Welcome back to the Deep Dive. I hope you're
ready to stretch your brain a little bit today
because we are tackling a subject that I think
everyone thinks they know. Oh, absolutely. But,
and I'm going to go out on a limb here, most
of us probably have it completely wrong. We're
looking at something that sits right on the edge
of, you know, human perception. It is certainly
a topic where pop culture has sort of completely
overwritten the original source code. We're talking
about angels. Exactly. When I say the word angel,
what pops into your head? Probably a chubby baby
with wings, right? Maybe a harp, sitting on a
cloud, looking very benevolent and, I don't know,
slightly bored. Or maybe a beautiful person in
a white robe saving you from stepping in front
of a bus. That's the one. The guardian angel
trope. That is the standard imagery. But if you
actually dig into the history, the theology,
and the philosophy, which is our mission today,
you find something vastly more complex. It's
a rabbit hole. It really is. You find beings
made of fire and light. You find cosmic wheels
covered in eyes. Entities that don't just deliver
messages but actually are the message. It really
is a journey from the, well, the mundane to the
metaphysical. We're taking a comprehensive stack
of historical and theological texts and we're
primarily using the very extensive Wikipedia
entry on Angel as our roadmap to unpack the evolution
of this concept across millennia. Right. We're
going to look at how a word for basically a mailman
turned into a supernatural superpower. And to
hook you in right from the start, let me just
drop a couple of facts we found in the research
that just, they blew my mind. Okay. First off,
for the first few centuries of Christianity,
angels in art didn't have wings. No way. At all.
They were just guys. Regular guys in tunics.
And second, and this is the big one for me, there
is a very strong argument in some theological
traditions that humans are actually superior
to angels. Which sounds completely counterintuitive
until you understand the mechanics of free will.
It changes the entire power dynamic of the cosmos.
It really does. So before we get into the linguistic
detective work, set the stage for us. Why do
we even have... Angels, like conceptually, if
you have a God who is all powerful, why does
he need a staff? Why does he need a middleman?
That is the fundamental question. And it really
comes down to the problem of the gap. In almost
every major religion, you have the profane, that's
us, the messy, physical, earthbound reality.
Right. We are dust. We are blood. We are temporary.
Exactly. And then you have the transcendent,
the divine. which is holy, distant, and often
just too overwhelming to interact with directly.
So if the two touch, the profane might just burn
up, like touching a high -voltage wire? That's
a perfect analogy. As theology evolved, particularly
in the monotheistic traditions, God became seen
as more abstract, more distant, and more holy.
You couldn't just have God walking in the garden
in the cool of the day as easily as in the earliest
stories. It's a different scale of being. A totally
different scale. So if God is the consuming fire
of the universe, you need a bucker zone. You
need a transformer to step down the voltage.
Angels represent humanity's attempt to solve
the problem of a distant God. They bridge that
massive gap between the creator and the created.
Yeah. Okay. So they are the cosmic middlemen.
They are the interface. I like that. So let's
look at the job description then. I love etymology
because it usually reveals the humble origins
of these huge ideas. Where does the word angel
actually come from? Because we use it so casually
now. It's a classic case of a job title becoming
a species name. Yeah. In modern English, we get
angel from the old English angel and the old
French angele. But those both go back to the
Latin angelus. And Latin, as always, stole it
from the Greek. Correct. The Greek word is angelos.
And this is crucial. Angelos literally just means
messenger. Just messenger, nothing else. Nothing
else. It doesn't inherently mean a spiritual
being with wings. It doesn't mean a glowing entity.
If I sent you to the store to tell someone we
needed milk, you would be my Angelos. I'm your
angel of dairy. In a very literal sense, yes.
But here's where it gets fascinating for the
history buffs. The earliest attested form of
this word isn't even in the Greek alphabet we
know. It's in linear B script from the Mycenaean
civilization. Wow. Okay, so we're talking Bronze
Age here, long before the classical Greece of
Plato or Aristotle. Yes, roughly 1400 BC. The
word found on these clay tablets was akiro. And
linguists, like the Dutch scholar R .S .P. Beeks,
suggest that this Greek term might actually be
a loan word from an Oriental term, specifically
the Persian word angros. Persian. Okay, I wouldn't
have guessed that. And what was an angros? A
mounted career. Oh! Think of the Persian Empire's
version of the Pony Express. This was a massive
empire, stretching from India to Greece. To run
it, you needed communication. You had the king
sitting in the capital, and you had these rider
Zangaros galloping across the plains, switching
horses at way stations, delivering royal decrees.
