Angel

• 1. Introduction

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  Angels appear in the oldest surviving script humanity ever wrote. The word itself traces back to Mycenaean Greek, preserved in Linear B syllabic writing, making the concept older than most of the world's major religions as we know them today. That ancient term meant simply "messenger" - and yet the beings it describes have accumulated an astonishing range of roles, disputes, and reinventions across thousands of years of human thought.

  Who counts as an angel? What do they actually look like, and why do the answers differ so radically depending on which tradition you consult? Why did some of the most rigorous philosophical minds in history spend enormous energy arguing over whether angels have bodies, whether they can sin, and whether they outrank human beings? This documentary explores how a simple word for "messenger" became one of the most complex and contested concepts in the history of religion, philosophy, and art.

• 2. A Word's Long Journey

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  Modern English inherited the word "angel" through two channels simultaneously: Old English engel, pronounced with a hard g, and Old French angele. Both arrived from Late Latin angelus, which itself came from Late Greek angelos. Dutch linguist R. S. P. Beekes suggested that angelos may have been borrowed from an oriental source, comparing it to the Greek word angaros, meaning a Persian mounted courier.

  The Greek Septuagint used angelos as its standard translation for the Hebrew term mal'akh, which carried no supernatural connotation on its own - it simply meant "messenger". A human prophet or priest could be called a mal'akh. The Book of Malachi takes its name from precisely this root; the Greek Septuagint superscription describes it as written "by the hand of his messenger."

  Latin translators faced a practical problem: the same Hebrew word covered both ordinary human envoys and extraordinary heavenly visitors. Their solution was to split the vocabulary. When the text implied a human messenger, they used nuntius or legatus. When a supernatural being was meant, they wrote angelus. That editorial distinction, made by translators centuries before the medieval Church existed, quietly shaped how every subsequent generation in the Western world would conceptualize the difference between the human and the divine.

• 3. From Polytheism to Messenger

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  Prominent angels such as Michael and Gabriel reflect a historical connection to El, the chief deity of the Semitic religious world from which monotheism emerged. This connection reveals something important: angels were not invented from nothing. They evolved from an earlier category of supernatural beings.

  In polytheistic and animistic worldviews, different supernatural powers were assigned to different natural phenomena - deities, spirits, and daemons all had their domains. When monotheism consolidated these powers under a single supreme God, those autonomous supernatural beings were reclassified as servants. The gods of neighboring peoples became the angels and demons of Israelite religion.

  Early Hebrew scripture shows no concept of angels as supernatural agents at all. The Hebrew deity intervenes directly in human affairs, mostly through punishment. Only in the post-exilic and prophetic writings does the Biblical God become more distant and merciful, with angels taking over the work of intervention. Even then, these angels were not simply benevolent beings. They still carried out what the source describes as "the gruesome attributes of God" and could be either helpful or terrible.

  The idea of angels as embodiments of goodness specifically - beings defined by benevolence - emerged only under the influence of Zoroastrianism. That Persian tradition conceived of a universe divided between a principle of good, Ahura Mazda, and a principle of evil, with hosts of holy entities on one side and demons on the other. That dualistic framework traveled westward and transformed how Jews and later Christians imagined the moral landscape of heaven.

• 4. Hierarchies and Named Powers

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  Daniel is the first biblical book to refer to individual angels by name. Gabriel appears in Daniel 9:21 and Michael in Daniel 10:13, both as part of apocalyptic visions. Before this, angels in Hebrew scripture were anonymous messengers, protectors, and accusers. Bill Rebiger highlighted the rabbinical tradition preserved in Yerushalmi Rosh Hashanah 56d, which notes that angel names were not used in early texts like Isaiah but appear later, suggesting the names "came up with them from Babylon."

  Rabbinic Judaism, which became the orthodox form of Judaism from the 6th century CE onward following the codification of the Babylonian Talmud, developed a rich and sometimes paradoxical view of angels. They were created from fire, eternal, and incapable of sin - yet this very perfection made them inferior to humans. The Babylonian Talmud states: "The Torah was not given to ministering angels." Humans, capable of failing and choosing to resist evil impulses through teshuva, were considered more deserving of God's love than the flawless angels who had no choice in the matter.

