Christian Symbolism: Angels
Next in our series on Christian symbolism, Mthr Arabella Milbank writes on the depiction of angels and their function and significance in the life of the Church. Mthr Arabella is serving her curacy in the Parish of Louth. She writes on literature and theology across the late medieval and early modern periods. Her PhD thesis (Emmanuel College and Faculty of English, Cambridge) dealt with the theology of fear in Middle English literature and her MPhil thesis (Emmanuel College and Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge) with the angelology of the seventeenth-century poet and spiritual writer Thomas Traherne.
As I write, global pandemic means it has been months since the angels which throng the church where I am a curate were joined by a human congregation. The glorious medieval Parish Church of St James in Louth has - I have counted - just about an angel for every day of the year: well over 300 depicted in wood, stone, plaster and glass.
Of these angels, the vast majority are now of relatively recent date. In the roof of the nave, demure Georgian plaster messengers, repainted in Farrow & Ball tones, are pendant on the stripped pine hammer-beams. They are joined between each brace by intriguingly pug-faced takes on cherub and seraph, also redone in ice-cream colours. In the darker heights of the chancel, gilded and elongated, angels in a more pre-Raphaelite style hover.
Our later hosts replaced fifteenth-century angels in at least one of these locations. Elsewhere, too there is continuity. In the Victorian stained-glass windows angelic variations rise through the echelons of much earlier Gothic stone tracery, with its implicit articulation of their hierarchy and mediation. In the armrests of the choir, angels carved by, Thomas Wilkinson Wallis, Louth's Grinling Gibbons, speak of a continuity over centuries before and beyond their specific depiction: generations of singing voices raised in angel-like praise and adoration.
One guardian pair of the original medieval flock has remained. Come down to human eye-level, they now flank the small altar of the Angel (once Lady or perhaps Trinity) Chapel in the northeast corner of the church.
Fifteenth-century angel, Louth (Photo credit: Allan Barton)
These medieval angels are about four-foot high, made of oak aged shining black. Their faces are impassively beautiful, the grain gleaming on high cheekbones grooved with chisel marks. Their hair is flung back in stiff waves, as if caught eternally in an invisible wind. One arm of each is raised in a slightly forbidding gesture: of greeting, of praise, of blessing? They carry not timbrel or trumpet, but the perversely human objects which are nonetheless the emblems of greatest mystery of God: the thorny crown and scourge-wrapped pillar.
Their grave and intense presence contrasts with the angels of the altarpiece: fleshy putti done in seventeenth-century oils, whose infant podge echoes that of the suckling Christ Child, their supplicant arms that of the toddler John the Baptist clambering into the Virgin's lap.
The Louth angels all stand somewhere on the most significant vector in the iconography of the angel: that between their alterity, their otherness in their glory or perhaps even terror; and their familiarity, their human likeness. A vector of knowability and unknowability.
The angel - in Greek and in Hebrew, the messenger (angelos, mal'ak) of God - carries also a message in its form and appearance: of the ineffable glory of the divine and its conformity, suitability, shaping to human understanding and sight. The myriads of angels participate that most fundamental paradox of Christian art and theology, that God is the one who is at once least seen and most fully gives himself to be seen.
Choirs of Angels, Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias I.6, Rubertsberg MS
Scholastic theologians after the Fourth Lateran Council, in their search for delineation and definition, often placed a strong emphasis on the incorporeality of an angel. An invisible, spiritual being, an intelligence. But in patristics writers such as Origen and Augustine all the way down to the poetic theology of John Milton, angels had merely a relative immateriality. Their substance was filmier, alterior to ours, but perhaps something more like the 'heavenly bodies' humankind themselves await. Their entity shares with ours that of the created being, separate from God, yet possessing a destiny of immortality and life in him. They are our co-citizens of heaven.
By definition the angel thus floats in one direction free of affirmation, and so free of depiction. What is the colour of glory? The very ultimacy of what they are, their proximity to God, suggests an uncontainable luminosity. Sometimes we see seraphs in the flaming red of love, sometimes cherubs in the celestial blue of their wisdom. But what an angel looks like, or can be described as looking like, would then be in a symbolic, or better, perhaps, analogical relation to what or who they actually are.
