We’d now be living in a different world.
We know that Antinous Bellori owned a copy of Bernard de Clairvaux’s De Consideratione, which told him, among other things, that angels are powerful, radiant, blessed, individual personalities of various ranks, which occupy that place they were accorded at the beginning of time, perfect in their kind, immortal, without feelings, of pure spirit, inseparably one in heart and mind, blessed with everlasting peace. ., while in Summa Theologica, which he also possessed, of course, he could study Thomas’s hairsplitting definitions of the angels’ form, characteristics, and knowledge. Thomas describes them as spirit without body, and then with some incredibly complex reasoning explains that they nevertheless take up room in time as well as space. Angels can remove themselves from one place to another without any expenditure of time, he writes, but this doesn’t mean that they defy or suspend time, only that their movements aren’t circumscribed by the laws of the universe. Furthermore he maintains that understanding is one with their existence, in other words, that they are understanding in pure form, a kind of perfect intellect, bereft of emotions, imagination, or senses. So angels know the world only as a concept, in its essence, as it exists (and always has existed) in God’s word. They don’t know material reality, each other, God, or themselves. The latter he justifies as follows: The intellect is moved by the comprehensible, because to comprehend is a kind of reception, as stated in The Soul 3:4. But nothing is moved by, or received from itself, as can be seen from corporeal things. Therefore the angel cannot understand itself.
In principle, Thomas of Aquinas’s notions about angels might be correct. Nothing of what he attributes to them was unthinkable. The problem was simply that the opposite wasn’t unthinkable either. How could anyone really know that that was just the way things were? None of the claims concerning angels in Summa Theologica is supported by examples, not one of the angels’ many and well-documented manifestations is mentioned, either from biblical or postbiblical times, so what is Thomas’s real basis when with such brilliance and detail he enumerates their various attributes?
Antinous Bellori had seen angels with his own eyes. Their characteristics on that occasion had so obviously been different from those the Church ascribed to them that only three conclusions were possible. The first was that he was mistaken and had not seen what he’d seen, or had not understood it correctly. The second was that the Church was mistaken. And the third was that the angels had altered since the time the dogma about them had been conceived. To maintain that the Church was wrong in so decisive a question would be heresy. To claim that the angels must have altered would also be heresy, but of a more serious kind, as it went against the fundamental concept of the divine order.
On the Nature of Angels consists of three parts. The first contains a catalog of all 189 angelic manifestations in the Bible, and the second discusses what conclusions can be drawn about the angels from these. The third, which initially looks at angels’ non-Biblical appearances, ends in a discussion about the question that is the work’s main theme: Can the nature of the divine undergo change?
Bellori’s ambition was to chart the angels’ appearance and characteristics with the same care and precision with which anatomists mapped the blood system, astronomers the constellations, and cartographers the coastlines of continents. The catalog formed his basic material, and it was thanks to this that he did not lose himself in the desert of speculation where most others who had written about angels before and after him had ended up. Bellori’s angels aren’t the figments of a fevered mind, they are concrete creatures with a history closely linked to that of humans over several thousand years. At the same time the catalog also reveals a problem. Rather than pinning down the angels and thus establishing a firm foundation for the discussions that follow, as Bellori must have intended, it makes apparent right from the outset the complexity, changeability, and consistent nebulousness of their presence in the world. Almost nowhere in scripture are we able to see angels as they really are, in their own right. Almost every one of their appearances is linked to an action and is always, therefore, woven into a specific context. And how can one sort out what is part of the angel from what is part of the context in which it operates? This is a recurring problem in On the Nature of Angels, in which attention is always being focused on the dynamic between that which changes and that which is immutable, honing in on the peripheral parts of the text in a belief that the small irregularities and aberrations found there will throw a different light on the angels’ substance than a bland illumination of the celestial. Bellori moved step-by-step closer to the conclusion he’s now famous for, which went against all current concepts of the nature of the divine. It is not the divine that is immutable and the human that is changeable, he wrote. The opposite is true and is the real theme of the Bible: the alteration in the divine from the creation to the death of Christ.
The first time angels appear in human history is in the story of the fall of man. When human beings ate from the tree of knowledge, the Lord drove them out of the Garden of Eden, and to prevent them from returning and helping themselves to the fruit of the equally desirable tree of life, he set the cherubim to guard the way to it: He cast him out, run the Bible’s exact words, and to the east of the garden of Eden he stationed the cherubim and a sword whirling and flashing to guard the way to the tree of life.
This is all it says. Not a word about who they were, where they came from, or what they looked like. Just a name, cherubim; a weapon, the flashing sword whirling round; and a task, the guarding of the tree of life. But even though we can’t say anything about their origins or appearance from this passage, it is nevertheless invaluable as a source for understanding their nature, Bellori writes, as the context it places them in is so unambiguous. Because they guard the tree of life, they are following God’s will, to which they are therefore subject. At the same time because of their role as guards, they are set above man’s will, which they are there to curb. In other words, the cherubim stand somewhere between God and man. And if one looks more closely at the Lord’s words when he drove man out of the Garden of Eden, it is clear that they’re considerably closer to the former than the latter. The man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, were God’s words. He could have said “like me” if that was what he meant, but he didn’t, he said “one of us” — and who else but the cherubim could that have referred to? No matter which way one looks at the text, one can see only three active parties there: the fallen human beings, God and the cherubim. As man stands in direct opposition to “us” in this context, it can hardly be anyone other than the cherubim he was referring to. This means, firstly, that the cherubim were similar enough to God for him to include them in the same expression as himself, secondly, that they knew the difference between good and evil and thus were in possession of free will. As Bellori saw it, this more than indicated that the cherubim also had eternal life. It’s hard to imagine God including a mortal creature in a description of himself, and even if he had done so, it is certainly unthinkable that he would have allowed this mortal creature, also in possession of free will, to guard the way to the tree of life after the fall of man.