One of the reasons people find it so difficult to believe in angels, is that our picture of them is puerile.

When an ancient Jew thought of angels he pictured a host of terrifying beings, tremendous in size, many-winged and many-eyed, brandishing swords of flame. Such angels were more magnificent and terrible than all of the idols that captured the imaginations of the surrounding cultures.

They were powerful and worthy of fear, and so he happily gave them his credence.

The medievals took this biblical conception, and brought it into the realm of the rational. The wings and eyes became symbolic manifestations of the angels’ spiritual properties. They established that the bodily form under which the angel appeared was an assumed body, and that the angel did not impart life to this form as human souls impart life to human bodies.

They determined that angels could not know the secret thoughts of man, but that they could discern anything that betrayed itself in the movements of the body. They discovered that angels could not tell the future, but having a much wider sphere of knowledge and much greater intellectual capacities, could make a much better guess than we could. These highly abstract and intellectualized angels captured the medieval mind, and took on forms that were more humanized, less grotesque, but just as firmly believed.

Already, though, in the medieval era, we see a division between the abstract angel that satisfied the theologian and the anthropomorphized angel that appealed to the heart of the illiterate.

Over time, this gap was to widen until the common conception of an angel became a cherub in a pink loincloth or a winged woman draped in bedclothes, while the theoretical angel became a vaguely interesting thought experiment washed away on the tides of mind-body reductionism.

Such visions are so uncompelling that most people have come to disbelieve in angels altogether. The result is a narrowing of the world.

The limits of things that we cannot fully understand are compressed, and in this compression we lose not only the hosts of heaven and hell, but also heroic virtue and diabolic evil; the vision of eternal beatitude and the dread of unquenchable fire.

The angels that Christians are called to believe in — the angels of the Bible and of Tradition — are neither harp-endowed human souls nor candied saps. Far from being the epitome of feminine emotion, they are intensely rational, possessed of a luminous understanding, and have been given the power to slay enemies — both human and diabolic — on the battlefields of earth.

That such beings exist is attested to by the universal witness of human experience. The apparition of supernatural messenger from heaven is a theme that is found in all cultures, in all times. From Plato to Pascal, discussions of spiritual beings have been a part of philosophical dialog, while nearly every major world religion relies on some form of knowledge revealed by spiritual powers, whether by avatars or Olympian gods, by archangels or by channeled masters.

The teachings of Scripture, and the theology of the Middle Ages, do us a great service: They allow us to understand something of the nature of these beings, and also to make a clear distinction between the good and the evil.

This is of tremendous importance: As St. Paul makes clear, Satan is perfectly capable of disguising himself as an angel of light. Those who do not believe in angels are the most susceptible to deception; an unexpected experience of the supernatural is usually overwhelming, and when one lands on the shores of a brave new world, one easily forgets to ask whether its inhabitants are worthy of his trust.

The contemplation of angels is not an idle pursuit for the intellectual who has nothing important to occupy his mind. It is an invitation to look beyond oneself and to enjoy the humility of knowing that God has created a world filled with wonders that we will never fully comprehend.

Modern man is beginning to rediscover these shores. Unfortunately, the modern scientists of the paranormal tend to stumble forward without the doctrines of the Church, rather like a man who, having finally hammered out the secrets of the wheel, seeks to reinvent the horse. The result is a mishmash of incoherent doctrines, over-simplifications and, like the old paganism, “gleams of celestial light falling on heaps of imbecility.”

What is needed instead is a new theology of angels that weds the discoveries of St. Thomas Aquinas with the discoveries of Einstein.

If we do not manage this, we will continue to stumble along through the dark — and as we will discover, there are plenty of malevolent forces waiting there to ensnare the unwary.

Melinda Selmys is a staff writer

at VulgataMagazine.org.