Christ and His Angels

Extract

There is much more in this paper about angels than about Christ; but I am sure that you will forgive me this disproportion. Christ, so it seems, is already well known to us: we can take him for granted. But angels are new—there is news in talking about angels: they excite our curiosity.

At our disposal are numerous scholary treatises in which Christ’s personality is analysed and this nature is dissected in its several components. About Christ we may think we know almost everything there is to know. But angels. . . ?

Of course, we know they have not really got wings like birds, and that in fact they must be quite different from the naked babies that tumble from the skies in our baroque paintings. But what else is there to say?

To be fair only in the past century and a half have angels suffered a leakage of meaning ending in the present debilitated condition. Before that they were the objects of much serious speculation. Were they material or pure spirits; what sort of knowledge did they have; could they have intercourse; how many of them were there; etc. ? Indeed, angels were dissected too: Fr Cipolla (Brother Onion) treasured in a box a ‘penna dell’hgnolo Gabriello’ which was left behind on the occasion of the archangel’s visit to the Blessed Virgin (II Decamerone VI 10, 370)—supposing, of course, that Boccaccio is a reliable witness.

But alas, for us this wealth of information is buried in the past, unavailable because we do not even know how to make it appear relevant. The break with the past is pretty well complete: angels have been lost definitively in a welter of tinsel and feathers.