Angels in Late Ancient Christianity by Ellen Muehlberger (review)

It likely comes as little surprise that angels were important to late ancient Christians. What is surprising is how little scholarly attention has been given to the question. Hence, until the publication of Ellen Muehlberger’s excellent book on the subject, it has been difficult to assess just how important angels were in the fourth through sixth centuries ce and in what respects they mattered to early Christians. Unlike previous scholars who took their cues from the elaborate angelology of Pseudo-Dionysus and attempted to reproduce such discourses for earlier time periods in Christian history, Muehlberger succeeds at contextualizing the hierarchical discourses of an impressively wide variety of early Christian intellectuals, re-embedding them in “specific local social contexts” (212), in “fields of practice emergent in the culture that took form after the legitimization of Christianity” (212). The two social contexts she explores are what she calls “cultivation,” that is, approaches to questions about higher spiritual beings that are embedded in academic and ascetic lineages aimed at self-transformation and the cultivation of nous, and “contestation,” approaches that seek to wield power in order to “assemble a congregation” using “rhetorical persuasion” (212). Although readers may be inclined to see these two contexts in light of the stereotypical juxtaposition of “ascetic” versus “bishop,” one of the great virtues of Muehlberger’s study is the way it resists this overly simple dichotomy and clearly demonstrates important instances of cross-pollination and dialogic exchange between writers in monastic and urban ecclesiastical settings. A few key and interrelated points emerge as a result of Muehlberger’s approach. The most significant of these is that although angels were central to the ways in which late ancient Christians imagined their communities, religious traditions, and identities, there was little agreement about what angels were, what they could and could not do in the cosmos, where they fit in, and how they related to humans both ontologically and soteriologically. The author succeeds in efficiently and clearly giving the reader a taste of this diversity without endeavoring to be encyclopedic, at the same time signaling why it matters for our overall understanding of late ancient Christianity.

Muehlberger demonstrates just how great the differences were among late ancient intellectuals on the topic of angels in chapter 1, “Late Ancient Theories of Angels: Evagrius of Pontus and Augustine of Hippo Compared.” In this chapter, she juxtaposes Evagrius’s emphasis on the mutability of angels, namely that they can become other spiritual species (a view he clearly derives from Origen), with Augustine who holds the view that angels, after the fall, were fixed in their identity as citizens of the City of God, in essence losing their free will as a “reward” for their initial faithfulness to God. She further highlights the ways in which these authors’ thinking about angels was fully integrated into their respective “programs of salvation.” For Evagrius, the mobility of angels implied a similar mobility for Christian souls involved in practices of cultivation. In the case of Augustine, angels were importantly different from humans, whose wills had been perverted as a result of the fall. Hence, angels were not so much models for humans on the path to salvation as reminders of just how wrong things had gone.

Chapter 2, “Locating Christ in Scripture: Angels in the Development of Theological Reading,” highlights the diverse ways in which Christians thought about angels in the context of their efforts to “establish reliable knowledge of Christ’s identity” from reading Hebrew Scripture. At issue was whether or not one could interpret angelic beings and other spirits in these texts as Christ. Muehlberger discusses the differences between writers such as Justin Martyr, Athanasius, Eunomius of Cyzicus, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine. While Greek writers entertained the possibility that spirits in Hebrew Scripture did indeed represent direct divine interaction and intervention, Augustine argued that any such moment was enacted through the agency of lesser spirits...