WHETHER God is dead or not, his angels seem to be. The angel in 1970 is mere commercial décor—a mothlike doll with pink wings and a smirk of good cheer, dangling amid the glitter balls on a thousand plastic Yule trees or twanging its polystyrene harp in the window of a Brooklyn store. In fact, Christmas is about the only area of our culture in which angels survive at all. An archangel, Gabriel, told the Virgin Mary that she would bear the son of God; it was an angel (progenitor of a billion Christmas cards) who appeared to the shepherds in a field near Bethlehem to proclaim the birth of Christ. Or rather, it "came upon them; and the glory of the Lord shone round about them; and they were sore afraid."
No Macy's angel, that one. The awe that angels inspired in those who saw them, the terrible sense of epiphany, the momentary contact with God's blazing ambassador—all this has been lost in a welter of tinsel and feathers. The tongues of angels now speak with the voice of Muzak. It was not always so. Angels have an older ancestry than Christianity itself, and the most copious sources for named angels are not the New or even the Old Testament but Talmudic and Mohammedan writings. Still, for nearly 2,000 years the belief in angels was vital to Christianity. Only in the past century and a half have angels suffered a leakage of meaning, ending in their present debilitated condition.
Zero Population Growth. The angel of popular culture today is to his forebears what the last American buffalo, ailing in some future zoo, will be to the mighty herds that roamed the West: a token, a remnant of a spiritual breed that will never return. In the 13th century, Doctor of the Church Albertus Magnus held that there were nine choirs of angels, "each choir at 6,666 legions, and each legion at 6,666 angels." That made 399,920,004, all fluttering and hymning in orbit around the throne of God. Of these, one-third were flung down with Lucifer, leaving 266,613,336. Angels are sexless and cannot breed, so this population achieved Z.P.G. at the instant of creation. (Hebrew tradition disagrees; according to the Talmud, new angels are born with every word God speaks.)
What did they all do? Traditional Christian teaching holds that God created angels partly to adore and praise him—like a duke, forming his own opera company to entertain an audience of one—but also to serve as intermediaries between the worlds of spirits and of men, between Heaven and Earth. Angels intervened, visibly or unseen, at every moment of God's enterprises, beginning with the largest of all: keeping the universe in motion. Tasks were dealt out among the various grades of angels; so vast a society obviously needed a pecking order. The structure of this heavenly bureaucracy varied in detail—it was the subject of much squabbling among medieval theologians—but not in outline. It consisted of nine angelic types, of which ordinary angels were the lowest. In descending order: 1. seraphs; 2. cherubs; 3. thrones; 4. dominations; 5. virtues; 6. powers; 7. principalities; 8. archangels; 9. angels.