Lust, Pride, Unredeemable Ruin: The Fall of the Angels in Medieval Life

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Today we will conclude—or maybe just pause, because there is so much more to say!—the Via Mediaevalis series on angels in the culture and theology of the Middle Ages. The previous articles are listed below.

1. The Age of Angels

2. Of Angels and Faeries

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

4. Fiat Lux: The Creation of the Angels

5. The Angels: Gardeners in God’s Creation

6. The Angels in Medieval Eyes

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We cannot end this journey through medieval angelology without addressing a topic that is, alas, not nearly as uplifting as the others in this series. It is, in fact, quite the opposite of up-lifting. It’s positively down-dragging, both spatially and emotionally, but it must nonetheless be faced: First, because we’re in Advent, and the newborn Light will be all the brighter if our eyes have adapted to darkness. And second, because not all the angels, as we discussed on Sunday, enjoy mankind’s poems and paintings—or rather, some angels “enjoy” only those poems and paintings which are as depraved and grotesque as they are.

I speak of the angels who, in the medieval imagination, remade themselves into beasts and fell into the flaming jaws of the underworld. We call them demons, but they are demons by virtue of their state, not their nature. From an ontological perspective, they are simply angels; we do well to remember this from time to time, because the angels, as the last two articles emphasized, are like us. The difference between angel and demon—between beauty and degradation, joy and misery, glory and ruin—begins in that same dread faculty which leads the great drama of human life to either commedia or tragedia: the freedom, and the ability, to choose.

Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress; foolish tongues! When God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam.
—John Milton, “Areopagitica”

The fall of the angels is not clearly explained in Sacred Scripture; it is not easily investigated through theological methods; it is not even fully comprehensible to the human mind. And yet it is, without doubt, one of the most significant events in human history.

First, the fall of the angels is absolutely central to how the human race, especially the (enormous) portion of it influenced by Judeo-Christian traditions, understands its own existence. Human beings look out at the appalling panorama of war, falsehood, greed, betrayal, lust, enslavement, murder—the panorama, that is, of our own sinfulness—and search in vain for some primeval logic to the mysterium iniquitatis, the mystery of evil in our world, and in our lives, and in our hearts. Perhaps the apparent madness of it all would simply overwhelm us if we did not have recourse to the answer given in Genesis: it did not begin with us. We continued it, we tended and watered that rank, poisonous weed of iniquity, but the seed was planted by another, an other-than-human that fell before we did, and deceived us: “And the serpent said unto the woman, By no means shall ye die.”

Second, the fall of the angels resulted in that loathsome host of malevolent spirits that has loomed so large in our psychology, spirituality, and theology. The demons appear frequently in the life of Christ, in the writings of the Fathers, in the theorizing of scholars; they are our tempters, our adversaries, our cautionary tales; and they serve as real, if unseen, allegories of the disorder and deformity that dwell ominously in our own souls. And let us not forget that the grace of redemption and the hope of eternal bliss are mysteriously intertwined, via the felix culpa, with the malice of the angel who was the first of all devils.

Finally, they have inspired—if so noble a word can refer to the fiends of Hell—countless works of art, including two of the greatest masterpieces to have ever emerged from the human imagination: the Divina Commedia and Paradise Lost. Readers of Dante must endure the horrors of the demons, even of the Archenemy himself, before passing through the heartening rings of Purgatory and the magnificent spheres of heaven. And Milton’s Paradise Lost is the supreme English epic—a poem “written” by a man too blind to write, and of such overpowering genius as to almost defy belief. The tragic, sinister drama of Satan and his noxious angels is charged with artistic possibilities. Intensely intriguing, perhaps dangerously so, their story is nonetheless an integral and resonant element of the human experience. It is, in a significant way, our story as well.

Why, in one word, did the angels fall? The answer I would expect is “pride,” for this is the explanation that has long dominated Western culture’s attempt to understand the origin of demons and, by extension, of evil itself. If you lived in the early Middle Ages, however, you would probably have a very different answer: the one word would be “lust.”

Let’s consider a few quotations from the Fathers of the Church:

God … committed the care of men and of all things under heaven to angels whom He appointed over them. But the angels transgressed this appointment, and were captivated by love of women, and begot children who are those that are called demons. (Justin Martyr, Second Apology)

Illicit unions took place upon the earth, since angels were united with the daughters of the race of mankind; and they bore to them sons who for their exceeding greatness were called giants. (Irenaeus, Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching)

Having assumed these forms, … they also partook of human lust, and being brought under its subjection they fell into cohabitation with women. (Clementine Homilies)

These ideas, which are based on a famously obscure passage from the sixth chapter of Genesis, continued into the Middle Ages, where they naturally harmonized with medieval culture’s mystical, imaginative reverence for the Bible. I am not qualified to defend, from a theological standpoint, the deeply perplexing aspects of a theory that was accepted by devout, intelligent Christians of the distant past. In any case, given the prevalence of the theory in Patristic and early medieval Christianity, I propose that it must—at its core, or in certain of its facets—be true.

Whether this truth is of a partially literal, or largely tropological, or purely allegorical character—I cannot say. In fact, I prefer to say little on this topic, and leave it mostly to your own judgment and meditations. I will, however, offer this observation: A leitmotif of this series has been the close companionship between medieval society and angelic society. I have suggested that angels were not only a pervasive presence in medieval spirituality but also a deeply personal one. Medieval Christians admired and venerated the angels, but they also looked to angels for insights into their own lives. Did carnal desire for human women lead angels to their downfall? I know not. But I do know, or at least I’m pretty sure, that ordinary folk in medieval villages and towns didn’t encounter a lot of people who ruined themselves through abstract, intellectualized acts of disordered pride. What they saw instead was a great many lives discredited and damaged—sometimes even destroyed—by lust.

“The greatest gift that God in his largesse,
as he was creating, gave,
and which is made most like unto his goodness,
and which by him most highly is esteemed:
it is the gift of freedom of the will.”
—Dante, Paradiso, canto 5

I readily admit that my rationalistic modern mind is far more comfortable with the theory that eventually became the theological consensus concerning the fall of the angels, but I must also acknowledge that prideful rebellion is not a watertight explanation for this fall.

At the end of the day, no explanation is watertight—how could any rational creature choose exile and torment while being so near to the love and beauty and perfection of Almighty God, and having no flesh to war against the spirit? This is a mystery, and always will be. If the choice was actually a very difficult one, owing to conditions that we do not know or cannot understand, why were the fallen angels excluded from the redemptive covenant that was offered to mankind?

This question of redemption for fallen angels was, in fact, yet another angelological quandary that kindled the intellects of medieval theologians. At least four different theories were proposed, none of them particularly helpful in my opinion, but the view favored by Aquinas and Bonaventure is at least satisfying on a poetic level: when you know as much as the angels do, there’s no second chance.

How vast, how dreadful, how sublime is the power concealed in the inscrutable act that we so casually call choice! How incomparable this gift, this burden, of free will! Let fall from human life the mask of triviality it sometimes wears—think of the angels, and the immensity of a mere thought by which the selection of good or evil is made! Imagine the tension, the drama, of that cataclysmic moment when Lucifer, looking out with unclouded eye toward the horizon of eternity, wavered between self and God, self and God, self and God, until the irrevocable word was spoken: “I choose myself: non serviam!” And with the final syllable still vibrating on his accursed tongue, he is down, “like lightning falling from heaven.”

Dante says that God’s greatest gift, after existence itself, is free will. The magnificent, celestial comedy of the angels shows what may await us if we use it well. The monstrous, infernal tragedy of the demons shows what may befall us if we use it ill.