That makes so much sense. If you're trying to
describe how God gets a message to Earth, you
use the vocabulary of the royal courts you know.
You picture the king's messenger. The speed,
the authority. Right. You see the dust kicking
up, the speed, the authority of the sea. Exactly.
Deep in the DNA of the word angel is this image
of a Persian mounted courier. It implies a hierarchy.
It implies a king who is too important to come
deliver the mail himself. And we see this in
Hebrew as well. The Hebrew word is malak. Which
also means? Messenger. Just messenger. In the
Old Testament, the context is everything. It
tells you if it's a human or a spirit. And the
research pointed out a really interesting split
that happened when the Bible was translated into
Latin, right? This is the bifurcation. Yes. This
happened in the Latin Vulgate translation by
St. Jerome in the late 4th century. He had to
make a choice. The Hebrew malach covers both
human and divine messengers. But in Latin, they
decided to split the concept. If the text was
talking about a human messenger, a guy carrying
a letter, they used the word nintius. We're getting
a nintio, or announce. Correct. But if it was
a supernatural being sent by God, they used the
lone word angelus. So that's the moment they
became two different things in the Western mind.
Before that, the line was blurrier. The word
was the same. After that, angel becomes a specific
creature. It becomes a distinct category of existence.
It's a really pivotal linguistic moment. That
is fascinating. And speaking of categories, we
have to talk about the shift from polytheism
to monotheism. Because angels didn't just appear
out of nowhere. They are part of a massive corporate
restructuring of the cosmos. Right. In the source
material, it talks about how in animistic worldviews,
which is how most humans lived for most of history,
you have spirits everywhere. Everywhere. The
river has a spirit. The mountain has a spirit.
The storm has a spirit. Exactly. In a polytheistic
system, those are independent, minor deities.
They have their own agency. You pray to the river
god so he doesn't flood. You offer something
to the storm god so he doesn't destroy your crops.
They're all free agents. It's a whole ecosystem
of divinity. It is. But as the Israelites move
toward monotheism, the belief in one supreme
god, Yahweh, you have a theological problem.
What do you do with all these other spirits?
You can't say they are gods because there is
only one God. So you demote them. You strip them
of their title. Or rebrand them. They get hired
by the supreme deity. They are stripped of their
autonomy and become servants. The spirit of the
wind isn't a god anymore. He's an angel sent
by Yahweh to control the wind. It brings the
chaotic supernatural world under one central
administration. It's a hostile takeover. God
acquires the competition and makes the middle
management. That's a cynical but... Actually,
pretty accurate way to put it. Instead of the
chaotic democracy of spirits, you now have a
monarchy. Everything reports up the chain. And
we can't talk about this shift without mentioning
Zoroastrianism. No, you can't. This is a big
aha moment in the reading for me. I didn't realize
how much influence ancient Persian religion had
on our concept of angels. We usually jump straight
from the Bible to the Renaissance, but there
is this huge Persian influence in the middle.
It is massive. Zoroastrianism is one of the world's
oldest monotheistic religions. They believe in
a supreme good god, Ahura Mazda, and they have
these holy entities called Amesha Spentas. Amesha
Spentas, okay. They aren't exactly gods, but
they are emanations of God, representing things
like truth, good mind, and righteousness. They
function very much like the archangels would
later function in Judaism and Christianity. They're
like aspects of God -given personality. And they
also had something called Fravashi. Right. That
was another concept. Yes. The Farvashi are fascinating.
They are like guardian angels, but much more
active, much more martial. They are individualized
warriors that belong to Ahura Mazda's celestial
army. Every human has one. So everyone gets their
own divine bodyguard. Exactly. And if a human
summons them, they descend to fight against demons.
It's a very active participatory relationship.
And this introduces the idea of dualism, this
cosmic battle between light and darkness. Right.
And that was a new idea. For the region, yes.
Before this influence, the early Hebrew view
of God was that he did everything good and bad.
Isaiah says, God was responsible for both sides
of the ledger. He was the source of everything.
