Angels-LITERATURE, ANGELS IN

The angel has been an almost indispensable literary symbol for many
poets and writers. In particular, one class of them, the Devil and his
legions, has provided a vast source of inspiration. Of all Christian
characters, Satan has appealed most strongly to the poets of all ages
and languages, and it may be said that the Devil, from his minor place
in the Holy Scriptures, has dominated most literary forms to the present
day. Although writers such as Pedro Calderón, John Milton,
Johann Goethe, and Lord Byron were fascinated by this character, the
most distinguished poet to dedicate a considerable part of his body of
work to the court of Satan was no doubt Dante Alighieri. At the core
of Dante’s Divina Commedia is Satan, who dwells in the apex of hell
and a multitude of angels who reside in his Paradiso.
Belief in the Devil was traditionally accompanied by belief in
witchcraft, widely considered a manifestation of diabolical activity,
especially during the Middle Ages. Many allusions to good angels
assisting in human warfare against demonic powers can be found in the
secular literature of the period. An example appears in scene IV of
William Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the young prince of Denmark,
upon seeing his father’s ghost, exclaims, “Angels and ministers of grace
defend us!” Angels are again called upon in the final scene of Hamlet
when Horatio, holding the dead prince, offers this farewell: “Good
night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”
Angels all but disappeared from literature with the passing of the
Middle Ages, but one can witness their resurrection from the humanistic
Renaissance, and their persistence from the sixteenth century
down to the present day. However, Satan is not a character that dominates
the literature of the Renaissance, in part due to the period’s
reaction against medieval thought.
One of the most significant post-medieval angelogogies can be
found in the writings of Emanuel Swedenbörg (1688–1772), who
devoted himself to studies arising out of what he claimed to be persistent
communications from angels and other agencies in a spiritual
world. He used the concept of angels to make the nature and vitalities
of the spiritual world come alive to a society that had lost sight of the
reality of the spiritual realm. According to Swedenbörg, angels are
realities far superior to humankind, and are able to communicate wisdom
because they are capable of receiving it. In his writings about the
angelic world, he asserts that angelic writing is very different from
human writing. They express affections with vowels, whereas with
consonants they express the ideas springing from the affections. In
angelic language a few words can express what it takes pages of human
writing to say. He also asserts that angels have no personal power since
they are only agents of God, and if an angel doubted the source of his
power he would instantly become so weak that he could not resist a
single evil spirit.
The works of Swedenbörg had a significant impact on the mystical
poet William Blake (1757–1827). Angels literally abound in
Blake’s writings and drawings. Blake, who was probably more familiar
with reincarnation and the karmic principal than most Englishmen of
his day, regarded angels as the real forces behind the lives of mortal
men and women. He was preoccupied with angels, both celestial and
infernal, and the struggle between spirits of light and dark took on a
vivid reality.
Other poets similarly regarded angels as very real forces and called
upon them frequently in a number of literary works. Robert Browning,
for example, in the poem The Guardian Angel, implores his angel to
take charge of the creative process; Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of
Melancholy, affirms the bit of folklore that each individual has a good
and a bad angel; and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow often espoused on
the language spoken by the angels.
The romantic poet Lord Byron was inspired to write this bit of
whimsy: “The angels all were singing out of tune, / And hoarse from
having little else to do, / Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, / Or
curb a runaway young star or two.”
In Victorian literature it was very common to find the use of
angels as intermediaries between God and man. An example is a poem
by Leigh Hunt called Abou ben Adhem, in which the main character
wakens one night to find an angel writing in a book of gold the names
of all those who love God.
The twentieth century found the German poet Ranier Maria
Rilke embracing angels in his Duinesian Elegies, particularly in the
first and second of them. According to Rilke, these celestial creatures
represented the most sublime expression of beings who are able to
ascend to God. He describes angels as:
Successful first creatures, favorites of creation,
high mountain ranges, dawn-reddened peaks
of all creation, pollen of the flowering
Godhead,
junctures of light, avenues, stairways, thrones,
spaces of essence, shields of ecstasy, storms
of tumultuously enraptured emotion and
suddenly, singly,
mirrors which reconcentrate once again in their
countenances their own outflowing beauty.
Angels also worked their way into longer literary works. Many
stories about angels, Paradise, and divine intervention have been written
by some of the major writers of this century and the turn of the
last. Most of these stories are characterized by the intellectual skepti
cism and sense of spiritual dislocation typical of the modern Western
point of view. However, the majority of great modern writers have
been fascinated with the possibility that a moral order and intelligence
lies hidden in the mysterious confusion around them.
G. B. Shaw (Aerial Football: The New Game), creates a chaotic
Church of England Heaven where the playing fields of the Lord and of
Eton can hardly be distinguished; John Steinbeck, in his Saint Katy the
Virgin, canonizes an erstwhile, very bad pig; the hero of O. Henry’s
The Cop and the Anthem is arrested just at the moment he has resolved
to go straight, and Mark Twain’s good little boy comes to a loud, bad
end in the The Story of the Good Little Boy.
In science fiction, Ray Bradbury’s astronaut missionary asks what
will constitute sin in other galaxies (The Fire Balloons) and Isaac Asimov
in The Last Trump foresees some knotty problems when the Day
of Resurrection arrives.
In other stories, E. M. Forster (Mr. Andrews) depicts a Christian
and a Muslim unhappy with their respective Heavens; Edgar Allan
Poe in The Angel of the Odd presents a hilarious angel in the shape of
an angry cask with a thick German accent; in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, angels play the traditional
role of messengers who bring, however, very contemporary messages.
In Bernard Malamud’s Angel Levine, a devout Jew is sent a
young black angel who hangs out in Harlem until the Jew can overcome
his racism.
The archetypical figure of the angel represented as the mysterious
stranger who arrives to effect a change of heart is utilized by Robert
Louis Stevenson (Markheim), and Philip Van Doren Stern (The Greatest
Gift), while Arthur Machen’s The Bowmen represents the genesis of
all rumors and legends of the Angels of Mons in World War II.
Leo Tolstoy’s (The Three Hermits) three ragged holy men cannot
remember the words of the Lord’s Prayer, but they can run on water in
pursuit of the Bishop’s ship. Franz Kafka, in his The City Coat of Arms,
summing up his agnostic position, tells how humanity’s plans to build
a tower to heaven are put off from one generation to another until
finally the idea becomes senseless.
Among other modern stories about angels and divine intervention
are Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant, H. G. Wells’s The Man Who Could
World Miracles, Paul Gallico’s The Small Miracle,Wilbur Daniel Steele’s
The Man Who Saw Through Heaven, and Flannery O’Connor’s Revelation.