  The four-camp arrangement recorded in Jewish sources assigned Michael to God's right, Gabriel to the left, Uriel before, and Raphael behind, with the divine presence at the center. No systematic hierarchy was ever formally codified in Judaism, though certain figures accumulated particular significance. Metatron, considered one of the highest angels in Merkabah and Kabbalah mysticism, served as a scribe and appears prominently in mystical texts despite only a brief mention in the Talmud itself.

  Kabbalah as described by the Golden Dawn organized ten archangels, each commanding a choir of angels and corresponding to one of the Sephirot. Metatron led the Hayot Ha Kodesh at the crown, while Sandalphon presided over the Ishim at the base. This elaborate architecture of heavenly administration reflects centuries of mystical speculation layered on top of the relatively sparse original texts.

• 5. Christian Theology's Long Argument

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  By the late 4th century, the Church Fathers had agreed that different categories of angels existed with distinct missions. What they could not agree on was whether angels had physical bodies. Some theologians maintained they were purely spiritual; others insisted on some form of physicality. Augustine of Hippo proposed a linguistic resolution: the word "angel" describes not what these beings are but what they do. "If you seek the name of their nature, it is 'spirit'," he wrote; "if you seek the name of their office, it is 'angel'." Gregory of Nazianzus described them as made of spirits and flames of fire, following the letter to the Hebrews.

  The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 declared formally that angels were created beings and that humans were created after them. The First Vatican Council in 1869 repeated this position in Dei Filius.

  Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century brought the full weight of Aristotelian metaphysics to the question. In the Summa Theologica, Summa contra Gentiles, and several other works, he argued that angels were created instantaneously by God in the Empyrean Heaven in a state of grace. Unlike humans, they acquired all the knowledge they would ever receive at the moment of their creation. They grasp truth at a single glance, without reasoning through it step by step. They know everything happening in the external world and the totality of creatures - but they cannot read human secret thoughts that depend on free will, and they do not know the future unless God reveals it.

  Aquinas departed from Augustine on two significant points. Angels were not created in an initial state of bliss, and only those angels who have been beatified possess what he called "morning knowledge" - direct access to the Word of God. This distinction between morning and evening knowledge, borrowed from Augustine's De Genesi ad litteram and reworked, became what Aquinas considered his most original contribution to Christian angelology.

  Ellen Muehlberger has argued that in Late Antiquity, angels were conceived as one type of being among many, primarily concerned with guarding and guiding Christians - a more modest role than the grand cosmic figures of later theology. Pope John Paul II addressed the topic in 1986 in a statement titled "Angels Participate in History of Salvation", calling on modern thinking to recognize their importance.

• 6. Islam's Living Theology

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  Belief in angels is one of the Six Articles of Faith in Islam, making it a doctrinal requirement rather than a matter of optional spirituality. The Quranic word for angel, Malak, derives either from a root meaning "he controlled" - reflecting their power over different affairs - or from a root meaning "messenger," parallel to the Hebrew and Greek terms. Unlike its Hebrew counterpart, the Arabic term is used exclusively for heavenly beings, never for human envoys.

  Most Muslim theologians, including al-Suyuti, drawing on a hadith, depicted angels as entities composed of light or fire - a substantive, if non-physical, existence, contrasting with philosophers who argued for purely disembodied spirits. Angels were understood to be endowed with reason and subject to God's tests. Al-Maturidi, writing between 853 and 944 CE, stated that the inhabitants of heaven were tested by adornments, just as humans and jinn were tested on earth. When angels fail their tests, the tradition holds that they may end up on earth - a fate associated with the figures Harut and Marut.

  Angels play a notable role in Mi'raj literature, describing Muhammad's journey through the heavens where he encounters multiple angelic beings. They also appear in Islamic eschatology and philosophy and are invoked in exorcism rites, with their names engraved in talismans and amulets.

  The Quran describes angels as messengers with two, three, or four wings, and the 13th-century text Aja'ib al-makhluqat wa ghara'ib al-mawjudat - The Wonders of Creation by Zakariya al-Qazwini - provided detailed Islamic angelology often accompanied by vivid illustrations. An undated manuscript of this text held in the Bavarian State Library in Munich depicts angels alongside humans and animals. Islamic theologian al-Ghazali, writing around 1058 to 1111, reconciled the literal existence of angels with Avicennan philosophy by identifying them with celestial intellects, without denying their literal reality.