But under the influence of Zoroastrian thought,
perhaps during the Babylonian exile where Jews
and Persians interacted, you start to see a clearer
separation. You get a hierarchy of light fighting
against forces of darkness. So you get a cosmic
enemy, a team evil. Precisely. You see this heavily
in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in texts like The War
of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness.
That kind of thinking is a direct echo of Zoroastrian
dualism. OK, so we've got the linguistic roots.
We've got the Persian influence. Let's dive into
Judaism specifically, because in the Hebrew Bible,
the evolution of angels is really a story of
God getting further away, isn't it? That's a
great way to frame it. If you look at the early
texts like Genesis, the distinction between God
and his messenger is incredibly confusing. You
have this figure of the Moloch YHWH, the angel
of the Lord. Right. I was thinking of the story
of the burning bush or Hagar in the desert. The
text will say the angel of the Lord appeared.
But then the angel speaks in the first person
as God. It says, I am the God of your father.
Exactly. It's what scholars call a theophanic
angel. It's an appearance of God himself, just
in a slightly mediated form. It's God wearing
a mask so you can look at him without going blind.
There isn't a clear us versus them distinction
yet. The angel is just an extension of God's
presence. But then you have the divine council.
This sounds like a boardroom meeting in the sky.
The brina hajam, the sons of God. Originally,
in the ancient Near Eastern context, this would
have been the pantheon of gods serving the high
god El. Like in Canaanite religion. Precisely.
But in the Bible, they are reimagined as a heavenly
court. They surround the throne, they offer praise,
but they are created beings. They are the staff.
Psalm 82 is a classic example where God is judging
among the gods or sons of God. And they didn't
have names for a long, long time. They were just
the staff. Anonymity was a feature. Anonymity
was key. If you give something a name, you can
pray to it. You can worship it. Early Judaism
was very strict about only worshiping Yahweh.
It's not until the book of Daniel, which is a
much later text written around the second century
B .C., that we get specific names like Gabriel
and Michael. And Daniel is dealing with a post
-exilic world, right? God feels very distant.
The temple has been destroyed. So maybe you need
named intermediaries more than before. Exactly.
The theology reflects the historical situation.
And Daniel is apocalyptic literature. It's all
about revealing cosmic secrets. specific angelic
guides like Gabriel to explain the visions becomes
a literary necessity. You need a tour guide for
the end of the world. A celestial tour guide.
I like that. Now let's get to the juicy part
of rabbinic Judaism, the rivalry. I love this
idea that angels and humans are in a competition.
It is a recurring theme in the Midrash and the
Talmud. The rabbis describe angels as being made
of fire, eternally living but having no bodies.
But here is the kicker, and you mentioned it
earlier. In many Jewish traditions, humans are
considered worthier than angels. That seems backwards.
They are made of fire and live in heaven. We
are made of dirt and live on earth. We get sick.
We die. We make mistakes all the time. How are
we superior? Consider the why. Angels, according
to this tradition, have no yetzer hara, no evil
inclination. No impulse to do bad things. None.
They are programmed to obey. They have no choice
but to be good. They stand in the direct light
of God. To disobey would be an impossibility.
It's like a computer program running its code.
It can't choose not to. Whereas we are just a
mess of conflicting impulses. Exactly. We have
the Yetzir Hara. We want to be selfish. We want
to sin. We want to hurt others. So when a human
chooses to overcome that instinct and do a good
deed, it's an infinitely more impressive to God
than an angel doing it automatically. I love
that. It's the robot versus human argument. A
robot vacuuming your floor isn't virtuous. A
teenager choosing to vacuum the floor instead
of playing video games is. Well, it's a miracle.
Precisely. The struggle is what gives the action
its value. And this leads to stories of angelic
jealousy. The Midrashim are full of tales where
angels get annoyed at how much attention God
pays to flawed, imperfect humanity. They're resentful.
They are. And there's a famous story in the Talmud,
a debate about the Torah. It happens when Moses
goes up Mount Sinai, the angels argue with God.
They say, why are you giving this holy, perfect
law to these flawed, smelly humans? Keep it here
with us. We are pure. They were gatekeeping the
Bible. They wanted to keep the good stuff in
heaven. They absolutely were. Yeah. And God tells
Moses to answer them. And Moses says, okay, let's
look at the Torah. It says, I am the Lord who
brought you out of Egypt. Were you angels enslaved
in Egypt? No. The angels have to admit, no. It
says, honor your father and mother. Do angels
have parents? Do you have families? No. It says,
do not steal. Do you angels have property or
feel jealousy? No, it says do not commit adultery.
