The Biblical—and Literary—Angelology of the Middle Ages

After a three-week hiatus occasioned by a series of reflections on pain in medieval life and liturgy, and then by an artistic celebration of St. Andrew’s Day, we can return to our series on angels in medieval culture. The series began with an essay on the Middle Ages as the Age of Angels: the incomparable Mont-Saint-Michel and a wonderfully medieval illumination of St. Michael gave us insights into a world where people “not only believed in angels, not only celebrated their feasts and invoked their aid, not only saw them in books and paintings and stained-glass windows, but felt their presence with a ubiquity and intensity and deep affectivity that are virtually unknown and almost unimaginable in the modern world.” After that, we discussed the mysterious faeries (not fairies) of medieval literature, which seem “rather like angels who were cast down from heaven but got tangled in the web of human folklore and didn’t make it to their infernal destination.” I emphasized the literary nature of medieval Christians’ extraordinary angelology, which “was rooted in and nourished by their inherently poetic life, their love for mystical and mythological stories, and—above all—their profoundly literary encounter with the Bible.”

That encounter gives us our topic for today’s post. The medieval world’s awareness of and interest in angelic realities is simply fascinating, and it’s unlike anything I’ve seen in modern Christianity. Why is this the case? How did medieval angelology develop into such a rich and pervasive aspect of daily, scholarly, and spiritual life? We find part of the answer in the medieval relationship with Holy Scripture.

Moses in the basket, early fifteenth century.

I consider myself well-versed in the sort of theology that I need for my life as a writer, teacher, researcher, and practicing Christian. I am not, however, a theologian, and I must say that I prefer to take theological scholarship, medieval or otherwise, in small doses. Since I am of a naturally inquiring, technical, and skeptical disposition, too much systematic or speculative theology might prove unhealthy for me. Indeed, the history of Christian civilization indicates that theology of a certain type, or in certain quantities, can interfere with things that are of the utmost importance in my life, such as respect for doctrinal and liturgical traditions; sensitivity to the aesthetic, emotional, and interpersonal dimensions of religious experience; and the cultivation of a poetic, wonder-filled relationship with reality and with the Author of that reality.

I cast no aspersions on theologians; rather, I thank them for the valuable work that they do. But for those who sympathize with my perspective, I offer these words written by Julian of Norwich, a remarkable mystic and anchoress of late-medieval England:

It is fitting that the royal lordship of God have His secret counsels in peace, and it is fitting that His servants, for the sake of obedience and reverence, not desire to know His counsels. Our Lord has pity and compassion for us, because some creatures make themselves so anxious about them. And I am certain that if we knew how greatly we should please Him and relieve our own distress by leaving such things alone, we would. The saints in heaven desire to know nothing but that which Our Lord desires to show them.¹

It is fitting that we not desire to know…. Julian is not condemning theological investigation per se; nor am I. But she is suggesting that there is danger in theological investigation that searches anxiously, intemperately, or presumptuously for things that should not be known, or that cannot be fully comprehended, or that unduly distract us from that “one necessary thing” of which the Master spoke—for the life of the soul is fundamentally mysterious, and the movements of the soul do not obey Aristotelian logic, and the nature of God will always surpass our understanding, and the works of God deserve awe and fear and love more than they deserve analysis and disputation. Alan Paton, in his superb novel Cry, the Beloved Country, writes in terms similar to those of Julian, and with much eloquence (though less authority, for he was a novelist, not a mystic):

Do not pray to understand the ways of God. For they are secret. Who knows what life is, for life is a secret…. And why you go on, when it would seem better to die, that is a secret.

Father Grigory, in Chekhov’s short story “The Requiem,” makes his point more forcefully (though with much less authority, for Chekhov may have been an atheist):

“I tell you again, Andrey, you mustn’t be over-subtle! No, no, you mustn’t be over-subtle, brother! If God has given you an inquiring mind, and if you cannot direct it, better not go into things.... Don’t go into things, and hold your peace!”

Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, fifteenth century.

