KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 26 September
Michaelmas Daisies: Dancing with Angels
Michaelmas daisies in all their varied hues dance along our maritime roadsides in the soft September air. They are asters, a Greek word meaning star, and are called ‘michaelmas daisies’, because their appearance here and elsewhere coincides with the great Fall festival of St. Michael and All Angels on September 29th. They serve as a reminder of the larger dimensions of creation and of the traditions of intellectual and spiritual life which are part of the life of academic institutions.
Angels are a strong reminder to us of our spiritual and intellectual nature. They, too, are creatures but purely intelligible beings, spiritual beings, in other words. As Diotima teaches Socrates in Plato’s Symposium spirits are intermediate between god and humans. She notes that “they interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans”. This ancient Greek view complements the angelic messengers in the scriptural traditions and belongs to the idea of good news that is shared and in which we participate. Evangelist means, literally, a good angel, a good messenger; hence, gospel or good news.
Angels are an inescapable feature of the scriptural and spiritual landscape of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worlds. The ideas or forms of Plato have become the ideas or thoughts of God and have entered into the spiritual imaginary of the theological cultures of reflection and to a branch of theology known as angelology. They belong to our thinking about creation, spiritually and intellectually, and to ourselves as spiritual creatures, albeit not angels, because we are embodied beings. Angels are the great ‘celestial no-see ums’. The artistic traditions picture and imagine the angels in various ways but in truth they can only be thought. When we think and pray – itself a form of thinking in a Godward direction – we are in the company of angels.
Some of the most important things in life are the things which we cannot see but are known intellectually or spiritually. Such are the angels who contribute to our thinking about the intellectual principles that belong to the created order and to our lives in thought and prayer.
In the year 1257, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in his “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”. Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but, as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding”. They belong to our life as intellectual beings. The feast of St. Michael and All Angels is the first major festival in the early Fall and thus marks the beginning of the first term at the great medieval universities such as Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge and the institutions which derive from them. At King’s-Edgehill, this term is historically and traditionally ‘Michaelmas Term’.