In several secularized European countries, such as Germany, God has become largely irrelevant to many people. God seems distant, abstract, impersonal, impossible to understand or touch, but also difficult to encounter or experience, a vague fantasy, simple in itself yet complex, somehow insubstantial. God is perceived by some as a pure idea, apparently paradoxical, impossible to substantiate or prove, no longer suited to our current world tormented by functionalist crises. There seem to be no answers to profound questions: if God made all things good, where does all the evil in the world come from? Why does the good and almighty God not appear to care? Will the world end up in nothingness?
If we then try to access the sacred or religion through human beings, the task does not appear any easier: human beings, for example, the saints of history or the luminous figures of contemporary religious life, are actual persons, and may be culturally limited, weak and sinful, sometimes sick. Today, it is difficult to believe that some human beings are shaped by the divine and are a sign of God’s love. The contemporary person, a product of modernity, is too well informed, too realistic, too critical.
A Personal Religion?
At this point, it might seem easier to adopt an impersonal “spirituality.” In religion, the personal element is particularly difficult, yet it is indispensable in Christianity. So how then can this personal element regarding God be represented in a hypercritical society? God as a shepherd? Some will say that this makes him appear authoritarian, infantilizes the sheep, or belittles them. God as a father? This would seem patriarchal, endowing God with excessive power, and therefore prone to abuse like so many fathers, an image that would be provocative to victims of violence, and which, among other things, is challenging from a gender perspective. God as father and mother? This image is perhaps a little better, but it may seem too parental for many, and too traditional from a social point of view. God as king, ruler of the world, as Kyrios (this was one of the titles of the Roman emperor)? Here too, there will be those who consider such associations to belong to museums, or to have become the preserve of monarchies and the conservative right.
What then of Jesus Christ as a man who came from God, or as the Son of God, or even as a divine person? A God in the form of a historical human person now seems hardly credible. Interreligious dialogue today seems possible almost only without Jesus: the main obstacles are his incarnation and then his death on the cross, which brings salvation, and his resurrection, which defeats death. For us Christians, it is difficult to explain these theological realities, and even to understand them.
Can angels give us easier access to religion? In some ways they are practical, understandable, imaginable; but at the same time they appear pleasantly anonymous – their names are almost never mentioned – androgynous, non-binary, compatible with the queer, or completely incorporeal, like a fleeting breath. They appear in images, and at the same time they elude everything that is image. They are pure, divine and good, but at the same time there is also room for demonic evil. Angels are not too divine, and at the same time they are not too human. They exist in all major religions and spiritualities, even in secular thought. For years, they have been experiencing a boom in popular literature, but also in esotericism, pop music, and advertising. It is thanks to the Benedictine Anselm Grün that the cult of angels was not completely absorbed by the esoteric scene, but also remained in Christianity. If Christianity is not so much what we continue to understand as “spirituality” – that is, elevation to a spiritual sphere presented in an impersonal way – but is above all based on faith, that is, trust and self-giving to a personal divinity. Can angels help us to attain such faith?[1]
Angels in the Bible
Some biblical references can introduce us to the significance of angels in the Christian context. They do not appear in accounts of the creation of the world, but after the expulsion of the first human beings, cherubim[2] guard the gates to Paradise and, above all, access to the tree of life (cf. Gen 3:24): on God’s behalf, they protect the order of the world from human beings, who are often disordered.
Abraham receives a visit from three men (cf. Gen 18), who later reveal themselves several times as “the Lord” and have been interpreted as angels. They oscillate between the divine and the human, and remain ambiguous, elusive and incomprehensible. These three figures have also been interpreted as the persons of the Trinity (Andrei Rublev’s famous icon of the Trinity preserves this interpretation in the collective memory). Abraham is then put to the test: God instructs him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice (cf. Gen 22). It is an enigmatic account, difficult to interpret. But just before his son is killed, “the angel of the Lord” stops Abraham, provides him with a ram to offer in place of his son, and promises him God’s blessing. Here the angel appears as a messenger who, on God’s behalf, interrupts the “test” to which the Lord subjects Abraham, transforming it into a blessing.
Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven; angels ascend and descend it; God blesses Jacob, promising him great things (cf. Gen 18:10-22). The question that children have always asked adults about why angels need a ladder, since they have wings and can therefore fly, leads to the paradox of angels who mediate between heaven and earth and must be imagined as spiritual beings who fly and at the same time as corporeal beings who climb a ladder.
The episode of Jacob’s struggle at the River Jabbok (cf. Gen 32:23-22) also plays on ambiguity. Jacob is guilty of having stolen his brother’s birthright, but now he wants to return to the promised land. To do so, he must cross the river that marks the border, a symbol of purification. A man wrestles with him at night, for hours, in a dark, violent, frightening way. Is this “man” an angel, or God himself? Jacob resists. He asks the stranger’s name, but it is not revealed to him. Instead, he himself receives a new name – ‘Israel’, he who fought with God – and receives from the stranger the blessing he had asked for. Jacob emerges from the struggle wounded and will limp for the rest of his life. This angel is again a hybrid, mysterious being, seemingly corporeal, but he comes from nowhere and disappears into thin air at dawn. Is he an avenging angel? Is there a blessing from God in the punishment? Does the angel wound Jacob on behalf of the Most High? Jacob is marked, but at the same time he is healed and blessed.
In the Book of Tobit, the angel Raphael is very different. He is a traveling companion of Tobias, son of Tobit, who finds himself in difficulty, and gives him medicine to cure his father’s blindness. Thus, the angel – whose name means “God has healed” – is both messenger and message of healing and guidance from God.
After involvement in the death of the discredited 450 priests of Baal on God’s instruction, the prophet Elijah is persecuted. He flees into the desert. Tired of life and God’s commands, he lies down under a tree, wishing to die, and falls asleep. An angel wakes him up and gives him food and drink. Elijah falls asleep again, and again the angel wakes him, feeds him, and directs him on a 40-day journey through the desert to meet God on Mount Horeb (cf. 1 Kings 19:1-13). The angel acts against fatigue, awakens and nourishes, admonishes and sends. Before Elijah, he reveals himself to be an entirely earthly being, yet he is undoubtedly a messenger of God, announcing his care and will.
The angel Gabriel also appears as a messenger of God. He announces to Mary the miraculous birth of a son, conceived by the Holy Spirit (cf. Luke 1:26-38). At that moment, the angel’s explanations must have been difficult for Mary to understand, yet they clarify the salvific significance of that birth for future readers. Mary’s generous willingness to accept the announcement has always impressed people throughout the history of Christianity. Here, the angel announces in a performative way, so to speak, because at the same time he does what he says: it is God himself who works in him.
Nine months later, Jesus is born in Bethlehem, and an angel announces great joy (cf. Luke 2:1-20). The glory of the Lord envelops the shepherds in light, and at the same time they are seized with great fear. Angels are ambivalent: glorious and frightening, luminous and violent, they shine with divine light and frighten with their power. In Bethlehem, a multitude of the heavenly army praises God: the angels are a military force, but at the same time a powerful choir.
In the Bible, Joseph, Mary’s betrothed, is the silent one – he never says a word – but he is also the great dreamer. In a dream, an angel orders him to take in Mary and the child, who is not his; in a dream, the angel tells him to flee to Egypt with his family because the child is threatened; in a dream, the angel makes them all return (cf. Matt 1:20-24; 2:13-14, 19-29). The fact that angels appear in dreams shows how fleeting, unreal and purely spiritual they are, but also how deeply rooted they are in the human psyche. This is how God speaks to humans, to protect and save them.
