CERTAIN ONES HAVE WINGS
Christine Burgin Gallery & New DirectionsSeptember 2020Selected by Barbara Epler
Wickedly funny (especially some of the saints’ tales) and gorgeously illustrated with the illuminated grid poems of ninth-century Benedictine monk Hrabanus Maurus, this is a wonderful co-publication by Christine Burgin Gallery and New Directions. In the face of the unknowability of God, Weinberger gathers a mountain of lore about heavenly beings, which he gleefully mines and countermines. — Barbara Epler
When armed men come to arrest Jesus, one of his followers draws a sword and cuts off the ear of a high priest’s servant. Jesus tells him to put down his sword. “Do you think I cannot now pray to my Father who would presently give more than 12 legions of angels?” A Roman legion at the time had 5,000 men, but Origen of Alexandria in the third century revealed that a heavenly legion has 6,666 angels. Twelve such legions would have been a modest portion of what the Bible calls “heaven’s army”. Revelation states there are “ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands and thousands” of angels. Hebrews merely says they are innumerable. Bernadino of Siena in the 15th century said there are more angels than stars in the sky, grains of sand on the beaches, or all corporeal things. Fourteenth-century Kabbalists, turning words into numbers, calculated that there are exactly 301,655,722, although the Zohar says that 600 million were created on the second day of Creation and others afterward. Marsilio Ficino in the 15th century, expanding Origen, said that there are indeed 6,666 angels per legion, and also 6,666 legions per order, and nine orders, but that the total number (which would otherwise be 399,920,004) remains incalculable. One of the largest estimates is in the apocryphal book 3 Enoch, where each of the seven archangels leads 496,000 myriads and each myriad has 10,000 angels: 34,720,000,000 angels in all. William Cross in the 18th century simply said, “’tis beyond the Power of Arithmetic to compute them.” Others have wondered how angels, being incorporeal, could be counted.
Surprisingly little was originally known about the angels. They are mentioned less than 200 times in the Bible, usually only in passing. (And, in the Old Testament, when a supernatural being appears, it often may or may not be Yahweh himself.) They appear or they act, but the matter of their existence is not elucidated. Augustine of Hippo in the fourth and fifth centuries said it was easier to know what angels do than what they are. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century explained that, in Genesis, Moses says nothing about the angels he met because he was “addressing an uncultured people, as yet incapable of understanding an incorporeal nature”. In the few times when they are described, the Biblical angels usually look like young men – not, as in the later iconography, as young women or androgynes or boys or babies. Only certain ones have wings. When two angels come to Sodom looking for a just man, the Sodomites find them attractive and try to seduce them. An angel with a drawn sword was invisible to Balaam, but visible to his donkey. The angel who tells Samson’s previously barren mother that she will conceive a child has a “very terrible” countenance. An angel with a face like lightning and a robe white as snow rolls away the stone from Jesus’ tomb to show that he has gone. (Or, in another Gospel, the people themselves roll away the stone and find inside a young man dressed in white. Or, in yet another Gospel, they find two young men.)
The Puritan Increase Mather said that angels are invisible and only demons make themselves visible. Yet in Boston in 1685 his son Cotton saw an angel with oddly Asian accessories:
After outpourings of prayer, with the utmost fervor and fasting, there appeared an Angel, whose face shone like the noonday sun. His features were those of a man, and beardless, his head encircled by a splendid tiara; on his shoulders were wings; his garments were white and shining; his robe reached to his ankles; and about his loins was a belt not unlike the girdles of the peoples of the East.
Thirty years before, the polymath Athanasius Kircher saw another angel, reflective of his interests, in Rome:
His head and face shone brightly, his eyes flashed like gems, his whole body was covered with an exotic robe and his folded wings were adorned with feathers of every conceivable colour. His hands and feet were more beautiful than any precious stone. In his right hand he held a globe showing the orbits of the planets, on which were little spheres made from precious stones in various colours: a wondrous sight. In his left hand he bore a jewelled measuring rod constructed and adorned with marvellous art.
At the same time, in the English countryside, there were multiple sightings of birdlike angels. Some were of “a bluish colour and about the bigness of a capon, having faces like owls”. Others were “bodied like Birds, as big as Turkeys, and faces like Christians, but the sweetest creatures that ever eyes beheld”. Two others simply appeared in the forms of a dove and a partridge. (This had its mirror-image in post-Conquest Mexico: traditionally, the yolia – the life force that inhabits the body and exits at death, somewhat similar to the Christian soul – was imagined as a bird. So when indigenous people saw the Spanish Colonial paintings of the Virgin Mary surrounded by winged, pale-faced angels, it was thought they were yellow-headed parrots.) ◉
Origen was an early Christian scholar born in the late second century AD. Eusebius, a historian from later antiquity, wrote that Origen paid a physician to castrate him after a literal misinterpretation of Matthew 19:12. There is continued academic debate over the credibility of this story.
Representations of angels as winged only became the norm in the fifth century. One theory is that this shift was a response to the problem of angel worship among early Christians, which was prohibited at the Council of Laodicea in the mid-fourth century. Wings visually distinguished angels from both men and God, and emphasised their role as mere messengers of God’s will.
Athanasius Kircher was a 17th-century Jesuit scholar known for his sprawling, eclectic and often delusional interests. His inventions include a clock powered by a sunflower seed and a “cat piano”, played by pricking the tails of seven cats with cries of varying pitch.