Angels-GREECE (ANCIENT)

In the earliest pantheistic religions of the Mediterranean and the Middle
East, there were myriad gods and demigods who served as divine
messengers, or other lesser divinities who in one way or another provided
paradigms for later angels. Among these were the nine Muses,
the Greek personifications of artistic and literary inspiration. It was
said that the Muses had wings and, while not explicitly messengers of
the gods, conveyed inspiration to mortals. The Greek Fates, divinities
of destiny, were also pictured with wings.
One of the most important of these angel paradigms was Hermes,
whose characteristics were later adopted by the Romans and attributed
to the god Mercury, chief messenger of Zeus. Hermes was a god of
good luck who protected people on journeys and led the spirits of the
departed to the afterlife. The most relevant myth associated with Hermes
is that he was traditionally represented as wearing a hat with
wings as well as sandals with wings; he was thus one of the classical
sources of the convention that God’s messengers wore wings.
Plato in the Phaedrus implies that both the gods and the souls of
men are winged. But the being who above all others must be winged is
the one who is neither god nor man, but an intermediary between the
two, a messenger—in Greek, angelos. Plato relates Socrates’ notion of
the winged spirit:
Thus when it is perfect and winged it journeys on high and
controls the whole world: but one that has shed its wings
sinks down until it can fasten on something solid. . . . The
natural property of a wing is to raise that which is heavy and carry it aloft to the region where the gods dwell: and more
than any other bodily part it shares in the divine nature.
This Platonic expression may have had some influence on later
conceptualizations of angels and their appearance. The classical idea of
wings as a symbol of speed, as the attribute of a being occupying an
intermediate position between mortals and gods, and as symbol of spirituality
lies at the root of the investment of Christian angels with wings.
The essence of Christian angelology, which can be considered an
adaptation of a Greco-Oriental inheritance, was based on the persistent
need for agents to explain certain events to which theologians did
not suppose God to condescend and to which humanity was not equal.
To explain such acts and the events of nature, both the ordered
and the random, the internal and the external, Christian theologians
had available to them the pagan concepts of rational agents above
humanity and beneath God, who out of obedience or revolt or innate
impulse invisibly controlled the events God left to them.
Plato’s doctrine of separable forms and the myths about superior
beings, in which he delighted, produced more kinds of invisibles than
the scriptural idea of angels could accommodate or a monistic religion
tolerate. On the other hand, Aristotle’s rejection of separable forms
and disinclination to allegorize led some of his followers to discount
separate intelligences almost altogether. Plato stressed heavenly order
as evidence of intelligence in celestial bodies, and Aristotle confirmed
Plato’s ascription of intelligent forces to the moving spheres of heaven.
According to later angelologists, Aristotle’s view was very close to
Plato’s. The spheres have “movers,” Aristotle argued, because their perfect
circular movements must each be caused by a substance both
unmovable in itself and eternal, since the heavenly bodies are eternal in
their motions and so could be moved only by what is itself eternal and
unmovable. He did not say that these substances were persons, but he
did say that we must not think of the stars as mere inanimate bodies, but
rather as experiencing life and action. This was enough to prompt
Christian angelologists up to the middle of the seventeenth century to
cite Aristotle as believing in at least the angels of the celestial spheres.