Angels

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Angels

At the end of the millennium, nearly three of four Americans reported that they believed in angels. While our earliest recorded references to angels date to the Gnostic culture of the first centuries c.e., angels cannot be understood apart from the development of monotheism begun with Zoroastrianism.

Writing in Persia (now Iran) between 1000 and 630 b.c.e., Zoroaster challenged the polytheistic religious traditions of his day, promoting instead an idea of one supreme God and an evil spirit who opposed God. This reorganized a Gnostic belief in a spiritual conflict between good and evil beings. In the centuries following his teachings, the commitment to monotheism grew as the Persian Empire spread into Egypt and Europe, although people continued to worship the Aryan nature gods in popular practices. Eventually, rather than being eliminated, the gods were incorporated into the new monotheism as angels, a demotion that preserved the idea of one supreme God while also accommodating popular practices.

The ancient polytheistic traditions therefore provided important precedents to contemporary angels. The word itself comes from the Greek angelos, meaning messenger, making a reference to the Greek god Hermes, who was the divine messenger between humans and the gods. The concept of a "guardian angel" also echoes Greek and Roman beliefs, as it was accepted that every man had his Genius and every woman her Juno. The hierarchy of angels and the assignments of specific tasks to certain divine beings are also borrowed from earlier traditions.

The Hebrews, already a monotheistic culture during the Hellenistic period, came into contact with the ideas of Zoroastrianism after the Babylonian exile. By tradition Yahweh, a remote God, could be reached only through intermediaries; the angels of Zoroastrianism may have seemed to fulfill the same function. Angels emerged later in apocalyptic Jewish writings, notably with the legends that came to be recorded in the Books of Enoch in about 200 c.e..

While Judaism distanced itself from popular angel traditions, Christianity, in its formative stage at the time, incorporated them. Even then, however, some viewed angels as a threat to orthodox faith: The Apostle Paul, for instance, warned against "angel worship" and stressed that Christ, not the angels, was the sole mediator between God and humans.

Despite the controversies, angels remained in popular consciousness, gaining prominence and legitimacy in the medieval period. Parallel writings on the divine nature and importance of angels emerged with the rise of the Jewish mystic tradition Kabbalah, in the writings of the Muslim cosmographer al-Qazwini, in Dante's epic The Divine Comedy, and in the philosophical writings of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas asserted the noncorporeality of angels, arguing that they, like God, are "pure intelligence" and so are not subject to the bodily drives of hunger or lust, claims echoed in Islam. Ironically, it was during this Gothic period that angels came to be depicted in art as corporeal, human, and sensual.

Angels fell out of favor in religious thought and art as emphasis shifted away from the supernatural during the Age of Enlightenment. Demoted once again, angels, now feminized and infantilized, became central to the sentimental art of Victorian England in the nineteenth century.

This sentimentality combines with more traditionally religious ideas in the representations of angels found in contemporary material goods, books, film, and television. Yet while the visual media reference earlier writings and artwork, through visual codes they also present an idea not commonly accepted within any religious tradition: the conflation of angels with spirits of the deceased. Today, both ghosts and angels are represented similarly (a halo of backlight, an ethereal smile, a white robe), and both serve similar narrative functions, as the deceased must return to earth to perform good deeds to earn his or her rank as an angel (see, e.g., the Topper films [1937, 1939, 1941, 1979] It's a Wonderful Life [1946], The Bishop's Wife [1947, remade as The Preacher's Wife, 1996], Heaven Can Wait [1978], and Ghost [1990]).

In the last decade of the millennium, more than three hundred web sites were devoted to angels; an average of eighteen million Americans a week watched the televised series Touched by an Angel; and more than five million books on angels had been sold, most of which were authored by persons without religious training and in many cases outside formal religious institutions altogether. Thus contemporary angels, like their predecessors of earlier periods, seem to be flourishing, particularly outside the formal institutions of religion.

See alsoDivinity; Gnosticism; God; Heaven; Kabbalah.