Christ Church

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth … when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

We dance in the company of angels today and always. “Prayer the churches banquet, Angels age”, as George Herbert puts it. This captures something of the meaning of the angels in the order of creation and their connection to us that God’s question to Job highlights so wonderfully about the joy of creation and redemption.

Michaelmas is the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. It signals the larger dimensions of creation as spiritual and intellectual and of our humanity as spiritual creatures within that order. Our liturgy is emphatic on this point. “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name”, we sing as we prepare to enter into the eucharistic sacrifice of Christ. We are in the company of angels.

We cannot see them. We can only think them. The most important things in life are the things we cannot see. The angels belong to the deeper sense of creation and redemption. They are pure, spiritual and intellectual beings, the very thoughts of God in motion, the thoughts that gather us to God. Angelic thinking offers an important corrective and critique to the confusions of our times.

Ludwig Feuerbach, a 19th century German theologian, claimed that “the old world made spirit parent of matter; the new world makes matter parent of spirit.” This influenced Marx to a considerable extent, leading to dialectical materialism and the various forms of material determinism, the legacy of which still remains with us in the forms of technocratic determinism. The dominance of a kind of instrumental reason leads to the illusions of power and control over nature and ourselves and to the ideology of progress, the religion of science or scientism, on the one hand, and the reactions against this kind of reductionism in the flights of fantasy into the abstractions and confusions about the self, on the other hand, what Michel Henry called sociologism. Such are some of our current confusions.

Charles Taylor, Canada’s pre-eminent philosopher, in a recent book, Cosmic Connections, undertakes an intriguing survey of English and German romanticism in the 18th and 19th centuries to show the strong desire for a deeper sense of connection to the larger dimensions of creation or the cosmos; reality, if you will. But this book like others is premised in part on the idea of disenchantment. The claim is that modernity for the last five hundred years is disconnected from the natural world. Our disenchantment is really about the dominance of a practical and instrumental relation to the world which is ultimately destructive of both the world and ourselves. This is certainly part of the story but is it the whole story or is this also part of ‘the myth of disenchantment’? The Angels, it seems to me, have always been with us and belong to the imaginary of our spiritual and intellectual culture in every age and period including modernity, whatever is meant by that term.

Plato, in the Symposium on the question of love, has Diotima, a female philosopher, teach Socrates about the things of the spirit. Love, she points out, is not an object, a thing, but an activity of the soul, of spirit. It is not a god because love is of something so it seeks what it does not have. It is a spirit, and spirits are intermediate between god and humans. “They interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans,” she says. This complements the idea of angels as God’s messengers in the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (and beyond). The very word Gospel in Greek literally means good angel or good messenger and signals to us the idea of things shared and of our participation in the goodness of God. The ideas or forms of Plato become the ideas or thoughts of God in motion and contribute to a larger view of our humanity.

Unlike the angels, we are embodied beings, but, like the angels, we are spiritual and intellectual creatures. They are sempi-eternal, the created ideas or principles of creation as an ordered whole, as intelligible. They are an inescapable feature of the landscape of the scriptural and spiritual traditions of our cultural heritage and are represented by artists in various ways in each and every age. We are constantly reminded through these “celestial no see-ums” as Fr. Crouse puts it, of the spiritual and intellectual nature of creation and of our place within it. We are in the company of angels in the Godward direction of our prayers and lives. As an Anglican divine, Mark Frank remarks in another image, we are dwellers all in the same house, they upstairs and we below stairs.

The angels recall us to an important feature of thought. It is not just about an instrumental reason which focuses on this and that, breaking things down into parts which belongs so much to the divided nature of our world and day. This is ratio, a ratiocinative kind of thinking, but it completely depends on a higher form of thought called intellectus, a sense of the whole without which the parts are empty and meaningless and endlessly divided and discursive. Prayer especially is about our participation in this higher form of thinking. It is about our being gathered to God in the spiritual unity of the whole of creation. As Thomas Aquinas, known as the angelic doctor, puts it, the angels teach us not by supplanting the light of nature or the light of grace, human and divine knowing respectively, but “by moving our imaginations and strengthening our understanding.”

All wonderful and good. The angels help us to think more deeply about the radical goodness of creation and of ourselves within it as at once connected to everything in creation, from dust to angels, and to a deeper sense of what it means for us to be made in the image of God. In this sense, the angels help us to reclaim and recover what belongs to the truth of humanity. But that means confronting the realities of sin and evil.

Michaelmas reminds us of this in no uncertain terms. The lesson from Revelation opens with a most troubling concept. “There was war in heaven”. It presents us with the idea of the cosmic conflict between good and evil. Whence evil? Where does evil come from? In the Genesis accounts of creation, it can only come from spiritual creatures, angels and humans through the forms of our contradiction of the very principles of our being and knowing. This is concentrated for us in this lesson which instantly recalls the story of the Fall now understood on a cosmic plane.

Michael and his angels fight “against the dragon” and “his angels”, “that old serpent” – an explicit reference to the serpent in the garden – but also “called the devil and Satan”, “the deceiver” and “the accuser”, but the dragon and his angels “prevailed not”. All these terms refer to what opposes the goodness of God. Yet the good is prior and greater than all forms of sin and evil because all forms of evil depend upon the principle which they reject and contradict. This is perhaps most clearly expressed for us in another name for the devil or Satan, and associated with the day star or star of the morning, Lucifer.

Lucifer is literally the light-bearer. His name signals his vocation but he rejects his vocation, and in so doing turns his back on the light of God But to turn your back on the light is to be in darkness; Lucifer is the prince of darkness. He exists in contradiction to the truth of his own being and knowing. But as the passage from Revelation makes clear, “there was war in heaven”, not that there is. Sin and evil are overcome, we are told, but not simply by any virtue or power of Michael and his angels but “by the blood of the Lamb”, an explicit reference to Christ as true God and true man, whose sacrifice is the redemption of creation and of our humanity. A number of renaissance and early modern artists capture this idea by portraying the angels at the crucifixion with chalices that catch the blood of Christ at Calvary and thus convey it to us sacramentally.

Like the Michaelmas daisies in all of their varied hues that dance along our roadsides in the September air, so too we dance with the angels in our worship and life of prayer. But like Job in his sufferings, we have to be reminded of the angels and what they teach us by recalling us to that larger dimension of thought and prayer “when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy”.

Fr. David Curry
Michaelmas Sunday
September 29th, 2024