But the God who has clothed himself in flesh has already broken wide this boundary. Saint Thomas Aquinas takes up a patristic theme when he writes of this angelic predisposition to be 'dressed' in human form as a prophecy or message of the divine clothing in humanity in Jesus Christ. [1] They are mirrors of future glory, of the possibility of a human spiritual perfection that will also reunite all the citizens of heaven, of a mystery beyond even their own glorious being. Depicting angels in art and architecture - angels which in the abstraction permitted in poetry can rest ambiguous in form - would seem to require something more fixed.
The doyen of all Christian angelology, Denys the Areopagite, writing in the 5th or 6th century, describes the paradox of all theological endeavour. The divine light can only be revealed insofar as it is hidden. It is through this paradox that Denys understands the eye-defying entity of the angels [2]:
This divine ray can enlighten us only by being upliftingly concealed in a variety of sacred veils which the Providence of the Father adapts to our nature as human beings.
God, known through what he is not, is also the source of all things and of their knowing. Hence the way of negation and the way of affirmation are fundamentally one. God's whole creation, visible and invisible, reflects God, and has no being except through God and God's desire to bring us to God. To come to him must be to come apparently indirectly, what some might call 'falsely', in a way shaped to our capacities, analogous, participatory. No painted angel is like an angel. Every painted angel is like an angel.
An Angel in Flight, Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
This paradox of theology invites the work of the imagination, the arts, literary and artistic. The artist of any kind has the capacity to extend our vision of the world, of creation visible and invisible. The angels, innumerable citizens of heaven, agents of our knowing and understanding of the divine purpose, have been seen in sleep and waking, in vision and reality, as young men and as eye-studded wheels within wheels. The artist's response to the angel extends and participates the angelic re-veiling and revealing of the divine, prolonging and promulgating vision. The validity, the transparency of these depictions to the divine is made possible by the original promise of the annunciation angel, the message of the incarnation: God dwelling and abiding in flesh and matter.
We might see the many attempts of Gothic architecture to fill buildings with layered and structured light, and to carry an iterating, structured hierarchy in their arcades, vaults and tracery as itself engaged in depicting the angelic. John Hutton's Screen of Saints, etched in the glass front of Coventry Cathedral, also limns the angel by making it a being of light - and yet of light refracted, dependent on facets and bevels, and of our own passing and repassing to view their guardian forms.
'Screen of Saints and Angels', Coventry Cathedral, John Hutton
The most prevalent visual expression of the angel, the winged and beautiful humanoid, apprehends this tension in its basic elements of likeness and unlikeness. In Daniel, in the Jewish Book of Enoch, and in Isaiah we find angels associated specifically with flight and wings. In the Psalms they are beings of 'fire and wind'. In Ezekiel they are animal-headed, full of wheels and eyes. Their movement between heaven and earth is enough reason perhaps to associate them with some extraordinary form of heavenly body. The more fixed iconography that results from this tends to dilate on beauty, brilliance and, of course, on wings.
For John Chrysostom, writing in the 4th century, the wings carry allegorical force. He comments on Isaiah's vision of the divine throne and its glory, its accompaniment by the seraphim [3]:
What do these wings tell us? These powers have no wings since they have no body; but by these sensible figures, the Prophet wants to make us understand hidden things, he condescends by that to the weakness of those who listened to him, and yet, by this condescension, he makes us understand excellently thoughts that surpass all intelligence. What do these wings mean? The elevated and sublime nature of these powers. Thus we are shown Gabriel flying and descending from heaven, to teach us his speed and lightness.
The external attribute, the 'sensible figure' of the wings, is not just a cipher to be 'got through' to the real meaning. The wings of the angel take us directly to an understanding of the nature and quality of divine power inaccessible otherwise, not 'less than' the discursive equivalent but somehow more. Like the angel itself, the image reveils to reveal, symbolic and angelic mediation maximising not occluding our understanding of the divine. Angel's wings, and the human participation in vision which gives them, give us wings to understand more of who God is through his creatures.
Stammheim Missal, Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, MS 64, fol 10v
Where to begin with talking about the iconography of angels? Where do angels begin? According to classical theology, the angels pre-exist us, perhaps accompany and even participate in the creation of the material world. They are there with God, as we can see in cosmological images of angels like this one above from a liturgical book, the twelfth-century Stammheim Missal.