When Jesus prays on the Mount of Olives, seized by a terrible fear of death, abandoned by his disciples, an angel appears to him to give him strength (cf. Luke 22:43). “Giving strength” certainly indicates divine consolation, but also energy, courage and confidence that come from God. Shortly thereafter, Jesus is arrested. He then forbids his disciples to offer violent resistance, pointing out to them that if he wanted to defend himself, he would pray to his Father, who would provide him with “more than twelve legions of angels,” that is, tens of thousands of angels (cf. Matt 26:47-56). Here, the angels are an armed force always at the disposal of God and his Son who prays to him. But Jesus renounces this. He does not want God to intervene violently; he takes the non-violent path of giving his own life. In God’s hands, the angels could perform powerful deeds, but God does not use them for this purpose; he acts differently.
On Easter morning, according to the Gospel of Mark, a young man dressed in a white robe (cf. Mark 16:5) was waiting for the women at the empty tomb; according to Luke, there are two men in dazzling apparel (cf. Luke 24:4), while according to Matthew, there is an angel, whose appearance is like lightning, with a robe as white as snow, who rolls away the stone that sealed the tomb, frightens the guards, and speaks to the women (cf. Matt 28:1-7). According to John, there are two angels in white robes, sitting where Jesus’ body had been laid (cf. John 20:12-13). Whether they are called “men” or “angels,” shining and dressed in white, these characters instill fear in the guards, but they appear beautiful and caring – “Do not be afraid,” they say – to the women, who are the first to receive the good news. In this case too, the angels appear sometimes human, sometimes spiritual, and convey messages that interpret the salvific events.
Through an angel, everything that John describes in the Book of Revelation is communicated to the seer (cf. Rev 1:1). The book is teeming with angels and similar heavenly beings, who are messengers and sentinels, heralds and heavenly courtiers, choirs of praise and trumpeters, but also reapers with sharp sickles of judgment. Michael and his angels fight against the dragon and his angels (cf. Rev 12:7-12); and here the fallen, and therefore evil, angels appear, who are defeated by God’s good angels in the final cosmic battle. Obviously, angels will become even more important at the end of time, but even in John’s vision they remain at once multiform and enigmatic, mythical and powerful, earthly and heavenly.
The biblical testimony about angels – who often appear at decisive moments in the history of salvation – contains all the essential themes of their subsequent image in Christian culture and spirituality. They are first and foremost mysterious, even paradoxical, conceptually elusive—and therefore seemingly of no interest to philosophical thought – “beings of light and fire, sweetness and terror […], double icons of God and man […], icons of mediation between the Totally Other and us.”[3] They announce and give directions; they watch over and console; they direct and dispose; they punish and fight; they radiate and shine; they dart and fly; they sound the trumpet and sing praises. Some fall into evil, but in the end it is the good angels who prevail.
Angels in History
Early Jewish and Gnostic speculations developed hierarchies of angels, often under Neoplatonic influence. Dionysius the Areopagite (around 500) classified angels into three levels, each composed of three choirs. St. Thomas Aquinas systematically framed this doctrine, giving it a form that would dominate for a long time. The nine choirs are, starting with the highest: seraphim, cherubim and thrones; then, descending: dominions, virtues and powers; and finally: principalities, archangels and angels.[4] The doctrine derives from biblical evidence and subsequent speculation. The term “hierarchy” (= “sacred order”) was coined for this purpose.
In the Middle Ages, the earthly hierarchies of the Church and the world were modeled on the heavenly hierarchy of angels and drew their legitimacy from it: the sovereign’s court was like God’s angelic court, his regulatory and administrative body, which also served to glorify him. The magnificent frescoes in medieval churches and the miniatures in manuscripts depict this extremely structured world of angels.[5]
Drawing on antiquity, from the 15th century onwards, belief in guardian angels developed: every person, especially every child, has a guardian angel who accompanies and protects them, invisibly. These angels “are our helpers and guarantors that our hope and longing for heaven will not be in vain, but that heaven will be open to us.”[6] Since the 19th century, a rich iconography has been dedicated to guardian angels, even in non-religious forms. There is debate as to whether each person also has an evil angel who induces them to sin, and Protestant theology has taken an interest in this question.[7]
“The angel is that light that shines and never burns out. But once this fire was ignited, it consumed itself. And in the fallen angel, the fire began to burn without shining: a black, icy fire. In this fire, the word of God turned to stone and died. […] It is the black fire of a freedom that rebels against God.”[8] Angels are spiritual creatures of God, and therefore free. Their freedom is their greatest gift and at the same time the prerequisite for turning to evil. Does this explain the entry of evil into the world? Fallen angels induce human beings – also free creatures – to rebel against God. Does this justify our being evil? Not at all, because, being free persons, we are responsible for our actions. Together with the fallen angels, we will be judged for our evil deeds, and the judges will be the good angels.
