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The commentariate on EA always surprises and delights me, and the response I got to an off the wall post inspired by an AP story about “biblically correct” angels was a perfect example. The resulting thread was a veritable primer on anglelology, with Ryan Harkins weighing in with three substantive posts and several others contributing valuable insight as well.

I don’t deserve you.

One more Christmas tradition that I left fallow this year—like almost all of them—in the absence of my wife was our Christmas Eve reading aloud of the children’s book “The Littlest Angel,” by Charles Tazwell. Grace loved the story so. She would always cry at the place where the Littlest Angel gives his most cherished possession, a simple wooden box where he kept his earthly treasures when he was a child on Earth, as his gift to the soon-to-be-born son of God:

“The Littlest Angel trembled as the box was opened, and there, before the Eyes of God and all His Heavenly Host, was what he offered to the Christ Child. And what was his gift to the Blessed Infant?

“Well, there was a butterfly with golden wings, captured one bright summer day on the high hills above Jerusalem, and a sky blue egg from a bird’s nest in the olive tree that stood to shade his mother’s kitchen door. Yes, and two white stones, found on a muddy river bank, where he and his friends had played like small brown beavers. And, at the bottom of the box, a limp, tooth-marked leather strap, once worn as a collar by his mongrel dog, who had died as he had lived, in absolute love and infinite devotion.”

Somehow, it doesn’t work quite as well if one is thinking of the Cherubim as having eyeballs all over his wings or three heads. But that’s just me…

Here are two of the many remarkable comments first from Ryan Harkins, and then from Sara B. on the post, “Wait…So Everyone’s Been Lying To Me All These Years About What Angels Look Like?” :

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(First, Ryan…)

“The story of Christmas and Christianity would have been a much tougher sell over the centuries if churches, missionaries, evangelists and proselytizers had to explain why Mary didn’t run screaming into the desert when that thing on the right showed up and started talking to her.“

It doesn’t hurt to point out that Mary was afraid. Gabriel specifically told her, “Fear not.” In a similar fashion, the shepherds were terrified when the angel announced to them the tidings that the Christ had been born, and then angel likewise told them, “Fear not.” The typical reaction to the presence of angels has been awe and trembling, and the angels frequently have to settle the frightened humans down before delivering a message.

Keep in mind that the ancient world was much more at home with the prospect of dealing with spiritual beings. We struggle greatly in our modern era that has been greatly influenced with materialism, the notion that the only things that exist are material and can be observed through the senses (perhaps aided by powerful tools). We also struggle with our literalistic way of reading Scripture, because we’ve become so technical-manual-oriented that we struggle with imaginative descriptions and depictions that are not meant to be taken literally, but as a figurative way of conveying deeper truths. On the other hand, the various idols crafted of ancient gods also reveals the human imagination trying to convey something about those supposed deities, trying to capture their super-humanness in a recognizable fashion. For example, depicting a fertility goddess with many breasts, rather than two, is meant to convey the goddess’ power of fecundity, not her unbelievable back problems or the need for custom-made bras…Angels are spiritual beings, which means they have no material components that are inherent to their nature. They can interact with matter, and can even form for themselves bodies that can be seen and touched. These bodies can even eat and copulate. In Genesis, when we have written that the Sons of God took for wives the daughters of men, from which spring the Nephilim, the ancient Hebrew tradition is that these spiritual beings actually procreated with humans, which created a race of giants. This was a sin, and just before the flood, supposedly, God arranged for the Nephilim to go on a bloody rampage and kill each other off, while their angelic parents were bound in the netherworld and could only helplessly watch while their offspring slaughtered each other. (The thought that the text actually equates the Sons of God with the line of Seth and the daughters of men as the line of Cain is a MUCH later development.) Many of the bizarre descriptions we have of angels come from apocalyptic literature, such as Daniel and Revelation, in which the narrator is describing a vision they had of heaven. The visions are not meant to be literal physical descriptions of what is in heaven, but use the descriptions as ways of concretizing the otherworldly experience into some the reader stands a chance of relating to. It is of note that often when an angel appears it causes fear and trembling because it is that awesome a being. It is so awesome a presence that it tempts mere mortals to worship it as though it were God.

