from the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels in late September and marked the beginning of the School year for the  medieval universities of Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, and, so to our School and College which belongs to that tradition.

The intellectual and spiritual life of the School is about thinking with the angels. We are in the company of angels, those messengers of God who bring down to us the thoughts of God and lift us up to God. The most important things in life are the things you cannot see – such as love and thought. As Thomas Aquinas, “the angelic doctor,” wisely observes, the angels move our imagination and strengthen our understanding. In other words, they belong to the elevation of our thinking and remind us of something more than the instrumental and calculative forms of thinking that so easily consume us. They remind us that the truth of ratiois found in intellectus.

The angels belong especially to our ethical thinking about the principles of good and evil as the lesson from Revelation shows. The lesson recalls both the story of the Fall and the fall-out from Paradise in the story of Cain and Abel about our world of strife and division. “What have you done?” God asks Cain, echoing his questions to Adam and Eve, “where are you?” and “what have you done?” The questions are all about how we are called to account, called into reason and truth albeit through the awareness of our separation from God. Michalemas shows the cosmic dimension of the contest between good and evil without leaving us trapped in a despairing and fearful dualism. “There was war in heaven,” not there is. The point of both stories is that the good is greater than evil – by definition.

The story of Cain and Abel is about the first murder. It arises from sibling rivalry. The story requires our careful attention. Here sacrifice arises as a human invention and as such is a problem. The logic, as Leon Kass notes, is intriguing. God (or the gods) are such beings as do good or could do good to me; I should try to please them so that they will do good to me; I like to receive gifts, therefore God (or gods) like gifts too. This assumes, wrongly, that God is just like us. Therein lies the lie and the problem. Sibling rivalry is about gaining the attention of parents and resenting it when one seems to get more attention than the other. It leads to resentment and revenge and to what the New Testament will identify as envy. God accepts Abel’s offering but has no regard for Cain’s, at least not right now. Cain’s countenance fell. He becomes angry at God and at Abel. He conspires to lure Abel into the field and kills him. In the story there is the hint, too, of a difference in relation to an ordering principle between Cain’s  tilling the ground and Abel’s keeping the sheep.

God asks Cain, “Where is your brother?” Cain says “I do not know” but adds the famous line, “am I my brother’s keeper?” Indifference to another can be as serious as killing another. The Greek word for brothers is about those who come from the same womb, sharing the same source of life, adelphos. Here Cain expresses an indifference to what they have in common and by extension, an indifference to our common humanity. God calls him explicitly to account. “What have you done? Your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.” Blood is life which Cain violates.

The Michaelmas story is about the overcoming of all evil not by virtue of any strength on our part or even of the angels as if they were supernatural heroes. “They overcame him by the blood of the lamb,” the blood of Christ’s sacrifice, the sacrifice which does not arise from human presumption but from the divine love which restores and recreates. It is about the power of the Good. The story connects the devil to the serpent of the Genesis story. It is all about a way of thinking more deeply about good and evil. As such the angels belong to our ethical thinking and imagination. Such is very much an integral part of education at King’s-Edgehill. It is about our thinking with angels.

(Rev’d) David Curry
Chaplain, English & ToK teacher
Chair of the Department of Religion and Philosophy