In the 16th century, St. Ignatius of Loyola, drawing on ancient traditions, made a psychological application of the doctrine of angels. In the “motions” of the soul – thoughts and feelings, imaginations and inner inclinations – there are “spirits” at work, which are manifold and often contradictory and confused. It is necessary to discern which motions come from a good spirit, or angel, and which, on the other hand, come from an evil spirit, or devil. The motions of the good spirit are to be followed, and one is not to “allow oneself to be determined” by those of the evil spirit. The angel of evil can also disguise himself as an “angel of light” (Lucifer) and, under the guise of good, lead the naive soul to evil. This further development of the doctrine of angels finds acceptance in ethics as “discernment of spirits,” but also in the spiritual accompaniment of individuals or groups; Pope Francis has made it fruitful for synodal processes.[9]
During the Renaissance and Baroque periods, angels were sometimes represented as cherubs, small, chubby children found in paintings or statues in churches, peeking out from every nook and corner, mischievous, playing music alone or in concert. They are merely trivialized and degraded: “naked, lush flesh, tamed like little pigs”[10] Certainly, cherubs embody a sensual, voluptuous, humorous, perhaps very Catholic religion, but the divine is manifested in the child, and cherubs allude to the child Jesus. They are the traveling companions of Wisdom, playing before God and delighting him (cf. Prov 8:27-31).[11] Cherubs are foreign to today’s spirituality, but they symbolize central and current themes of Christianity. It is surprising to see how they inspire even secular enthusiasm, as found in the little angels at the feet of Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna.”
Since the Enlightenment, reason has banished angels: they are no longer suited to a functional and organized world, but act as an opiate for immature, irrational and authoritarian people. Moreover, they have largely disappeared from theology, and scientific exegesis struggles with the stories of angels found in the Bible. However, religion always maintains an anti-rational, mythical, and even anti-Enlightenment corner, where angels will make their nature of good or evil felt. So, should angels remain in ancient churches, which are now only admired as museums? Or should they be confined to the anti-modernist currents of the Church, in that remote area that is ridiculed as reactionary and merely emotional? Is there a separation between an official ecclesiastical world and a devotional world? That is, between a world that is the result of rational reflection and efficiently organized, capable – at least so we hope – of adapting to modernity, and therefore devoid of angels, and a devotional world, the result of emotional speculation, populated by angels and certainly very “interesting” from a historical and artistic point of view and blessed by God?
On Angels and Humans
Regarding angels, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) quotes St. Augustine: “‘Angel’ is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is ‘spirit’; if you seek the name of their office, it is ‘angel’: from what they are, ‘spirit,’ from what they do, ‘angel.’”[12] Angels, the Catechism continues, as purely spiritual creatures, are servants and messengers of God. They are completely bound to Christ: present when God created the world in Christ, present in the life of the incarnate God, and at the service of Christ in his return and in his Judgment.[13]
Giorgio Agamben defines angels as “officials of heaven.”[14] They have two tasks. On the one hand, in their governing function, equipped with the vocabulary typical of power, such as “thrones,” “virtues,” “powers,” they form a body of officials and a heavenly bureaucracy, thus administering the “kingdom” of God and making his historical decrees known on earth (they serve and govern: in Latin, the virtus administrandi). On the other hand, they stand before God, as required by court ceremony (they see God and praise him: in Latin, the virtus assistendi Deo). Agamben refers to Dante, who distinguishes two beatitudes in the nature of angels: the contemplative one, by which they see the face of God and glorify him; and that of government, which corresponds in the human world to “active life, that is, civil life.”[15] Suspended, so to speak, in the middle, governing downward and praising upward, angels connect earth and heaven, the human and the divine, in a mysterious way that can never be fully understood. But today, has their place not been taken, with the same functions and characteristics, by the Church, which often presents itself in a rather earthly way?
