Michaelmas Daisies: Dancing with Angels

Michaelmas daisies in all their varied hues dance along our maritime roadsides in the soft September air. They are asters, a Greek word meaning star, and are called ‘michaelmas daisies’, because their appearance here and elsewhere coincides with the great Fall festival of St. Michael and All Angels on September 29. They serve as a reminder of the larger dimensions of creation and of the traditions of intellectual and spiritual life which are part of the life of academic institutions.

Angels are a strong reminder to us of our spiritual and intellectual nature. They, too, are creatures but purely intelligible beings, spiritual beings, in other words. As Diotima teaches Socrates in Plato’s Symposium spirits are intermediate between god and humans. She notes that “they interpret and carry messages from humans to gods and from gods to humans”. This ancient Greek view complements the angelic messengers in the scriptural traditions and belongs to the idea of good news that is shared and in which we participate. Evangelist means, literally, a good angel, a good messenger; hence, gospel or good news.

Angels are an inescapable feature of the scriptural and spiritual landscape of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic worlds. The ideas or forms of Plato have become the ideas or thoughts of God and have entered into the spiritual imaginary of the theological cultures of reflection and to a branch of theology known as angelology. They belong to our thinking about creation, spiritually and intellectually, and to ourselves as spiritual creatures, albeit not angels, because we are embodied beings. Angels are the great  ‘celestial no-see ums’. The artistic traditions picture and imagine the angels in various ways but in truth they can only be thought. When we think and pray - itself a form of thinking in a Godward direction - we are in the company of angels.

Some of the most important things in life are the things which we cannot see but are known intellectually or spiritually. Such are the angels who contribute to our thinking about the intellectual principles that belong to the created order and to our lives in thought and prayer.

In the year 1257, at the University of Paris, Thomas Aquinas, known as Doctor Angelicus, the angelic doctor, undertook in his “Disputed Questions on Truth,” the question “Can a man be taught by an Angel?”. Angels can teach us, he says, not by supplanting what is given by the light of nature or the light of grace, the human and the divine respectively, but, as he says, by “moving the imagination and strengthening the light of understanding”. They belong to our life as intellectual beings. The feast of St. Michael and All Angels is the first major festival in the early Fall and thus marks the beginning of the first term at the great medieval universities such as Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge and the institutions which derive from them. At King’s-Edgehill, this term is historically and traditionally ‘Michaelmas Term’.

The lesson read in Chapel and at the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels is from The Book of the Revelation of St. John Divine. A powerful passage, it begins with the troubling idea that “there was war in heaven”, a cosmic struggle between the angels of God and the fallen angels who are associated with the classic images of Satan, the Devil, the Dragon, the Tempter; in short, all that opposes the goodness and truth of God. The images belong to the story of the Fall into sin and evil and, importantly, teach us that evil and sin are not material forces but arise from spiritual creatures in their denial of the express conditions of our being. As such sin and evil are really a form of contradiction of what we know as belonging to the order and structure of reality and our place in it. But the idea so strongly emphasised in the Genesis stories is that the goodness of God is prior to and greater than all and every form of evil.

Another name for Satan or the Devil is Lucifer which nicely captures the problem with evil. Lucifer means ‘light-bearer’; that is his vocation and the truth of his being. But he turns his back on that light and truth and thus becomes darkness, even the Prince of Darkness. Sin and evil is about that kind of contradiction and its consequences.

So too with the cosmic battle between good and evil with the angels. They overcome “that old serpent” - an echo of the story of the Fall - not by any virtue of their own but, as Revelation puts it, “by the blood of the Lamb”. In the Christian understanding, this refers to Jesus Christ, true God and true man, whose sacrifice is the overcoming of all sin and evil.

Michaelmas reveals to us a way of thinking about sin and evil and contributes to a deeper understanding of the beauty and wonder of creation. Angelic vision points us to intellectus, to a unified way of thinking that transcends without negating ratio,  rationative or linear ways of thinking. They raise us up to a deeper grasp of the world as a unified whole beyond the endless divisions and animosities of our world. As Revelation puts it, “there was war in heaven”, not that there is. Thus St. Michael and All Angels recalls us to the divine reconciliation between our fallen world and God and to the forms of our participation in that reconciliation through thought and prayer.

It means that along with the Michaelmas daisies we too can dance with the angels.