  In more recent centuries, Salafist and Wahhabi scholars have pushed back against both modernistic reinterpretations and what they see as excess traditional material. Muslim Brotherhood scholars Sayyid Qutb and Umar Sulaiman Al-Ashqar rejected established accounts from earlier periods, including the story of Harut and Marut, and dismissed earlier scholars who had relied on such reports.

• 7. Wings, Halos, and Uniforms

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  No angel in the Bible is actually described as having wings. Cherubim and seraphim have wings in scripture, but angels specifically do not. John Chrysostom addressed this gap directly: wings in representations of angels indicate not anatomy but nature. They signal that these beings descend from heights to approach human existence. The wings convey sublimity, not anatomy.

  The earliest known Christian image of an angel, found in the Cubicolo dell'Annunziazione in the Catacomb of Priscilla from the mid-3rd century, shows a wingless figure. Sarcophagi, lamps, and reliquaries from the same period also depict wingless angels. The first representation of a winged angel appears on the so-called Prince's Sarcophagus, attributed to the time of Emperor Theodosius I (379-395 CE) and discovered at Sarigüzel near Istanbul in the 1930s. Wings became standard from that point. The cycle of mosaics in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, dated 432 to 440 CE, shows them throughout.

  The four- and six-winged angels drawn from the higher grades of cherubim and seraphim - often showing only faces and wings - derived from Persian art and were typically reserved for heavenly scenes rather than earthly tasks, appearing in the pendentives of church domes.

  Beyond wings, the Archangel Michael and other warrior angels came to be depicted in Late Antique military dress: a tunic to the knees, an armored breastplate, and pteruges. The most elaborate version was the uniform of the Byzantine Emperor's personal bodyguard - a long tunic with the loros, the gold and jeweled garment restricted to the Imperial family and their closest protectors. Eastern Orthodox icons maintained this military dress through to the present day, while Western art continued it into the Baroque period. Other angels were depicted in the vestments of a deacon, a cope over a dalmatic - most notably Gabriel in Annunciation scenes, as in the Annunciation in Washington painted by Jan van Eyck.

  Mormon art takes a different path entirely. Based on a statement by Joseph Smith that "an angel of God never has wings," angels in Mormon artistic tradition are shown without them.

• 8. Philosophers and the Rational Angel

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  Thomas Hobbes declared angels to be "accidences of the brain" with no external reality - a stark dismissal that placed him among the materialist thinkers who removed angels from serious philosophical consideration. Immanuel Kant's critique of knowledge further reduced the rational justification for their existence. But before that modern skepticism arrived, angels had served as some of philosophy's most productive thought experiments.

  Henry of Ghent, writing around 1217 to 1293, argued in the debate over angelic moral choice that evil volition must precede mistaken consideration. Bad choices come from bad will, not bad reasoning. Aquinas, following an intellectualist approach and living from around 1225 to 1274, argued the opposite: the mind cannot hold all thoughts simultaneously. An angel who fails to focus on the highest good commits evil not through corrupt will but through misdirected attention. These two positions - voluntarism versus intellectualism - mapped onto deep disagreements about the nature of human moral agency as well.

  Muslim theologian Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, who lived from 1149 or 1150 to 1209, used the debate over whether angels or prophets are more noble as a vehicle for constructing a virtue ethics. His earlier voluntarist position gave way to a later argument for the superiority of angels: they are perfect in power and knowledge, with no physical limitations to obstruct moral excellence. Humans, burdened by bodies and their attendant weaknesses, cannot achieve the same moral perfection, regardless of effort. This placed al-Razi in opposition to the more consequentialist ethics common among his contemporaries.

  Maimonides, drawing on neo-Aristotelian philosophy, proposed that what the Bible and Talmud call angels are allusions to the laws of nature themselves - the principles by which the physical universe operates. In the Guide for the Perplexed, he wrote: "For all forces are angels!" He argued that a reader who accepts a story of an angel physically entering a womb but rejects the idea that God placed formative power within sperm has the entire matter backwards. Ibn Sina developed an angelological hierarchy of Intellects, in which the first creation by God is a supreme intellect, from which intermediary spirits emanate in sequence, ultimately animating matter and illuminating the human mind.