The angelic hierarchy has been interpreted in different ways throughout history. Let us take Bernard of Clairvaux as an example. According to him, God manifests himself in the angelic hosts in his attention to humanity, which is expressed in many ways: “In the seraphim, God loves as charity; in the cherubim, he knows as truth; in the thrones, he governs as justice; in the dominions, he reigns as majesty; in the principalities, he governs as law; in the virtues, he guards as salvation; in the powers, he acts as strength; in the archangels, he manifests himself as light; in the angels, he consoles as goodness.”[16] Angels show God’s actions in their complexity, even in his often paradoxical and seemingly unfathomable decisions, but always in his benevolence and goodness, just like a blessing.
Angels sing in chorus, so in ancient choral singing and in early Christianity, words and music merged, expressing themselves together in movement and dance: “Pronounced syllables, musical sounds, and dance steps were manifestations of the same force.”[17] Angels therefore appear “in a natural unity of the senses.” In circle dancing, “the ability to articulate words was lost because there was nothing left to express: the dancers themselves were the expression that walked and turned.”[18]
Angels sing alter ad alterum, one facing the other, in alternating choirs, in dialogue. Already in Hebrew, the Psalms were arranged in parallel, and even today in monasteries psalm verses are sung in alternation. Alter ad alterum also refers to the guardian angel who, so to speak, is a double of the human being and accompanies him in a friendly dialogue.
Of course, angels sing with one voice, in unison: a choir is a teeming being, in which those who sing listen to themselves and at the same time to the sound produced by the choir; this transforms them and resonates far beyond them; those who sing are, so to speak, absorbed by this sound.
Angels sing sine fine, infinitely. Since music unfolds in time, happening only now, this expression is paradoxical. “Angelic singing sine fine is therefore something different from music as we hear it. It is a kind of unlimited artistic expression […], disinterested, spontaneous, formless, and like a space that expands infinitely at the speed of sound.”[19] Singing angels point upward, toward the sky; in Gothic art, they hover above the apses of churches with ever-higher vaults. Singing angels are already heaven: the I, the you, and the we merge into a timeless and spaceless unity.[20]
Angels dissolve rigid images and concepts of God: “Angels […] escape the theory of sets, passing through walls of rigidity as through those of prisons […]. Faced with the one God, they bear witness to polytheism; faced with paganism, they proclaim monotheism; and they spread pantheism everywhere when they sing in the fields.”[21] God is one, but multiform; perceptible, but fleeting; nowhere, but everywhere; in all things, but not in those of this world; angels restrain any narrow or rationalistic thinking that excludes or seeks to define by concepts.
Christian Lehner discovers in angels the Lutheran sola fide, “By faith alone. One could almost say that what Augustine and Luther meant by faith, that is, the inner appropriation of a promise, a transformation, and a salvation that have already taken place long ago, but which can only become real for me through my personal acceptance, that is, the inner realization of God through trust in him, a form of movement that is at the same time a welcoming that gives peace, beyond man’s closure in himself, all this is another way of expressing the reality of angels.”[22] If angels themselves are, so to speak, faith, then believing in angels is not the worst form of faith, because angels come from God and lead to God. Catholics, who have always appreciated the senses and forms, and therefore also angels, will readily agree with this idea of evangelical origin.
