“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?”
God’s question to Job echoes God’s first question in Genesis to our humanity. Where are you? In the Book of Job, the question deepens the metaphysical and spiritual meaning of that first question. They have entirely to do with the world as spiritual and intellectual, as ultimately good and deserving of reverent respect and of ourselves as spiritual creatures who find themselves in a spiritual community. God’s question to Job points us to that community of spiritual creatures: the morning stars and the sons of God are the Angels. We are in the company of angels, something which our liturgy constantly reminds us. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious name”.
There is more to reality than what meets the eye. It is what belongs to the mind, to intellect and spirit. Michaelmas testifies to the spiritual nature of reality, not as solipsistic and narcissistic nonsense in flight from the world and the body as evil, but as signalling the intellectual and spiritual structure of the world in which we find our truth and being. Thomas Aquinas, the great Angelic Doctor, as he is called, remarks that the Angels move our imaginations and strengthen our understanding. They are an essential aspect of creation as intelligible and good and belong to a long and profound tradition of reflection about the world as in principle knowable, as known and loved by God in the Christian understanding.
The Angels are the pure thoughts of God. To think is to think with the Angels and to think with the Angels at once counters and redeems our limited linear forms of reasoning, ratio, by recalling us to intellectus, to the unity of thought, to the grasp of things as a whole without which the parts fall away into nothingness. God’s question to Job echoing God’s question to us in the garden of Eden calls us to account as intellectual and spiritual beings and to a self-consciousness which recalls us to God and thus to the truth of our humanity as made in the image of God.
This does not deny the reality of suffering and evil. God’s question to us in Eden calls us to account because of our denial of what God had said about not eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By disobeying we learn two great truths, our mortality and ourselves as self-conscious creatures who like God know good and evil. But unlike God, we learn this through separation and negation, through contradiction and so unlike God who knows evil through the good we have to learn the good through the experience of suffering and evil. Yet the vocation to know even as we are known remains. It impells the spiritual journey in which we are in the company of Angels who assist us in our thinking and doing. They bring down to us the thoughts of God and raise us up to the things of God.
Angels are an inescapable part of the spiritual landscape of the scriptures. These ‘celestial no-see ums’, as Fr. Crouse humorously called them, belong to the pageant of creation and redemption. We can’t see them because they are invisible and immaterial beings without bodies. The question how many angels can dance on the head of a pin is a meaningless modern question; they have no bodies, no spatial or temporal extension. They are sempiternal.
Michaelmas reminds us of the cosmic dimensions of evil, on the one hand, and the strong witness to the power of the good, on the other hand. There was war in heaven; there was not there is. Here, however, we continue to experience suffering and evil, sin and death. But not as a simple dualism. The problem of sin and evil is about us as spiritual creatures who have denied the truth of our being and knowing; through the long pageant of redemption, a journey of learning through suffering and sacrifice, we find ourselves in a spiritual community. As spiritual creatures, there are also the fallen angels, those who deny as well the truth of their being. Such is the way in which the serpent in Genesis is understood in Revelation as “the great dragon, called the devil and Satan,” a marvellous summing up of the various terms for what opposes or tests God.
What the lesson from Revelation emphasises, however, is the overcoming of evil; the triumph of the good. How? Not by some angelic heroism but by the blood of the Lamb, an explicit reference to Christ in his Incarnation. Thus Michaelmas reminds us of the radical nature of the redemption of the world. It teaches us that spirit and matter are not opposed forces or principles but are reconciled in Christ. The world and the flesh are made adequate to spirit, made the means of our spiritual life. This shows the sacramental principle at work. Through the things of the physical and material world, we learn the things of the spirit. Michaelmas counters the techno-gnosticism of our current world which reduces us to things to be used and manipulated including our own bodies; techno because we have the means to remake creation in our own image. This assumes a false sense of the self as disembodied, as if we were angels.
But we aren’t, for this would once again be a denial of our God-given humanity. “Where are you?” is the question about who we are, the question that recalls us to our being made in the image of God and to learning what that means. In that sense we learn to think with the Angels without presuming to be Angels. We learn to think the good order of God’s creation and the greater good of redemption, for God alone makes good even out of our evil. We learn to act with care towards one another and not to despise others, namely, the little ones, the children of God which we are too, as Matthew’s Gospel reminds us tonight. Such is the wonder of our being in the company of Angels. The Angels recall us to who we are in the sight of God and in so doing move our imaginations and strengthen our understanding of ourselves and of our world.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy?”
Fr. David Curry
Michaelmas 2022