Angels are an unreal reality informed by a Baroque vision of winged messengers
Mons
In September 1914 the London Evening News carried a report by Arthur Machen, describing what happened to the British Expeditionary Force during the Battle of Mons on 26 August 1914. Apparently the outnumbered British were saved by at least one angel who stood between them and the advancing Germans. One British officer’s account stated that while facing certain death, his troops turned to see an army of angels which terrified the German horses into stampeding in all directions. Machen later admitted his report was faked, yet the Angel of Mons has achieved mystery status.
Rationalists
Rationalists would seek to dismiss the Angel of Mons as mass hysteria or mental dissociation, and they may be correct. But we need angels. Unlike rationalists, they are good for the soul.
Baroque Vision
Angels represent an unreal reality, a reassuring presence which might not exist but which we want to believe in. Whether in Pozzo’s The Glory of St. Ignatius in Rome’s Church of St. Ignazio, or Reni’s Adoration of the Shepherds, there is no mistaking them. Given that Baroque art had its origins in the Catholic Church, it follows that our idea of angels is largely informed by the same Baroque vision.
Winged
Angels, then, are intermediaries, or messengers, between earth and heaven: a sort of supporting cast. Thus we have Gabriel at the Annunciation to Mary – a proclamation as in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing; Raphael, the archetypal Christian guardian angel; and Michael, often portrayed killing the devil, the souls of the dead on his scales. Whereas in the apocryphal Book of Enoch seven archangels are mentioned, the Koran names four chief angels: Gabriel; Michael; Azrael, the angel of death; and Israfel, who will sound the trumpet at the resurrection.
Art
The word ‘angel’ is derived from the Latin angelus or Greek angelos,meaning ‘messenger’. But, as Augustine said, this is more an allusion to what they do than to what they are. He defined their nature as Corpus, non caro: Body, but not flesh. So is there an angelic essence in each of us which we recognise when it is realised through art? If there is, perhaps it is rooted in the idea of symbolism in art and beauty. The function of art was to produce a spiritual symbolism to help enable the illiterate viewer to contemplate the religious truths of the time: art revealing the invisible. As Umberto Eco writes in ‘The Name of the Rose’ (1983): ‘… images are the literature of the layman.’
