Angel

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An angel is, in the Abrahamic religions, a created spiritual being who carries out the will of God — a messenger first of all, the word itself coming from the Greek angelos, “messenger,” which renders the Hebrew malʾakh. The term names a function before it names a nature: in the oldest layers of the Hebrew Bible the malʾakh of the Lord is less a separate creature than the presence of God made addressable, the form in which the unapproachable could speak to a person and be answered.

The developed picture is later. The Bible’s named angels are few — Michael and Gabriel in the Book of Daniel, Raphael in the deuterocanonical Tobit — and a fuller cast, with the watchers who descend and fall and the elaborate machinery of heaven, belongs to the Jewish apocalyptic writings of the centuries around the turn of the era, the Book of Enoch chief among them. From there the lore passed into early Christianity and, in time, into Islam, where the malāʾika are made of light and the angel Jibrīl delivers the Qurʾān. Each tradition holds the beings really to exist and really to act; what they dispute, often sharply, is how much may be said about them.

The ranked orders that most people picture — seraphim and cherubim at the summit, descending through thrones and dominions to the angels nearest the human world — are the work of one late-fifth-century author writing under the borrowed name of Dionysius the Areopagite, whose Celestial Hierarchy gathered scattered scriptural terms into a nine-tiered system and fixed it for the Latin and Greek Middle Ages alike. The scheme is theology, not scripture; medieval schoolmen treated it as near-authoritative all the same, and Thomas Aquinas devoted careful argument to questions the Bible never raises — whether angels occupy place, whether two can hold the same form, how a being without a body can know.

A second history runs alongside the theological one. The same names, and many invented ones, fill the magical and Kabbalistic literature, where angels are beings to be summoned, bound, and set to work by those who know the right names and seals. Jewish mysticism mapped angelic ranks onto the structure of the divine world; the Renaissance grimoires drew on both streams to compile their catalogues of spirits. Here the angel is less a subject of belief than an instrument of practice — a distinction the theologians worked hard to police, and the magicians largely ignored.

What carries across all of it is the intuition the word began with: that the gap between the human and the divine is not empty, but crossed, in both directions, by beings whose whole reason for being is the crossing.

→ In the library: The Book of Enoch (Charles, 1912) · The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Lucifer · Daniel · Emanation · Amulet · Neoplatonism