They, looking back, all the eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late their happy seat,
Waved over by that flaming brand, the gate
With dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
—JOHN MILTON, PARADISE LOST
ANGELS HAVE ALWAYS been difficult to write about, for many different reasons. In the past, people knew that the chief reason they were hard to write about was because the subject was intimidating. There were, it was known, all kinds of angels, all sorts of cosmic-spiritual levels on which they dwelt, and a million mysteries attached to these levels, which were so high, so rarefied, and so mighty from our pathetic earthly perspective that to say anything on the topic seemed the height of arrogance.
In the Christian tradition, only the great geniuses—Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart—would dare go near the subject. The same is the case in literature. Goethe, the greatest German writer of all time, could write about angels. Dante, the greatest Italian poet, could write about them, though he did so always with enormous humility. Milton, the greatest poet in the English language, could write of them, and indeed, they were one of his chief topics.
In short, if you were a giant, you could dare to approach the subject. Otherwise, it was wisest to stay quiet and listen to what other voices had to say on the topic.
Today, though the topic remains just as challenging to write about, the reasons are quite different. Generally speaking, if you wish to address the modern secular world about the possibility that angels might actually be real, you will immediately be dismissed as crazy, naive, or both. If you want to address the question from within the Christian, Jewish, or Islamic tradition (all three of which have always taken the existence of angels completely for granted), you will often still have trouble. This is because the sheer volume of thought produced by all these traditions over the centuries is such that you will scarcely be able to utter a word before discovering you’ve said something that the other faith traditions take issue with.
Angels are, in short, an impossible subject.
And yet, somewhat paradoxically, books that take angels seriously are wildly popular. The trendiness of angels with the public at large waxes and wanes, but in our time, the big surge of interest in angels began in the early 1990s. Suddenly these beings, which previously had shown up now and then in movies and TV but mostly on cards at Christmas and disappeared for the rest of the year, were everywhere.
Why was this? The short answer is that there is something about angels that makes it impossible for people to forget about them for too long. There may be phases during which they sink out of sight, yet those phases always end eventually, and the figure of the angel reemerges, interpreted through the lens of the time in which they have appeared back into the light of human interest.
In 1923, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke famously wrote, “Every angel is terrifying.” What did he mean by this? Essentially, that leaving the human world behind and genuinely seeking to encounter the spiritual world was a vaster, scarier, and more dizzying project than most people think. Angels, for Rilke, were real, but they were so real that their reality threatened to overwhelm us if we approached them in a light and disrespectful way.
But during the angel resurgence that began in the ’90s, that idea seemed to have vanished, leaving in its wake a plethora of cute, cuddly, completely harmless angels, eager to do our bidding and make our lives better in a thousand ways, from comforting us when we were lonely to finding us good parking spaces.
This trend of making angels seem like friendly, entirely cozy, and nonthreatening beings was taken by some Christian groups—notably Catholics and Evangelicals—as evidence that people were using angels as stand-ins for a God they either didn’t believe in or felt too distanced and alienated from to engage with directly. Some went so far as to suggest that these warm, comforting beings were creations of Satan, designed to lure us ever further away from the true God.
So where, amid these arguments, do real angels lie—if, that is, we are ready to face the inevitable ridicule and grief we will get from one party or another just by using real and angels in the same sentence?
His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow: And for fear of him the keepers did shake, and became as dead men. And the angel answered and said unto the women, Fear not ye: for I know that ye seek Jesus, which was crucified. He is not here: for he is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay. And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth before you into Galilee; there shall ye see him: lo, I have told you.”
—MATTHEW 28, KING JAMES VERSION
In the earliest episodes of the Hebrew Bible, angels appear as more or less ordinary people, usually men, who have about them an indefinable but noticeable aspect of otherworldliness. The great twentieth-century Russian Christian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev wrote that “the spirits of the angelic and the demoniac hierarchies are not personalistic in the sense in which the human world and God are personalistic,” which means he recognized that while angels (and demons) are real spiritual beings, they are not human. Because of this, we make a mistake in attributing fully human qualities to them, just as we do when we treat animals as furry people rather than beings genuinely different from us. Berdyaev was a great animal lover, and this does not mean that angels don’t, in Berdyaev’s view, possess personalities. It simply means that the personalities they possess are something other than the kind we possess. Angels are different kinds of beings from you and I, and it is therefore a (sometimes dangerous) mistake to give them specifically human attributes.
