четвъртък, 27 октомври 2011 г.

Angels-SEX AND ANGELS

Angels in medieval art are usually androgynous, and it is not until the
Renaissance that women and children angels are depicted. Within
Western Catholic theology, references to the virility of angels are
extremely scarce, although biblical evidence of manly angels certainly
exists. Examples are the cherubim with the flaming swords who guard
the gates of Eden, as well as the angel with whom Jacob wrestles until
daybreak.
The paucity of references to angelic virility might have derived
from the early Christian wish to distinguish the angels from the pantheon
of Greek gods, often criticized for endless fornications and for
their crimes of rape. Later Christian authors scrupulously avoided references
to masculinity among the angels, especially because
demonology attributed masculine traits to those angels who had been
expelled from heaven. They gradually removed from angels their masculine
attributes.
Even though angels have sometimes been given a masculine role,
some aspects of the masculine role have been clearly excluded from
God’s holy angels. Angels have been consistently assimilated to the
functions of the human soul. For some authors the soul is simply
another angelic form; for others the angel comprises only part of the
functions of the human soul, those that concern intelligence and will.
Enjoyment, and not desire, is the design with respect to angels.
Throughout Christian theology angels are granted the enjoyment that
comes from seeing God face-to-face. This kind of enjoyment is
promised to the soul that attains an angelic state, and, as far as a soul
is concerned, this enjoyment is feminine. As a matter of fact, the soul
that experiences this enjoyment is often referred to as “she.” Not only
is the soul a feminine noun taking a feminine pronoun, but the soul’s
capacity to become married to Christ places it in a distinctly feminine
position in relation to God the Son. Making the soul feminine in
many cases led to a sense of the maleness of angels or the maleness of
God, although this maleness was not of the order of virility most often
associated with pagan gods, demons, and genies.
The question of the angelic body and the gender of angels has
fascinated many authors and has been the topic of significant philosophical
and theological disputes since ancient times. Beginning
around the fourth century A.D. with St. Gregory of Nazianzus and St.
Gregory of Nyssa, extending through St. Augustine and Dionysius
the Areopagite, and reaching an apotheosis in the thirteenth century
with Thomas Aquinas, angels gained more and more importance,
eventually constituting the vast majority of the inhabitants of the
Heavenly City. For the most part, angels were not considered to be
divided according to sex, since as invisible beings they were bodiless
and thus not sexed.
From the time in which Philo of Alexandria commented in the
first century A.D. on the text in Genesis 6:1–4 reporting that the sons
of God—angels—took as wives the daughters of men—human
women—it has been an article of faith that God’s holy angels could
not be accused of such acts, the agents of which could only be the fallen
angels or fallen angelic humans. For Philo it was perfectly appropriate
that good angels couple with something, namely, knowledge and
virtue. Later, it appears, angels and the daughters of right reason
became so thoroughly undivided that they did not need to couple.
Philo’s idea that the angels who couple with the daughters of men
in Genesis are actually devils was taken up by Augustine and also
formed part of Aquinas’s response to the question of the angelic body
and angelic sexual function. By considering the sons of God in the
Genesis account to be fallen angels, Augustine collapsed the distinction
between humans and angels and set up a group of angelic humans
whose corruption and fall derived from their attraction to female
beauty. Augustine went on to speak of those angelic humans who did
not fall and were not tempted by the daughters of men, asserting that
these earthly angels procreated to produce citizens for the City of
God. His angels were devoid of both sexual desire and the concerns of
kinship, and he used the term angels to mean any servant or messenger
of God, not necessarily a heavenly being. The Augustinian view seems
to presuppose that angels are male and that there is no reason for
there to be female angels, daughters of God.
Thomas Aquinas addresses the issue of the angelic body in the
fifty-first question of the first part of the Summa Theologica (1266–73).
He asserts that the angels assume bodies and that they have bodies
naturally united to them, although they do not exercise functions of
life in the bodies assumed. He then addresses the issue of the gender of
angels, stating that the angels of God are of neither sex so long as they
remain in heaven.

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