Michaelmas and the Reality of Angels
Breviari d'Amour, Cosmological diagram showing angelic movers turning cranks to rotate the celestial spheres, PD
Tomorrow the Church celebrates Michaelmas, more commonly known as the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Then, on Saturday, we celebrate the feast of the Guardian Angels. Angels and the spiritual beings at the back of reality are integral parts of Christianity. It is no overstatement to say that a failure to believe in angels is a failure to understand something essential about reality: there is more to reality than what we can see, taste, touch, smell, and hear. Our senses, as good as they are, (and let’s be honest, we’re outclassed by most animals) are insufficient to explain or explore the fullest depths of reality.
Many years ago now, the theologian John Milbank was interviewed by CBC Radio. Over the course of the interview, meant in large part to be an overview of Radical Orthodoxy, a kind of theological sensibility which sought to unite aspects of the Ressourcement tradition and postmodern philosophy, Milbank said this:
I believe in all this fantastic stuff. I’m really bitterly opposed to this kind of disenchantment in the modern churches, including I think among most modern evangelicals. I mean recently in the Nottingham diocese they wanted to do a show about angels, and so the clergy – and this is a very evangelical diocese – sent around a circular saying, “Is there anyone around who still believes in angels enough to talk about this?” Now, in my view this is scandalous. They shouldn’t even be ordained if they can’t give a cogent account of the angelic and its place in the divine economy. I want everything put back again, in one sense. I believe in the lot. Pilgrimages, you know, everything. The importance of sacred sites, the traditions about the unseen, even about there being other creatures hidden within the dimensions of this world. These are things which I think we should take seriously that exist in many different traditions.
I have pondered and meditated on this brief part of his interview for over 7 years now. And the more I think about it, the more true I believe it to be. Humanity once believed that there were spirits of every kind guiding the forces of creation. They helped the flowers to grow; they controlled the winds; they were behind all the natural forces and even guided us. With the introduction of the natural sciences, we put much of that aside in order to study what is observable in nature. We’ve even invented new ways of increasing our perception so we can see and understand the microorganisms that make life possible. This was good and necessary. And perhaps we needed to set aside the angelic, the spiritual, in order to see these things. But it’s time to put them back.
There is, of course, no easy way to do this. We cannot become “pre-modern”. There is no simple recovery of the past. It is gone. But we can learn from the past and infuse it with what we know now. We can see the wind move and understand the nature of the heating and cooling of the earth caused by the Sun. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that this natural explanation is the full one. Shakespeare’s Hamlet told his friend Horatio that “there are more things in Heaven and Earth […] than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” Hamlet may have been fooled by something demonic, but it goes to show that behind, inside, upholding all the things we perceive, there are other, spiritual, forces at work.
At the very least, then, we should, on this Michaelmas, praise God for his servants, the angels, who ministered to Christ in the garden, and minister to all of creation even now. And perhaps, as we continue to seek holiness, we can be granted glimpses of the deeper magic that stands at the back of all reality, upholding and guiding it as we await Christ’s return.
In order to aid in this effort here is a poem, first published at Macrina Magazine that will be in my forthcoming book of poetry, Liturgical Entanglement.
Jacob's Ladder
Ascending and descending the angel’s fly,
Going about their secret ministrations,
Rejecting as unworthy our adulations,
Showing themselves only to those with eyes
Made clean, to eyes that have been purified.
They work behind the scenes, an undulation
Of hidden waves, of hidden murmurations
We cannot sense no matter how hard we try.
But if you can find the Stone of Destiny,
The rock on which poor Jacob played his head,
The Stone on which he slept, on which he dreamed,
The Earth will seem as liminality.
It teems with life, it lives and is not dead,
And every single creature is more than it seems.
If you like what you’ve read here, please consider donating by “buying me a beer”. Also, if you liked this poem, please consider purchasing a copy of my first book of poetry, The Green Man, out now.
