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

Why were medieval theologians so concerned about the creation of angels, or lack thereof, in Genesis? One of the reasons was rooted in doctrine. Christians these days take it for granted that God is, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” Those last two words served as an implicit rejection of heterodox ideas that were circulating in the early Church. Various schools of thought posited the existence of purely spiritual (and therefore angel-like) beings that were uncreated; the Church needed to prevent such ideas from filtering into Christian angelology, since they were inimical to the foundational belief in God as Creator of everything. Thus, the Genesis narrative was causing some dogmatic difficulties: the absence of the creation of the angels could be interpreted as evidence that angels were, in fact, uncreated.

These non-Christian spiritual beings, however, were not merely uncreated. Both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonist philosophical tradition viewed them as creators of the material world. Thus, the Genesis account was again an open door to heterodox speculation. Those of a more pagan persuasion might argue, citing the absence of the creation of angels in Genesis, that angels were already there at the beginning, performing the labor of material creation as God uttered His creative commands: “And God said, Let there be a firmament…, Let the dry land appear…, Let the earth bring forth grass…”

It is generally the case that if people are determined to believe something, they will find ways to validate their beliefs. For those who held that the angels were creators or co-creators of the material world, the evidence was right there in Genesis: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (1:26); “And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us” (3:22); “Let us go down, and there confound their language” (11:7). God speaks on multiple occasions in the first-person plural. Perhaps you’ve heard this explained as a fleeting Old Testament glimpse into the interior life of the Trinity. Other theories—it’s a literary relic of polytheism, a plural of majesty, a plural of deliberation, a plural of omnipotence—have been proposed. For proponents of heterodox angelology, it might be something very different. It might be evidence that God collaborated with the angels, His heavenly co-creators, and that He did so even in that sacred and momentous prelude to the creation of our first parents.

Medieval theologians, artists, and mystics were men and women of profound insight, with minds attuned to exploratory and allegorical modes of thought. But there were always limits: in the Middle Ages, public heterodoxy was not an option. The Church taught that God was the one and only Creator of the universe; the angelic spirits served Him, and sang His praises, and helped His wayward children on earth, but they were not co-creators.

That seems clear enough. There’s just one problem, though: the idea of angels—mysterious, beneficent beings that Hildegard in Scivias described as “bright living lamps” who shine “in great beauty and adornment,” and on whom “human features show as if in clear water,” and who “spread the desires in the depths of their minds like wings”—the idea of angels adding their ethereal craftsmanship to the wondrous works of Creation seems to touch a chord in the human soul. I, for one, would cherish the thought that an angelic hand lay on Adam’s breast when God “breathed into his face the breath of life.” If co-creation is not sound doctrine, it may nonetheless be captivating poetry. What to do?

In The City of God (Book 12), Augustine declares emphatically that the angels, “whom those Platonists prefer to call gods,” cannot be “creators, any more than we call gardeners the creators of fruits and trees.” Rather, true creation belongs only to God, “the Creator and Originator who made the world itself and the angels, without the help of world or angels.” And yet, even Augustine seems reluctant to completely abandon the idea; the analogy of the gardener is in itself rather mild, since gardeners do many things to help a garden reach its final form and full potential, and at one point he even yields to the unsearchable mysteries of the incorporeal realm: “I know not what kind of aid the angels, themselves created first, afforded to the Creator in making other things.” If Augustine doesn’t know, neither do I.

To take an example from the other end of the Church’s history, J. R. R. Tolkien was not one to espouse heterodoxy. And yet, as someone pointed out in a comment on the previous post, co-creation was integral to his legendarium, “with angelic powers (God’s first creatures) being vital participants in bringing the world into being.” Again, there is a sense that angelic co-creation is so enchanting—and so meaningful, but why?—that the Christian imagination just can’t quite let it go.

The Middle Ages, with its uniquely rich and fervent devotion to angelic realities, was the Age of Angels. Co-creation—within the limits of permissible theology—must have appealed strongly to medieval spirituality, and indeed, we see wonderful echoes of it in medieval artwork.

I included these first two images in Sunday’s post. Here, a council of angels draws near to God and appears eager to participate as He creates the land and the sea.

And in the mosaic, the angel’s posture is one of action, and his body is divided into light and dark just as the world is. Perhaps there is a sense that the angel is an intermediary, not issuing creative commands but communicating these commands, and their inherent power, to the material elements.

In the next example, the central scene evokes the creation of both the earth and the human race. The scene is surrounded by angelic faces.

In this last and really quite astonishing illumination, the Triune God, accompanied by a mighty host of angels, oversees the six days of Creation.

The presence of angels is especially prominent in the earliest moments of Creation, when “the earth was formless and void, … and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters”:

Let us return briefly to a question posed above: Why were theologians of the Middle Ages so concerned about the creation of the angels? We saw that one reason was of a doctrinal nature. The second reason—so resonant in medieval culture, so neglected if not utterly forgotten in modern culture—is of a beautifully and deeply human nature: If we wish to know more about ourselves, we must seek to know more about the angels. Why? Because they are like us, and we are like them—they are, in the grand structure of the created order, our closest kin. This mode of thought, which we might call the “angelic epistemology” of the Middle Ages, will animate our further reflections on Sunday.