Angels do not exist, in the sense of a reality that can be verified by the senses, accessible to the natural sciences, in the sense of an ontology that operates on concepts, in the sense of a modern understanding of the world. But angels do exist, understandable only through poetry, as spiritual realities, as shadows of another higher reality, as mental images in the ambivalence between good and evil energies, as “short circuits that are created in a flash between irreconcilable poles, like miracles, unpredictable things, like energies of transformation.”[23]
Returning to the example of Germany mentioned earlier, it is estimated that 40 percent of Germans believe in angels, with an upward trend, and 55 percent believe in God, with a downward trend. In eastern Germany, there are already more people who believe in angels than those who believe in God.[24] Angels seem to have left the Church, subverted by the esoteric and kitsch industries. But does the Church give the impression of having renounced angels? They are useful, at least to God, who uses them as officials, ambassadors and choristers. But are they not also useful to Christianity, as a gateway to a sensual-supersensible religious reality that lies beyond the rational and helps us to encounter the person of God?
Reproduced with permission from La Civiltà Cattolica.
[1]. There is much to say on the subject of angels in Judaism, Islam and elsewhere, but here we will limit ourselves to Christianity.
[2]. Mentioned several times in the Old Testament, the term “cherub” primarily refers to a servant or assistant of God; later, it also came to be seen as an angel, and in the Middle Ages it was included in the angelic hierarchy. On this subject, cf. Y. Cattin – P. Faure, Les anges et leur image au Moyen Age, Abbaye de la Pierre-qui-vire, Zodiaque, 1999.
[3]. Ibid., 20.
[4]. Cf. C. Lehnert, Ins Innerehinaus. Von Engeln und Mächten, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2020, 114.
[5]. Cf. the illustrated volumes by Y. Cattin – P. Faure, Les anges et leur image au Moyen Age, op. cit., and M.-C. Boerner, Angelus et Diabolus. Engel, Teufel und Dämonen in der christlichen Kunst, Potsdam, Ullmann, 2016.
[6]. Katholischer Erwachsenenkatechismus, vol. 1, 1985, 111. Cf. R. Guardini, L’Angelo. Cinque meditazioni, Brescia, Morcelliana, 2024.
[7]. Cf. E. Weinberger, Engel und Heilige, Berlin, Berenberg, 2023, p. 32.
[8]. Y. Cattin – P. Faure, Les anges et leur image au Moyen Age, op. cit., 25.
[9]. There are modern psychological approaches to angels: cf., for example, R. Perrone, Le syndrome de l’ange. Considérations à propos de l’agressivité, Paris, ESF, 2013. The author writes about the “angel syndrome,” in which people who suffer aggression from others take refuge in an attitude similar to that of an angel, which is unassailable and self-sufficient, but at the same time allows them to devalue and despise their aggressors.
[10]. C. Lehnert, Ins Innerehinaus…, op. cit., 63.
[11]. Cf. S. Kiechle, Spielend leben, Würzburg, Echter, 2008, 31 f.
[12]. Catechism of the Catholic Church, Vatican City, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1992, no. 329.
[13]. Cf. ibid., nos. 329-333.
[14]. Cf. G. Agamben, Die Beamten des Himmels. Über Engel, Frankfurt – Leipzig, Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2007.
[15]. Ibid., 38.
[16]. Quoted by E. Weinberger, Engel und Heilige, op. cit., 52.
[17]. C.. Lehnert, Ins Innerehinaus…, op. cit., 90. The ideas presented below are inspired by this book.
[18]. Ibid., 91.
[19]. Ibid., 95.
[20]. Cf., on musical angels, W. W. Müller, Musikder Engel. Eine Kultur–geschichte, Basel, Schwabe, 2024.
[21]. C. Lehnert, Ins Innerehinaus…, op. cit., 230.
[22]. Ibid., 36.
[23]. Ibid., 14.
[24]. However, the results of the polls vary considerably. In the case of such sensitive issues, they depend to a large extent on the survey methods used and the intentions of those conducting the poll.