And angels don't have bodies. They don't have
sex. Right. So Moses wins the argument. The law
is designed for beings who struggle. It is a
mechanism for managing friction and angels don't
have friction. Therefore, the Torah belongs to
humanity. That is such a profound way to look
at religious law. It's not for perfect beings.
It's a toolkit for imperfect ones. It validates
the human experience. It does. It puts humanity
at the center of the story. But then we have
Maimonides. He comes along in the 12th century
and takes this in a completely different, hyper
-rational direction. Maimonides is the great
medieval philosopher. He was a doctor, a scientist.
He wanted to reconcile the Bible with Aristotle.
And Aristotle didn't talk about winged men. He
talked about forces and intellects and the laws
of physics. Right. something radical. He said
that angel is just the biblical word for a force
of nature. Wait, so gravity is an angel? In Maimonides'
view, yes. The force of gravity is the angel
of falling. He writes that when the Bible says
an angel shapes the embryo in the womb, a naive
person thinks a little spirit flies in with a
hammer and chisel. Right, a tiny sculptor. But
a wise person, a philosopher, understands that
God has created a biological force, what we would
call DNA, growth, cell division, that shapes
the embryo. That force is the angel. That blows
the whole thing wide open. It turns science into
angelology. It does. He says all forces are angels.
It demythologizes them while simultaneously elevating
the physical world. It suggests that when we
study physics, we are studying the messengers
of God. It's a breathtakingly modern idea. It
really is. And then swinging the pendulum completely
back to the mystical, we have Kabbalah. Yes,
Jewish mysticism. Here, angels are often seen
as tasks. An angel is an extension of God's will
sent to perform a specific action. So it's not
a creature, it's a function. More of a function,
yes. And the fascinating part is the idea that
once the task is done, the angel might cease
to exist. Or rather, the angel is the task. So
if God sends an angel to save someone, the angel
is the act of saving. When the saving is done,
the angel is gone. Correct. It emphasizes that
there is only one actor in the universe. Everything
else is just a temporary tool, a temporary manifestation
of his will. Though Kabbalah also has high -ranking
permanent angels like Metatron. Metatron sounds
like a transformer. He's the highest of the angels
in some mystical traditions, the celestial scribe,
who sits and records the deeds of humanity. He's
said to have once been the human Enoch. Wow.
Okay, we'll leave him for another day. Let's
move to Christianity. Because if Judaism emphasized
the rivalry and the law, Christianity got really
obsessed with the physics of angels. Physics
is a good word for it. Christian theology, especially
in the Middle Ages, tried to map out exactly
how these beings function in the cosmos. Augustine
of Hippo gave us the famous distinction, angel
is the name of the office, not the nature. Their
nature is spirit. Okay, so that sets the stage.
But the heavy hitter here is Thomas Aquinas,
right? They called him the angelic doctor. Yes,
the 13th century theologian. He wrote a massive
amount about angels in his Summa Theologica.
He treats it almost like a hard science of biological
classification. He argues that angels are pure
form without matter. Okay, unpack that. Form
without matter. What does that mean in practical
terms? Think of it this way. In Aristotelian
philosophy, which Aquinas was using, everything
is made of matter, the stuff, and form, the shape
or idea. A cup is made of plastic. matter and
has the shape of a cup form got it aquinas argued
that angels are intellects their minds they don't
have matter they're just the idea or the mind
of a being okay so they are disembodied intelligences
pure thought but this created a logical problem
for aquinas If they have, no matter how do you
tell them apart? What do you mean? Like, how
do you know Gabriel from Michael? Exactly. If
I have two identical cups, I can tell them apart
because this one is made of this specific chunk
of plastic and that one is made of that separate
chunk of plastic. Their matter individuates them.
But if you take away the matter, if you just
have the pure concept of a cup, there's only
one concept. You can't have two identical. Separate
concepts floating next to each other. They'd
just be the same one thing. He can't have two
angels of the same type. That was his astonishing
conclusion. Yeah. Every single angel must be
its own distinct species. Wait, what? Every single
angel is a different species. Not just a different
individual, but a different species. That was
his logic. Gabriel isn't just a different guy
than Michael. He is as different from Michael
as a cat is from a dog, or as a dog is from a
fish. Each angel is a unique, one -of -a -kind
category of being. A universe of one. What? That's
a wild thought. A billion angels, a billion species.
