The consequences were enormous. In order to attain this innocence, they had to relinquish everything about themselves that was capable of inspiring awe and admiration, and even though their own self-respect would disappear with it, they were all willing to make the sacrifice. For in the spring of 1606 they swarmed into the world of human beings. Hoards of cherubim spread out across the whole of the southern and western parts of Europe. Small, chubby, naked boy children with white wings gradually appeared wherever there were concentrations of people. For a long time they must have noticed the position children occupied, what tenderness and joy enveloped them, how spoiled and voluptuous they were, what hope people invested in them. And for the first few years it seemed to have been a happy choice. The cherubim also aroused joy and tenderness wherever they showed themselves. They could do pretty well as they liked, for people viewed them as the sign of God’s unqualified love for mankind. In the paintings of this period they can be seen filling entire meadows with their games and songs and reveling. Their hunger was just as rapacious, but no longer seemed threatening to human beings, on the contrary, it was often depicted as comic. Rubens, for example, shows how the mismatch between the angels’ divine status and their sensual behavior tends, again and again, toward the farcical. The tubby little infantile figures fight each other until the feathers fly, they lie lounging in the grass with bunches of grapes in their hands and gorge while the juice runs down their chins, they stare at one another with desire or hate in their looks, candid as only children or animals can be. At some point a new attitude to angels, that regarded them as inferior human beings because they lacked human seriousness and dignity, must have displaced their divine status entirely. For what did their divine status actually consist of? Where precisely was it? In the past, the glorious past. And because seventeenth-century man began to regard himself and his own notions as truer and more important than those of the previous age, the angels’ past lost ever more of its force, in an almost wildly escalating process: toward the end of the century there were no longer any theologians or philosophers who could be bothered to write dissertations about them, and even though they were occasionally still depicted by the well-known painters of the time, their status diminished even there, until at last they became mere motifs for artists who were mediocre or downright poor, and finally their soft presence became seen as a sign of poor taste. The angels were no longer the most beautiful beings imaginable, but had, in an astonishingly short time, become nearly the opposite: the most vulgar. The Italian count and libertine Scarlatti relates in one of his letters how the servants on an estate where he was a guest were sent out during dinner to chase away three cherubs who had sought shelter under the roof beams of the ballroom. With brooms and torches and loud shouts they were chased from room to room, until at last they gave up and flew out into the dark rainy October night. They’d been there for several weeks, Scarlatti was informed. On the first night they’d got into the larder, which the next morning had been full of half-eaten cuts of meat, ruined dishes, broken platters, and feathers. When the door to that had been bolted, and the windows kept closed, they were several times observed at the animal troughs. This must have made them desperate, because not long after they made several attempts to get into the main building in broad daylight. When that didn’t work, they went down to the village, where, Scarlatti was told, they’d remained until the evening he saw them himself. Alone among the guests he found the interlude interesting and followed the servants as they chased them out. They constantly made small squeaks, he wrote, not unlike the cackling noises of magpies, but what he found really noteworthy was in their eyes. It was as if they had two souls, he wrote. When they looked at each other, which they did unceasingly, their expressions were sometimes frightened, sometime angry, sometimes despairing. When they looked at their surroundings, it was as if all emotion left the eyes. Something strangely neutral descended on them. When they stared down at the servants below them, their eyes were quite empty. Not apathetic, not cold, not unaffected, just empty.
Of course it wasn’t just from this mansion that the angels were banished. The same thing happened everywhere that human beings lived. Doors were locked, windows shut. They weren’t even welcome in the churches anymore, people were fed up with their mess there as well, and by the start of the eighteenth century almost all the angels were surviving on what they could scavenge of garbage and remains in back streets and alleys. Soon they were even more unwelcome than they’d feared they would be in their old guise. Things were bad, very bad. They weren’t happy, especially because they must surely have been able to remember how things had once been, when they were divine. But it was soon to get even worse. No matter how strongly earthly things had gotten hold of them before, there had always been a distance between them and the earth they walked on. Desire, savagery, fury, hunger were all facets that had always been there within them. Even though terrestrial things tore at and embroiled them, they never altered them, they only reinforced characteristics they already had. But when they turned themselves into childlike creatures, they also moved toward the boundary of the earthly, too far toward it as it was to prove, for in that form earthly things got a hold over them, they got caught up, or were hurled into earthly things, the distance was removed, and the laws that apply to the terrestrial suddenly also applied to them. It was what Scarlatti had seen and so succinctly described: they had two souls. One that was driving them ever deeper into earthly life, and one that resisted, perhaps remembering who they were and where they’d come from. Naturally it’s impossible to say how much they understood of what was happening to them. But they must have noticed it. The alterations to their physiognomy were extensive, and happened quickly. They got smaller, their legs became thinner, and the feathers, which previously had only covered their wings, began to sprout on other parts of their bodies.
That was a time of despair for them. For although their minds had become more and more depraved, they still had remembered glimpses of what they’d once been. Then shrilly they wailed out their woes. Roosting under a roof they would sit plucking out feathers until their gnawing hunger grew so great that they couldn’t think about anything else and had to take to the wing once more and fly off looking for rubbish to satisfy it. Over the course of the next century their noses and mouths grew together into hard, bony beaks; those eyes, formerly so sensitive, lost all their powers of expression, until at last they possessed only one, a stiff and fixed stare straight ahead, no matter what was happening or how their bodies were moving; their toes turned into claws, while their arms and hands shrunk and finally hung there just beneath their wings, tiny and unusable, concealed by a thick down of feathers, but still intact, and ultimately the only remaining physiological link with their once proud past. After a few generations the human mind separated the memory of the angels and these creatures. By the end of the eighteenth century there was no connection between the angels as they were described in the Bible and in medieval manuscripts and angels as they appeared at the time, so fatally birdlike as they were in both character and appearance. They’d lost the competition for the town’s garbage to other birds and small animals, so they were driven away from there as well, out to the coast, where they gradually made a niche for themselves, and not only survived as a species but also became a biological success.