Angels were not portrayed with wings, generally, until the fourth century AD, probably because biblical writers were anxious to separate them from the numerous winged deities and demons worshipped by the peoples around them. (The classic “angel” we think of today owes a great deal to the famous winged statue of Nike, the goddess of victory: a piece of Greek art, but one of such power that it made an indelible impression on the Christians who saw it.)
A helpful definition to remember when trying to sort out just how “genuine” angels differ from the numerous winged beings that populated all sorts of ancient mythologies is this: they are manifestations from above who appear here in the world below, where by nature they don’t belong, but which they visit, on occasion, because of the benefit they can provide to certain individuals who need assistance.
Angels—if you listen to the stories that people tell about them—can be dressed in white robes or three-piece suits. What makes them angels is not what they wear but the fact that they are spiritual beings who break into our world to tell us something. Beyond the questions surrounding the guises that angels assume when they appear in our world, there lies a larger and more fundamental one: Do angels always mean us good, or are they capable of meaning us evil? Both evil angels and good ones appear in the New Testament, and orthodox Christianity takes as a matter of course that both types are real: not allegorical but actual spiritual beings, capable of both appearing to and taking up house within the psyches of individual people. All angels can see infinitely more of us than we can see of them—a generalization with which the great geniuses of angelology agree. Angels are smart. Generalizing further, we can say that the good angels want to assist us in our process of growing toward the beings God wants us to be, and the evil ones are dead set on subverting this process, because, as members of the fallen third of the heavenly host, they don’t approve of our existence to begin with.
In most cases, when a good angel appears, the force of the encounter is such that the people who experience it have no doubt of the goodness of the being that has come before them. But again, because angels are not familiar earthly beings, but transearthly emissaries of extreme power and a certain irreducible “otherness,” that intuition of goodness also often comes with a good deal of surprise or even shock. Angels are not beings of earth but of a “somewhere else”: one that lies above the earth (not in the simple geographical sense, of course, for angelic reality transcends the three-dimensional existence in which we are, for the moment, situated, and by whose rules we have to communicate), and when they appear here, they rock the bearings of the world in a way we are not used to. When angels come to the rescue of people in need, they can appear as “generic” angels (wings, robes, halos), or they can appear as your uncle Murray, whom you never met in life but have seen only in family albums, if even there.
The halo that angels traditionally have around their heads in paintings derives originally from the circular scattering of wheat made on a threshing floor. This concreteness is a good thing to keep in mind, because when it comes to envisioning what angels are, the abstract is inevitably the enemy. This is, of course, why Jesus, when explaining truths of incalculable subtlety and difficulty to his puzzled but earnest listeners, always opted for the homeliest, most down-to-earth analogies for what he was talking about.
The word angel comes, via old French, from the Greek angelos, or messenger. Angels are messengers from God.
Once again in a nutshell, what is their chief message?
That there is another world beyond the filters we have created to block it out—a real world, no less real by a micron for our ignoring this fact. Perhaps we could call angels manifestations, which when we see, feel, and speak to them we categorically cannot doubt, of the world we block out when our helmets are intact. They are the most singularly potent and overwhelming representatives of the world we don’t see, the spiritual half of the world that so many today want to pretend doesn’t exist at all.
Rilke was not the only great twentieth-century poet to suggest that seeing the world without one’s helmet—seeing the spiritual side of the world—is terrifying. “Humankind,” the poet T. S. Eliot wrote, “cannot bear very much reality.” This sounds abstract, but what Eliot means is that we are such blinkered creatures, by and large, that we have lost our understanding of just how explosively huge the real world—the world that includes the spiritual landscape and not just the physical—really is. Encountering the reality of the spiritual world is not necessarily a soft and cozy experience. In fact, it is generally awful—in the original sense of that word, as “full of awe.”