It's like a cosmic menagerie of intellects. Did
Aquinas figure out how they think? He did. He
distinguished between morning knowledge and evening
knowledge. Sounds like a shift schedule at a
factory. It's metaphorical. Morning knowledge
is knowing things as they exist in God. It's
seeing the blueprints of creation in the mind
of the architect, seeing the idea before it's
made. Evening knowledge is knowing things as
they exist in the created world, seeing the building
after it's built. And he argued that only certain
angels have morning knowledge, right? Right.
Only the beatified angels, the ones who are in
direct contemplation of God, have that direct
access to the source code. And they don't learn
like us, right? They don't have to go to school
or read books. No. Humans learn sequentially.
We count one, two, three. We reason from A to
B to C. Aquinas says angels learn intuitively
and instantly. They grasp the totality of a concept
in a flash. So they just download it. That's
a perfect modern analogy. They download the entire
file in one nanosecond. If an angel looks at
a complex mathematical formula, they don't solve
it step by step. They just know the answer and
all its implications immediately. That sounds
useful. But there's a limit. Can they read our
minds? Can they know our secret thoughts? Aquinas
says no. This is crucial for Christian theology
of free will. They can know the external world
perfectly. They can observe our bodies, our actions.
They can predict human behavior because they
are super intelligent and have observed us for
thousands of years. But the secret thoughts of
the heart depend on human free will, and that
is a locked room. Only God has the key. Only
God has the key to that. Your guardian angel
can see you reach for the donut and predict you're
going to eat the donut based on past behavior.
But he doesn't know the internal monologue you're
having about the calories versus the deliciousness.
Unless I say it out loud. Exactly. Unless you
speak it or act on it, your inner will is private.
Let's look at the Bible interactions in Christianity.
We have the Annunciation Gabriel visiting Zachariah
and Mary. The quintessential messenger role,
announcing a birth, but also the role of comfort.
Angels appear to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane
to strengthen him when he is in agony. And they're
at the tomb. Right. They roll back the stone
at the tomb. They announce the resurrection.
They are the supporting cast in the great drama
of the Gospels, showing up at key moments. And
Jesus himself mentions that angels don't marry.
Right. In the Gospels, he's asked about marriage
in the resurrection. And he says people will.
Neither marry nor are given in marriage, but
are like angels in heaven. This reinforced the
idea that they are sexless and incorporeal. This
became a huge deal for monks and nuns later on.
The idea of living an angelic life meant living
without sex or marriage. But then you have Paul
the Apostle. He always throws a wrench in things,
doesn't he? He always adds a layer of complexity.
He mentions tongues of men and angels, implying
some kind of heavenly language. But then in 1
Corinthians he says, Do you not know that we
will judge angels? Which is just, what does that
even mean? It is a very mysterious verse. It
implies a future reversal of hierarchy. Even
though angels are powerful now, in the end times,
redeemed humanity, who have suffered and chosen
Christ, will somehow have authority or judgment
over the angelic host. It echoes that Jewish
idea of the struggle making us more in the end.
We graduate to a level above them. Fascinating.
Let's pivot to Islam. Because angels are absolutely
fundamental to Islamic belief. You can't be a
Muslim without believing in angels, right? Correct.
It is one of the six articles of faith, alongside
belief in God, his books, his prophets, the day
of judgment, and destiny. You cannot treat them
as just metaphors. They are real, created beings.
And the Islamic view has some very distinct features.
First, the substance. We said Jewish tradition
often cites fire. Aquinas said pure form. In
Islam, the dominant tradition is that angels
are created from light or nur. Contrasting with
humans made of clay, tin, and jinn made of smokeless
fire already. Exactly. Light, fire, and clay.
That is the periodic table of intelligent life
in Islamic theology. It's a very clear taxonomy.
And this leads to the big devote about free will.
The mainstream Sunni Islamic view is that angels
are masam impeccable. They are completely obedient.
