This is an extraordinary tale, and the angels’ role in it is not easy to grasp. Traditionally angels are the link between the divine and the human, at once messengers and the message itself. The message carried by the angel that appeared to Mary about her being with child is also the thing that makes her conceive. The angels are action and meaning in one. Everything they do has to be interpreted. That is why their actions are normally so large and obvious, like the gestures of actors on a stage, which again are made with the distance of the audience in mind, and for this reason the angels’ behavior toward Lot seems so strange. Isn’t he too small for them? Aren’t they too close to him? Yes, one might say, but couldn’t that be the whole point? That, in doing it, they want to elevate this small, upright, and considerate man, as well as justify the terrible things that follow: the only pure person is spared, everyone else is impure and deserves to be punished. And that’s certainly true, seen from our perspective. But it must seem different to the angels. What we may think of them means nothing. They don’t belong here, just as they don’t belong in heaven; transition between the two is their element. Compassion is alien to them, they are indifferent to us and all our affairs, thus the semblance of cruelty that angels often exude.
But they showed consideration and feeling as far as Lot was concerned.
What could have been its cause?
I believe the explanation is simple. Angels can, as is well-known, assume any shape. But what is less well-known is that the shape they assume contains an element of danger for them, as well. If they inhabit it for too long, it will begin to affect them, and finally, if they haven’t heeded the warning signs, it will take them over entirely. In Sodom they appeared as human beings. Clearly the idea was to go through the city, separate sinners from nonsinners, and then raze it. But Lot’s intervention disturbed this chain of events. Initially they said no to his invitation, but then they must have thought: Why not? A morsel to eat and a short rest can’t do any harm. Once they’d entered his house, they had to sit there and wait for the bread to bake, angelic still in their silence, dignity, and coolness, but slowly taking stock of their surroundings and noting everything that never usually impinges on an angel’s consciousness, so that, by the time the meal was over, they had been fatally caught up in Lot’s trivial existence. This frail man suddenly meant something to them, and the impulses that governed their actions became more attuned to him than to the task they had been sent to accomplish. This may explain the fury with which Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. As soon as Lot was out of sight, they came to themselves again, understood how weak they’d been, and took it out on the two cities. For they didn’t just destroy all the houses and inhabitants, but also the entire plain and everything that grew in the fields; and they turned Lot’s wife, who was unable to relinquish the past, not even the evil parts of it, into a pillar of salt.
A modern reader of the Bible is struck by how strong the connection between this world and the next once was. It can almost seem as if God was genuinely concerned about mankind. It took very little to get him to show himself and talk to men, or send one of his angels down to Earth to do his bidding. But these constant interventions never led to any permanent improvement. On the contrary, everything always reverted to its old ways. It seems as if all goodness and justness is the result of gargantuan efforts, which must constantly be repeated, in a continual maintenance that no human being is strong enough to manage. Even Lot, the angels’ unlikely favorite, succumbed in the end. After fleeing from Sodom, he settled in the mountains above Zoar with his two daughters. Still too fearful to chance living in the city, they dwelled in a cave, and there he got both of them pregnant. True, they were living alone in the mountains after an apocalyptic event, and may have been bewildered enough to believe that they were the last people on earth, and certainly the insemination took place at the instigation of the daughters, who plied him with wine before going to bed with him, but Lot must still have been well aware of the mark he was overstepping. He wanted his daughters, and he had them. For lustful thoughts may form such a tangled web above the sky of consciousness that not a single ray of light can penetrate to the soul, whose damp and dingy seat excludes all life-forms except the very lowest; moss and fungus, beetles and maggots, and a slimy snail or two blindly creeping about the mire. And who can be expected to do right under such conditions? For a time, perhaps, you’ll manage to keep it open a chink; righteous and enlightened as you still are, but sooner or later you’ll sleep, and when you awaken, you’ll be surrounded by darkness once again. If you have the strength, you’ll fight on, if you