For most of us, the nonspiritual world contains more than enough to frighten us. The daily paper has enough pain in it, if we really appreciated what we were reading about, to send us to the mental hospital. The physical world is terrifying.
But so is the spiritual world. The Bible often describes angels arriving with the words “Fear not.” Why? Because they are terrifying, just as Rilke suggested. One glimpse of full reality would sweep us away, and angels are ambassadors of full reality.
But, in keeping with their paradoxical nature, they can also protect us from the full blast of that reality. That’s why one tradition about guardian angels says that they shield the humans they are assigned to from the divine—from God. Were God’s greatness to shine on us fully, we would instantly be destroyed.
Angels represent a reality of which there is no speaking, and they represent it in human form. But by talking about angels—just by giving them a name—we risk losing them. Maybe that’s why, early on, the Bible does not have a name for angels at all but calls them simply “men.”
One of the singular mysteries of angels is that they show up at times exactly as they are supposed to—with white robes, halos, and wings. To a modern sensibility, this would suggest that they’re fantasies. After all, angels, even if they exist, wouldn’t really wear white robes, would they? These secondary characteristics were thought up over the course of the centuries, and the characteristics that angels have in our mind today can be—and have been—traced by art historians, cultural historians, and others.
But . . . angels sometimes do show up dressed like that all the same, and try telling someone who has seen one dressed that way that what he saw wasn’t real.
That’s exactly the essence of the nature of angels—they subvert our expectations at every turn. They demonstrate that reality—real reality—is way bigger and stranger than we like to tell ourselves it is. They are always many steps ahead of us.
People who see angels have their ordinary assumptions about what the world is and isn’t knocked from them as swiftly and decisively as a gun is knocked from a villain’s hand in a movie. That is the message: our assumptions are wrong.
Once knocked away, there is no picking up that old worldview again. There is no talking these people back from what they have seen—no “correcting” them. Even years later, long after the angel has come and gone, there is no getting people back to the old, flat, one-dimensional world in which they lived before. They have stepped out onto the porch of the house of their old understanding, and the door has blown shut behind them.
As mentioned, angels, though by definition messengers, were far from the only messenger beings in the ancient world. India had Hanuman, the monkey god, who served as messenger to the god Rama. Greece had Hermes, who moved quickly and easily between the dark, dank Greek underworld, to the middle world of ordinary mortals, to the blazing, sun-shot overworld of the Olympian gods. Ancient Rome had Mercury—who was basically Hermes tricked out in Roman rather than Greek gear.
But angels—the beings that appear in the Old and New Testament—don’t simply deliver messages. In and of themselves, they are the message.
An angel is a line drawn straight down into the confusion and darkness of this world from the light-filled world above it. In their pure, powerful, unapologetic strangeness, what angels chiefly do in the Bible is convince. If we are the type to doubt the existence of God or the world beyond this one, one look at the angel permanently shuts us up.
And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.
And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.
And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. And he called the name of that place Bethel: but the name of that city was called Luz at the first.
GENESIS 28, KING JAMES VERSION
When Jacob comes to the place that he will name Bethel after he has his famous dream of angels ascending and descending a ladder, he says, “How awful is this place.” Meaning, how full of awe it is. The world, then and now, is both “awful” in the sense of being a terrible place full of evil and suffering, and “awe-full,” in the sense that beyond the fallen world is a larger spiritual one, that places the evil of this world within context. A context which, even now while we are still stuck in this broken world, cures it. The negative aspect of the world is still there, but it cannot overcome us as it did before, because we have seen beyond it.
Both the ladder that Jacob saw and the rock that he used as his pillow are echoes—framed in a manner acceptable to Jewish thought—of an older image: that of the Babylonian ziggurat, or stepped pyramid. In the ages before Judaism arose in the Fertile Crescent, the Jews’ predecessors built such pyramid-temples as literal stairways to heaven—places where humans could climb up and interact ceremonially with the gods and goddesses they worshipped.
But for the Jews, of course, building stairways or ladders up to heaven from earth was presumption and could lead only to the kind of outcome that the builders of the Tower of Babel suffered. For humans to make any power-based claims upon the spiritual world means asking to be reduced to confusion, for our understanding of the world is provided by God. If we make a move upon the spiritual, we make a move upon that which has given us our faculty of understanding to begin with, and thus we risk losing that understanding for good.