They do not disobey God. They are immersed in
the truth. So the very concept of rebellion is
foreign to their nature. But there's a massive
exception in the story of creation. Iblis, the
figure we equate with Satan. Right. This is the
central problem. When God created Adam, he commanded
the angels to bow down to him as a sign of respect
for God's creation. Iblis refused. He said, I
am better than him. You created me from fire
and him from clay. Now here's the logical trap.
If angels cannot disobey, how did Iblis refuse?
That's the plot hole. Well, Islamic theology
resolves this in a few ways. The most common
explanation is that Iblis was never an angel
to begin with. He was a jinn. He was a jinn who
was so pious and powerful that he was allowed
to hang out with the angels because of his high
rank. He was an honorary angel. Jinn have free
will. just like humans, so he could choose to
disobey. Ah, so he was an interloper, a different
species who was in the room when the order was
given. Or a diversity -ire who went rogue. He
was a being of fire among beings of light, and
his fiery pride got the better of him. But there
are some traditions, like the story of Harut
and Marut, that suggest angels can fall... Or
be tested. What's the story of Herut and Merut?
I found this one really compelling. It's a fascinating
narrative from the Quran and later traditions.
The angels were looking down at earth from heaven,
criticizing humans for sinning. Look at them.
Killing, stealing, cheating. We would never do
that. Very judgmental. And God said, if you had
their desires, you'd do the same. The angels
said, no way. We are holy. We are pure. A challenge
was issued. So God picked two of the angels,
Herut and Merut, sent them to Babylon. gave them
human bodies and human desires, lust, greed,
anger, and said, okay, your test is to live on
earth and just don't sin. How did they do? They
failed spectacularly. A beautiful woman came
to them, and they were overcome with lust. She
said she'd be with them if they worshipped her
idols, drank wine, and told her the secret name
of God to ascend to heaven. They refused the
idolatry, but figured the wine wasn't so bad.
It's a slippery slope. The worst. They got drunk.
They committed adultery with her. A witness saw
them and they killed him. It was a complete disaster.
They couldn't handle the human experience for
one afternoon. Right. And they were given a choice.
Punishment now on earth or punishment in the
hereafter. They chose the former. So they are
said to be hanging upside down in a well in Babylon,
being punished until the day of judgment. It's
a lesson in humility. It says to the heavens,
don't judge the humans. Their test is harder
than yours. Though you said modern scholars are
wary of this story. Yes. Many modern Salafi and
other reformist scholars reject this story as
non -canonical. folklore, insisting on the absolute
infallibility of all angels. They stick to the
Iblis was a jinn explanation. The bureaucracy
of heaven and Islam seems very detailed. You
have specific angels for everything. It's highly
organized. It is very structured. You have the
Kirman Khatiban, the honorable scribes. Every
person has two of them. The one on the right
shoulder and the one on the left. The one on
the right records your good deeds. The one on
the left records your bad deeds. And tradition
says the one on the right is the supervisor.
If you commit a sin, The angel on the left asks
the one on the right, should I write it down?
And the angel on the right says, wait, give him
six or seven hours. Maybe he will repent. That
is a beautiful detail. It shows the system is
rigged in favor of mercy. The bureaucracy has
a grace period built in. But the good deeds is
written down instantly, multiplied tenfold. Then
you have Munkar and Nakir. These are the angels
who visit you in the grave immediately after
death to test your faith. What do they do? They're
described as terrifying figures who sit the deceased
person up and ask three questions. Who is your
lord? What is your religion? Who is your prophet?
And your answers determine your state in the
grave until the final resurrection. And interestingly,
the Quran specifies that angels, not demons,
are the guardians of hell. Yes. That's a crucial
point. I think we usually imagine demons running
hell, you know, the bad guys running the prison.
In Western pop culture, yes. Dante's Inferno,
for instance. But in Islamic theology, God runs
everything. Hell is a place of divine justice,
not a separate kingdom of evil. So the guards,
the Zabania, are obedient angels carrying out
God's sentence. They are described as stern and
powerful, but they aren't evil. They are just
doing a grim job. They are the corrections officers
of the cosmos. That is a crucial distinction.
It keeps God in control of the entire system.
There is no rival kingdom of darkness that rules
itself. Exactly. Everything from heaven to hell
is under one administration. Okay, we have to
talk about what these things look like because
we promised the listener we'd get past the cherubs.
