Long to Look

While going through our readings about angels this week I tried to keep in mind certain passages from scripture which talk about angels. One in particular stayed in my mind and I think it serves as a useful foil with which to contrast our different readings and their conceptions of angels. The passage comes from 1 Peter 1:10–12:

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that was to be yours made careful search and inquiry, inquiring about the person or time that the Spirit of Christ within them indicated when it testified in advance to the sufferings destine for Christ and the subsequent glory. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in regard to the things that have now been announced to you through those who brought you good news by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven – things into which angels long to look. (NRSV)

As I read our sources, I thus constantly asked myself, “What are the angels looking at?” and “What can’t the angels see?”

It should be obvious, but the angels see God. The sources talk about the angels somehow interacting with God, seeing His glory, and worshipping Him in some capacity. The Sworne Booke, for instance sees its purpose for the incantation of the angels as the ability for humans to see God like they do (7r–7v).[1] Likewise, Pseudo-Dionysius talks about how the angels “participate in the Divine” and “make known the supremely Divine Hiddenness” (4.2).[2] I particularly liked the imagery from the York Mystery Plays where the Seraphim respond to their being created by God by worshiping God: 

With all the wit at we wield we worship they will,

Thou glorious God that is ground of all grace;

Ay with steadfast steven let us stand still,

Lord, to be fed with the food of thy fair face. 

“Fall of the Angels,” lines 73–76[3]

But to return to our passage from 1 Peter, if the angels can see God why are there things into which they long to look? Because God is the most wonderful thing that someone can see, why would the angels want to look at anything else? 

Initially I thought angels might look away from God because, like humans, they are able to make their own choices through free will. This seems to be confirmed in several readings. Hugh of St. Victor, for example, sees the angels as having some capacity for free choice, he writes, “There was free choice in them, because the will could move or be borne according to its desire in either direction.”[4] Additionally, the fact that some angels are able to maintain their devotion to God and some are able to rebel against God I think confirms their possession of free will. In the York Mystery Plays the words of the Seraphim and Cherubim constantly refer back to God and his glory, while the first words spoken by Lucifer are centered on himself. The Seraphim praise God as the creator, but Lucifer praises himself. Here are two stanzas put side by side for comparison:

Seraphim: Ah, merciful maker, full mickle is they might, That all this work at a word worthily has wrought. Ay lofed by that lovely lord of his light, That us thus might has made that now was right nought… “Fall of the Angels,” lines 41–44

Lucifer: All the mirth that is made is marked in me! The beams of my brighthood are burning so bright, And I so seemly in sight myself now I see, For like a lord am I left to lend in this light. “Fall of the Angels,” lines 49–52

But this left me wondering: Why would God allow free will among the angels? Doing so seems to make God culpable of allowing evil to exist. However, Hugh of St. Victor quickly objected to my question in his theodicy. He emphatically states, “But the most excellent Creator could not have been the author of evil, and so all was good that they [the angels] had from Him and all was good, since all was from Him.”[5] And later Hugh writes that God actually ordered evils wills but did not create them.[6] In these ways the angels see God and choose whether or not to look at Him continually.

But that angels have free will still does not fully satisfy the question that arises from 1 Peter 1:12. Into what do the angels long to look? Our sources this week seem to suggest, to me at least, that the matter is just the opposite, that the angels provide a portal through which humans are able to glimpse God. Barker’s piece on “The Many” I think draws this conclusion.[7] Her discussion of the mixed singularity and plurality used in the Old Testament to describe visions of God forces her to describe the angels as manifestations of God.[8] While ultimately I do not disagree with Barker on this point, I think her use of passages from Psalm 82 and Genesis 1:26–27 complicate her discussion. Psalm 82, for instance, does not have to be taken as a problem regarding divine oneness because of its poetic nature; the two instances of אֱלֹהִים (e’lohim’) can simply be a part of the parallelism that is so prevalent in Hebrew poetry.[9] A simpler way of defining the angels as manifestations of God would be to look at the etymological relationship of מַלְאַךְ (mal’ak) and ἄγγελος (angelos) which are the most common words to describe angels in the Old Testament and which both mean “messenger.”[10] This avenue I think illustrates well how the angels manifest from God, but does not confuse the issue of whether the angels are a part of God’s being/essence.

Upon further reading, however, I finally came to the conclusion that it is because the angels provide the window through which human can see God that they long to look into that same window themselves. The angels, in this understanding, are the messengers or intermediaries that proclaim something marvelous and wonderful between God and humans. Pseudo-Dionysius puts it this way, “But I observe that Angels first were initiated in the Divine mystery of the love of Jesus towards man, then, through them, the gift of its knowledge passed to us” (4.4). Here, the gift of the knowledge of Jesus is passed from angels to humans (e.g. Luke 1:26 ff.; 2:8–14). It is this gift, this grace, into which the angels long to look. They can hold it and carry it, but it is ultimately humans who experience it. The York Mystery Plays in a subtle way make mention of this grace by describing how God intends to restore the heavenly and earthy realms through humanity.

Mankind of mould will I make

But first will I form him before

All thing that shall him restore,

To which that his talent will take. 

“Fall of the Angels,” lines 140–144

“Mankind” in this stanza, I believe, has the double meaning of referring to God’s creation of human beings, but also to the incarnation of Jesus, perfect humanity and perfect divinity, made flesh for the salvation of all creation, and into which the angels long to look. God did not enact his grace through the angels, but through humanity. That is what the angels long to look into, the grace of God and the incarnation as only human beings can experience it.

-Daniel Christensen

---

[1] The Sworne Booke of Honorius, ed. Joseph H. Peterson. http://www.esotericarchives.com/juratus/juratus.htm

[2] Dionysius the Areopagite, Works, “On the Celestial Hierarchy,” 1899, ed. Roger Pearse. http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/areopagite_13_heavenly_hierarchy.htm

[3] York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, ed. Richard Beadle and Pamela M. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4.

[4] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America: 1951), 85. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.32106005020059

[5] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments, 84.

[6] Hugh of St. Victor, On the Sacraments, 89.

[7] Margaret Barker, Temple Mysticism: An Introduction (London: SPCK, 2011).

[8] Barker, Temple Mysticism, 65, 71.

[9] See Ehud Ben Zvi, Maxine Hancock, and Richard Beinert, Readings in Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Textbook (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); David L. Petersen and Kent Harold Richards, Interpreting Hebrew Poetry (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 21–37.

[10] Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994–2000); Frederick William Danker, et al., eds., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Early Christian Literature, 3^rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).