Angels in Late Ancient Christianity by Ellen Muehlberger (review)

Muehlberger’s book is a welcome and fascinating exploration of the Christian archive of thinking on the nature and function of angels between the third and sixth centuries. Muehlberger discerns in this Christian archive two discourses of angels, which she terms “cultivation” and “contestation,” discourses that in turn reflect two ways of being Christian in late antiquity. The first discourse arises out of the urgent pursuit of holiness, an enterprise in which angels serve Christians as guards and guides. The second is one of polemics and power, in which angels are enlisted to buttress episcopal authority and to fight on behalf of doctrinal orthodoxy. The scene of cultivation is the desert; of contestation, the city. Exemplars of the former include Antony and Evagrius; of the latter, Athanasius and Augustine. This distinction between discourses is helpful for organizing the sources and for appreciating the very different motivations Christians had for thinking about angels. But like many distinctions (such as that between the desert and the town), it is perhaps “more honour’d in the breach than the observance.” In other words, my only, and minor, objection to the distinction is that certain texts and figures are not fully appreciated as falling within both categories (more on that below).

Chapter One opens with an instructional diptych: while Evagrius and Augustine had nearly opposed views of angels, they nevertheless both put angels on center stage of salvation history. Chapter Two explores how angelology was relevant for the Arian controversy. Augustine, nervous that the Old Testament theophanies— traditionally understood as the work of the pre-Incarnate Christ—might be grist for the Arian mill, insisted instead that they were the work of angels, not Christ. Chapters Three and Four are tremendously interesting: Muehlberger traces the development of the notion of a “companion angel” from Origen through the early ascetics of the Egyptian desert (not only Antony, but also Serapis, Ammonas, and Macarius) to Evagrius of Pontus. The “spirit” or “divine power” that Antony speaks of in his letters is not, Muehlberger argues, the Holy Spirit per se, but a personal companion or angelic guide, who in the Apophthegmata is said to appear to Antony as his mirror image (recalling, by the way, Mani’s suzugos from the Cologne Mani Codex). The desert tradition, culminating in Evagrius, understood this companion angel as equivalent to the individual nous, waiting to be awakened. Athanasius tries (somewhat unsuccessfully) to suppress this tradition of the companion angel in his Life of Antony, choosing to identify Antony’s “helper” with “the Lord” himself. Gregory of Nyssa also carries this tradition forward in his Life of Moses, figuring Aaron as the type of angelic “ally” Moses (that is to say, every Christian) can enjoy on his epekstatic journey of contemplation. Chapter Five traces the ascetic trope of “the angelic life,” provoked in part by the different versions of Jesus’s promise that in the resurrection we will live “like angels” (Mark 12.25) or “equal to angels” (Luke 20.36).

In Chapter Six, Muehlberger invokes Benedict Anderson’s famous notion of “imagined communities” to appreciate how a Christian minority might appeal to an angelic liturgy in which they are somehow participating, and thereby imagine themselves to be, not an insignificant and beleaguered sect, but instead “part of a universal, heavenly majority.” Whereas Cyril of Jerusalem and Theodore of Mopsuestia imagined Christian liturgy as an imitation of an angelic liturgy performed in heaven, John Chrysostom turned this on its head, and instead imagined angels descending to witness Christian rituals on earth. With this inversion, we become the liturgical center of the universe, and the imagined community of angels comes to us, rather than we to them.

My only real, and relatively minor, objection is the handling of Pseudo-Dionysius in the Conclusion. His Celestial Hierarchy is treated as a work of “contestation,” and it very well may be. But whatever polemics might be operating in this treatise or in the entire Corpus Dionysiacum are explicitly in the service of “cultivation...