Let's talk about the visuals, wings. The wing
controversy. Right. So if you read the Bible,
do angels have wings? What does the source material
say? Here is the surprise. Simpler messengers,
the malach, are almost never described as having
wings in the text. When angels show up to Abraham's
tent or to Lot and Sodom, they just look like
men. You often don't know it's an angel until
they do something spooky like vanish or refuse
to eat. But the cherubim and seraphim do have
wings. In the visions. Yes, in the visions of
Isaiah and Ezekiel. Those are the high -ranking,
bizarre throne guardians. The seraphim have six
wings, the cherubim have four. But those were
a special class. The standard angel on the street,
the messenger, didn't seem to have them in the
text. And the art reflects this, this lack of
wings. For a long time it does. If you go to
the Catacomb of Priscilla in Rome, we are talking
mid -third century, very early Christian art,
you see depictions of the Annunciation. And the
angel Gabriel is just a guy. He's wearing a Roman
tunic, no wings, no halo, just a man delivering
a message. So when did they get their wings?
When did that become the standard image? It appears
to happen in the late 4th century, around the
time of Emperor Theodosius, when Christianity
became the state religion of the Roman Empire.
It seems to be a cultural merger. What do you
mean? Well, the Roman world was full of images
of Nike, the goddess of victory. She always had
wings. Eros or Cupid had wings. Sonatos, the
personification of death, had wings. Wings were
the established visual shorthand for a divine
or supernatural being. So Christians essentially
borrowed the iconography. They adopted the visual
language of their culture. They adopted visual
language that meant speed and power and divine
origin. It was a way to signal to the viewer,
this isn't just a guy in a tunic. This is a being
from the higher realms. It was a practical artistic
choice. John Chrysostom, the early church father,
actually wrote about this. He said the wings
symbolize sublimity. Right. He was clear. Yeah.
They don't literally have bird wings made of
bone and feather. It's a symbol of their ability
to move between the heights of heaven and the
lowness of earth with great speed. It was a visual
metaphor that became so popular we forgot it
was metaphor. And what about gender? Theology
says they are sexless and corporeal. Art says.
Well, art is confused, isn't it? Artists had
a long and varied history with this. For a long
time, they were masculine, or at least military.
In the Byzantine era, angels, especially Michael
the Archangel, were dressed like the emperor's
bodyguards. They wore armor, carried spears,
wore court robes. They were soldiers and courtiers.
When did they become feminine or cute? The cute
factor, the putty, those little chubby toddlers,
really explodes in the Renaissance and Baroque
periods. It's a revival of the Greek Eros figures.
They became symbols of divine love or just decoration.
And the more feminine, gentle, long -haired angel
becomes popular much later, really peaking in
the 19th century. Victorian sentimentalism softened
the scary warrior angels into comforting guardians.
So we went from wanting a commander -in -chief
to wanting a nanny. A celestial nanny, yes. The
cultural need changed and so the art changed
with it. But if we go back to the Bible, some
of them are terrifying. Genuinely monstrous.
Absolutely. The Ophanim, or thrones, Ezekiel
describes them as wheels within wheels. And they're
covered in eyes. Yes. Gyroscopes of judgment,
constantly moving, covered in eyes. And the Seraphim,
the burning ones, these are beings of fire, with
six wings, two to cover their face, two to cover
their feet, and two to fly. If one of those showed
up in your bedroom, you wouldn't feel comforted.
You'd be terrified. Which is why the first thing
angels usually say in the Bible is... Do not
be afraid. Because they are scary. Because the
natural human reaction to the transcendent breaking
into your reality is terror. It shatters your
sense of normalcy. You need reassurance before
you can even hear the message. Let's move into
the final section. Philosophy, ethics, and the
esoteric. Because angels aren't just religious
figures, they are useful tools for thinking.
Right. Medieval philosophers, both Christian
and Muslim, loved using angels as moral thought
experiments. Like what kind of experiments? Well,
think about free will. We sin, but why? Humans
are distracted by hunger, lust, tiredness, pain.
It's hard to tell if we sin because we are truly
evil or because we are just, you know, hangry.
Right. But an angel has no body, no hormones,
no hunger. It has perfect knowledge of what is
good. If that being sins, it tells you something
profound about the nature of will itself, separated
from all biological excuses. It isolates the
variable. It's a pure test of choice. Exactly.