The art historical genesis of angelic depiction begins with the clues afforded by the Jewish and Christian scriptures, and in the inheritance - from all the cultures of Asia Minor - of depictions of winged deities. This often results in a complex, sometimes surprising, cultural interplay. So on Christian sarcophagi we see classical putti flit through Virgilian ideal landscapes, and angelic psychopomps appear on pagan Roman tombs. In the iconography of some of the frescoes of the Dura-Europos synagogue in Syria, now destroyed by ISIS, a hand of God is generally preferred to the iconographically ambiguous angel. However, to illustrate the breathing of the spirit into Ezekiel's dry bones four classically draped, fairy-winged forms drift down. We might imagine them to be some kind of angel - my suspicion is that they are in fact the classical anemoi, evoked by the 'four winds' referenced in Ezekiel 37.9.
Detail from Ezekiel mural, Dura Europos.
But it is to the turning point of history, Athanasius' 'beginning of our salvation' that we turn to find the first explicitly Christian depiction of an angel. In the third-century frescoes of the underground Catacombs of Priscilla outside Rome a small roundel carries two blurred, brown figures. One stands upright, hand extended in rhetorical style to give an arm winged only by the folds of a toga: the angel in the rôle of a classical messenger. The other is seated, hair unbound: an enthroned virgin.
Annunciation, from fresco in Cubiculum P, Catacombs of Priscilla, Rome.
So the first Christian angel is wingless, anthropomorphic. Like the three young men who are the guests of Abraham, and the brilliantly clothed youths who greet the women at the empty tomb, this is an angel in its likeness, not unlikeness, to humankind. And yet each of these scriptural examples suggest an alterity nested in that familiarity: they are recognized with reverence, with fear. There is a reason that the first words of so many scriptural angels are 'do not be afraid': whilst they may not always appear as the winged seraphs of Isaiah's vision before whom the pillars of the temple tremble, there is something in their being that rocks ours, some greater glory perhaps all the more concerning for being contained in a familiar form.
Most people's favourite depiction of an angel will perhaps be an annunciation of the thousands upon thousands produced by the Western tradition and by the iconographers of the Eastern. Standing; kneeling; in flight; touching ground; fearful; gentle; with feet, with eyes aflame. There is so much to meditate on in the endless iterations of relation these give between human and angelkind.
The Annunciation, Fra Angelico
Fra Angelico's fresco was painted for the monk's stairwell of his Dominican convent San Marco in Florence. In their daily contemplation of it they are asked, in the words inscribed below, to make this angel's 'Hail' their endless prayer. Gabriel's robe and cheeks are rosy as the new dawn, as if about to supply all the colour the Virgin's plaster-coloured, suppliant body lacks. The garden beyond suggests an Eden the angel has just stepped from, inverting the driving away of Eve by that other angel, and the colour of his wings the rainbow of hope and covenant.
Yet the angel makes a reverence to her, and Gabriel's hands, halo, body - all are subtly smaller. He has a certain statuary unreality, his glorious aesthetic nonetheless competing unfavourably with her greater reality, her supplicancy to be filled with an unending grace. Her eyes do not seem to have found his form, rather, she looks just up and beyond and out, to the will of God, to divine purpose. They are in the same frame: the pillar only separates them from our point of view: in three dimensions they are not separated at all but gaze eye to eye. Which way does holiness flow? Who acknowledges whom? Mary's 'yes' will affirm the calling of the angel, too, whose appearance in Fra Angelico's painting deeply echoes and mirrors hers.
The presence of angels in church architecture and fittings begins again with our Mosaic inheritance: the cherubs which adorn the tabernacle and its curtain and guard the Temple's holy of holies. Angels are coincident with divine presence. But in churches, too, they indicate not just the raising of hearts to the holy and heavenly but the real presence of something transcendentally glorious in what we offer there. Both the participation of human liturgy and offering in celestial life of prayer and praise and the delight and rejoicing of the angels in the sacramental life of the Church are indicated by their presence in church art and architecture.
