Book review: From Gabriel to Lucifer, by Valery Rees
Valery Rees' new book aims to make sense of the dimension between heaven and earth, and to explain why so many people, for so long, have populated it with entire hosts of messengers.
From Gabriel to Lucifer: A Cultural History of Angels
by Valery Rees
IB Tauris
In pursuit of that goal, Rees flits across space and time with an aptly angelic facility. Ranging from ancient Sumeria to the novels of Philip Pullman, and from medieval scholasticism to Jungian theory, the breadth of her learning is formidable. We are given accounts of cherubim and seraphim that read almost like the reports of a field anthropologist, detailed biographies of the archangels, and a rich seam of angelological trivia.
The next time you are at a carol concert and want to impress someone, try following up a rendition of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing by revealing that the 15th-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino thought there were 399,920,004 angels in all, that the Koran features angels with three wings, and that Pius XII claimed to have seen St Peter's Square thronged with the guardian angels of the faithful gathered below him.
Yet, ultimately, the sheer extent of Rees' research overwhelms her. Perhaps the risk of this happening was inherent in the subject. Angels, after all, are notoriously hard to pin down. Rees writes as an eminent scholar of the Renaissance, but part of her, she acknowledges in her epilogue, wants to believe in the literal truth of the angelic realm. As a result, the parameters of her investigation are constantly shifting. Sometimes angels are described as though they possess an objective reality; sometimes as though they are expressions of the subconscious; sometimes as though they are theological constructs.
What Rees does not do, but surely would have profited from doing, is to treat angels as a phenomenon of cultural evolution. Whether real or not, it is certain that different peoples at different times have had very different understandings of them - and that these various differences have often had a dramatic impact on history.