It sparked huge debates. The intellectualists
versus the voluntarists. Did the fallen angels
fall because of intellectual error? They just
didn't focus their minds on God's goodness enough?
Or was it a pure willful choice to embrace evil
just for the sake of autonomy? Is sin a mistake
of the mind or a rebellion of the will? That's
deep. And on the flip side, you have thinkers
like the Muslim theologian Al -Razi. He argued
for the superiority of angels. Yes, his virtue
ethics took the opposite stance of the rabbis.
He argued that angels are superior to humans
because they are morally perfect by nature. They
don't have to struggle. Humans are limited by
our biology, our needs, our pain. He saw that
as a flaw, not a feature. So for him, effortless
perfection is better than hard -won virtue. Exactly.
It's a fundamental disagreement about what makes
an action good. And then you have the Gnostics
who flip the script entirely. The Gnostics are
always the plot twist. In many Gnostic texts,
like those found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, the
material world is a trap. It's a prison. It was
created by a false, ignorant god called the Demiurge.
And the angels in this system? They are the prison
guards. They are the archons. They aren't benevolent
messengers of a good god. They are hostile powers
that rule over the planets and the material world.
And their job is to stop the divine spark, the
soul. from escaping the earth and returning to
the true transcendent divine realm. So in Gnosticism,
you don't want to meet an angel. You want to
sneak past him. You need secret passwords, secret
knowledge gnosis, to bypass them as your soul
ascends through the heavens. It's a cosmic jailbreak.
The angel isn't a helper. He's the warden. That
is such a cool sci -fi concept, the heavens as
a series of guarded gates. It's very influential
on a lot of later esoteric thought. And speaking
of alternative views, what about theosophy? This
was the late 19th century mystical movement.
Yes. Helena Blavatsky and her followers. They
had a very different take. They viewed angels,
or divas as they called them, using a Hindu term,
as agents of evolution. How so? They believed
these beings lived in the atmosphere, or the
sun, and were responsible for guiding the growth
of plants and the formation of nature. They were
seen as the intelligent minds behind natural
processes. So they were like supernatural gardeners,
or programmers for the simulation. In a way.
But they saw them as a separate evolutionary
line. Humans are evolving one way. Divas are
evolving another. We don't turn into them when
we die. They are a different kingdom of life,
just as distinct as the animal and plant kingdoms
are from us. And finally, before we wrap up,
we have to mention the Baha 'i faith, which has
a very beautiful metaphorical take on all this.
They view angels as people, specifically people
who have consumed all human limitations with
the fire of the love of God. So an angel isn't
a different species. It's a state of being. A
human can become angelic. Exactly. To be an angel
is to have burned away your selfishness, your
ego, and to act as a pure conduit for God's will
on earth. It brings the concept right back down
to human potential. That brings us full circle
back to the idea of humanity's role in the cosmos.
It does. So we've covered linguistic roots, Zoroastrian
wars, Jewish rivalry, Christian physics, Islamic
obedience, wheel monsters, and Gnostic prison
guards. What is the synthesis here? What does
this journey tell us? I think the journey shows
that angels started as a functional necessity,
a way to explain how the divine interacts with
a distant world, the messenger. It was a solution
to a theological problem. But over time, they
became a canvas. A canvas for what? A canvas
for us to project our own anxieties and hopes
onto. Are we better than them? Do they judge
us? Are they just forces of physics? Are they
our guardians or our jailers? The way a culture
defines its angels tells you a lot about how
that culture defines itself and its place in
the universe. They are a mirror for what we think
about God and ourselves. Precisely. And I want
to leave the listener with that provocative thought
you mentioned earlier, the one that comes from
Maimonides. Yes. It's a powerful one. sit with
if mnemonides is right and angels are essentially
the laws of nature the forces that make the universe
run then consider this when a scientist describes
the force of gravity or a biologist described
the elegant mechanism of dna replication are
they actually doing theology are they describing
the angels just using a different language if
the distinction between scientific law and angelic
agent is just a matter of vocabulary, then we
are interacting with angels every single moment
of our lives. We just call it physics or biology.
That is going to keep me up tonight. Next time
you see a bird catching up draft or a lightning
storm or just drop a cup on the floor, ask yourself
who or what is making that happen. Indeed. What
forces are at work? Thanks for diving deep with
us. We'll see you next time.