So it is that the ladder Jacob dreamed of, with angels moving up and down it, was not a ladder built up from earth to heaven, but one let down to earth by God. The suggestion here, of course, is that there is no getting to heaven by human ingenuity, no storming of the walls of the divine by human force. But that doesn’t mean heaven is hopelessly sealed off from us. It means that there is indeed commerce between heaven and earth . . . when God wills it.
As we mentioned earlier, the early angels of the Bible lack wings and are often described simply as “men,” though typically there is some special atmosphere about them that alerts those who see them that they are not, in fact, ordinary men at all.
Angels often appear to people in trouble. People for whom the world is about to become too much to cope with successfully. However, there is no making an angel appear. Angels, by definition, manifest when God wants them to. Like everything else in the spiritual world, they do not show up on command.
Rainer Maria Rilke was acknowledging this fact in his famous long poem Duino Elegies, a poem uniquely loaded with angels, when he suggested that it is only when we get to the very edges of life that we can see it clearly. That perilous edge is where the angel dwells; just as we are about to be vanquished by the material world, the supernatural (sometimes at least) steps in and saves us. Rilke was hinting at all of this when he wrote:
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.”
It’s also probably what the apocryphal gospel of Thomas is talking about when it quotes Jesus as saying: “He who seeks, let him not cease seeking until he finds; and when he finds he will be troubled, and when he is troubled he will be amazed, and he will reign over the All.”
Angels change our context. They make us see the whole world instead of the half-world we lived in before.
When an angel-like being appears in the form of someone familiar, such as a grandparent or a recently lost spouse, who—or what—are we to take this being to be? Is it a “ghost” of the individual, an angel in the guise of the family member, or something else? During my years working at Angels on Earth, I constantly had to deal with the issue of identity. (In the tremendously common stories of recently lost loved ones who appear in the middle of the night at the foot of the bed of a person suffering from that loss, are we to believe that it really is the person who died, or is it an angel representing the person?) Because traditional Christian thought alludes (with greater or lesser degrees of directness, depending on denomination in question) to the concept that the dead are “asleep in God” after death, awaiting the final trumpet before rising in glory, many Christians are uncomfortable with the notion that deceased family members or friends can show up to comfort those they have left behind. The standard solution for this problem at Angels was to suggest that, in stories like this, God presented the individual in question as a kind of facsimile of their friend or relative in order to let them know that this person was okay and safe in heaven.
But is it as simple as that?
As usual, the answer is . . . probably not. The fact is that the true fate of the individual following death is a matter of dispute both among Christians and between Christians and other believers in the spiritual world. In the early years of the twentieth century, when a phenomenon called Spiritualism exerted a huge influence on popular thought, the idea grew up that it was possible to be both a Christian and a believer in the possibility that the dead can return, either visibly or audibly, to communicate with the living they had left behind. The intensity of the arguments about this subject that occurred throughout the first decades of the twentieth century might come as a surprise to many today. But in fact, this was an enormous question, both for Christians and non-Christians, and—no surprise—it was never fully resolved.
But it doesn’t need to be. Mystics of every age have told us that the spiritual world is so multifaceted, so much subtler and more complex than ordinary physical existence, that it may be that we simply don’t have the equipment to answer this question from our present position. As we keep suggesting, the word angel doesn’t describe a being so much as it describes an action: the communication from the “above” (the heavenly worlds) to the “below” (the flat and ordinary plane of earth), by beings who can appear in a multitude of guises. The Bible describes angels appearing in all manner of ways, from the three strangers who visited Abraham beneath the oaks at Mamre on a sweltering day, to the angel who comforted Hagar in the wilderness, to the being Jacob wrestled with all night, to the dazzling beings sitting at the opening of Christ’s tomb on Easter morning, to the wildly alien four-winged circular creatures that manifested to the authors of Ezekiel and Revelation. To say that we have a total grasp of what the biblical writers meant, in our current terms, by these stories is to underestimate the vast variety in which the spiritual worlds, and the beings within them, have appeared to humans.
Like God himself, they are too big for that.