What is it about the holiness of God and the angels that makes us aware of our unworthiness? Yet, moderns have easily mistaken and made soft the contours and real nature of angelic beings. C S Lewis in his Screwtape Letters gave a succinct outline of the demise in thought pertaining to angels from the Middle Ages to Modern times, when he wrote:

In the plastic arts these symbols have steadily degenerated. Fra Angelico’s angels carry in their face and gesture the peace and authority of heaven. Later come the chubby infantile nudes of Raphael; finally the soft, slim, girlish and consolatory angels of nineteenth-century art. . . They are a pernicious symbol. In Scripture the visitation of an angel is always alarming; it has to begin by saying “Fear not.” The Victorian angel looks as if it were going to say “There, there.”

The holiness of God is known by the angels whom, like the seraphim, burn fiercely for the love of truth, goodness, order and beauty all of which reflect the glory of God. They love the good and hate what is evil because they love God above all else. Their fiery love reflects their being and their being is hierachical but not according to nature or species, as each angel or spirit is a species unto itself, rather it is a hiearchy of their ontological acts in obedience to the will of God; hence the term angel which means one who is sent and hence their hierarchical order, descending from the highest to the lowest: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominations, virtues, princes, powers, archangels and angels. They fiercely hate anything that besmirches truth, goodness, order and beauty. Yet, we often seek to picture angels according to our own nature and here again we find C S Lewis instructive when he states in the Screwtape Letters:

[A] belief in angels, whether good or evil, does not mean a belief in either as they are represented in art and literature. . . . They are given wings . . . in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy. They are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know. Creatures higher in the natural order than ourselves, either incorporeal or animating bodies of a sort we cannot experience, must be represented symbolically if they are to be represented at all. . . .

When we, who are made in the image of God, encounter the Holy it reveals to us our lack, our lack of holiness, that is founded on our sinfulness, our lack of truth, our lack of goodness, our evil, disorder and ugliness. So, before the Holy we feel the flame of shame, the sting of guilt and that leprous sense of being unworthy as the Holy is like a fire that burns for the purity of truth, goodness, order and beauty and desires it alone to exist in us, as images of God.

Thus, we find that before the Holiness of God, Isaiah declares himself ‘a man of unclean lips who lives among a people of unclean lips.’ After harkening to the instructions of Jesus ‘to go out into deep water and prepare for a catch’, Peter marvels at the great catch of fish and falls before the Lord and says ‘depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man’. And St Paul confesses that because he persecuted the Church he was not worthy to be an Apostle, yet despite all their unworthiness before the Holy, Isaiah was sent as a prophet, Peter was sent to be a fisher of men and St Paul was sent to be an Apostle to the Gentiles. Clearly, love conquers all, especially divine love, as it turns sinners into saints in and through the mission a saint like an angel is sent to do! When we know that God in all his holiness still loves each of us in all our sinfulness then it inspires us to give our all as it did with Isaiah, Peter and Paul. And the angels who stand watching over us, guiding us and defending us are like elves or supernatural beings who want us to give of our best and fight our worst and thereby stand like they did at the dawn of creation when they stood against Lucifer and stood with St Michael for God and his Kingdom.

If at the dawn of physical creation a third of angels rebelled against God, we must always remember two thirds of all the angels stayed faithful to God. So when we in our environment of being which is a being-in-time-and-space we call history, we find ourselves seemingly overwhelmed by the forces of evil in politics, government, judicial and police authorities, health agencies, mass media and global corporations from Big Tech to Big Pharma we need to remember both the numbers of faithful angels and the power of the Cross [which is the sacrament of the Resurrection] that divine Love triumphs and evil eventually consumes itself and consumes its own. In such times as these we may find the contemplation of the true nature of angels helps us to dispel the glamour and seeming power of evil and it’s servants. The glamour of evil would deceive us in thinking that the moral, the good and the just is weak and ineffectual against evil but that is only glamour. Here again C S Lewis comes to our aid when he writes about the appearance of two angelic beings to his hero Ransom in his second Sci-Fi novel, ‘Perelandra’ and its realism is startling:

And suddenly two human figures stood before him. . . . They were perhaps thirty feet high. They were burning white like white hot iron. The outline of their bodies . . . seemed to be faintly, swiftly undulating as though the permanence of their shape, like that of waterfalls or flames, co-existed with a rushing movement of the matter it contained. . . . Whenever he looked straight at them they appeared to be rushing toward him at enormous speed: whenever his eyes took in their surroundings he realized that they were stationary. This may have been due to the fact that their long and sparkling hair stood out behind them as if in a great wind. . . . It was borne in upon him that the creatures were really moving, though not moving in relation to him. This planet . . . was to them a thing moving through the heavens. In relation to their own celestial frame of reference they were rushing forward to keep abreast of the mountain valley. Had they stood still, they would have flashed past him too quickly for him to see, doubly dropped behind by the planet’s spin on its own axis, and by its onward march around the Sun. (198-99)