Knowledge of angels

We are surrounded by angels. If we stop to think about it, wherever we go, there is no more popular image in art than an angel. From the awe-inspiring cherubim and seraphim with their blinding lights and multiple wings to splendidly handsome archangels encased in glittering armour to cascades of chubby, cheeky, pink and white putti tumbling off billowing clouds in a tangle of diaphanous drapery, angels are all over the place; not only in our churches but in our homes and on the streets!

There is no image older than an angel for after all what was Eros/Cupid in Greco-Roman mythology? The love god. A winged adolescent of spectacular beauty blessed with a pair of golden wings and an archer's rather capricious aim. Angels appear in the Old Testament, holding back Abraham's arm when he was just about to sacrifice Isaac or walking hand in hand with Tobias. We are familiar with all of them. Islam has angels too while the Eastern religions all have winged creatures somewhere in their myths and legends.

Therefore what is it that makes this image so universal?

Rather like Tolkien's immortal elves, angels are mirrors of what is superlatively unattainable in us, endless hosts of premier servants of God, indispensable and endearing to a humanity that is pitifully earthbound and so febrile and mortal. Angels epitomise beauty in the most perfect sense and innocence in its purest form. When we refer to someone as angelic that is precisely what we mean.

My first knowledge of an angel was the indisputable fact that I had been assigned one at birth. This angel, "my guardian dear", would keep me out of harm's way and protect me from sin. I wonder how many children today are aware that they have anything called a guardian angel? I was convinced that my own personal one was in fact the one on the left hand side of the statue of Stella Maris and I was quite happy to share him with her. Whenever I am there, even at the venerable age of 47 I still surreptitiously glance at him as he sits at Our Lady's feet, balancing on a silver cloud with the grace of a butterfly.

Following the twilight of the gods in the 4th century AD when the Holy Roman and Apostolic Church, through the timely vision of Constantine the Great, assumed the trappings and attributes of the declining Roman Empire, the Church fathers tried to unsex the angel image and divorce him from the ci-devant Eros and Cupid, the god of love, who was the most popular of the Olympians for reasons that are patently obvious. The attributes of this beautiful winged youth reflected all the traits of human love, both good and bad. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that this sacred and profane image in Greco-Roman iconography was decreed to henceforth be free of any sexual attributes, be they male or female.

As time went on artists found the depiction of an angel an irresistible temptation and angels became more and more human and scantily clad. Along with portraying St Sebastian, depicting an angel was the only opportunity available to an artist to work on the nude and this was thankfully allowed to flourish by the Church fathers so long as the floating drapery was strategically placed.

Witness Caravaggio's very human angels in the current Mostra Impossibile at the Caraffa Stores in Vittoriosa; stand amazed at the Preti ceiling of St John's Co Cathedral upon which an incredible profusion of them fly so purposefully across the vault; be moved by the wildly baroque phantasmagoria of the side-chapels at St Philip's Church in Zebbug where the marble statuary comes alive in a whirl of shapely limbs, beautiful faces and flying drapery as the angelic hosts glorify, on one side, the Mysteries of the Rosary and, on the other, The Stations of the Cross!

There is a mystery about angels that convinces me more and more that these spirits who have so much in common with elves, fairies and leprechauns, have a universality and a timelessness that negates their being tied to one particular belief and that in fact their existence, when considered with the Van Daniken type of conjectural science that may or may not be fiction, underlines the fact that the earth may once really have been populated by winged extraterrestrials of superlative intelligence. These beings gave mankind a knowledge that has been totally lost and which built the pyramids and the inexplicable structures that still defy human engineering today.

One day, when they had had enough of our limited and capricious mortality, these beings simply escaped to a place beyond our human comprehension, leaving us with an unconscious memory of aureoled beautiful beings whom we revere and love so much even in today's ultra material world. This love of angels cannot even be explained by Man's subconscious wish to fly as the angel's popularity has successfully survived the advent of air travel.

The iconography of the angelic hosts bears this out. It is as if the human memory has this image permanently engraved on it and that very rarely is the image of an angel not met with a sense of happiness and serenity.

At the head of these heavenly hosts we have the Archangel Michael, a Prince of Light, diademed and clad in golden armour with a flaming sword, as painted by Guido Reni, stamping on the vanquished Lucifer who was in the process of being transformed into the dreaded Satan. One must remember that Satan is the demoniac name and Lucifer, bringer of light, was the angelic name. He was once a great noise in the Heavens and having overreached himself, his innate total goodness, being a reflection of his Creator, turned to total evil; a Prince of Darkness.

So there we have it. Even the knowledge of the total goodness and light of angels must be tied to the knowledge of evil and darkness; for without the Night, how can Day exist? The knowledge of angels ceases to function without their being a direct reflection of our own personal assumptions and aspirations to all that is perfect, good and beautiful. In the same way as Caravaggio created three-dimensionality out of chiaroscuro, using Light and Darkness, there cannot be one without the other.