The Divine Universe

You may not believe in fairies, but you may be interested to know that angels are an important element in Christian tradition. They are also part of our day-to-day speech. The most famous of all the angels is probably Gabriel, the angel of the Christmas story, or rather the prologue to it. Set in the context of serious historical research, Luke’s Gabriel marks a watershed point in our understanding of angels. And Luke makes it clear in his introduction to Theophilus that he is writing about real events. Jesus was a real person, not a hero from Greek mythology. But what was Gabriel?

Let me remind you of the situation in which Gabriel’s role was so central. It was a bit involved. It seems that it was generally known that Jesus was conceived out of wedlock. Joseph was not his real father. This presented a serious problem for those trying to convince people that he was the Messiah or Christ, God’s anointed representative and vicegerent.

The only person to provide a complete answer to this difficulty was the Macedonian gentile Luke; one of Paul’s early converts. The angel Gabriel is a central figure in his explanation. To a modern reader this may suggest that this episode is intended as an allegory, such as might be written by C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien - edifying fiction. It is not that, But for us modern Europeans to understand Gabriel and angels in general, we need to understand Luke.

Luke and Paul were kindred souls, intelligent and cultivated. They were interested in each other’s cultural backgrounds, especially since they now had a deep common bond in Christ. Luke, hardly less than Paul, wanted to share his newly discovered faith. His natural inclination was to reach out to people like himself, classically educated, critical thinking seekers after truth. Theophilus, god-lover, may have been an individual but, more likely, Luke used the name to attract any literate gentile, interested in religion and spirituality but sceptical about the popular Hellenistic gods.

So Luke gathered all the information he could about Jesus and wrote an account of his life, death and resurrection that is unique because it is the only account written by a gentile. The accounts Luke discovered were all by Jewish writers or oral traditions of Jewish origin. Christianity was a Jewish religion. To an educated gentile it might be interesting but it was essentially foreign.

Luke aimed to bridge that gap, and that is important for us because our modern European culture owes more to Classical than to Jewish ways of thinking. Luke’s treatise draws on both Jewish and Greco-Roman tradition, seamlessly combining both. It presents a heroic characterisation of Jesus after the Classical pattern, but the content is as Jewish as it is historical.

Miraculous births and angelic visitors are part of Jewish tradition. Samson’s birth to Manoah’s barren wife, Sarai’s conception of Isaac at the age of ninety-nine, Hagar’s angelic visitor to tell her the name of her firstborn, Ishmael, and promising her abundant fertility, Samuel’s birth to barren Hannah as the result of prayer; these were part of Jewish Scripture. Conception through a conjugal relationship between a god and a human is a common feature of Greek myth, but alien to Jewish thinking, as is the notion of a god-man, yet Luke’s account of Jesus’ conception implies just that.

In so analysing Luke’s story, I am not saying that it is purely fictitious. As he tells Theophilus at the beginning of his treatise, Luke intended to write an exact account of events, albeit relying entirely on the witness of others. It is possible that Mary herself confided this story to Luke; it cannot have come from anyone else. Perhaps Mary told Luke of a tremendous mystical experience that she could not precisely describe, and Luke, a skilled writer, translated it into language that combined elements from both Jewish and Greek religious tradition, and that his intended readers would understand. The God who is Mary’s partner in this unique conjugal union is not one of the gods of Olympus; he is the one true and living God, the source of all things. God did not only sire a baby boy; according to Genesis he sired the whole universe.

For an educated person all this is implicit in Luke’s account. However mythical its style, Theophilus would be challenged. Myth, even for Theophilus, was not for entertainment; it was a vehicle of profound and sublime truths. In this case it was the truth of Mary’s essential innocence and purity, regardless of anything that may have befallen her. Of this Luke was undoubtedly fully convinced, as are all Christians.

Do angels, then, have a real place in our understanding of human affairs and history? Luke, like most Christians, was quite at home with them. Tradition holds that he was a physician, but that does not mean that he was a narrow-minded scientist, admitting the reality only of matter. He was deeply aware of the spiritual dimension of reality, including the idea of spiritual messengers. Spiritual truths are not simply products of our own creative imagination; they are mediated to us by some ‘other’. The Greeks spoke of the muses; Jewish legend spoke of angels. Luke did not see myths as we see Superman or Luke Skywalker, for entertainment only. He knew nothing of anything called a fairy story. Angels represented an element of non-material reality for which we use abstract, psychological terms. Christian theology is not all abstractions; it contains a rich mythology too.

In common discourse we also find angels useful symbols. Guardian angels reflect our capacity for self-preservation, both instinctive and learned, and most often unconscious. Reference to “angelic choirs” reflects our belief that music possesses a non-material power, beyond and quite different from its physical impact as sound. “You are an angel” means that someone has brought you a drink when you were exhausted after your work – a messenger of divine compassion! “Entertaining angels unawares” refers to some morally challenging encounter. In these examples, the context is ordinary daily life, not fairy stories. What they refer to is real, though not tangible. None of these examples are used with religious solemnity, but they are not less meaningful for that.