haven’t, you’ll give up. The human soul is a clearing in a forest, and for the divinely pure and untarnished it must be impossible to understand why it’s forever getting choked with growth. This is the struggle the Bible speaks of; the darkness that descends again and again on person after person, generation after generation, century after century, until the despair is unendurable, and the story ends in the description of the insane, apocalyptic fury that was revealed to John on Patmos: So the four angels were released, who had been held ready for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, to kill a third of mankind. They decapitate, burn, become a living torture, and from the bottomless pit they release swarms of poisonous locust-scorpions, which harm no grass or bush or tree, but only the people who haven’t the seal of God on their foreheads. Stars fall down to earth, the sun is darkened, forests burn in great firestorms, the seas turn to blood. A huge army is sent out numbering twice ten thousand times ten thousand, and they must have been an impressive sight for John, riding on horses with lions’ heads and clad in breastplates the color of fire and sapphire and sulfur. His descriptions are so detailed that there is no reason to doubt that he has seen what he’s describing, and yet there is something that grates, because since his vision in that cave on Patmos, things have happened to make the scenario he described impossible. The world will be destroyed, but not in that way. The angels have lost all the power they once had, and if they went to war with us now, we wouldn’t find it hard to crush them. At that time they probably did have plans to destroy everything, and it might have happened, too, if something hadn’t gone terribly wrong for them, so there is no need to lambaste John; he acted in good faith, and the fury he witnessed was at least authentic.
What the angels didn’t foresee was what a success Christianity would turn out to be. At the time they revealed the apocalypse to John, Christianity was still just a small, insignificant minority religion, something like our UFO sects, and as Christians were greeted with universal suspicion, and then persecuted, tortured, and killed, no one expected them to survive. When Christianity suddenly began to spread across the world in the first centuries after the death of Christ, the angels were completely unprepared. Soul after soul in country after country was saved. And all of them extolled the angels. Poetry was written about them, pictures were painted, theses written, stories told. By the time we get to the Middle Ages, angels were part of the common consciousness. They caused conditions resembling hysteria when they revealed themselves, because their proximity proclaimed those who’d been selected to carry out God’s will, perhaps to give away their wealth and dedicate their lives to the poor, as in the case of Francis of Assisi, or lead the French army into battle against the English like Joan of Arc, or just flog themselves until the blood ran as the many flagellants did. Bodies were racked with convulsions, fell into deep trances, spoke in strange tongues, exhibited sudden wounds. The angels themselves stood aloof from this monstrous physicalization of God’s word, but must have been fascinated by the way their mere presence could induce a phenomenon that was so utterly foreign to them. Fair, beautiful, and pure as they were, they must have felt a growing intoxication about the adoration they received. In any case they appeared more and more often, and gradually became the objects of another, and no less intense, kind of worship, in the welter of learned tracts and theses about angels that were written in the medieval period, tabulating, systematizing, and classifying all their various manifest forms in a kind of angelic taxonomy, complete with kinships, species, and subspecies. The Swedish theologian Lönnroth from Uppsala distinguished, for example, between material and immaterial, visible and invisible, immutable and mutable, with and without free will; in his On the Heavenly and Ecclesiastical Hierarchies, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite argued that there were nine classes of angel, while Gregorius Tholosanus believed that the number was seven, in keeping with the seven planets, and that the virtuous could be found above the moon and the evil beneath it. Johannes Durandus discussed whether angels had memory, or if their consciousness occupied an eternal present. Were they pure form (creatura rationalis et spiritualis)? Or were they, like human beings, both form and substance (creatura corporalis et rationalis)? Bodine and David Crusius maintained in Theatrum naturae and Hermetica philosophia, respectively, that they were fully and entirely corporeal. Bodine put forward the odd notion that they must be as round as balls, because this is the most perfect of all shapes, while Bochard went as far as to claim that they were actually mortal, took sustenance, and had bowel movements.