Angel roof, St Mary's, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
The especially English phenomenon with which we began, the angels of nave and chancel roof, became prevalent in fifteenth-century East Anglia although it probably began with the angels of Westminster Hall. They cluster below the eaves, connecting praise 'here below/and here above' in the words of George Herbert's dialogue of angels and humankind, 'Antiphon (II)'. Sometimes they are vested in garments which explicitly parallel the clerical garments themselves sometimes understood as deriving from angelic garb: the surplice or alb the white raiment of the angel in Matthew 28, the stole the golden sash of the angels of Revelation. They participate in our worship; we participate that of heaven.
As we move down the centuries angels in the iconography we see in our churches do sometimes have moments of placidity, flattening what were striking statements of the nature of the angelic into ornamentation or trope. We should not forget the capacity of the angel to awe and overwhelm. Angels, at our beginning, are also at our end. As well as the angels of liturgical timelessness there are the angels of time's urgency, the angels of apocalypse. The angels with trumpets we see in many mediums might have devolved to a pleasing trope, but their trumpets originally referred to those blown by the angels of the Book of Revelation, each blast from which announces a new unfolding of the last times.
But in contemporary church art, the paradoxical vector angels inhabit, what they can bring us as mediators of divine vision, has been far from lost. Marc Chagall's window for Chichester Cathedral was completed in a spirit of deeply poignant post-war hope for increasing harmony between Jewish and Christian people. Exuberantly crimson, it interprets the shared inheritance of the text of Psalm 150 'Let everything that has breath, praise the Lord'. Creatures who defy or modulate between the categories of human, animal and angelical are caught up in a red riot of form and motion. The suggestion of the angelic that is everywhere: in the leadlines of the glass, the gravity-defying dance, the musical instruments, implies the capacity the angelic has to speak of the shared vocation of praise. Perhaps more than this, it hints at Origen's idea that all things are full of angels, omnia angelis sunt plena, from the celestial bodies to the minerals of the ground, angels the perpetual omnipresence of the divine providence, accompanying, aiding and illuminating the capacity of all things to return that gift of providence in that of praise. [4]
Marc Chagall, Let everything that have breath praise the Lord, Chichester Cathedral
An angel to end with might be one who brings together the angels of judgement with the angels of mercy, the flaming sword and the crown of thorns. The travelling Knife Angel, which has come to a stop in Telford for the moment, is a national monument against violence. 100,000 reclaimed knives feather its vast wings and 27 feet of body. Palms extended, face caught in a grimace which moves between compassion and a victim's pain, its pose is that of the medieval Man of Sorrows, Christ who displays his wounds of nails and spear even as he stands upright in the tomb of his Resurrection.
Alfie Bradley and the British Ironworks Centre, Knife Angel
That angelic form this monument takes, alongside the iconic status of Antony Gormley's Angel of the North, suggests that the angel is a deeply important contemporary icon. We have far from forgotten the theme of angelic guardianship, national and personal, which the Archangel Michael and the guardian angel embody. Contemporary culture, in embracing the depiction of angels, expresses its still-keen hope for, even belief in, a mediated transcendent and a caring divine. The angel, in a culture where confessional religion is sometimes viewed with greater scepticism, has not stopped speaking its message to us. In its otherness the angel retains the capacity to stretch the limits of our perception and the sense of our ways; in its familiarity to speak of a God who shares our wounds, who feels our pain.
1. S. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a q.51 a.2 in K. Foster, ed. (2006). Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 36-7.
2. Denys the Areopagite, Celestial Hierarchy in Colm Luibheid, ed. (1987), Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, p.146.
3. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Isaiah 6.
4. Origen, Homily on Ezekiel 1.7.
Further Reading
Dominique Ponnau and Erich Lessing (2000). Dieu en ses anges. Paris, Les Éditions du Cerf.
Rosa Giorgi (2005). Angels and Demons in Art. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum.
Michael Rimmer (2015). The Angel Roofs of East Anglia: Unseen Masterpieces of the Middle Ages. Cambridge, The Lutterworth Press.
Steven Chase, ed (2002). Angelic Spirituality. New York, Paulist Press.
S-T. Bonino (2015). Angels and Demons: A Catholic Introduction. Washington D.C., Catholic University of America Press.
Jean Daniélou. The Angels and Their Mission. Trans. David Heimann. Westminster, MD. The Newman Press, 1957.
