Angels have a twofold reputation in modern religious discourse- they are either cringe emblems of kitsch spirituality or a e s t h e t i c creatures of eldritch horror (“Biblically accurate angels”). Their actual importance to either systematic theology or meaningful religious practice is dimly understood, if at all. The great spiritual struggles of literary and philosophical history, from Augustine on down to Kierkegaard, seem to have been concerned with the human soul alone before God, with an occasional appearance by the Virgin Mary. Are angels merely window-dressing for whatever one considers to be the real core of Christianity?
And yet in the magnificently intricate Neoplatonic and Aristotelian philosophical systems of the Middle Ages, angels were considered to be an irreplaceable piece of the cosmic fabric. The universe was pictured as a great Chain of Being between that which is simultaneously the source of Being and above Being (God) and that which is in some sense lower than Being (the Devil and all evil, which is primarily defined by “lack” of some good rather than active malevolence). The angels occupied the crucial role of intermediaries between God and man, perpetually ascending and descending from the court of God to Earth to the benefit of both the One who sent them out and the many who received their help, messages, and governance. In a way, they weren’t just seen as important, but as necessary.
Crucial in the development of medieval angelology was the mysterious mystic known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, claimed to be a student of St. Paul himself but now usually thought to have lived centuries later. In his tract titled “On the Celestial Hierarchy,” Dionysius divided the angels into three groups of three, totaling nine classes. The angels weren’t a vague and monolithic group, but rather a rational sequence of their own in the great Platonic chain. As angelology developed into the high Middle Ages, theologians like Aquinas and mystical poets like Dante identified a more fundamental difference between the angels who primarily had an “inward” focus (attending to the Throne of God) and those who had an “outward” focus (governing the world that God created and sustained). Bonaventure, in particular, used the story of Jacob seeing the ladder with angels ascending and descending upon it to illustrate the demarcation between the two groups. The contemplative angels are ascending to behold the glory of God, and the administrative angels are descending to act as God’s operatives in the world.
Italian philosopher and political theorist Giorgio Agamben investigated the development of western political philosophy in the light of theology, continuing off a theme set by the right-wing German thinker Carl Schmitt, who famously said that modern political concepts are all “secularized theological concepts.” Agamben didn’t content himself with the obvious analogies between God and government or sin and crime- rather, he dug deep into arcane theologians and neglected branches of theology, like angelology. In his 2007 work The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben laid out the continuity between the government of heaven and the government of men in Western culture. Agamben claims that, beginning with Aristotle, a split developed in Western conceptions of Divinity between God as the active administrator of the world and God as He is “in Himself,” alone in His Glory. The esoteric concept of the Demiurge reflected the fear that the creator and ruler of this seemingly deeply flawed material realm could not be “the One” that the mystics claimed to have glimpses of. How could the One even be Oneness if it chose particular courses of action over others and ruled over the world of multiplicity and illusion? What started as an arcane philosophical problem in a passage of Aristotle developed into a cornerstone of the many Gnostic mystery cults that sprung up during the decline of the Roman empire. The teachers of these esoteric schools created elaborate mythologies in which the fallen Archons manipulated and deceived the souls trapped in the material realm, who struggle to break free and rejoin the Monad from which all that exists originated. But Agamben says that the divide between the “glory” and the “government” of God wasn’t exclusive to Gnosticism- orthodox Christianity experienced the same discontinuity, although it was never presented as outright spiritual war as the Gnostics did. In fact, it is possible that the main stream of Christianity was so uncomfortable with Gnosticism precisely because it highlighted a contradiction that the orthodox theologians were trying to avoid.
One of the most original researchers of Gnosticism in recent years has been the occult writer Tracy Twyman, who died under suspicious circumstances in 2019 while investigating child sex abuse networks. Twyman’s main contribution to the endless theorizing about Gnosticism is that she managed to say something new about it and present a hitherto unseen picture of the motivations and core beliefs of the Gnostics themselves. Traditionally the Gnostics have been categorized as extreme renouncers of the world, ascetics who took their asceticism along one too many unorthodox turns and lacked the balance of other Christian virtues like humility and forgiveness. Doubtless some of them were suicide cultists who wished to escape from life altogether. But in her book Baphomet: The Temple Mystery Unveiled, Twyman used such disparate sources as Greek mythology and artifacts of the Knights Templar to argue that they were actually revolutionaries trying to overturn the cosmic order. The ostensible purpose of the book is to solve the historical mystery of what the Templars were actually doing and what they believed. She argues that they were (1) a continuation of the Gnostic tradition, and (2) were developing or had developed a magical ritual to tear down the power of the Archons- the rulers of the material realm. The Archons seem to have been identical with the planetary gods (Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) of Indo-European mythologies, as well as the angelic powers of Judaism, particularly in their form as the gatekeepers of holy secrets in the Merkabah mysticism that developed in parallel with the rise of Christianity. In this interpretation, the Demiurge is as much Zeus as Yahweh. Recalling the imagery of the Platonic “Chain of Being,” Twyman puts together evidence of a ritual designed to “pull down the chains” of the planetary powers in order to usher in a new spiritual aeon. In her novel Genuflect, Twyman envisions what kind of magical ritual would be required to effect the overthrow of the Archons- and comes up with a horrifying sequence in which orgies and violence are used to lure down and weaken the Archons who govern these primal forces.
All of these ideas are also tied in with Mithraism, whose god was supposed to have been beyond good and evil, the arbiter of disputes, and the administrator of the transitions between one aeon and the next, moving the great wheel of history along. This god, and its Basilidean Gnostic equivalent Abraxas, was likely an influence on the Templar idol of Baphomet, who seems to have represented the dialectical synthesis of opposites, of good and evil and of male and female. And in a sense, this strand of Gnosticism is itself a dialectical synthesis of an ethereal esotericism with no interest in worldly affairs and a conventional religion that defends the established Powers That Be. It wants to transform the world rather than either withdraw from it or maintain it. It promotes the use of the will, and it is at least theoretically a threat to the very underpinnings of the cosmos- and the angels or archons who govern it.
And here we arrive at the connection with Agamben’s thought. Agamben points out an interesting passage in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, arguably the most proto-Gnostic book of the New Testament. In chapter 15, verse 24, Paul says that at the end “he [God] shall have put down all rule and all authority and power,” which seemingly indicates the angelic hierarchies will somehow lose their governing power, especially given the ambiguous conflation of earthly and heavenly powers in Paul’s letters. Earlier in 1 Corinthians, Paul says that “we [Christians] shall judge angels,” indicating that they too must somehow be held to account in the last days. Agamben relates these passages to the overall antinomian bent of Paul’s work- just as the Law fades away, so do the intermediary powers which enforce it, a concept that recalls Karl Marx’s idea of the “withering away of the state” that comes with the establishment of true communism. The anxiety of the division between the glory and the government of God disappears as the millennial kingdom is ushered into existence, and the Demiurge is at least figuratively reconciled with the true God of Spirit above him. Instead of the magical power-grab of Twyman’s descriptions, a true dialectical synthesis emerges in which the wolf and the lamb feed together in Paradise made anew, and in which the governmental arm of God disappears as His glory simply pervades and transforms everything and everywhere.