The Angels: Gardeners in God’s Creation

“I know not,” says St. Augustine, “what kind of aid the angels, themselves created first, afforded to the Creator in making other things.”

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

4. Fiat Lux: The Creation of the Angels

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As we saw on Sunday, the Book of Genesis says nothing—or so it would seem—about the creation of the angels. This omission is rarely mentioned in modern discussions of biblical cosmogony; medieval Christians, in contrast, considered it a detail of great importance, for reasons that will become clear in due time.

Various explanations for the omission were proposed: Perhaps the inspired author wrote Genesis in this way because the Bible is above all a story of redemption, and since the heavenly angels have no need of redemption and the fallen angels have no hope of redemption, the creation of the angels had no proper place in the sacred narrative. Another possibility, this one favored by Thomas Aquinas, was that the author was writing for people “as yet incapable of understanding an incorporeal nature; and if it had been divulged that there were creatures existing beyond corporeal nature, it would have proved to them an occasion of idolatry” (Summa Theologiae, I.Q61.A1).

A third option, and this is the theory that we explored in the previous post, is that the Bible doesn’t really omit the creation of the angels; rather, it reveals something about angelic nature by including God’s luminous, bodiless messengers in the creation of light on the first day (or of heaven, on the second day). This idea appeals strongly to my imagination, and it is in keeping with the highly poetical nature of the Book of Genesis—poetic discourse is powerful, in part, because it can convey more while saying less. It is remarkable to think that through the sublimely enigmatic words of Genesis, in the very first verses of the world’s most influential Book, the angels by their absence establish one of humanity’s most fundamental and inspiring symbolic relationships: purely spiritual beings, which we cannot see, are like light, which illumines the universe and vivifies the earth and warms our hearts and gives visual form and beauty to all things—and yet is itself, in a certain sense, invisible.

And I saw between the North and the East a great mountain, which to the North had great darkness and to the East had great light, but in such a way that the light could not reach the darkness, nor the darkness the light. And again I heard the voice from Heaven, saying to me: The visible and temporal is a manifestation of the invisible and eternal.
—Hildegard of Bingen, “Scivias,” Book One, Third Vision