My field, rather than theology, is historical literature, meaning literature that requires a great deal of historical and linguistic knowledge when one studies and teaches it in depth. My primary specialization is literature of the “English Renaissance,” which to some extent is a euphemism for the “English Reformation,” which is in turn a euphemism for the “English Social Apocalypse”—by which I mean that the religious turmoil, vitriolic debate, and internecine savagery of Reformation-era England was so severe and so shocking as to resemble a harbinger of social cataclysm. (Somehow English society survived, and even produced William Shakespeare in the meantime, and then John Donne, and then John Milton, and then John Dryden—let us never underestimate the resilience of the human race. And yes, John was the most popular boy’s name during that period.)

We’re making our way back to medieval angels, I promise.

This phase of English history, especially when one reads primary sources and ponders it at great length, can have strange effects on a person. It is, for example, profoundly bewildering that people would disagree so violently and pertinaciously about things that not too long before were taken for granted by almost everyone. It is also deeply disorienting to see both sides of an ostensibly Christian conflict employing methods that, at least in the modern mind, are little more than hellish tortures.

But something that has perhaps left an even deeper impression, insofar as it more directly affects my daily life, is the conversion of the Bible into a vast collection of proof texts—that is, into a book from which every polemicist and demagogue and self-proclaimed prophet in England could draw abundant support for his or her theological positions. Like never before, Sacred Scripture was a splitting axe working its way down the felled trunk of English society. At its lowest ebb, this new scriptural paradigm saw verses of the Bible used like artillery shells with which to bombard the cherished beliefs and practices of medieval Christendom.

The ascension of Elijah, early fifteenth century.

I consider the Bible to be the greatest, and truest, work of literature ever written. (The only other thing that comes close, from a literary standpoint, is the entire corpus of Shakespeare’s plays and long poems, which together form something akin to a secular scripture of the human experience.) To study the religious disputes of the English Reformation is to witness the words of the Bible wrenched—again and again and again—from their narrative, cultural, oratorical, and poetic contexts. It is to watch as the divinely inspired stories and poems and discourses of an immortal book were made subservient to the novel theories of mortal men. It is to feel that Sacred Scripture was no longer the object of love and wonder and meditative exegesis, because it had become a means to an argumentative end.

Debates are inevitable; I understand that Scripture will play a role in them, and that sometimes this role will be beneficial and wholesome. Nonetheless, for someone of my scholarly and spiritual disposition, this scriptural paradigm—which emerged at the end of the Middle Ages and remains prevalent today—is extremely disheartening.

Samson fights a lion, thirteenth century.

It goes without saying that Reformation-era scriptural polemics were not a significant part of the medieval world’s relationship with the Bible, since the Middle Ages and the Reformation are mutually exclusive. (In my view, the best way to periodize this stage of European history is to identify the end of the Middle Ages with the gradual establishment of Protestant denominations during the sixteenth century.) But even if it goes without saying, it shouldn’t go without thinking—what I mean is that we still need to seriously reflect on the fact that in medieval culture, the Bible was of little value as a tool for theological apologetics, because the heresies of the early Church had largely faded away and the endless doctrinal disputes of the Reformation were, at most, a faint specter on the cultural horizon.

What was the Bible in medieval culture, then? The historian Dr. David Keck, whom I mentioned in the first article on angels, summed it up perfectly:

For medieval Christians, Scripture was the primary source for understanding their own world.

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.

To encounter the Bible in this way is to transform one’s life. An aspect of this transformation in medieval culture was a theoretical and devotional angelology that was scriptural in the fullest and most literary sense of the word, and which we will learn more about in Sunday’s post.

Abraham and the three angels, early fifteenth century.

1. This is my translation from the Middle English. Here’s the original text, from the edition edited by Nicholas Watson and Jacqueline Jenkins: “this is oure lordes prive consayles, and it langes to the ryalle lordeship of God for to have his prive consayles in pees, and it langes to his servantes for obedience and reverence nought to wille witte his councelle. Oure lorde has pite and compassion of us, for that sum creatures makes tham so besy therin. And I am seker if we wiste howe mekille we shulde plese him and ese oureselfe for to lefe it, we walde. The saintes in heven wille nathinge witte bot that oure lorde wille shewe thame.”