St. Thomas Aquinas speaks of every angel being its own species, meaning while we can divide them into 9 choirs (as Steve-O mentioned above), each angel is a unique creation. Of course that differs from we humans, who are all one species. Aquinas believed that there are more angels than the sum total of all of mankind from the beginning of time to the end of time, which makes sense if there is a unique guardian angel for each human person (though theologians argue on whether one angel could guard several people, or if an angel would be “reassigned” after his charge moved on to his final reward). But there are also angels for each nation (cf Daniel, when the “prince of Persia” delayed Gabriel), for each church (note the letters in Revelation are addressed to the “angels” of each church), for each of the stellar bodies, and I think if you follow Aquinas’ reasoning further, an angel for each subatomic particle out there. So if we have this vast array of angels, it stands to reason that there would be, for all practical purposes, and unlimited way they could represent themselves to us.

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(And now, Sarah B…)

Angelology is something I find fascinating.  Tradition holds that there are nine choirs of angels.  We start with the Seraphim, then the Cherubim.  Following those are, in order: Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and finally Angels.  Typically, only the lowest four choirs interact with humans, and even then, most interactions are in the angels only. 

Now, the Bible describes 3 named good angels, and two distinct choirs of angels with specific descriptions, while attributing many activities to the generic angelic.  Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael are all archangels.  Lucifer, before falling, was one of the highest of the angels, perhaps a Cherub or Seraph (but beaten by an archangel, one of the lowest, which, in consideration of all the massively cool theology that this goes into, is one of the things I like best in angelology, but is unimportant here).  However, many times in the bible, angels interact with humans, unknown to humans.  In addition, Catholic and Orthodox theology both hold to the concept of Guardian Angels, who are almost never seen.  It is also classically held, for most of a millennia, that each angel is its own unique, for lack of a better word, species. 

Now, the six-winged thing on the far right is considered as accurate of depiction of a seraph as we’re probably going to get in popular depiction, and as Steve-O said, cherubim are also unlikely to be palatable to our eyes.  We also have some evidence in the Bible of some of the people spoken to by the angels as feeling fear, awe, and at least overwhelmed.  Others do not even know it.   Because angels have little in the way of description in the choirs that interact with humans, any romantic description of an angel may be accurate, as long as we are not trying to say Seraph or Cherub.  Please note that the modern idea of cherubs (fat baby angels) is not remotely the same as the traditional Cherubim, and is not considered particularly accurate for an angel, but makes for a really cool and cute picture.  Not all artists are particularly interested in theological accuracy.   They want to make a point or a dollar, and are rarely interested in literal accuracy in any case. In addition, while we of this century are very literal and want literal accuracy in most dimensions, older cultures often focused less on the literal and more on the figurative. This led to entire genres of literature that focus on a figurative truth taught in non-literal format.

There is nothing to say that you were taught incorrectly, as far as you were taught.  I believe you have said in the past that your family was not strongly religious and you were not very strongly catechized at an older age.  My ten-year-old daughter, who has benefited from my interest in angels despite her young age, is aware of the differences at a basic level and would recognize the Seraph above.  She managed to floor her choir director who didn’t even know that there was an ordering of angels, despite a Catholic school education, as a lot of angelology is found in the later years.  My eight-year-old is not so aware, and the younger kids, even less so.   Actual religious education, usually taking many more years than just a couple years of Sunday school, has been lacking in our society for a very long time.  Pope Leo XIII, in the 1890’s, spoke out about the failing education in both the secular and religious realms.  This is less a case of your being taught a lie as it is that your education was never taken to that next level.  Just as no one has lied to a child about the physics that require calculus to understand, angelology is hardly basic Sunday School fare, especially for Protestants, as the choirs of angels tend to be more of a Catholic topic.  Even as an Orthodox child, you would not likely have covered these topics until late teen/adulthood in the best of circumstances.