Fiat Lux: The Creation of the Angels

The Via Mediaevalis series on medieval angelology continues. I hope that you can find time to read some of the previous essays on this topic, if you haven’t already:

1. The Age of Angels

2. Of Angels and Faeries

3. The Biblical—and Literary—Angelology of the Middle Ages

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We ended last Tuesday by reflecting on the immense and multifaceted importance of Sacred Scripture in the lives of medieval Christians: The Bible was

the primary source for understanding not just their religion, but their entire world. To experience the Bible in that way is to experience it as literature—as divine literature that conveys truth through literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical senses, as all-encompassing literature whose poems, proverbs, love stories, betrayals, journeys, battles, tragedies, conquests, heroes, villains, sermons, parables, prophesies, and visions speak of everything that happens on earth and in heaven, explore all the great questions of individual and social existence, descend into the depths of the human psyche, and reach up to the heights of the Most High God.

The multiple “senses” or interpretive “levels” of Scripture can be understood as distinct categories of meaning that are present in the inspired words of biblical texts. The senses have been theorized in different ways. The fourfold model mentioned above was favored by Thomas Aquinas. Origen spoke of three levels: the literal, the moral, and the spiritual. Dante saw two fundamental categories of meaning in Scripture, one literal and one symbolic, though the symbolic category includes the three non-literal senses of the Thomistic model. The example he provided in a letter to Cangrande della Scala serves as a memorable explanation of the theory: commenting on the exodus of the Hebrew people from the land of Egypt, he says that we can read according to the letter (“the departure of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses”), the allegory (“our redemption wrought by Christ”), the morality (“the conversion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin to the state of grace”), or the anagogy (“the departure of the holy soul from the slavery of this corruption to the liberty of eternal glory”).

Thus, Scripture communicates to the reader on as many as four levels: a passage can speak literally or historically of real events; allegorically of Christ or His Church on earth; morally of the duties and virtues involved in Christian life; and anagogically of heavenly realities.

It is not uncommon to come across the multiple senses of Scripture in discussions of traditional exegesis. It is uncommon, though, to see this scriptural mentality fully integrated into the “big picture” of medieval life. To read the Bible this way is a scholarly activity, yes—it requires attention to detail, awareness of context, theological proficiency, perhaps even expertise in the original languages. But it is also a highly imaginative activity, and one in which the biblical texts are experienced and appreciated in a highly literary way. To discover and explore all this figurative eloquence and all these resonant textual relationships, one must know the Bible with a special type of knowledge that Dr. James Taylor—whom I knew personally, may he rest in peace—called poetic knowledge:

Whatever poetic knowledge is, it is not strictly speaking a knowledge of poems, but a spontaneous act of the external and internal senses with the intellect, integrated and whole, rather than an act associated with the powers of analytic reasoning…. It is, we might say, knowledge from the inside out.¹

Medieval Christians entered into the Bible, and dwelt there. Accustomed to traveling by foot, they were content to move slowly—from scene to scene, from verse to verse, from word to word. In their journeys through the Book of Scripture, they found that which was clearly present; they saw also that which was hidden; they noticed even that which was absent. And they kept these things, pondering them in their hearts. When the day was far spent, and the tolling of the bell or the lowing of the cows called them back to the Book of Nature, they looked out from within the literary world of the Bible and saw their material world as through a lens—the lens, that is, of divine Story.

One conspicuous absence that was of great concern to medieval culture resides in the Book of Genesis. The first chapter of this sacred masterpiece mentions the creation of the dry land, the grass, the living creatures, and so forth. It says nothing, however, about the creation of the angels. That angels existed was undeniable: the good God placed cherubim at the east of Eden, “to keep the way of the tree of life,” and members of the angelic host appeared repeatedly all the way through to the last chapter of Revelation: “the Lord God of the spirits of the prophets sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly come to pass.” If the inspired author of Genesis saw fit to record the creation of every “winged fowl” and “creeping thing” and “beast of the earth” after its kind, why not the holy and glorious messengers of heaven?

The mysteries of Holy Writ are many, and this is yet another that has no clear answer. Modern exegetes, perhaps informed by something akin to the historical-critical method, might examine the text in scientific fashion and draw conclusions that, while perhaps valid as scholarship, do absolutely nothing to lead us deeper into the sublime drama and spiritual richness of the divine Word. I am reminded of a comment in the Anchor Bible’s edition of the Gospel of Mark, regarding “the accounts of Jesus raising the dead”: “perhaps we are confronted with the resuscitation of persons in a diabetic coma.”² Well then, I suppose if archaeologists someday unearth the Daughter of Jairus’s medical records, we will be one step closer to confirming or rejecting this hypothesis. We will not be any steps closer, however, to loving God and the poetical Book that He wrote for us.

The medieval mind, looking from within the multilayered, awe-inspiring, literary world of the Bible, sees each verse unfolding with the mystical potentialities of symbolic thought and poetic language. It was St. Augustine, then, who suggested that Genesis does indeed recount the creation of the angels:

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.

The light was good. Of all that is found in the material world, two things speak to us most eloquently of spiritual existence: one, as we saw in a previous essay, is air, particularly moving air; the other, as we see in Dante’s Paradiso, is light. What a wondrous notion, what a gift to the imagination—that the swift and bright-shining servants of God, who now glide among the heavens and turn with eternal perfection the great spheres of the cosmos, received life on the first day of Creation, when those incomparable words resounded through the dark and formless void: fiat lux.

How I do love to imagine these mighty and all-beautiful beings emerging, in a bodiless and luminous birth, from the primordial light of the universe. I suspect that the Christian folk of the Middle Ages loved it even more, and we have some evidence that they did.

In the following illustration, we see that the angels are already present, and already singing the praises of their Creator, on the first day of Creation:

The next image shows something similar, with an angel present as God divides the light from the darkness. This angel, in fact, almost seems to be participating in the acts of Creation—we’ll learn more about that topic on Tuesday.

Finally, we have a very special painting that comes to us from St. Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), via the twentieth-century Benedictine nuns who produced a copy, complete with illuminations that were subsequently lost, of her book known as Scivias. These illuminations, which accompanied Hildegard’s descriptions of her prophetic and apocalyptic visions, are that uniquely medieval mixture of sacred, profound, mystifying, and disturbing. The image below depicts the six days of Creation, with each circle enclosing that which was created on the corresponding day. Day One includes the angels. Fiat lux—fiant angeli.

1. James S. Taylor, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education. State University of New York Press (1998), p. 6.

2. The Anchor Bible, Mark, translated by C. S. Mann. Doubleday (1986), p. 142.